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*OCLC Webinar on "Wikipedia and Libraries: Increasing Your Library's Visibility webinar recording available" http://www.oclc.org/research/news/2014/12-18a.html |
*OCLC Webinar on "Wikipedia and Libraries: Increasing Your Library's Visibility webinar recording available" http://www.oclc.org/research/news/2014/12-18a.html |
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*OCLC Webinar on『The Wikipedia Library Project—what is it, and how can you be involved?』http://oclc.org/research/events/2014/02-25.html |
*OCLC Webinar on『The Wikipedia Library Project—what is it, and how can you be involved?』http://oclc.org/research/events/2014/02-25.html |
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Recorded February 2014. Overview of the project at that time from the view of university library participation. Learn about hosting a Wikipedia editor in order to enhance the article citation process on Wikipedia. Find out about making e-collections available online via the Worldcat knowledge base, so that students and others on campus can see links in Wikipedia to full-text articles that the library makes available. |
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*OCLC Webinar "Wikipedia and Libraries: What's the Connection?" http://www.oclc.org/research/events/2012/07-31.html |
*OCLC Webinar "Wikipedia and Libraries: What's the Connection?" http://www.oclc.org/research/events/2012/07-31.html |
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*OCLC Webinar: "Improving Wikipedia Show and Tell" http://oclc.org/research/events/2014/12-08.html |
*OCLC Webinar: "Improving Wikipedia Show and Tell" http://oclc.org/research/events/2014/12-08.html |
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The Wikipedia Library
Wikipedia is a ubiquitous starting point for research. Students, librarians, even doctors check Wikipedia to begin their research, get an overview of a field, find relevant sources, and engage with the popular conception and summary of a subject.
In the modern information age, search no longer begins at the library. It begins with a google search and typically goes next to the top-linked Wikipedia article. There's a saying in the library world that, discovery happens elsewhere (meaning not at the library itself). What is less often mentioned is that these days, "elsewhere" IS Wikipedia.
Any teacher, anyone who deals in information science, public access to information, open knowledge, or specialized disciplines must grasp Wikipedia's role as a powerful cultural resource. Wikipedia's outsized importance has increased with its staggering usage, but essential to cultivated digital literacy is understanding how Wikipedia works, why Wikipedia works, when it doesn't work, and how to evaluate its credibility as a sophisticated consumer of information.
Universities and university libraries are in a unique position to train their students and faculty in appropriate use of Wikipedia. They are also in the privileged position of being able to improve Wikipedia. There are a variety of mutually beneficially ways to do that, and this page will outline them so you can find adapt programs that fit your institution best.
The Wikipedia Library, along with many other members of the Wikimedia, Open Educational Resources, and Open GLAM communities are here to help!
Here are some benefits and opportunities from working on Wikipedia in an academic context:
Worth reading: https://chronicle.com/article/Wikipedia-a-Professors-Best/149337
The Wikimedia community has been developing, over the half decade, specific roles which affiliate libraries and cultural institutions can use to recruit manpower to facilitate sharing their vast storage of knowledge through the Wikipedia Community and the sister projects supported by the wider Wikimedia Community. Here is an outline of the least investment to greatest investment roles available to libraries:
The least cost/investment opportunity for libraries would be to create a Wikipedia Visiting Scholar. Like in traditional affiliate researcher role: Wikipedia Visiting Scholars allow engaged Wikipedia editors partner with an established university library to gain access to its research resources. Visiting Scholars gain full and free access to a library's online catalogue in order to improve articles on the Encyclopedia. The partnerships are unpaid and remote. Editors gain access to the best available sources, while libraries help serve their mission of sharing knowledge while learning how to harness the power of Wikipedia. The aim is to build and strengthen connections between universities, the source of creating new knowledge, and Wikipedia, the broadest platform for disseminating it—to generate goodwill between librarians (research heroes) and Wikipedia editors (public knowledge superstars). Visit here for more information about the program and here to learn more about hosting a Visiting Scholar.
The newest role in the community, the interns model allows for untrained students or staff to experiment with Wikipedia editing around the specialized holdings at the particular institution. Wikipedia Library Interns are interns hired by partner libraries to contribute new Wikipedia content which improves Wikipedia, improves the profile of library digital resources, and gives the students an educational introduction to Wikipedia and best practice within librarian use of social media. These interns edit specific content of interest to the library, while learning more about contributing to Wikipedia through the model developed by the Wikipedia Education Program (see below. These internships offer a lower risk investment of time and energy than a Wikipedian in Residence but allows a much more focused effort on exposing the organizations holdings. Interns are especially well placed in Special collections with extensive secondary sources available.
