The Wikipedia Library-The largest encyclopedia needs a digital library and we are building it/Beginnings
Beginnings
"Bad libraries build collections,
good libraries build services,
great libraries build communities."
—R. David Lankes
The Wikipedia Library started in 2010 as an English Wikipedia community-based volunteer effort, to address the lack of access to reliable sources for editors to build Wikipedia articles. The Library’s first initiative was to seek account donations from publishers and aggregators to provide access to editors so they could summarize and cite this research on Wikipedia.
An anecdote reveals the simple but powerful alignment between the interests of Wikipedia's editors and publishers of reliable sources.When I founded The Wikipedia Library, one of my very first calls was to the news and magazine aggregator HighBeam Research, to gain a few additional resources for a minor biography I was writing. Upon being asked, "for an account for me... and maybe a few for my close editing friends," HighBeam's head of customer service remarked, "How about 1000?"
Credo Reference was the earliest partner, providing 500 free accounts to top article writers in 2011. HighBeam, Questia, Cochrane, and JSTOR followed in 2012. The project received funding for a pilot experiment from the Wikimedia Foundation in 2013 in the form of an Individual Engagement Grant, broadening its outreach efforts and developing community capacity to scale.3 The editing community's enthusiastic reception and positive participation in the program led to TWL being incorporated into the Wikimedia Foundation in 2014 as part of what is now the Community Engagement department.
From the beginning, The Wikipedia Library set ambitious and broad goals4:
Connect editors with their local library and freely accessible resources
Facilitate access to paywalled publications
Build relationships among editors, librarians, and cultural heritage professionals
Facilitate research for Wikipedians and readers
Promote broader open access in publishing and research.
TWL advances these efforts through a global branch strategy: 22 different Wikipedia language projects now have TWL branches, including French, German, Arabic, and Finnish.5 Global efforts are driven by a core team of staff, contractors, and over 100 volunteer coordinators, which allows insights from one branch to be shared with others.
The Wikipedia Library works in tandem with the broader GLAM-Wiki movement (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums). The budding community of practice around Wikipedia and Libraries is a sign of a radical shift in the nature of authority and knowledge production: from scholarly credentials and expertise to literate evaluation of myriad references, from individual authors imbued with the authority of the academy to diverse crowds of contributors with varying levels of expertise. Three reflections illustrate the profound transition in which Wikipedia has come to be seen as an essential part of the information and research literacy ecosystem:
- "Wikipedia is increasingly becoming the go-to reference resource for the newest generation of students… Librarians and faculty should help remove the stigma associated with Wikipedia by embracing this Website and its imperfections as a way to make information literacy instruction valuable for the twenty-first-century student."6
- "When asked to contribute to a wiki—a space that's highly public and where the audience can respond by deleting or changing your words—college students snapped to attention, carefully checking sources and including more of them to back up their work… Instead of blindly consuming the content, they understand where the research comes from and how it gets there. In the past, we've told them not to use Wikipedia. That's insane. Rather than saying, 'It doesn't have a place in the academy,' let's explain to students how it can be used as a tertiary resource. It's not the end-all and be-all of research, but it's incredibly useful."7
- "Producing information for others in online environments can give young people a starting point for reflecting on where information comes from; such experiences support second-order information literacy skills, which require students to reflect on the nature of information production…If we want to develop a more local, shared sense of responsibility, continuing efforts to incorporate public information production in classrooms should include opportunities for students to support and challenge one another in justifying and critiquing claims, as is done by co-authors on Wikipedia."8
The Wikipedia Library did not create this trend, but it has helped accelerate it through efforts to improve the work and lives of Wikipedia's editors, readers, and the network of librarians that support them. TWL's annual #1lib1ref campaign built on that momentum with a simple social media-friendly call to action: imagine a world in which every librarian added one more reference to Wikipedia. Imagine a world in which librarians were as much contributors to Wikipedia as they are critical consumers of its content.