The Wikipedia Library/Processes/Interns class development

The Wikipedia Library Interns model is a program designed around cases studies published in library journals and experiences from Wikipedians who developed their GLAM-Wiki skills through internships or student hire programs. The goal of the program is to get someone unfamiliar with GLAM-Wiki acclimated to the potential online effects of the GLAM-Wiki work through editing.

The position are differentiated from Wikipedian in Residence positions in that the role is explicitly not about organizing GLAM-Wiki capacity within an organization; instead the focus is helping a professional or student become intimately aware of organizational considerations and methodology for improving the GLAM's impact on Wikipedia and public knowledge; moreover, in supervising the work of this professional or student, the GLAM's hierarchy gains a better ability to assess and measure the impact of GLAM-Wiki work, and make decisions about it in the future. Similarly, the position is different than Wikipedia Visiting Scholars in that the position works to bring in new Wikipedia contributors through a GLAM-based incentive. For more definition of the role, see en:Wikipedia:The_Wikipedia_Library/Library_interns#Concept.

Typically a class needs the following support:

1–3 recruiters to develop the "class" of interns – the number of work to develop the participating organizations depends on the level of organizational buy-in each partner needs to make
1–2 volunteers or other moderators for monitoring work by the interns to ensure that the interns successfully navigate community hurdles
(optional) 1 organizer of extra-curricular professional development opportunities (i.e. consultations with GLAM-Wiki practitioners, reading seminars or group gatherings to talk about issues/ideas on-wiki)

The curriculum documented on the alpha experiment class pages is largely self-guided and conceptually structured around "gates" of activities, rather than a particular timeline. This structure anticipates the organizational differences of GLAMs, competency differences amongst participants, and a general desire to turn the interns into independent Wikimedians who have a hand's-on understanding of GLAM-Wiki concerns, without having to learn those concerns during a high-intensity Residency. Moreover, the gates are designed with the intention of self-assessment of skills, giving the students an understanding of the major skills and activities they should be doing during the class.

Identifying Scope

All classes following the "interns" model should have the following characteristics:

A focus on developing competencies in the "interns", rather than developing organizational capacity – typically organizations will develop some capacity as a side effect of a GLAM professional contributing to Wikimedia projects, but the focus should be on understanding the strategies to contribution, and understanding on how to measure and report these activities. From there, many of the interns should feel confident enough (and likely have enough institutional support) to expand the impact of that organization on Wikimedia through other strategies. In the past interns have organized editathons with staff, targeted content uploads and developed continuity strategies at their organization.
Expectations that the host organizations use an in-place organizational resource (for example, student hire, professional development time/money, or practicum student time) to resource the role.

An interns class could follow several scopes:

A type of intern: historically student hires (interns, practicum students or other) have been the focus, because of their ready availability as resourced staff, the ease of turning those staff into experimental project labor, and the potential for these interns to become future advocates for GLAM-Wiki. Other possible types of "interns" could include: staff needing professional development, volunteer docents who have formal digital competencies, or Wikipedians who want to learn about GLAM-Wiki, but don't have the broad ranging skills that most Wikipedian in Residence positions require.
GLAMs with a particular focus: The Wikipedia Library focused on recruiting special collections with records of social media work; other GLAM focuses might strategically scale their impact on a particular topic (i.e. Gender Studies) or type of materials (i.e. Research Bibliographies).
GLAMs supported by a particular meta-organization, such as a standardizing or aggregating org, like Europeana, a local library coalition, like METRO, or another affiliate group of partners.

The initial experiments with this program used a model focused on individual special collections with previous programs that supported experimental work. It was very successful once interns were on-boarded, but very time intensive to set up the opportunities (as is the Wikipedia Visiting Scholars program).

We suggest using the interns model in situations that would reduce the recruiting intensity, using strategies like:

Using the curriculum on a librarian-focused professional development class
Working with a Library and Information School to have their practicum students use the curriculum
Recruiting Wikipedia editors who want an internship, who are at a university or near a GLAM before approaching the universit(ies) and GLAMs in that region.

Before developing the program: assess which type of audience you will be using for the "internships". Moreover, explore the recruitment strategies in the section below, to understand how these experiments might change the amount of energy investment needed on the part of the coordinator.

Setting up a curriculum page

The curriculum is hosted on a Wikipedia Education Program course page, using the Education program extension. The instructions for setting up the course pages can be found at the Education Program's documentation for course pages: en:Wikipedia:Training/For educators/Setting up your course. Note that the curriculum uses a flexible timeline for the course, allowing for self-guided instruction and different institutional situations; if, for whatever reason, you need a firmer timeline, make sure that the timeline allows for the interns' situation as organizational employees.

Per the documentation for setting up the course page for the Education Program, there are a number of pre-fabricated class sections/units automatically generated by the tool. You do not need to generate all of these: remember, the curriculum for the interns program is a modified version of that larger education curriculum, with additional focus on independent work. Instead, you can copy the text from other interns courses.

When setting up the page, make sure to set up a token for the students to enroll in the class. When creating the page, log the token in a place that allows students to access it; this makes the page easily discoverable. The goal is not to create an exclusive space, but to limit the number of passing-by enrollees in the class.

