The Wikipedia Library
Books & Bytes
Issue 16, February–March 2016
byThe Interior, Ocaasi, UY Scuti, Sadads, and Nikkimaria
In this issue we cover some new resources in the sciences, humanities, religious studies, and a unique library of video content. Our global system of branches expands, a new coordinator joins the ranks, the Visiting Scholar program comes to Wales, and we have news on upcoming conferences. Alex Stinson and Stephen LaPorte talk hashtags in edit summaries as an effective new social tool, and a new citation template for archival holdings is born! As always, we have a roundup of news and community items related to libraries and digital knowledge.
We're excited about four new research partnerships:
We are very happy to announce two more global Wikipedia Library branches:
We'd also like to take this opportunity to highlight the Global Wikipedia Library on Meta. This portal showcases the projects and accomplishments of each of our language branches. New and growing branches also have their own Meta planning pages to coordinate and track their progress, for example: meta:The Wikipedia Library/Portuguese. If you're interested in helping to start a branch on another language Wikipedia, please get in touch! wikipedialibrary
wikimedia.org
We would like to welcome Checkingfax as a new account coordinator on our team!
New volunteers are always welcome; help is always needed to manage distribution of accounts or to do other tasks. Many hands make for light work!
We are in particular need of a volunteer for metrics coordination. These volunteers help analyze and report metrics for Wikipedia Library partners and open-access publishers. If you have benefited from a TWL account or are interested in helping out, sign up here.
Alex Stinson, project manager of the global Wikipedia Library program at the WMF, will be attending both the Wikimedia Conference in Berlin and Wikimania in Italy to talk with community leaders about the opportunities for developing branches in more language communities. If you are attending, please get in touch! We will also have a poster presenting the results and impact of the #1lib1ref initiative from last January.
The Wikipedia Library team also reserved a booth at the International Federation of Library Associations conference in Ohio in August. The booth will include updated and internationalized outreach materials from the Library's bookshelf on Meta.
If you want to share some of the library outreach your community is doing at one of these conferences, please email Alex at astinsonwikimedia.org.
As an extension of his Wikipedian in Residence role at the National Library of Wales ( see reports), Jason Evans announced two Visiting Scholar positions – the first ever Wikidata Visiting Scholar filled by User:Sic19 and an application for the first ever Wikipedia Visiting Scholar position outside of North America. The LLGC blog described how the WikiData Visiting Scholar has already engaged in expanding the coverage of library on Wikidata to take advantage of tools like Histropedia.
With much valuable feedback from community members and practicing librarians and archivists, we are happy to announce the activation of a new Wikipedia citation template: {{cite archive}}! Designed to streamline and standardize how archives are cited in Wikipedia, the template can support a variety of uses, from simply citing a finding aid for an archive, to specifying a unique item within folders, fonds, series and other organizational standards. We would like to thank all who contributed to the discussion, and the template experts who did the final coding. As with all things wiki, there is still room for improvement of course. Let your archivist friends and colleagues know about it!
ByAlex Stinson and Stephen LaPorte and originally published on the Wikimedia blog
In March 2015, the Hatnote team (volunteer developers Stephen LaPorte and Mahmoud Hashemi) announced that the 'Humble Hashtag is now on Wikipedia", launching the first hashtag search tool for Wikipedia edits.
Every Wikipedia edit is accompanied by an edit summary, a short description of the changes made in each revision. If you include a hashtag in the edit summary, you will see your edit appear on the search page alongside other similar edits.
One year later, hashtags are providing vital insight into Wikipedia editing events in over a dozen languages. This post explores some of the success stories made possible by dedicated volunteers using hashtags on Wikipedia.
One of Wikipedia's biggest movements has been the Wikipedia Library's #1lib1ref. In January 2015, the Wikipedia Library (@WikiLibrary) asked librarians and Wikipedia volunteers around the world to imagine "if every librarian added one more reference to Wikipedia."
This campaign continues today, its global momentum still building in part by #1lib1ref usage on mainstream social media, but also Wikipedia itself.
Hashtags not only spur interest, but are prove effective in archiving contribution history and gauging editor reach. Previously editors would report their edits to organizers, who really had to work to maintain complete records. Now, new editors need little to no explanation and organizers can watch the contributions roll in.
That said, even the most experienced editors need a reminder. Getting remote participants around the world to write useful edits summaries continues to be a challenge — and we expect the 1250 edits with the hashtag to underestimate participation in the campaign by as much as 50%. For our notes on best practices and more about the #1lib1ref campaign, check out our lessons learned.
Wikipedia editing never stops, and volunteer automation in the form of bots help keep the edits going around the clock. These bots fill tedious gaps, usually with small edits that add up to make a big difference, allowing more editors to work on harder problems.
One of these tireless bots is Cyberpower678's Cyberbot II. This bot fixes dead links on English Wikipedia by pointing to backups provided by the Internet Archive. But in its thousands of edits per day, Cyberbot II also has other jobs, like fighting spam. By simply adding #iabot to its archive link edits, the bot keeps a record of the deadlink task within its other work, and everyone can see it has replaced links on almost 90,000 pages—over 200,000 links saved!
