On 19 June 2026, the Dutch Wikipedia turned 25. To celebrate, we spoke to Olaf Janssen, Wikimedia coordinator at the KB. He tells us about the difference between Wikipedia and Wikimedia, the importance of community and a card game about birds.
Congratulations! But why are we congratulating you anyway?
Because it's great that Wikipedia has existed for 25 years! Wikipedia is just really cool, and this birthday has caused a lot of attention for Wikipedia. Not just from the KB either, but from other news organisations and the entire world. There have been many interview requests, for example, and a documentary about Wikipedia is currently in the making. Attention for Wikipedia emphasises the importance of Wikipedia as a reliable source of information, and will hopefully cause more people to contribute. It's not just a celebration, but also a moment of reflection.
I first read about Wikipedia in 2001. It had just launched, and I thought "That'll never work. Who's going to spend their free time working on an encyclopedia?" I was thoroughly wrong about that. To work on Wikipedia, you have to do a lot of research. Most of the easy subjects have already been covered well at this point, so increasingly, you have to do research in places like libraries and archives. That's a very fun thing to do, and when people across the entire world read your Wikipedia article, that makes it even more satisfying. There's really no need to get paid for any of that.
You work as a coordinator for Wikimedia Commons. What exactly is that, and what is the difference with Wikipedia?
My role in the KB is Wikimedia coordinator, which means that I'm in charge of the collaboration between the KB and the Wikimedia projects. Wikipedia is the most well-known of them, but there are other projects as well, such as Wikimedia Commons, an image library, and Wikidata, a structured database. There are 13 other Wikimedia-projects besides those.
A Wikipedia article is typically made up of text with images, audio files or videos. For the text portion, the KB has websites like DBNL and Delpher. People can use those as sources to write their own articles. All the images, audio files and videos are kept in a single media library, Wikimedia Commons. It's called Commons to reflect that commonality. Those files are shared by all Wikipedias in all languages, more than 300 at time of writing. The KB contributes media to that library. I provide that as part of my work.
I have noticed that it's pretty hard to make something like a flipbook on our website usable for Wikipedia. They are free to browse on KB.nl, but you can't easily download them. The KB's role is to prepare the images in such a way that they can be easily used as illustration for a Wikipedia article. These will usually be photos that our Image studio has made before, but I'm also regularly asked if I can quickly photograph a few pages or check a source.
People often use images from Delpher, such as obituaries, advertisements by companies that no longer exist or a portrait of an alderman from 1913. We don't upload those to Commons ourselves, Delpher is too big for that to be viable. That means people upload those themselves. They do have to make sure the image is no longer copyrighted, but Wikimedians tend to be pretty good at that. It doesn't often happen that something is deleted after uploading because of a copyright issue.
Since when do the KB and Wikimedia collaborate and what does that collaboration look like?
I always say that I have one leg in the KB and one leg in the Wiki community. That's a bit of a blurred dividing line, especially because I'm also a Wikimedia volunteer outside my work. As the KB's Wikimedia coordinator, I maintain contacts at Wikimedia, mainly the Dutch branch but also in the international community. I make sure I'm available to answer any questions but I also give presentations, lectures and explanations.
I also take part in the discussions that take place on Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. Over the past months, there have been three large content releases on Delpher. When that happens, I post an announcement in 'de Kroeg' (the Pub), Dutch Wikipedia's living room. People tend to post pleased reactions to that sort of thing. Sometimes, the discussion will concern copyright. People will ask if they are allowed to use a specific image or not. They might also ask about Wikimedia's strategy and the collaboration with heritage institutions. There has to be at least a tenuous link with the KB, if a discussion is interesting but unrelated, I will usually keep my distance.
At the end of 2011, I was bored on a Friday afternoon and I saw there was an information session about Wikipedia in Amsterdam. That seemed like a good time, so I went there. It was kind of interesting, but it didn't particularly grab me yet. The month after that, I visited a conference where the world's first Wikipedian-in-Residence, Liam Wyatt from Australia, was a speaker. He told us about his work to make the British Library's collection more visible through Wikipedia. This struck me as interesting for the KB as well. In 2012, we were intending to merge with the Nationaal Archief (National Archive, NA) and we were looking at projects to work more closely together in preparation. I suggested the idea of a Wikipedian-in-Residence.
The merger ended up not happening, but the idea stuck, so our Wikipedian-in-Residence started in October 2013. He worked with us for a year, half in the KB and half in the NA. It was a successful project, which really showed that our collection could be made much more accessible through WIkipedia. When he finished, I basically took over his work, and I still do that today.
