WASHINGTON — No one knows the components of dark matter, the mystery of Mona Lisa’s smile or precisely how long it will take Kim Kardashian to lose the 50 pounds she gained during her pregnancy.

Amid this vast ocean of bewilderment, however, a small group of volunteers managed to expand the well of shared human knowledge last week by joining a daylong group editing session sponsored by Wikipedia and the Smithsonian Institution’s American Art Museum in Washington. The gathering — called an edit-athon — was the latest collaboration between the online encyclopedia and cathedrals of culture like the Smithsonian to expand and improve Wikipedia entries, which are subject to the vagaries of volunteer contributions. At the same time, the Smithsonian is able to better publicize what’s in its extensive collections.

“Wikipedia is driven by this desire to share knowledge freely with the world, and that is in sync with our mission,” said Sara Snyder, webmaster at the Archives of American Art, a Smithsonian research center that held an editing session in March to beef up the digital encyclopedia’s entries on female artists.

These amateur-professional collaborations began in 2010 as the brainchild of Liam Wyatt, a former bartender, fire twirler, podcaster and vice president of Wikimedia Australia, during an unpaid five-week stint as Wikipedian in residence at the British Museum. The following year, the Archives of American Art appointed its own Wikipedian in residence and organized an edit-athon, enlisting local volunteers to create new articles using the archives’ resources. Other institutions, including the New York Public Library, the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis and the Picasso Museum in Barcelona have joined what has been called the GLAM-Wiki initiative. (GLAM stands for galleries, libraries, archives and museums.)

Institutions like the British Museum and the Smithsonian recognize that they cannot compete with Wikipedia’s popularity. Many more people searching for information online about the Smithsonian go to Wikipedia rather than the Smithsonian’s own Web site.

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Several members of the Smithsonian’s social media staff joined the dozen or so Wikipedia editors and novices who were lured to the American Art Museum last Friday by the prospect of disseminating knowledge, a behind-the-scenes tour and a free lunch.

While somebody could just as easily add Wikipedia entries while home alone in skivvies, sitting around a conference table with a laptop and fellow Wikipedians can be a great way to socialize “for people who don’t like to meet,” said Gerald Shields, a Treasury Department tax attorney who lives in Prince George’s County, Md., and is a member of the local Wikipedia chapter.

Mr. Shields said he generally edited articles on North Korea and on feminism, primarily because few other people do. He combs through the English-language version of The Pyongyang Times for citations, and last year, even spent part of a trip to China trying to track down a photograph of Ri Sol-ju, the wife of the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. At the museum, Mr. Shields, camera in hand, took on the role of the day’s official chronicler.

This was the first group editing session for Robert Greenwood, a retired police dispatcher from Catlett, Va., who has been editing Wikipedia entries, mostly on citizen science and ornithology, for more than two years. What got him hooked on the Wiki world, he said, was the 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed black teenager who was killed by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer in Sanford, Fla.

Photo
Chance Paglia and Sara Snyder, foreground, were among those in an editing session at the American Art Museum. Credit Jonathan Ernst for The New York Times

“I was a dispatcher myself, and I had listened to all of the recordings of 911 calls,” he said. Rather than having access only to snippets of conversations provided by the news media, Mr. Greenwood said, citizens should be able to listen to the entire conversation and come to their own conclusions. He formatted the recordings and uploaded them to Wikipedia.

For the American Art Museum, Mr. Greenwood created an article on art conservation, one of two dozen subjects — digital conservation and the artists Paul Cadmus, Leo Friedlander and Margaret Boozer among them — that the museum had listed as needing more information or new entries.

Making the museum’s list did not necessarily pass Wikipedia’s muster, however. The online encyclopedia relies on citations to determine whether someone is sufficiently notable to merit an entry.

Fran Rogers, who is on the technical committee of Wikimedia District of Columbia — a nonprofit group affiliated with the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia — decided to write about Betty Spindler, a ceramist, after seeing one of her creations, a clay hot dog with relish and mustard, in the museum’s collection. Ms. Rogers said she hoped the inclusion of Ms. Spindler’s work in a couple of other collections and a mention in a few newspaper articles would get her past the notability hurdle. It seems to have worked. No other Wikipedians have challenged the entry.

Ms. Rogers had come to the editing session primarily to help neophytes with technical problems. Like most of the other participants not on the Smithsonian’s staff, she had no particular interest in art.

Madilynn Garcia, a student at the University of Texas at Austin, and her cousin, Chance Paglia, a student at Georgetown University, were interested in learning how to use Wikipedia to disseminate information — but not necessarily about art. “I know a lot about pre-Shamanistic native cultures,” Mr. Paglia said, explaining why he was working on entries for metallurgy in Japan and the pre-Roman Empire instead of those related to art. Ms. Garcia, a summer intern at the American Alliance for Theater and Education, was looking at the page for Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatists.

When Wayne Clough, the secretary of the Smithsonian, stopped by for a brief visit, he peeked over Ms. Garcia and Mr. Paglia’s shoulders and asked “What are you working on?”

Before they could answer, another Smithsonian employee distracted Mr. Clough. Ms. Garcia and Mr. Paglia flashed each other a quick smile.

Mr. Clough thanked the volunteers. As he spoke, Mr. Shields and another veteran contributor, Jim Hayes, checked out Mr. Clough’s Wikipedia page and decided that the accompanying picture could be improved. So Mr. Shields snapped some photos and soon substituted a shot of Mr. Clough with a couple of the volunteers at 2:21 p.m. Fourteen minutes later, however, another editor somewhere in cyberspace named Duckduckgo restored the original photograph and moved the new image farther down because the Wikipedia community has agreed that biographical pictures are generally portraits only of the individual.

“This is part of the way Wikipedia works,” Mr. Shields said. “Everyone can edit any article.”

Correction: November 18, 2013

An article on July 27 about collaboration between Wikipedia and museums misidentified the organization on whose technical committee Fran Rogers sits. Ms. Rogers, who attended an editing session sponsored by Wikipedia and the Smithsonian Institution’s American Art Museum in Washington, works with Wikimedia District of Columbia, not with Wikipedia. (Ms. Rogers told The Times about the error this week; an email from her at the time the article was published did not reach the appropriate editors.)

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