Similarly, on Wikidata, Wikipedia's structured data sister project, there have been a number of tools transforming the tedious into something easy and fun, like Magnus Manske's Wikidata Game. The Wikidata Game and other similar tools now use hashtags to show how different people contribute to Wikidata.
Still other hashtags have been used to maximize the impact of our communities working on improving balance on Wikipedia. Take, for example, the usage of the hashtag during a recent editathon at the Helsinki University Library Kaisa House in Finland focused on prominent women.
Organizers asked the event's over one hundred participants, many of whom were new editors, to use the hashtag #satanaista, meaning “100 Women” in Finnish. One of the event's organizers, Teemu PerhiöofWikimedia Suomi (Finland), said, "hashtags were easy to teach to the audience as it is something they are used to in other social media." For the organizers, hashtags provided an easy way to explain a very particular part of Wikipedia’s design and culture: "the edit summary is sometimes confusing; people don't know what to write, so now at least they had simple guideline to it, just add the hashtag!"
For Finnish Wikipedia, the visibility of the hashtags makes them a catchy convention. Bigger Wikipedias see dozens of edits per minute, often burying hashtagged summaries. Perhiö writes "edits with hashtags were visible on our Recent Changes feed, making the hashtag more meaningful in Finnish Wikipedia due to the smaller editor base." For them, the right hashtag signified a well-meaning edit: "Experienced Wikipedians noticed the hashtag and could easily realise when edits were related to the event. Knowing this, Wikipedians could tune their approach and assume good faith more easily."
Other editors have used hashtags to help follow editing related to the March Art+Feminism event, the Wikipedia Gender Gap, and editing related to the EemhuisinAmersfoort, Netherlands.
Ultimately, we hope to see the hashtag become useful for a whole range of Wikimedia communities and projects, and you can help. In the short term, experiment with the hashtags in your own language community! If you use the hashtag in a new or novel way, let us know!
If you plan to use hashtags on a currently unsupported Wikimedia wiki or discover a bug, report an issue to Hatnote on Github. Also, if you care as much about community organization as we do, join the conversation about making hashtag support an integral part of MediaWiki!
Alex Stinson is the Wikipedia Library projects manager and Stephen LaPorte is legal counsel at the Wikimedia Foundation. LaPorte's work on this project has been strictly in his volunteer capacity.
Quarter 3 of the 2015–16 fiscal year ended March 31st. Below is a summary update of how we did with our goals. Click here for the full 3-slides.
It is worth noting that we are always ambitious about our targets, and so we don't always hit them! Also, the WMF had a lot of internal disruption last quarter which explains why our focus was sometimes limited to maintaining core work rather than pushing ahead on new efforts.
One of the way we track our progress is with specifically measurable goals. Below is an update on how we did with our targets this past quarter.
| The Wikipedia Library (KPIS) | Q3-2016 |
| Total Difference from Last quarter (q-q) Percent change from last quarter (q/q) Difference from last year (y-y) Percent change from last year (y/y) |
Jan-Mar '16 |
| PUBLISHERS | |
| Number of partners | 57 |
| q-q | 7 |
| q/q | 14.00% |
| y-y | 33 |
| y/y | 137.50% |
| Number of accounts distributed | 5,637 |
| q-q | 295 |
| q/q | 5.52% |
| y-y | 1585 |
| y/y | 39.12% |
| Number of unique editors receiving accounts | 2,683 |
| q-q | 85 |
| q/q | 3.27% |
| y-y | 536 |
| y/y | 19.98% |
| Number of citations added to partner content (per quarter) | 19,353 |
| q-q | 4,311 |
| q/q | 28.66% |
| y-y | n/a |
| y/y | n/a |
| Number of days from signup to distribution of access | 40 |
| q-q | 7 |
| q/q | 21.21% |
| y-y | n/a |
| y/y | n/a |
| Access Frequency (0= Very low- 5= Very high) | 2.8 |
| q-q | 0.01 |
| q/q | 0.36% |
| y-y | n/a |
| y/y | n/a |
| Citation Frequency (0= Very low- 5= Very high) | 2.21 |
| q-q | -0.1 |
| q/q | -4.33% |
| y-y | n/a |
| y/y | n/a |
| Resource Usefulness (1= Not Very, 5 = Very) | 3.81 |
| q-q | -0.02 |
| q/q | -0.52% |
| y-y | n/a |
| y/y | n/a |
| BRANCHES | |
| Number of global branches | 20 |
| q-q | 5 |
| q/q | 33.33% |
| y-y | 15 |
| y/y | 300.00% |
| Number of coordinators (NDA) | 55 |
| q-q | 4 |
| q/q | 7.84% |
| y-y | 41 |
| y/y | 292.86% |
| Number of global library pages/projects | 191 |
| q-q | 17 |
| q/q | 9.77% |
| y-y | n/a |
| y/y | n/a |
| Number of global library pages/projects created by TWL | 103 |
| q-q | 15 |
| q/q | 17.05% |
| y-y | n/a |
| y/y | n/a |
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