I'm pretty sure I'm the longest serving person in this kind of job in the Netherlands. Not in the entire world though: someone in Wales started two months before me and still holds the job today, and someone in America also started just before me, but there are not many people who've been doing this for longer than I have. I am lucky that the KB has supported me all these years.
What benefits does this have for the user?
Richer articles. The better Wikimedia Commons is filled, the better Wikipedia can be illustrated. Currently, you can find 32.000 images from the KB and 62.000 user uploaded pictures from Delpher on Wikimedia Commons. It's not just a media library for Wikipedia either. Anything in Wikimedia can be used for free, without copyright and without restrictions. The card game Tureluurs was based on Nederlandsche Vogelen (Dutch Birds), one of the KB's masterpieces. The creators found the book on Wikimedia Commons and asked me if they could use it. The book is public domain, so they were free to use it. Somene even baked a cake shaped like a manuscript he'd seen on Wikimedia Commons.
It's also beneficial to the KB itself. As the National Library of the Netherlands, we support open access to information. All the images we add are free to use and easy to find, they are not hidden behind a login screen and they can be easily downloaded.
It's also an important source for researchers. Images we upload to Commons are also made machine readable. The metadata and URLs are made available through an API. That means they do not need to manually download the images from the website one at a time, but they can automatically download them from the back end. The images also become part of the Linked Open Data cloud. This makes it much easier to connect related information from different data sets.
UNESCO is working on a project around 50 years of hip-hop in the Netherlands, through which they want to better document the history of hip-hop. Among other sources, they have chosen Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons for this. I gave a lecture in Zwolle earlier this month explaining the use of Wikimedia Commons. Say you've taken a photo of a hip-hop concert, how do you get that onto Wikipedia?
The KB is actively working to improve the multiperspectivity and depth of our collections. We are looking for broader voices, more target audiences, and more contemporary and hip uses of our collection. To the hip-hop community, it's an important signal that the established order takes them seriously. They're often "free boys and girls" who don't much care for institutions, so it's a cool thing for them to be considered cool by the KB.
What have you contributed to Wikimedia Commons yourself?
I already mentioned that Wikimedia Commons contains 32.000 images from the KB. 10.000 of those were uploaded by a colleague, the rest were done by me personally. All of that used to be manual labour done with awkward tools, that's a lot easier and faster now. AI can make useful tools that also document the work and the approach better.
Where possible, we offer the images in high resolution. That makes it easier for users to crop part of the picture or do something else with it. It's my opinion that it's the KB's job to offer Wikimedians quality material. They sacrifice a lot of their time writing articles about our collections, so we should give them the tools to do that well.
Besides images, I contribute a lot of knowledge. I give lectures, courses, presentations and more. I've also created tools to visualise uploads to Wikimedia Commons. This lets heritage institutions see how Wikipedia uses their collections across the world at a glance. For example, I occasionally get requests from Belgium or the Utrechts Archief (Archive of Utrecht) so that they can use this information in their own reports.
What has changed around Wikimedia in the last 25 years? And what has remained the same?
Uploading is a lot easier because it's easier to build your own tools, but also because Wikimedia offers better tools. Wikipedia started in 2001 and the Dutch version also appeared early in its history. These days, there are Wikipedia pages in more than 320 languages, with new ones appearing regularly. The community also keeps growing, which makes it feel like you have a quarter of a million friends across the world.
Wikipedia is Big Tech now, really. If you were to hire all those volunteers, it would be a gigantic company. It's also taken increasingly seriously. You used to often hear that Wikipedia was not a reliable source. It's the other way round now: Wikipedia is often seen as one of the last online places you can still trust. Of course, things do go wrong occasionally, but only relatively rarely. Pride in the work has grown along with this expansion. Being a Wikimedian is a kind of activism now. It can almost feel like Asterix's village, a last bastion in a world otherwise conquered by Big Tech.
The goal and the mission are still the same, 25 years in. Like the KB, Wikimedia Commons stands for open access to all knowledge for everyone. That is what makes this such an obvious collaboration.
What is your hope for Wikipedia in the next 25 years?
I hope it will still exist in 25 years, of course! I hope the community will remain as active as it is now, because that is Wikimedia's greatest strength: not the technology or the contents, but the people. I hope that people will still recognise its importance and want to spend their time on it. In my vision of the future, it will remain a source of reliable information in a sea of AI slop. I also hope my successors in the KB will ensure we keep making active contributions.
The percentage of heritage collections in the Netherlands is many times larger than the percentage which is available through Wikimedia. I hope that ratio will become less skewed over the next 25 years. It's very important for heritage institutions to not only offer their collections through their own platforms, but also through platforms like Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons.