Wikipedians in Residence offer the most investment of energy and resources from a library, but also can : Wikipedians in residence are {usually paid) members of the Wikimedia community who are hired for an extended period of time to facilitate collaboration between the Wikimedia community and the institution. Wikipedians in residence spend considerable energy ensuring the institution has sufficient knowledge and capacity to collaborate with Wikipedia, running events, coordinating donations, and training staff and affiliated volunteers or scholars in running various other activities (editathons, education program classes, etc.). Though high investment, these roles frequently have very high return: press related to Wikipedians in Residence is often strong and postive; Wikipedians-in-residence can strategically explore an organizations' resources to identify the best collaboration models would work best; and the Wikipedian in residence will be able to find and support volunteer contributors in the digital community.
Wikipedians love to talk about Wikipiedia; scholars who contribute to Wikipedia love to talk about their theory and intentions behind their contributions; scholars investigate Wikipedia as a subject of research. Talks or workshops from all of these individuals could create opportunities to encourage greater conversations on your campus about not only Wikipedia, but the larger state of information literacy and knowledge dissemination. When thinking about talks related to Wikipedia, most come in one of the following variants:
With less of an intention of actively engaging volunteers in Wikipedia, lectures might focus on a dynamic topic of interest to the scholars and students on your campus. Usually Wikipedia related lectures engage a broader topic of interest on campus, through the lens of Wikipedia. In the last several years, growing interest in certain topics has grown the number of Wikipedia related-speakers available on topics for example, like: representation of Women and other minorities in the community and topics typically focused on by those groups, such as ethnic studies, women studies or broader topics dominated by these groups in research such as the humanities; Medical knowledge, Wikipedia and its effect on public health; research on information literacy, open access or copyright and the web; and cultural institutions, Wikipedia and open models of collaboration. Lectures are not usually intended to a form of action to follow, rather incite conversation.
Frequently faculty, staff or other professional communities on campus might be interested in Wikipedia. Informative events allow the opportunity to disseminate information about Wikipedia on campus: whether its communicating the Wikipedia Education Program, providing guidance on how to interpret Wikipedia articles for research purposes, or explaining how Wikipedia provides examples of other information literacy concerns.
The Wikipedia has the most documentation on how to run training events related to editing Wikipedia. Frequently taking the form of editathons (see below), workshops might include other forms of information dissemination as well: do your librarians want to learn how to add sources to Wikipedia articles? do faculty want to learn how to teach with Wikipedia?
Already have a community of scholars on campus who want to contribute to Wikipedia? Why not try a Wikipedia editathon? Editathons are were a group of new and experienced contributors come together for an extended. These have some great benefits: they create devoted time and space for volunteers to ; and in research by the Wikimedia community, we have found thta new users, especially new contributors that are demographic minorities within the Wikimedia community like women and the senior citizens, feel more comfortable learning how to make their impact on Wikipedia. Frequently, these events are organized around topics of importance to the hosting organization, engages volunteers, and fill gaps on Wikipedia, for example Wikipedia:Meetup/ArtAndFeminism editathons or the Black Lives Matter editathon in 2015.
Though editions are powerful tools for contributing content to Wikipedia in the short term, these events may not always create sustainable positive impacts: university editathons don't usually draw very many participants, unless a research group or class requires attendence; non-Wikipedian volunteers that do show up for events are unlikely to continue contributing on their own accord after the event; and organizing events can require a number of volunteer and staff hours ahead of time. When planning for editathons, plan for followup opportunities, such as subsequent editathons, volunteer drives, check in opportunities, and/or educational support opportunities. Editathons are also a good way to culminate a series of events (following a talk, for example).
As a more focused version of the general mission of the University Library to develop information literacy and disseminate scholarship, special collections and archives often specialize in facilitating and disseminating information about primary sources. As a bulk of Wikipedia's citations are to secondary sources, a focus on citing special collection and archival material won't best fit the community's practices. Instead, the Wikipedia community has developed a number of strategies for Gallery, Librarys, Archives and Museums to support integration of primary materials into the Wikimedia community. The most successful projects, include transcription projects on WikiSource and donations of freely licensed media on Wikimedia Commons. For more information about different models for archival and special collections, see our GLAM case studies and best practices.
Are your holdings unique? Do you have control of the copyright for those holdings? Are they out of copyright? If so, the Wikipedia community is a great way to public-ally make available your digital images, video and sound files for public access and dissemination.
Recorded February 2014. Overview of the project at that time from the view of university library participation. Learn about hosting a Wikipedia editor in order to enhance the article citation process on Wikipedia. Find out about making e-collections available online via the Worldcat knowledge base, so that students and others on campus can see links in Wikipedia to full-text articles that the library makes available.
Recorded December 2014. Librarians and archivists share their processes for adding links to collections and other content to Wikipedia. Presentations include both lessons learned and successes. Note that several of the presenters “shared desktops” to show how they edit Wikipedia articles to include library and archival resources.
wikimedia.org, Head of The Wikipedia Library
