Wikiesfera + GLAMs: Care and Joy

Last month, we in the project Wiki and GLAM : Harnessing Knowledge to Foster Gender Equality talked about the partnership between the Belém Library and the Wiki Editoras Lx in Portugal. Now we are moving east on the Iberian Peninsula to speak with Encina Villanueva. Encina the GLAM officer at Wikiesfera, a user group officially recognized by the Affiliations Committee of the Wikimedia Foundation in 2018. A feminist community of editors based in Spain, Wikiesfera is dedicated to addressing knowledge gaps within Wikimedia by promoting the participation of underrepresented groups. It organizes initiatives and events around four lines of work: gender, culture, memory, and equity. Within the culture axis, they lead numerous activities in partnership with museums, archives, and other cultural institutions, such as the Teatro de la Zarzuela (Zarzuela Theater).

Around ten years ago, Encina left the NGO sector where she had been working for more than a decade. She got involved with Wikiesfera, which was still in its early days, and became fascinated by their work: with the care they put into everything, from how content was chosen to the way editors treat each other. She found Wikiesfera gatherings joyful; she felt welcome and has stayed with the group ever since. Over the last three years, the group has received funding from the Wikimedia Foundation, which has allowed her to dedicate a few hours a week professionally to Wikimedia projects, besides her volunteer contributions.  

Wikiesfera had already collaborated with archives and libraries when it started its museum partnerships. In the beginning these were small one-time events at the Museo del Traje and the Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas in Madrid, as well as the Museo Sefardí in Toledo, public museums managed by Spain’s Ministry of Culture. From these experiences, they broadened their scope by reaching out directly to Spain’s Subdirección General de Museos Estatales (General Sub-Directorate for State Museums), which helped to develop more GLAM collaborations. Like what we saw with the WELx and the Belém Libraries in our last post, these partnerships are two-way: the GLAM institution contributes with their information and expertise, the editors rely on their experience to decide what makes sense as Wikimedia content. Often, Wikiesfera organizes an edit-a-thon at the institution premises – events that are rewarding for both sides when partners are ready and well prepared. To locate potential partners, Encina suggests looking around and paying attention to gender-oriented projects led by GLAM institutions in their area. They may already have interesting material ready to be published.

She also suggests widening the focus. For example, when partnering with a museum we don’t need to talk just about artists: there are curators, researchers, educators, and other professionals with major roles in GLAMs. Consider Wikiesfera’s collaboration with the Ministry of Culture’s Archives, which was based on the work of women archivists and not women represented in the archives. Remember that women are predominant in the workforce in museums, libraries, archives, and other cultural institutions, representing 55.7% of professionals (2019 data). Museums, indeed, tend to be highly feminized workplaces – in 2021, 72.68% of the specialist workforce in Spain was made up of women.

Learning from Wikiesfera, it’s clear that we should think of a broader definition of GLAM, one that considers other cultural and heritage organizations. One example is the Zarzuela Theater, which contacted the group because they realized that many women who were relevant in the history of Zarzuela, the Spanish lyric-dramatic genre, did not have an article on Wikipedia, even though the theater’s archive contained a lot of information about them. Wikiesfera and the theater then worked together to launch the project Mujeres de Zarzuela (Women of Zarzuela) in 2025. This collaboration went even further, as the theater reached out to universities with music departments to invite and train students interested in creating, translating, and improving articles. They designed a four-session online course to teach about Wikimedia, as well as about Zarzuela and the women who have been part of this musical heritage. This project will continue in 2026, but this time the training will be offered on WikiLearn. This highlights another aspect that is important to Encina: offering something interesting and fun to volunteers. When organizing edit-a-thons, the group usually invites a guest speaker, offers snacks, and even tries to provide a small gift to participants, such as a book. As we know, socializing is an important aspect of these in-person events.

As other Wikimedians working with GLAMs have told us, Encina identified two major challenges in these projects. The first is ensuring long-lasting and sustainable partnerships, and the second is obtaining image clearance from museums. Wikiesfera has addressed this challenge by collaborating with institutions such as Biblioteca Nacional de España (the Spanish National Library, BNE), which has released images on Wikimedia Commons to illustrate biographies within the Mujeres de Zarzuela project.  

There is one thing Encina mentioned that made us think: she pointed out that most participants who show up at the events they organize with GLAM institutions are women over 40. At least when it comes to museums, that makes sense. Recent research carried out by SENTOMUS, based on data from more than 150 museums, found that almost 68% of museum visitors were aged 46 and older, and that more than 60% of museum visitors are women or non-binary people. We know that more than 80% of Wikimedians are men (2020 data) – GLAM partnerships can be a great way to reach out to a more diverse pool of Wikimedia collaborators, at least in terms of gender.

Lessons learned:

• Make it fun for participants! Think of ways to give back to volunteers: invite a guest speaker, offer snacks, try to provide a small gift.
• Broaden your understanding of GLAM institutions: theaters, for example, may have archives.
• Think about the wider institutional context and about who works behind the scenes: curators, set designers, archivists, and other professionals.  
• Look around: see whether there are GLAM institutions already leading gender-related initiatives in your area.

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