knowledge discovery and curation, as will expanding the popular #1lib1ref (One Librarian, One Reference) global microcontribution campaign.
The future of collaboration and integration between Wikipedia and libraries and Wikipedians and librarians looks very bright.We hope that our organization and programs have extended the dialogue and sparked new conversations among two natural allies in the realm of free knowledge.
Beginnings
"Bad libraries build collections,
good libraries build services,
great libraries build communities."
—R. David Lankes
Wikipedia is the world’s largest free online encyclopedia, with over 45 million articles across almost 300 languages, all written and edited by volunteers. Because of its requirement of verifiability—which states that facts and their interpretations should be accompanied by a citation to a reliable source verifying them—the quality of Wikipedia depends on the ability of its volunteers to access the best and most reliable scholarship on a topic. Ultimately, the website's efficacy depends on readers understanding this premise, so that they use Wikipedia as a starting point and not an ending point for their research, and so that they too understand how to contribute relevant content to the project. These are the fundamental issues The Wikipedia Library was inspired to advance.