Student Interns, Practicum students or University Classes
One of the common patterns that emerges among Wikimedians who become Wikipedians in Residence or staff champions: they often do so after being high performing students (usually graduate students) in a field related to the institution's focus, either library science, museum studies, archival studies, or a related writing-focused program, such as art history, history or a social science. Moreover published case studies in the library and archive studies community include a number of projects where university libraries or archives engage student workers to highlight institutional content by contributing new content on Wikimedia projects. Early case studies take the approach of “just adding links” to institutional collections on Wikimedia, a practice perceived as spam by some parts of the Wikimedia community; newer case studies focus on the win-win relationship between quality content on Wikimedia projects and the visibility of not only the contributing institution’s digital assets, but also the broader materials available on that niche subject area.
Employing students to get involved in Wikimedia contributions for the institution, acts as a flip-version of the Wikipedia Visiting Scholar project: instead of a low-cost, low risk contribution from a Wikimedian, student employees offer a low cost, low risk introduction where the institutional supervisor and their student learn how to effectively participate within the
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- ↑ Jason Evans and Simon Cobb. ‘How the world’s first Wikidata Visiting Scholar created linked open data for five thousand works of art’ Wikimedia Blog, November 5th, 2016. https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/11/05/wikidata-visiting-scholar-art-dataset/