GLAM/Newsletter/April 2026/Contents/USA report

This Month in GLAM – Volume XVI, Issue IV, April 2026

USA report

Wiki MIT launches and US meetups

Announcing Wiki MIT: Prototyping university-wide collaboration with Wikimedia

In February 2026, the meta:Wiki MIT project officially launched with Andrew Lih serving as the Wikimedian at Large. This experimental project with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a strategic collaboration with their MIT Open Learning initiative.

In association with Curt Newton, director of MIT OpenCourseWare, and Peter B. Kaufman, Associate Director of Resource Development at MIT Open Learning, the initiative is an experimental evolution of the established GLAM-Wiki model by exploring how one of the world's top research universities' curriculum can contribute to and co-create content with the Wikimedia movement at scale.

Our core inquiry: how we might transform a university’s freely-licensed courseware materials, expert faculty knowledge, and vast multimedia archives into a global public good through the Wikimedia ecosystem.

While we are patterning the effort after the digital Wikimedian in Residence work of peers such as the University_of_Edinburgh and the Smithsonian Institution, crafting an academic-expertise model at scale with MIT's catalog of more than 2,500 online courses requires its own carefully crafted set of best practices.

Therefore, this initiative is being treated as a collaborative experiment that includes a "multimedia-oriented" strategy. Visual assets such as scientific diagrams, simulations, and video demonstrations are valuable because they can often bridge knowledge gaps across 300+ language editions without requiring immediate translation.

The project also works to identify and respond to the "signals" already present within Wikimedia projects that indicate a need for more or better content. This includes assets such as WikiProject worklists, en:Wikipedia Pages Wanting Photos, addressing {{unreferenced}} tags, or utilizing advisory templates like {{refideas}} to suggest high-quality academic sources on talk pages. The project aims to prototype methods to identify and contribute MIT’s openly licensed materials where they are most needed.

This is not MIT's first connection to the Wikimedia movement:

MIT hosted the Wikimania 2006 Hackathon and has had longtime Wikimedians, and former WMF board members, Phoebe Ayers and Sam Klein advising their wiki endeavors over the years.
In 2018, the MIT Open Learning unit hosted an AI-oriented hackathon with Wikimedia, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Microsoft Research, which led to a successful Wikidata Game Andrew Lih implemented as a GLAM wiki project - "Tag, That's It" (MIT News and Combining AI and Human Judgment to Build Knowledge about Art on a Global Scale) that was described in the GLAM Wiki newsletter in January 2019
The next year, in 2019, MIT hosted WikiConference North America.

We invite fruitful collaboration from other editors, universities, the emerging Education Hub, and global affiliates to help refine these approaches. This is designed as a collective effort to build a sustainable pipeline for academic knowledge, and we look forward to discussing these new modes of engagement at Wikimania 2026.