Wikipedians in Residence Speak About Their Work

Wikipedians in Residence are Wikipedia contributors who work in a heritage institution in order to serve as mediators between the Wikipedia community and the institution’s staff. In an interview with Dominik Landwehr from Migros Kulturprozent, Micha L. Rieser talks about his experience as a Wikipedian in Residence at the Swiss Federal Archives in 2013 and at the Swiss National Library in 2014. He speaks about the challenges regarding the selection of images to be uploaded, about copyright issues, about challenges in the area of digitization, about what material is particularly useful for Wikipedia, and why being present on Wikipedia is important for heritage institutions.

> Podcast – digital brainstorming (in German)

In the video “The GLAM-Wiki Revolution”, Liam Wyatt, the inventor of the “residencies” talks about the beginnings of the approach back in 2009, his difficulties in finding a host institution in Australia, and his experience during his 5-week-stay at the British Museum in summer 2010, where he served as the very first “Wikipedian in Residence”. A handful of other Wikipedians in Residence from the United Kingdom give an account of their residencies at institutions as varied as the British Library, the York Museums Trust, the National Library of Scotland, the Natural History Museum and the Science Museum in London, or the Royal Society. They talk about the synergies between heritage institutions and Wikipedia, present various cooperation approaches, such as edit-a-thons, and describe the impact of the residency on their host institutions.

More background information about the residencies can be found in the excellent Program Review published by Wikimedia UK this summer (in order to get a printed copy, write a short message to: beat.estermann@bfh.ch).