The Wikipedia Library-The largest encyclopedia needs a digital library and we are building it/For Readers: From Informed Access to Open Citations
For Readers: From Informed Access to Open Citations
"A library implies an act of faith..."
— Victor Hugo
Half a billion people each month use Wikipedia for research, but many may not understand how it is constructed and how to best make use of it. Wikipedia's principle of verifiability institutes an ideal that all knowledge in the encyclopedia, whether facts or outside opinions, are supported by a reliable secondary source—but sources that readers cannot access and read are of limited use in furthering research.
The Wikipedia Library is developing research literacy materials to help support readers in understanding how Wikipedia is built and how to explore its underlying sources. This ranges from supporting instruction on how Wikipedia works, to tools that help readers get from citations to sources, to help pages about locating a local library. These initiatives will contribute to the development of a more informed citizenry able to use Wikipedia (and other information sources as well) in a responsible manner, by examining the original sources to assess the validity of an article's claims.
The Wikipedia Library has also piloted open-referencing strategies. For example, Newspapers.com encouraged Wikipedia editors to use their clippings feature (https://www.newspapers.com/clippings/) for references on Wikipedia. Each clipping creates a free-to-read openly available excerpt of sections of Newspapers.com articles which allow readers to see the same content as the editors researching for Wikipedia.11
We would like to eventually transition key publisher partners to a toll-free access referral program that could drastically enhance reader access to sources. Under this model, a reader clicking on a paywalled link on Wikipedia could gain full text access to the source without needing a login or affiliation, solely because the traffic is referred from Wikipedia. This would open to readers the scholarly resources on which Wikipedia is built, allowing them to truly use it as a starting point for research even if they are unaffiliated with well-resourced libraries or do not meet the criteria for access in the Library Card Platform.
Another factor blocking access to sources is linkrot—when content at a particular URL is moved or deleted—which leads to the previously live link becoming a dead link. A partnership with Internet Archive (IA) and volunteer community members led to more than one million outbound broken links on English Wikipedia being replaced with archived versions, ensuring that readers are still able to access the original sources cited.12 Using a Wikipedia bot and IA's Wayback Machine, Wikipedia articles are scanned to test if they are dead; if they don't properly resolve then the Internet Archive version most-closely dated to when the original link was added is inserted if available. Continued work in this area will expand the process to other language Wikipedias and implement methods to fortify our online citations against linkrot problems from the very moment when they are first added to Wikipedia. While editors benefit directly from TWL's publisher relationships, readers face the same obstacle of closed access paywalls that TWL was created to overcome for editors. OABot (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:OABOT) is a tool that finds open access versions of references in Wikipedia articles. If no URL is included in the citation, it adds one that points to an open access repository version of the source; if one is available, OABot uses the Dissem.in service (http://dissem.in/) to find these versions from sources like CrossRef, BASE, DOAI, and SHERPA/RoMEO. On an article like Cancer, which has 200 citations, 15% will have free-to-read links to repository versions added. Those links will be accompanied by a green open lock icon broadcasting their availability to readers. This expands on previous efforts led by Daniel Mietchen and other open access advocates to present icon-based indications of open access sources as part of the OA Signalling Initiative (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Open_Access/Signalling_OA-ness). The growing prominence of both open access publishing and article-level metrics (altmetrics) amplify each other on Wikipedia:
- "The odds that an open access journal is referenced on the English Wikipedia are 47% higher compared to closed access journals. Moreover, in most of the world's Wikipedias, a journal's high status (impact factor) and accessibility (open access policy) both greatly increase the probability of referencing. Among the implications of this study is that the chief effect of open access policies may be to significantly amplify the diffusion of science, through an intermediary like Wikipedia, to a broad public audience."13
Part of supporting readers is making the creation of accurate and thorough citations easy in the first place. Through a TWL partnership with OCLC, editors can now use the WorldCat API to automatically generate book citations in Wikipedia articles. They need only enter the ISBN in a citation tool, which then draws from WorldCat to return fully formatted bibliographic metadata, including an OCLC identifier that links to libraries in which the book can be found.14 This service, alongside similar services offered by Crossref for DOIs and using the PMID database, ensures that citation information provided in a Wikipedia article points readers to a deeper resource on the topic.
Lastly, TWL is working on the frontiers of meta-knowledge about our project's content. Wikidata (https://wikidata.org/) is a newer Wikimedia project created to store structured data. It is a language-independent, linked, open, structured database that is openly editable by both humans and computers. Since 2012 it has grown to include over 25 million items, each with a unique Wikidata identifier. TWL participates in WikiCite (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiCite), the collaborative community effort that aims to take advantage of Wikidata to build a repository of all the citations on Wikipedia and to design tools to take advantage of this rich data.