Why I Founded the Wikimedia Consultants Network

Two decades inside Wikipedia taught me to recognize a pattern almost no one outside the movement was paying attention to. Some of the most accomplished people working on Wikipedia and its sister projects did not work at Wikipedia. They worked for themselves alongside Wikipedia, with it, in service of it, on behalf of institutions that wanted to engage the movement responsibly.

Administrators with hundreds of thousands of edits. Former Wikimedia Foundation staff. Wikimedians in Residence who had shaped entire museum collections. Software engineers maintaining setting up and maintaining tools and extensions the movement runs on.

But few were visible to the institutions that sought and needed them most.

That was the problem I set out to solve when I founded Consultants.Wiki, the Wikimedia Consultants Network. Twenty-seven expert freelance practitioners from twelve countries, organized across six skill clusters, accountable to a shared code of ethics, and accepting engagements. Not a firm. Not a guild. A community of professional practice with a public address.

The Problem the Network Was Built to Solve

For most of Wikipedia’s history, organizations seeking to engage with the movement faced a binary that served no one.

On one side, a shadow industry of black-hat paid editors who violated community norms, misled clients about what was possible, and produced work that got reverted, deleted, or worse, got the institution publicly embarrassed.

On the other, the small population of professional Wikimedians employed full-time inside foundations, chapters, or specific institutions, who by definition could not serve the wider universe of organizations seeking expertise.

Between those poles sat a third category no one had named. Experienced, independent, ethically rigorous Wikimedians working as freelance consultants. We accept multiple clients. We disclose our affiliations. We comply with every Term of Use and conflict-of-interest guideline across the movement. We build long-term relationships with cultural institutions, nonprofits, research foundations, and mission-aligned organizations. And we do work that meets the standards of the volunteer community because we too are the volunteer community.

This group existed. What had never existed was a way to find us, evaluate us, and trust the category we represented. The launch of Consultants.Wiki was our answer.

What We Are and What We Are Not

First off, we are not a company. We are not a guild or a union. We are not an industry lobby. We are not a paid editing agency. We are not an affiliate of the Wikimedia Foundation, nor can we speak for it.

We are a community of professional practice. Each member operates independently, with their own clients, geography, and areas of focus. What we share is a code of ethics, a commitment to the movement’s values, and the recognition that our work is stronger when we can refer clients to one another, learn from one another’s challenges, and stand together in articulating what ethical Wikimedia consulting actually looks like.

The members themselves makes the point:

Andy Mabbett has served as Wikimedian in Residence with over a dozen institutions and delivered keynotes on five continents, with clients including the BBC, the Royal Society of Chemistry, and UK Parliament.

Mervat Salman has made more than 183,000 global edits, currently serves as Wikimedian in Residence at the World Intellectual Property Organization, and has directed major Arabic-language conferences and movement committees from her base in Amman.

Cindy Cicalese spent eight years at the Wikimedia Foundation as Senior Product Manager for MediaWiki and Principal Engineer on core, has open-sourced roughly a dozen MediaWiki extensions, and now leads Amethyst Collaborative Knowledge.

Mary Mark Ockerbloom wrote the Wikipedia Workbook for Cultural Institutions, served as Wikipedian in Residence at the Science History Institute and Annual Reviews, and co-hosts the Philadelphia WikiSalon.

Subhashish Panigrahi has supported Wikipedia communities in more than twenty-five languages, built the largest South Asian-language speech corpus in the public domain, and co-founded the Odia Wikimedians affiliate.

Their contributions to the movement are their credential.

Six Skills, One Standard of Practice

The network organizes its expertise across six areas that map to how organizations might engage the Wikimedia ecosystem.

• Community organizing and capacity building for institutions designing programs, scholarships, and events.
• Content, research, and article writing for organizations whose topics need careful sourcing and notability work.
• Training, education, and public engagement for universities and conferences.
• Institutional partnerships for galleries, libraries, archives, and museums.
• Technology, engineering, and data science for organizations standing up MediaWiki or Wikibase, running bulk imports, or designing semantic data models.
• Strategy, governance, and grantmaking for foundations and movement actors.

Many consultants span multiple clusters:

Léa Lacroix (co-founder), based in Sicily, works across community engagement, Wikidata projects, and intercultural cooperation, training new staff at Wikimedia Deutschland, Wikimedia CH, and Wikimedia Italia in wikitext editing and the Translate extension.

Nicolas Vigneron in Brittany has imported 14,000 Wikidata items for the Swiss Archive of the Performing Arts and served twice as a Wikimedian in Residence with French cultural institutions.

Elisabeth von Münch, with over 55,000 edits ranking her among the top 2,000 Wikipedians worldwide, brings a PhD in chemical engineering to climate science editing for the Stockholm Environment Institute and the Earth System Governance Project.

Jan Ainali, named Swedish Wikimedian of the Year in 2021, runs Open By Default from Amsterdam and built the award-winning Govdirectory project on Wikidata.

James Hare consults through Scatter on Wikibase, Wikidata, and decentralized knowledge graphs for clients including the Internet Archive and Hacks/Hackers.

What unites us depth of practice across years and across projects. We are Wikimedians at heart. We work for the benefit of the movement in collaboration with the community. We use our real names and rely on our professional reputations. We view each other as collaborators and share our expertise.

What Has Two Years Brought

The friction that used to surround the question “how do I find a Wikipedia consultant I can trust” has dropped for the organizations who knew to look for us.

Internally, the network did what networks do at their best. Members referred clients to one another when scope or geography or language fit someone else better.

People with twenty years of practice compared notes on contracts, on conflict-of-interest disclosure language, on how to price a notability analysis or a bulk Commons upload. A few collaborations turned into joint engagements. The community of practice became real in the way you can only build by doing the work together

Two years ago the case for a Wikimedia consultants network was structural. The category existed and needed an address. That case is now also strategic.

Wikipedia articles are now training AI data and retrieval sources for the systems that answer billions of questions a day. The reputational stakes of having an accurate, well-sourced, neutral Wikipedia presence are no longer abstract. They are baked into every AI-generated summary about your institution, your founders, your scientific contributions, your collection. Organizations are beginning to understand this, and the demand for expert help is climbing.

At the same time, the volunteer community is under more pressure than it has ever been. Editor recruitment is hard. Reliable sourcing is contested or undermined. Coordinated inauthentic behavior is a real problem on real articles.

Ethical paid consultants who follow community norms and improve sourcing are part of the answer, not the problem, and the case for that proposition has never been stronger.

The category I founded the network to make visible is now the category institutions are actively looking for. The address we built two years ago is more useful today than it was the day we launched.

What Comes Next

The Wikimedia Consultants Network is actively expanding. If you are a Wikimedian with a real practice, real name, real record, and open capacity for taking on clients, we want you to join us.

We are also deepening the community of practice itself. Regular convenings, shared resources, joint responses to industry developments. The network is more useful when its members are visibly in conversation with one another.

We are going to keep saying, in every venue available to us, that the category of experienced, ethical, freelance Wikimedian consultant is real, is growing, and is worth collaborating with seriously.

If you are an institution wondering how to engage Wikipedia responsibly, you do not have to figure it out alone. If you are a peer practitioner who has been doing this work in isolation, the network exists for you.

The address is consultants.wiki. The door is open.