However, it does take time to decide on projects to tackle, and giving a WIR exibility to choose their projects should not mean that the WIR is left alone to navigate the library or Wikipedia ecosystems on their own. At Toronto and Alberta, where the WIRs were graduate students and not veteran Wikimedians, there was a learning curve to understand the kind of language and information appropriate for Wikipedia articles. The other unanticipated learning curve was understanding some of the libraries’ more unique archival or special collections, which were cataloged in sometimes complicated ways. is challenge had not been anticipated, so it taught us a lot about how we present our collections, which was invaluable.
How Will Engagement Be Generated?
The news of a WIR hire can be very exciting for an institution. It is a good news story that often aligns with institutional goals around digital and community engagement. Reaching out to institutional communications teams and news services is also important to achieve almost every other task as a WIR: when people know about the work, they are more likely to reply to emails or attend a workshop. Both Berson and Jung began their roles with outreach, earning both internal institutional attention and mainstream media coverage (local papers and local TV news). To announce the WIR role at Alberta, O’Neil did several interviews with campus media. Media coverage is especially useful to explain why a library needs a WIR or would engage with Wikipedia at all, as there are still many misconceptions about the site on campuses. Kloda and Carliner both noted that using the good news story angle also brought positive attention to their libraries, universities, and Wikipedia work in their cities.
Future Directions
Everyone we talked to said they would do a residency again if they could. When asked about future plans, Concordia said they would be interested in doing another WIR but imagined it would be completely different in terms of projects or perspectives. At Toronto, Carliner hopes that future Wikipedia work will shift to a balance between
