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 popular conceptions and summaries of a subject. This usage of Wikipedia, reflects its heavy reliance on sourcing, which has led Wikipedia to become the largest curated bibliography in human history.
In the information age, search no longer begins at the library. It begins with a Google search, and typically to the top-linked Wikipedia article. There's a saying in the library world, that discovery happens elsewhere[1] (meaning not at the library itself). What is less often mentioned is that "elsewhere" is Wikipedia.
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 (for more information about these basic literacies, see WP:Research help).
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 and 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!
Libraries, especially in a university setting, have a significant investment in improving the state of research and literacy on their campus and in their communities. Engaging with Wikipedia offers opportunities to educate different organizational audiences. Students can be engaged in information literacy through Wikipedia programs; faculty can be engaged in developing best practices for teaching research and information literacy; and the public can be engaged through creating access routes to library resources. Edit-a-thons, lectures, Wikipedia education assignments, and Wikipedia specialists are all resources for libraries to lead public discussions about the state of information, knowledge, and access to knowledge.
We know researchers are starting their searches on the open web, and even on Wikipedia directly. Working directly with the Wikipedia community allows libraries and librarians to engage directly with issues around how to expose their collections in Wikipedia and continue the conversation about how to get researchers from sources on the web, back to the library, where they can access those resources directly and discover even more to help them with their information needs.
One of the greatest weaknesses of the public's use of Wikipedia in its research and information seeking interest, is that they often don't understand how Wikipedia is made, how to use it within a research process, and other key critical thinking and digital research skills. Moreover, much of Wikipedia content is connected to reference materials that can be hard to find: you could use Wikipedia research skills as a window into other research practices within your library's resources. These skills can be applied to both Wikipedia, and the broad range of other digital research environments: Wikipedia offers both the strengths and weaknesses of Web 2.0 and many of the characteristics of more traditional reference materials. Check out Wikipedia's WP:Research help page or the more extensive guide at File:Evaluating Wikipedia brochure.pdf, for some tips about evaluating Wikipedia content.
The Wikimedia community has been developing, over the last half decade, specific roles which affiliate libraries and cultural institutions can use to recruit people than can help facilitate sharing their vast storage of knowledge using Wikipedia community and the sister projects supported by the wider Wikimedia Community. Here is an outline of the roles available to libraries, ordered from least to greatest resource investment:
The least cost/investment opportunity for libraries to get a Wikipedia specialist to serve in a Wikipedia Visiting Scholar position. 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 have some of the greatest reward in creating exposure for the Library through Wikipedia: 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 positive; Wikipedians-in-residence can strategically explore an organizations' resources to identify which collaboration models would work best; and the Wikipedian-in-residence will have the connections and tools to find and support volunteer contributors in the digital Wikipedia community.
Students come to libraries to create research projects every semester, but more often then not that work gets thrown away at the end of the semester, seen by only a few sets of eyes. The Wikipedia Education Program seeks to abate that deluge of lost research, by empowering students to share it on Wikipedia. The Wikipedia Education Program provides faculty and support staff the tools to design assignments that improve students skills in reading, writing, researching, critical thinking, translation and collaboration; gain information and media literacy; and deepen their understanding of copyright, plagiarism, citation, and digital citizenship.
In most settings, students write Wikipedia articles as substitute for a traditional research paper, taking the pedagogical position of literature reviews. These assignments engage students in writing for a global audience with real-world purpose: giving the public access to new information. Facilitating education program assignments allows libraries to intervene in faculty teaching practices related to research, teach students information literacy, and require students to engage with the wide selection of secondary sources available to them through the research library's holdings.
Wikipedians love to talk about Wikipedia; 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. The community even holds an annual "Wikipedia:Wikipedia Loves Libraries" event, which highlight the importance of such events (we would like to encourage you to organize one during Open Access week). 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. For example, West Virginia University Libraries hosted a panel on Women and Wikipedia with both scholars, Wikipedia Volunteers, and Wiki Education Foundation staff.
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?
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 editing. These have some great benefits: they create devoted time and space for volunteers to contribute to the institutions relationship to Wikipedia; and in research by the Wikimedia community, we have found that 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 in these personal settings. 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. The Systemic bias workshop kit describes the process when thinking about diversity focused editathons.
Though edithons 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 attendance; non-Wikipedian volunteers that do show up for events are unlikely to continue contributing on their own accord after the event (though they often have much greater information literacy and understanding about Wikipedia); 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).
