The Successful Wikipedian in Residence: A WikiBlueprint Guide

Your institution holds knowledge the world is looking for. A Wikipedian in Residence is the cleanest way to deliver it.Wikipedia is the most read reference work in human history, and the source that search engines, voice assistants, and large language models weigh most heavily when they describe a museum, library, archive, university, or publisher. A Wikipedian in Residence is an experienced editor who works inside your institution for six to twelve months, sharing its collections, expertise, and data with Wikipedia and its sister projects under the community's own rules on neutrality and disclosure. More than 160 institutions have hosted one, including the Smithsonian, the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art.The Successful Wikipedian in Residence is the playbook WikiBlueprint uses with its own clients, from the first internal conversation to year two and beyond. It distills a decade of selecting, supporting, and sustaining residencies, and it names what goes wrong as plainly as what goes right. No prior knowledge of Wikipedia's inner workings is assumed: every term is explained where it first appears, a short section covers how the encyclopedia is governed, and a glossary collects the vocabulary in one place. Inside- The Role. What a Wikipedian in Residence does, the ten activities every strong residency covers, the six skills to hire for, and why Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, and AI systems now matter as much as articles.- Selection. Eight stages from first questions to end or extend, and a roster of the institutions that have already made the case for you.- Execution. The twenty questions a content partnership must answer before it begins, and the signs that tell you it is working.- Mentorship. The Four M's that turn a fragile position into a lasting one: Money, Metrics, Mentor, Message. What year two looks like, and how to plan the off-ramp from day one.- Impact. The ten worries executive teams raise, examined. Six ways residencies fail, each with a defense. The hard questions from second-time buyers: contracts, grants, copyright, AI, multilingual work, and what to do when a dispute reaches the press. One residency described in these pages produced 366 new articles, 2,910 citations, and 104 million pageviews in a single year. The numbers are real, the method is repeatable, and the rules that make it work are Wikipedia's own.About the author. Jake Orlowitz founded WikiBlueprint after building The Wikipedia Library at the Wikimedia Foundation. He is a nineteen-year Wikipedia editor and administrator, and he has set up and supervised ten Wikipedians in Residence at scientific publishers, art museums, public libraries, and the Smithsonian's Biodiversity Heritage Library.