Wikipedia:GLAM/Wellcome

From 2017 to 2023, Wellcome had a permanent Wikimedian in Residence (WiR) who worked in the Wellcome Collection Digital Editorial team. Before the role became permanent, there was a freelance Wikimedian in Residence at Wellcome Library from May 2016 - October 2017.

The aim of the residency, and the aim of the Digital Editor's Wikimedia work, was to engage with staff and users, members of the public, researchers and visitors to Wellcome Collection, to encourage contributions and to support the sharing of knowledge.

Activities

Wiki-at-Wellcome involved activities such as:

• Working with staff, including librarians and curators, to identify areas of Wikipedia and sister projects that could be enriched with resources and knowledge from Wellcome’s collections.
• Developing a policy and workflow for adding to Wikipedia, Wikidata, Commons, etc., in a sustainable and ongoing fashion.
• Organising and hosting Wikimedia-related events.
• Adding even more resources to Wikimedia Commons.
• Working with Wellcome Collection to develop an outreach policy to coordinate contributions from the Library and the wider communities to support the development of Wikimedia in under-represented areas.
• Supporting researchers, practitioners, librarians, etc., to engage with Wiki-users and editors and to make their work more accessible.
• Being an advocate for open knowledge within Wellcome Collection and externally.
• and other activities (get in contact if you have any ideas!).

Events and workshops

We ran a number of projects, editing events, training sessions, conferences, seminars and workshops. Some of these were listed here.

Contact

If you have questions about the residency, you can contact Zeromonk.

What is a Wikimedian in Residence?

A Wikimedian in Residence (WiR) is someone who works with an organisation to promote open knowledge generally and specifically to enable more people to engage with Wikimedia (and Wikipedia, and Wikidata, etc., etc.). For general information about how Wikimedian-in-Residence programmes work, take a look at these articles:

• Wikimedia UK
• The GLAM-Wiki Initiative
• Ongoing GLAM Projects around the world
• Wikimedians in Residence article on Wikimedia Outreach
• Wikipedians in Residence article on Wikipedia

Background to Wellcome's Residency

Wellcome Collection is part of Wellcome Trust, a global charitable foundation. The Collection has a museum and library, which are free and open to anyone, and it has particularly extensive collections concerning medical history, health and welfare.^[1] It is located on Euston Road, where it has been since 1945 (it opened to the general public in 1949).^[2] As well as physical holdings, Wellcome has a number of digital resources. Wellcome is in the process of digitising a substantial proportion of its holdings and making the content freely available on the web in various forms, including the Library Website, Youtube, and the Internet Archive.

The Residency at Wellcome Library was first advertised in January.^[3] This followed on from a bulk-upload in 2015, when nearly 100,000 images were uploaded from Wellcome to Wikimedia Commons. Many of those images are not yet being used on other wiki-pages, so one of the aims of the Residency was to promote greater use of images already uploaded and improve how accessible they are.^[4] During the initial fixed-term phase of the Residency, reports documented what happened each month.

You can read more on the following pages:

• Wellcome Trust's Official Webpage and Wikipedia Page.
• Wellcome Collection Official Webpage and Wikipedia Page.