GLAM/Newsletter/May 2026/Contents/Netherlands report

This Month in GLAM – Volume XVI, Issue V, May 2026

Netherlands report

Setting up your own platform (part 1): from wish to the creation of a wiki

Phase 1: disappointment

Spoiler: This phase has ended in a failure. If you want to stay positive, read only the 1st paragraph, skip the rest of this phase and continue reading at phase 2.

This phase is characterised by two main activities: the search for information to be used in the website and finding the right software/platform to build the website in. Finding information went very prosperous. Within two months I had collected a huge amount of information from books, articles, archive documents, and more, in such a way that I could draw the outline of the website and would have been able to start to work on the content. I also invented a name for the website: UMemory. Within the university it is a bit of a habit to use the abbreviation (UM) in various places. Also, within two months, I had created a poster with many events/changes that had taken place in the past 50 years to give an impression about what the website would contain, and this poster was spread to various people within the university as some pre-promotion of the website to come. The poster, as well as the idea of the website, was very well received everywhere I came.

For finding the software/platform to be used, a meeting was organised with multiple people from the Maastricht University Library to talk about what possibilities there are to set up the website. I described there a little bit my first ideas. I thought it would be the best to do something similar as UGentMemorie, with a main body of text and on the right side some metadata. It would be nice if such metadata could come from a underlying database. As the university is bilingual and internationally orientated, we would have a page in English and a page in Dutch for each subject, as such is common for various parts of the university website. What options/routes were suggested?

We could Omeka S; software is a content management system for online digital collections. The University Library uses this software for the website digitalcollections.library.maastrichtuniversity.nl, where it hosts the Special Collections and some other materials that have been made publicly available.
We could use WordPress, which is used for hosting the website of the University Library, and they have a lot of experience with.
I suggested we could also a wiki environment, as that is what I am used to and have a lot of experience with.

(Note about another option: More than 6 months later I learned that the university also has a self hosting team that can easily create basic websites for projects and teams, but nobody had told me about it. Diving into what is possible with it, it appeared that this option only creates very simple websites, with very limited possibilities to change something, which made it unhandy to use.)

Besides me, nobody in the library had wiki experience and they wanted to go for Omeka S, as that is the software they have experience with. I have also some experience with Omeka S, and knowing this software, I saw there were possibilities to use it for the website. Omeka S is itself only not that suitable to build a website, so the technical person in our team indicated that he needed to go look for a way to present the data from the Omeka S database to a web format. I suggested that perhaps other organisations have done something similar, and the technical person would go look for a way to do it. Despite various attempts to get clarity on the status, I haven't heard anything regarding if a way to do this was found, until months later I got the reaction that the technical person did not have much time to work on the project, and was asking me (via another person) if I still wanted to continue this route. This tasted to me as a lack of interest to work on the project, so I indicated that seeing the situation, that it would be better to go for another route.

Another route (Wordpress) also meant that the technical people from the team were replaced by other technical people from another department of the library. Various weird things happened. For example, I had to hear from a colleague, that he had heard from another colleague, that she had heard from another colleague that a meeting had taken place about my project, while I wasn't even informed that a meetings was organised. When I asked for the outcomes, no answer. At some point an inventory was made to get an idea what was needed for the website (without telling me this happened, without asking me any questions), something I also had to hear from another colleague. I asked the colleague who had made the inventory what the outcome was, and he indicated that I should ask a particular colleague, but asking that particular colleague it appeared that she wasn't even involved at all and had no idea about the project. Not being informed, no clear progress, no project path, etc., around the end of October 2025 I realised that this is not going well, and I started to ask the supervisors for help. First I asked my mentor who supervises my WiR position, then no action was taken. I also asked the team leader, but she was ill that period and no action was taken. And third I asked the manager for help, but no action was taken. Much waiting, not being able to continue, and the weird things that happened. I tried to stay positive, but in December I got depressed and got ill because of the situation. I then decided that very soon something needs to happen, or I would cancel the project. And something happened, a fantastic colleague stood up and started to help me (and said some angry words to colleagues who had failed to do their work), which brought the project back to life. Suddenly, in a very short period of time things were possible, a Wordpress installation created, logging in made possible, first setup, etc. At first it seemed a lot of progress was made, but three months later was the page structure still not ready, still unhandy to use, and still missing basic functionality, and with bugs. (And then a simple OpenStreetMap map with the buildings of the university had still to be figured out.) In March I concluded that this is not going to work, but how can I end this?

