Cebu WikiConference 2025/Resources

Theme: Weaving Knowledge, Sharing Stories
Mandaue City, Cebu, Philippines; 22-24 August 2025

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Sharing Institutional Knowledge through GLAM Partnerships

Wikipedia, and increasingly other Wikimedia projects like Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, and Wikisource, offer powerful platforms for sharing knowledge with the world: they regularly find their way to the top of Google searches and are widely reused in other web applications. However, despite their ubiquity and flexibility for increasing access to knowledge, Wikimedia projects have sizable content gaps: from a systemic under-coverage of women, to poor representation of non-Western cultures and communities, to major gaps in specialized knowledge.

Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAMs) frequently partner with Wikimedia communities to help fill those gaps, increasing representation of the knowledge they curate and collect. Not only can GLAMs work with Wikimedia communities to profile knowledge unique to their institutions, but they can also promote the knowledge collected by the expert communities they work with and represent.

How can Wikimedia communities help GLAMs share their knowledge?

The Basque Wikimedia community works with local libraries to ensure that Children's literature is covered on Wikimedia projects.

Though early case studies in the library and museum professional literature limit using Wikimedia and Wikipedia to just "add links" to institutional websites in order to increase the visibility of knowledge, nearly a decade of partnerships and practice with the international Wikimedia community has shown that deeper partnerships create more impactful outcomes. These partnerships benefit most from the skill each organization brings: Wikimedia communities can provide knowledge of effective crowdsourcing and powerful platforms for sharing knowledge; and GLAM institutions provide the expertise in finding sources, topics, and materials that are most relevant to public interest and information seekers.

Partnership models typically fall into two broad types: working with digitized collections (click on this link to learn more), and sharing other kinds of knowledge curated by the institution. Wikimedia communities can often bring a significant set of skills to these knowledge partnerships, including:

activating online volunteer communities to contribute to topics
teaching how to contribute to Wikimedia projects at in-person events
working with institutional staff to increase skills and capacity for using Wikimedia projects.
designing programs which engage existing volunteer communities or educational communities not yet involved in Wikimedia projects