Bringing Wikimedians into the Conversation at Libraries/Innovating, growing, and supporting communities
Innovating, growing, and supporting communities
The models for engaging volunteers, collaborators and champions are still very fluid in the Wikimedia community -- outreach with cultural heritage organizations has only been systematically approached within the international Wikimedia community since 2010/2011. As a community working with libraries, the Wikimedia community is still learning what consistently creates desired outcomes, and how to best serve the missions of both communities, institutions and Wikimedia. Within this shifting context and understanding of how these collaborations work, it behooves Wikimedia allies in the library community to continue iterating upon what we know about community engagement: public programming around access to knowledge is something that librarians have much more experience with than the Wikimedia community.
Iterating on other forms of volunteer and stakeholder development, and finding ways to make Wikimedia participation relevant to local stakeholder groups, is important for both communities for the long term. The Wikimedia community is at a critical point in time: a very slow decline in active contributors on Wikimedia projects, from a peak of participation during 2007-2009, has recently leveled off, but during that time, the content on Wikimedia projects has more than doubled.[1] Developing communities of knowledge seekers and preservers ready to build the next stage of quality improvements, as well as finding knowledge stewards who can ensure the long-term reliability of Wikimedia content, is a strategic investment in the broader availability of information for the public. Ultimately libraries and Wikimedia communities need to figure out how to bring the right participants into these collaborations for maintaining public access to this knowledge.
- ↑ For this information, see: https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/SummaryZZ.htm