Recruiting/placing interns

One of the hardest (and most time consuming) parts of the pilot versions of the interns class was the recruitment of organizations to sponsor interns. In many ways, the process is similar to the strategy approached by the Visiting Scholar program: it requires strategically reaching out to organizations with a history of early adoption and/or organizations with strong networking ties. However, the major distinction between the pilot course establishment and pilot batches of the Visiting Scholars program is that the the Library did not directly facilitate the recruitment of interns. Instead we asked schools to place interns based on their own student hiring process, because each and every organization allocates the resources differently. This worked well, most of the interns in the pilot were very successful contributors as part of the project.

In the pilot version of the project, we focused on recruiting from organizations that had strong digital media presences on this wiki and libraries with which we have direct affiliations. This recruitment strategy had moderate returns, with about one in five contacted partners expressing interest, and about half of the interested organizations executing an intern. However, this strategy was never time-effective.

If creating a class of interns, we recommend one of the following strategies:

Administering classes in decentralized places, like library schools that are members of ALISE or another GLAM School professional alliance (maybe through a professional organization partnership?), so that the recruitment of interns and placement of them in practicum/student hire positions is on the school, instead of in the hands of volunteer or central coordinators. Volunteers or coordinators should consult on best practices for Wikimedia.
Running interns classes through some type of professional development space – where the classes are self-recruiting rather than soliciting relationships directly with organizations from (like libraryjuiceacademy.com/115-wikipedia.php )
Running interns in reverse: identify and recruit Wikipedia editors (like Spring 2015's User:Ducknish) who are in or near colleges and could use more experience in GLAM-like activities, and reach out to universities with some possible interns already in hand. One of the hardest parts of GLAM work is opening the door and establishing the terms of impact; the interns model could be used to open the door and place a Wikipedian with less savvy into an organization.

The basic strategy for recruiting interns was as follows:

Identify potential partners
Track partners in spreadsheet, with name of org, contact name, and notes
Email the contacts using either the sample email below, or something similar
Follow up with basic questions/feedback after 2–3 weeks

Frequently asked questions

Who pays for the interns? Part of the goal of the role is to familiarize organizations with paying for roles like the "Wikipedian-in-Residence", without the level of organizational commitment and high-level resource investment of a strategic "program" of a Wikipedian-in-Residence. Generally, student hire pools of funds are distinct from normal operational money and tend to be usable for experimental projects/programs, so may be easier to part with within the organization.

How do the interns start? In general, we try to direct students to the course page on wiki as the guide for getting started. In the pilot, we used this welcome letter.

Sample email

Here is a sample email for recruiting organizations:

Hi [Contact person],

I am [NAME], and I am [ROLE] at [ORGANIZATION], a Wikipedia community program helping [CULTURAL INSTITUTION TYPE] collections resources become more accessible to Wikipedia editors and readers.

I am emailing because I saw your [X WORK] and thought that you might be interested in one of our programs. We are establishing a set of best practices based on published studies about Library interns and student hires editing Wikipedia to improve the visibility of institutional collections: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:TWL/I . Previous case studies have found that such internships greatly improve the discoverability of special collections and other library materials because of Wikipedia's prominence as the 7th most popular website in the world.

We hope to have a cohort of institution-sponsored interns and/or student hires at different research libraries and archives this summer, for our second class of interns. With the help of their institutional supervisor, each intern will be working to improve their individual library's impact and relationship to Wikipedia while improving the quality of information related to the library's special interest.

Attached I have included a one pager describing the program or you can learn more at our program at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:TWL/I. Would you be interested in figuring out if our program would be a good fit for you? Or should I talk to someone else at your institution?

Warmly,

[NAME] Library Interns Coordinator [COMMUNITY ORGANIZATION]

Monitoring intern work

Because of the comprehensiveness of the curriculum, and the emphasis on self-guided work within the internship, monitoring of interns from the Wikipedia side should be limited. However, occasionally students will have questions about the community, or not be able to handle something that requires intimate community knowledge. Make sure to have someone around to monitor these opportunities, and check if there is any need for reaction. The education extension provides a fairly robust monitoring system for changes that students make and comments on their talk pages.

Followup, tracking and reporting

The most challenging part of the project is tracking user contributions in light of the project. The best way to track the user contributions is to use some of the external tools available through the community's X!-tools. For example, User:Amcdougal's contributions from Spring 2015 can be found both through the edit counter and through the article creation counter.

Similarly, the interns should be tracking the various types of GLAM-Wiki metrics documented as part of the documentation for the project at en:Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Library/Library interns#Reporting activities. In general, Wikipedians do not need to "prove" this kind of impact, in that we know partnerships have very consistently created traffic to knowledge organizations that work with the community.

Similarly, once interns are begun, and have finished activity, its important to interview or query the partner to help revise the curriculum and learn about common pitfalls. Make sure to ask questions like the following:

Did the curriculum provide sufficient guidance for the interns?
What kinds of support did your interns need?
Did you feel like you sufficiently understood the program? What materials would strengthen the process?