First back to January again, while I had found a solution and a fantastic colleague started to help me, the manager that about 3 months earlier refused to help, now suddenly woke up. It became very clear to me that the manager disliked me, and I basically got the blame for that the project wasn't going well. But when I asked what I should have done better or different, the manager could not indicate anything. And when I indicated that I had asked the manager for help months ago, the manager claimed to have no memory of it that I had spoken with her about the project. In the weeks and months following, the behaviour of the manager went worse and worse, and I felt very unsafe at the workplace. Independent staff who deal with harassment and problems on the workplace have looked into the situation and have concluded that the manager had broken 17 rules and guidelines. With my one-year contract nearing its end, early March it became clear that I wanted to switch departments to get away from this bad situation. Later in March, despite I got zero complaints, all my direct colleagues were very positive about me, and my direct supervisors wanted me to continue, the manager made clear that she refused to extend my contract, and that the timeline project should end (read: at the former department). For me this was disappointing, but also the perfect solution to get rid of the 2nd route that also clearly didn't work.

The sad part: 10 months of time and energy have been lost and wasted...

Phase 2: success

To start with the good news: in April my year contract got extended at another department of the university and I can continue my residency (including permission for my work on the timeline website about the university). I am now also in a much better team with various enthusiastic colleagues. I find it important to mention this enthusiasm, because I have learned that enthusiasm drives innovation and makes things possibly and easier to achieve. As most organisations have zero experience in setting up a whole new project, including a timeline website or a wiki, doing such is for them new and unknown (aka innovative). And then enthusiastic people say "yes, let's try it", while people that are not enthusiastic start by describing all the ifs and buts.

The first question I asked myself is if I wanted to continue working on the timeline website. Thinking about the past year, I realised that working with the content of 50 years university history made me feel happy, as well as that I had put so much time and energy in the project, with a lot of materials collected which I did not want to throw away. With my enthusiasm I certainly go for happiness, but how to proceed?

First I thought about just expanding the content of Wikipedia with history of the university, but soon I realised multiple problems: as WiR I officially work for the university so editing pages about the university would possibly cause a conflict of interest which I want to avoid, many images to be used have an unclear copyright status or unknown author so uploading to Commons is problematic, and to be able to have a good coverage also sources not suitable for Wikipedia should be used. So doing this project on Wikipedia quickly disappeared from my mind.

It is understandable that colleagues prefer to use software that they are known to, but as Wikimedian in Residence I wanted to go back to my roots and may natural habitat: the timeline website annex encyclopedia about the university should be a wiki. Thinking it all through, a wiki serves the best the needs and wishes for such a website. Besides the basic Wikipedia extensions, I identified some needed features:

own domain name setup
being able to change the default skin/design
to structure the wiki, pages are grouped being subpages, so the title should be changeable (for non Wikibase pages).
account creation control, only university staff editing
images local upload + usage of images from Commons
to have a Wikibase where knowledge can be hosted as structured data (like Wikidata)

So how can such a wiki be setup? I researched the various ways of setting up a wiki.

Option 1: Wiki hosting by the university. I found internal documents with specifications for hosting by the IT department. It appeared that the IT department charges prices to departments that want to host a website, prices that my new department didn't want to pay. Also the maximum capacity the offered for a website was lower in comparison to what a wiki with extensions, pages, images and data would need. They also indicated that I have to make sure myself that all the software updates of MediaWiki and the extensions got implemented, something I have no experience in. It also became clear the university has no experience with wikis, and having experienced the past year with all the disappointments and setbacks, hosting within the university is not a serious option.
Option 2: Wiki hosting by a professional company. At a trustworthy hosting company, I found pricing for a wiki with Wikibase for € 119 per month. That is something my department does not want to pay. (An overview of hosting companies can be found here.)
Option 3: Wiki hosting by Wikibase.cloud. This hosting is organised by Wikimedia Deutschland and the focus is on a Wikibase. The focus of the project I work is both pages with text and a database with data. That is possible. One thing is not possible: the upload of local images, meaning that only images from Wikimedia Commons can be used or that images are hosted elsewhere and are linked to only (and not inserted in pages). As many images of the past 50 years of the university are unsuitable for uploading to Commons or would require a lot of work to determine who the rights holders are (without guarantee of getting permission), this option for our project would result in many pages having no photos looking boring and bare. For our project not the best option.
Option 4: Wiki hosting by Miraheze. Miraheze is a free wiki farm run by volunteers that hosts more than 22 000 wikis and exists since 2010. Many extensions can be installed, and wiki administrators can set many settings according to the project's wishes. Based on the needed features, this option matched the best with our needs.

Within my new department we discussed the creation of a wiki at Miraheze with all the possibilities, limitations and characteristics. Within 10 days I got the approval from my supervisor to setup a wiki at Miraheze with the purpose of building timeline website. Phase 1 took about 10 months with insufficient results, phase 2 took 10 days, and the creation of the wiki itself took 10 seconds.

Phase 3

In a future report (part 2) the next phase of this project will be described: the first settings and infrastructure needed for content creation.

Next "Netherlands report" →

← Previous "Netherlands report"

In this issue

May 2026

+ Add a commentDiscuss this story

To follow comments, add the page to your watchlist. If your comment has not appeared here, you can try purging the cache.