Page:Wikipedia and Academic Libraries.djvu/191

178 Introduction

Spanish is the second most spoken mother tongue in the world with around 500 million Spanish speakers worldwide (González, 2020, p. 47; Instituto Cervantes, 2019, p. 6). Although a multilingual country, Mexico has the greatest number of native Spanish speakers, and it ranks among the top fifteen countries with the greatest number of Internet users (Instituto Cervantes, 2019, p. 50; Navarro, 2020). Yet, between 2009 and 2013, Spanish represented less than 7 percent of the global share of Wikipedia edits, and edits from Mexico represented only around one-tenth of the Spanish contributions (Zachte, 2013). This missing perspective in the world’s largest encyclopedia was one of the main drivers of our project—and who better to fill an information gap than librarians.

The figures now available on the amount of Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAM) that have collaborated to Wikimedia projects (Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, etc.,) seem to confirm that this partnership has been suitable for at least 100 libraries around the world (Gill, 2020). Moreover, there have been around forty Wikipedians-in-Residence (WIR) working in libraries, but who are they and what are they doing in our institutions?

A WIR oversees the integration of an open knowledge strategy that leverages the usage of Wikimedia projects into the work ows and practice of a library or other cultural institutions. This type of collaboration was first developed and tested in 2010 at the British Museum (BM). The experienced Australian Wikipedia editor Liam Wyatt (User:Wittylama) held the residency as a volunteer for five weeks and ran interesting initiatives like the £100 gift shop voucher prize for new featured article or the “one-on-one collaborations” in which Wikipedians got to work with BM curators on a particular topic, which also caught the eye of the media (see Cohen, 2010). Unfortunately, the story following this mythical genesis is not so easy to track. There is no official data on WIR positions. However, there