The Successful Wikipedian in Residence: A free, complete guide for institutions
In 2010, the British Museum did something unusual. They invited a Wikipedia editor named Liam Wyatt to spend five weeks working inside the museum, with access to the curators and collections, helping the staff understand how the world’s largest encyclopedia actually worked. They called him a Wikipedian in Residence. The phrase stuck.
Since then, more than 160 institutions have hosted one. The Smithsonian. The Met. The National Library of Israel. The Museum of Modern Art. Cancer Research UK. The Royal Society. Annual Reviews. Cochrane. The Bodleian. The British Library. The U.S. National Archives. The list is long enough now that the question is no longer whether a Wikipedian in Residence is a real role.
The question that took its place is harder. How do you run one well?
I’ve been close to this work for over a decade. I founded The Wikipedia Library in 2011, eventually running it for six years at the Wikimedia Foundation. After leaving the Foundation in 2019, I founded WikiBlueprint to help institutions engage with Wikipedia’s talented community.
Since Wyatt began in 2010 I’ve seen programs that delivered tens of millions of pageviews and hundreds of new articles. I’ve run nine residencies out of WikiBlueprint, as close-up as it gets. I’ve also seen programs that didn’t thrive because the institution and the editor were not working from the same playbook.
I wrote everything we’ve learned.
The Successful Wikipedian in Residence is a free, thirty-five-page guide for the leader, curator, communicator, or program officer who knows Wikipedia matters to their institution and wants to do it well. It covers what the role actually is, how to define it before you hire, how to select the right person, how to structure the partnership, how to mentor the editor through the lifecycle, and how to measure impact in ways a director can quote in a budget meeting.
It includes the numbers most consulting collateral hides: what a twelve-month engagement typically costs, what the editor is paid, what we charge as a consultant, what year two looks like when the institution starts carrying more of the work itself. It names failure modes honestly. It answers worries that come up in plain language.
What it tries hardest to convey is that this work is patient. Pageviews build over months. Articles compound. A well-run residency produces the kind of impact that doesn’t arrive in week three and doesn’t announce itself with a press release. By month ten, institutions that started skeptical are usually saying out loud that they should have done this five years earlier.
The guide is here, free: The Successful Wikipedian in Residence.
Read it the way you’d read any handbook for a discipline you’re thinking of taking up. If a residency makes sense for your institution, the guide will help you scope and stage one. If it doesn’t, the guide will tell you that, too, with enough specificity that you can make the call yourself.
The world wants what your institution knows. There’s a craft to delivering it well. This is what we know about that craft.
Jake Orlowitz is the founder of WikiBlueprint. He founded The Wikipedia Library in 2011 and has been editing Wikipedia for nineteen years. Reach us anytime at info@wikiblueprint.com.
