Page:Wikipedia and Academic Libraries.djvu/228

Rh Introduction

A Wikimedian used to be an easy shorthand for the community of editors who created and expanded the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia. Today we’ve seen the Wiki “universe” expand to encompass a variety of interrelated projects and a growing understanding that a Wikimedian is anyone who engages with the encyclopedia in a critical self-reflexive frame, which includes a much wider community than before. As academic readers and users we must take ownership of our role and relationship to Wikipedia to see that we are all members of this online community and equally complicit in its construction.

Creating a Wikimedian-in-Residence (WIR) program is one way a library can engage with this online community but is far from a onesize-fits-all experience. What the resident will do and how the program is set up depend on many factors including institutional priorities, funding options, community expectations, and existing programming.

To better understand the role of a WIR in an academic library and to look at the institutional factors that shaped the residencies, we interviewed colleagues at two different Canadian academic libraries with recent WIR programs and used our experiences to complete three descriptive case studies.

In this chapter, we cover each residency, including its achievements and the factors that shaped it. From these three experiences, we pulled out some of the common questions that should be considered when thinking about how to engage in a successful WIR program. The goal is to act as an introduction to the topic of WIR and illustrate what these positions can look like at different academic libraries, with the hope that this will guide others to create their own successful WIR programs.

What Is a WIR

Over the past ten years, WIR positions have become a popular way to establish collaborative working relationships with the larger Wikimedia community in an effort to increase the quality and quantity of content across Wikimedia projects. Some WIRs focus on content creation using library resources, which could be editing Wikipedia articles or uploading digitized public domain content to Wikicommons. Other activities