Hard Out Here For a WiR: Can the Wikimedian-in-Residence Position Survive?
Wikipedians working at cultural institutions are struggling with brittle tools and a lack of resources to support their work. Now they're facing a new threat
In June 2010, The Wikipedian covered an intriguing development in the world of Wikipedia: the creation of a new professional role for a volunteer editor at the British Museum in London—the Wikipedian in Residence. Borrowing from the artist-in-residence concept, this position aimed to bridge the gap between traditional institutions and the digital world, sharing knowledge locked away in their musty halls with the vast virtual repository of Wikipedia.
What began as an experiment has since evolved into a formal role—you know, a job—and a vocation for many. Fifteen years later, over 200 Wikimedians1 in Residence (WiRs) have been embedded at cultural institutions worldwide, collectively known as GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums).
Wikimedians in Residence have helped create and expand content from archaeology to Picasso, shared collections of the Frick, the Guggenheim, the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History, and the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, and uploaded millions of videos, sound recordings, and photographs. The relationship is symbiotic: as GLAM institutions contribute content, they increase their visibility, bring in new visitors, and even win new donors.
The WiR’s Lament
Yet all is not well in GLAM world. A new report by Smithsonian Wikimedian at large Andrew Lih titled “GLAM Contributor Study Initiative” currently circulating at the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) details frustrations by professional WiRs, whose work has long been undermined by underfunding and minimal institutional support. That its abbreviation is “CSI” is lost on no one.
Even the CSI report only hints at a larger challenge: a lack of job security or career pathways. As the WiR position developed from the bottom up, it has always remained an informal designation. Most are on short-term contracts that must be renewed year-to-year, and sometimes require them to fundraise for their own position. While WMF has a dedicated GLAM team, its capacity is limited, given its small size and emphasis on partnerships over technical skills.
The resourcefulness of the WiR should be praised—but they shouldn’t have to do it alone. Without proper institutional backing, the WiR role remains precarious. And that’s never been as true as it has been for, oh, about the last two weeks, as WiRs2 and their institutional colleagues face a near-future defined by what could be the most hostile environment for government workers in living memory.
Boulevard of Broken Tools
The current crisis has its roots in late 2022, when WiRs discovered that the very software tools they relied on to measure the impact of their work had degraded. Utilities to track how often images were used on Commons or monitor traffic to specific categories had been critical to keeping institutional partners informed about the value of their contributions. Without reliable metrics, it becomes more difficult for many to justify their next year’s grants.
These tools, built in Wikipedia’s early days by volunteer developers like Magnus Manske—a legend for writing the MediaWiki software still used by Wikipedia today—have become increasingly unmaintained and unreliable. Herein lies a microcosm of a larger problem: the Wikimedia movement’s reliance on sometimes a single individual volunteer to support critical processes. When those volunteers move on, the process may simply come to a halt.
Consider Pattypan, an open-source tool responsible for nearly 1.9 million images on Wikimedia Commons. Despite being the only one-click, user-friendly tool for mass uploading of images, it’s no longer maintained, and can only accept files in Microsoft Excel’s pre-2007 XLS format, among other technical limitations. You shouldn’t have to be a software developer to be a Wikimedian in Residence.
But the problem isn’t just outdated tools—institutional prerogatives sometimes stand in the way of helping them do their job as well.
Take the Wiki Commons Query Service (WCQS). It allows users to ask detailed queries like, “Show me all images of castles in Europe in cities with populations over 500,000”, or “Show me the most popular images of extinct animals”. Yet when it debuted in 2023, it launched behind an authentication wall, making it essentially unusable for the public or GLAM partners outside the Wikimedia ecosystem3. Imagine having to login to Wikipedia just to read its articles. Two years later, there is still no release criteria nor support for developers. What’s the point of building great products if your audience can’t use them?
These are not mere inconveniences: these impediments directly affect high-value WiR partnerships the WMF should be supporting, such as bulk uploading utilities, advancing the query service, or providing tools to measure impact.
We’ve Got a Bigger Problem Now
And this is all before considering, ahem, the larger institutional landscape. The problem is no longer merely technical, or institutional. Ironically, it’s increasingly cultural as well.
Of course The Wikipedian is referring to the havoc being wrought across the federal workforce by world’s richest edgelord Elon Musk—no friend of Wikipedia’s—and his merry band of post-adolescents. Some GLAM institutions, like the National Gallery of Art and National Archives, are directly federally funded, and now increasingly imperiled. Would you be surprised if they were ransacked tomorrow? Many non-federal U.S. institutions also receive grants, the likes of which the new Trump administration has already made moves to block.
What’s more, many GLAM projects focus on underrepresented minority populations and trailblazing women—which obviously smacks of DEI, making any such initiative a prime target for harassment and elimination.
In a context where WiRs are often dependent on irregular grants and work occurs at federal institutions, it’s not too alarmist to speculate whether the combination of benign neglect and malign intent threatens the survival of this important role.
The Fragile
The Wikimedian in Residence went from experiment to cornerstone, yet WiRs face an uncertain future marked by underfunding, broken tools, and a lack of institutional support. Outdated systems, short-term contracts, and now the shifting political winds threaten the viability of their work.
WMF’s mission is all about promoting open knowledge, and WiR-led collaborations with the world’s top institutions represent among the clearest expressions of that goal. But when you look at how financial commitments speak to actual priorities, the revealed preference is striking. It’s time for WMF to stop paying lip service to its commitment to free knowledge and start actually supporting the people who make cultural knowledge freely available.
The CSI report is too polite to ask whether the Wikimedia Foundation really cares about their work, but The Wikipedian isn’t. Does it?
As Wikipedia became less central to their work and platforms like Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons gained prominence, many have adopted this new designation.
Specifically, those based in the U.S. European WiRs have things a bit easier. Many get funding from their chapters, which in turn get funding from the WMF.
Thus making the elusive goal of federation (i.e. a collaborative query with Wikidata) impossible.