Finally, a few remarks about our “how-to” tutorials. Murrieta and I created these based on recurrent questions we received during our workshops such as: how to start an account, how to add a reference, how to upload an image. Many of these skills were already available in video form (Wikimedia Argentina, 2017); however, during our edita-thons, some of our older participants expressed the need to have those instructions printed out or as a still image so that they could come back to them in a format they felt more comfortable with. Initially, in our grant’s plan proposal, we had thought about creating an offline publishing booklet with these materials (Gutiérrez De la Torre, 2017). However, given the richness of formats (webinars, slides, video tutorials, manuals, etc.) that had been created by the Spanish-speaking Wikimedia community, we thought about another strategy. Why not curate these resources (which had been shared with Creative Commons licenses) in an online digital collection? With a metadata librarian mindset and powered by an open-source content management system (Omeka), we launched Wikipedia y Bibliotecas (https://wikibibliotecas.colmex.mx/). Apart from the traditional metadata search options, developer Jaime Cisneros and I created several entry points for the collection: Keyword tag clouds, subject indexes, and collections organized by format (slide presentations, cheat sheets, webinars, or video tutorials). We also included a map of Wikibrarians. As the name suggests, this section includes an interactive map with the names and contact forms of librarians from Latin America who are already collaborating within the Wikimedia universe so that they can be reached by potential collaborators.
A Fireplace Guard: Feedback
In May 2020, I conducted two in-depth, follow-up interviews with volunteer BDCV colleagues about the residency. In her interview, Claudia Escobar discussed her motives in joining the Wiki movement: one of these incentives was the fact that in our country there aren’t enough librarians5 and participating in Wikipedia is a way of amplifying our work by sharing what we do (whether it is curated information as bibliographies, Wikipedia workshops to teach critical information
