A new Wikimedia Residency is starting this month, in mini format. One of our Connected Heritage Digital Skills Wikimedians, Leah Emary, will work with The Mixed Museum for one day a week between September and December 2022. The residency has a few goals:
- To work with Director Chamion Caballero and others affiliated with the museum to incorporate material from their collections into the Wikimedia Projects.
- To understand existing practices at the museum and incorporate Wikipedia editing, Wikimedia Commons uploads, and Wikidata where possible.
- To identify gaps on Wikipedia around the history of racial mixing in Britain and use the museum’s scholarship, research and expertise to fill them.
- To train and upskill museum staff, volunteers, interns and freelancers in how to edit Wikimedia projects.
This partnership is especially exciting for Wikimedia UK, because it addresses an important and under-represented topic on the Wikimedia projects.
The Mixed Museum, with only one full-time staff member, relies heavily on partnerships to conduct its exciting and innovative work. In addition to co-curating exhibitions with academics and artists, the museum currently hosts a folk musician as the organisation’s first Artist in Residence. Director Chamion Caballero says that partnership work is critical to small organisations like The Mixed Museum, not only for producing new and creative content, but also for building robust support networks that help increase the capacity to connect, learn, share and grow. She notes that for the museum, ‘our partnerships have helped all involved to reach wider audiences, as well as access ideas, skills and funding that would be much more difficult to achieve alone.’
The residency builds upon the work of two interns earlier this year, who improved Wikipedia articles based on research for the Mixed Race Irish Families in Britain, 1700-2000 exhibition. You can find out more about that project here.
Host a resident
Are you interested in hosting a mini-residency at your heritage or cultural organisation? Come see what Connected Heritage is all about at our free, hour long webinar on Thursday 13th October at 12:30pm.
Book a 121
If you know you’re a good fit and would like to talk about hosting an editathon or undertaking a Wiki project at your organisation, book a half hour online meeting with the team.
Get stuck in
If you would like to try your hand at editing, we would welcome you to our potluck wikithon on 30th September 2022 at 10am.
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