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Netherlands report

International Womensday; New Wikimedian in Residence at Maastricht University

By Mx Lucy & Romaine

International Womensday

As part of the program for International Women's day the Dutch Gendergap workgroup organised a diverse program on the 8th of March 2025. Host for this event was ‘Nationaal Archief’ (the Dutch national archive). The event was in collaboration with Netwerk Archieven Design en Digitale Cultuur (Network archives design and digital culture).

We organised two parallel sessions:

The workshop Wikipedia for activists. Intersectional feminist Laurier, an active Wikipedian for many years, gave a short introduction into the workings behind the scenes of Wikipedia and what the role of an activist could be. A packed room of interested activists engaged in lively discussions and afterwards worked on Wikipedia articles of their choice.

In the other room the session on fashion and textiles took place. Connoisseurs of Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia alike enjoyed a brief introduction by all round Wikimedian Sandra Fauconnier after which each participant worked on their favorite wikiproject around the subject of textiles and fashion with the assistance of an enthusiastic bunch of volunteers. We look back on a great day on which we collectively closed the gender gap a little bit more.

New Wikimedian in Residence at Maastricht University

The city of Maastricht at an old map in the university library
Students getting an introduction to the special collections

In April 2025 Maastricht University has appointed a Wikimedian in Residence (WiR++) who will be working on making more materials from the university available on the various Wikimedia platforms.

The university, founded in 1976, is an international university with many students from abroad and is seen in the Netherlands as an innovative university. Of every five projects that have been carried out with Wikimedia at universities in the Netherlands, four have been due to the efforts of Maastricht University. Since 2014 various activities at the University have been organised. First it began with two Wikipedia users who organised some Wikipedia workshops for the students and the staff, in the years after it was followed by various courses organised by teachers from the university who got guidance and support from various experienced Wikipedia editors. Most of the Wikipedia courses were also supported by the university library, including access to the (special) collections and training and support in finding sources. It has resulted in various Wikipedia articles, but also that more than 3700 images have been donated by the university library which got uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. So far, at three of the six faculties Wikipedia courses have been organised. Now the university takes the collaboration another step further.

It was about a year ago that I was looking for a new challenge what I wanted to do for (paid) work. While I was talking with various people about it, the idea of becoming a Wikimedian in Residence grew and the university where I have supported the various projects in the past decade felt like a good place to do so. The next step was to find the right person to help me bring this idea to reality, as the university is a big organisation I have no experience navigating through. One of the teachers I had worked with in earlier years appeared to be a perfect match. Over the course of multiple months we had several meetings where I explained my ideas of what I would like to do, and he proposed the idea internally at various departments. The idea was welcomed with much enthusiasm, and after budget was found and getting information from Wikipedian in Residence Olaf Janssen at the Royal Library in The Hague, I wrote my own job description where I have put the various things I would like to do.

Some may have noticed that at the end of the function label there are two plusses, this has two reasons. It is my impression that a university can be a bureaucratic organisation in what people easily can get boxed in by other people's expectations and hierarchical structures. Such limitations I would like to avoid as much as possible, being able to think outside the box, to break through internal barriers and to transcend departments. A second reason is that I also have ambitions that are not related to Wikimedia which I want to keep some space for. To accommodate the work I want to do, we have looked at where my main workplace will be from where I can collaborate with the various departments of the university. We have located two departments where I will be settling, of which one of them is the university library. The library often has served in the past 10 years as central hub from where various projects with Wikimedia have been organised.

In the past ten years the largest group of projects with Wikimedia, were Wikipedia assignments done by students: students pick a subject to write about, go search for sources, and based on these sources they write or expand an article, and by doing so they learn to apply academic principles like citing sources. In the future I will keep providing support for these assignments in my new role. Also I will keep uploading files to Commons from the collections with the intention to approach this more structurally. Further I will be making public domain texts available through Wikisource, working on linked open data of the collections, give training and workshops to university staff, and more. I also hope to have in this role more easier access to quality sources for my Wikipedia articles.

During the process of getting this position it was occasionally a struggle, but also university staff loves stroopwafels and those kept them (and the process) running. As said, a crucial role was for the teacher who helped me, I thank him for his fantastic support to make my idea become reality.



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