Special collections holdings include both primary sources (in the case of archival materials) and also valuable secondary source materials (in the case of rare books, historic serial collections, and deep collections that may contain less widely held published materials). As the preference in Wikipedia is to cite secondary sources, it's best to not focus on primary source materials. For materials that would be considered primary sources, the Wikipedia community has developed a number of strategies for Gallery, Libraries, 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.
While primary source materials are not appropriate sources for Wikipedia, including references to archival collections in an article can be an excellent way to lead interested researchers to rich collections as further resources. However, care should be used when linking to archival collection descriptions or finding aids—if the editor is affiliated with the holding institution they should only include links to collections which would provide the best information about a topic. The editor should take care to include links to other important collections located at other institutions. Links to archival collections can be included in the "External links" section of an article, and if there are enough links to archival collections, it might be appropriate to call attention to this group of links by adding a subsection titled "Links to archival collections".
Many Wikipedia articles concern topics that are represented in many library collections. For those topics, one can add special templates that link to searches in the online catalog or discovery service of a reader's preferred library. (The reader will be asked for their preferred library the first time they follow the links; after that, searches will normally be directed there automatically until they clear their cookies.) Placing these templates in the External Links or Further Reading section of an article allows many libraries to be linked to without requiring a separate link for each library. Examples of such templates can be found in articles on Louisa May Alcott and Bipolar disorder.
On one hand, institutions are storehouses of knowledge about their own history and programs and that history should be recorded in places like Wikipedia. On the other hand, Wikipedia takes care to be a neutral encyclopedia and avoid promotion which can slip in through authors with a conflict of interest. University employees are not prohibited to write about their own institutions, but it takes an abundance of care to get it right and have a successful experience. The basic advice for you is to a) gather independent research; b) create an account (for you, not your organization) and disclose your institutional affiliation on your userpage; c) write a neutral draft; d) have other editors review it; e) engage thoughtfully with any community concerns raised in discussion.
Wikipedia, and its sister projects Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata, are vast structured collections of knowledge, media, and data respectively. These collections can provide powerful tools for the libraries community, both as a pathway for discovery with tools, like the Remixing Archival Metadata Project and the Forward to Libraries, and as part of existing library platforms, like LibGuides and Search and Discovery platforms. After all, Wikipedia is the default discovery point for researchers: what if libraries took advantage of this, and integrated Wikipedia more into the libraries ecosystem?
There are also growing conversations in the Wikipedia community around tools like a default citation template for Archival metadata, Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Library/Archivists/Citation, or keeping Wikipedia's citations in a structured database to make them more useful and query-able, Wikidata:WikiProject_Source_MetaData.
If you have an idea for a tech project, reach out to the Wikipedia Library team at wikipedialibrary
wikimedia.org.
The long list of activities above are often pursued by individuals or small teams of people within organizations. Having one or two advocates pursuing these works well, but often doesn't scale or allow enough institutional capacity for all of the activities. Sometimes these activities are best gathered under a single strategy, to ensure that organizational resources are effectively used.
One strategy for encouraging engagement in your GLAM is to provide guidelines for staff contributions. For example, the National Archive of the United States provides its staff guidelines on how to engage with Wikimedia projects (see the guidelines here). The State Library of New South Wales has taken the guidelines further, both enacting a similar set of guidelines, but also creating an internal mandate, that when work responsibilities permit, staff should surface any organizational research or resources of public interest on Wikimedia projects. This has lead to a number of successful strategies for improving discovery at the State Library of New South Wales, including their work on the List of Australian_diarists of World War I, which has been documented in this blog post.
Sometimes, establishing organizational strategies is sometimes best pursued in peer organizations as an alliance or consortium of like-minded organizations: coalitions of organizations can explore a wider range of experiments, to figure out what activities best support the goals of the libraries community. The best documented example of a network adapting GLAM-Wiki strategies like those described above for library or library networks is the outreach by Amical Wikimedia with the Catalonia Network of Public Libraries. Using the support and infrastructure of this network, they were able to support over 100 libraries after 3 years of activities, doing a wide variety of outreach activities. Similarly, METRO used a Wikipedian in residence to expand the New York City area network and community of practice: Wikipedia:GLAM/METRO.
wikimedia.org, Head of The Wikipedia Library
