are two sources that can help us reconstruct a timeline: a Wikidata query (WQ)1 and a scrubbed version of the “Mapping GLAM-Wiki collaborations” (MGW) collaborative spreadsheet (Gutiérrez De la Torre, 2020a).2
According to MGW, the earliest Wikimedia-library liaison was in 2011, ten years after Wikipedia was first launched (Shin, 2017). This liaison consisted in a Wikimedia Commons project conducted by the State Library of Queensland in Australia. The main objective was the donation of 50,000 public domain images and their metadata (ACULibrary, 2011). Months later, in December, Daniel Tsvi Framowitz became the first WIR in a library.3 This position was held at the National Library of Israel, and the focus was directed toward improving Wikimedia’s coverage of the library’s collection. In addition to several national libraries that hired WIRs in Chile, North Macedonia, Scotland, Switzerland, Wales, and so on, university libraries also became a part of this collaborative endeavor starting from 2014 (see figure 1). Following WQ’s results, Rob Velella became the first WIR in an academic
Figure 1 A map of WIRs in libraries (2011–2020) according to the WQ data (see interactive version at Gutiérrez De la Torre, 2020c).
