The Wikipedia Library-The largest encyclopedia needs a digital library and we are building it/With Librarians: Collaboration on a Shared Vision
With Librarians: Collaboration on a Shared Vision
"My library
Was dukedom large enough."
— William Shakespeare
The Wikipedia Library envisions librarians and Wikipedians as natural allies in working towards a goal of access to reliable information.
An early effort pioneered by TWL, in partnership with OCLC, was the creation of the first-ever Wikipedia Visiting Scholar (WVS) roles.15 Through the WVS program, Wikipedia editors gain online access to an educational institution's library resources like databases, journals, ebooks, and special collections. A WVS, like a Wikipedian-in-Residence (WIR), works in partnership with an institution to help expose its content on Wikipedia. The WVS role differs in that it is remote, unpaid, and primarily focused on creating content rather than building institutional capacity. Libraries get involved because of a desire to see their collections put to good use and to make a difference in public knowledge in one or more topic areas. Wikipedians receive access to specialized and paywalled content to expand and improve articles in topic areas they already care about. A Wikipedia Visiting Scholar at Rutgers University shared:
- “This was both Rutgers University’s first collaboration with Wikipedians, as well as [my] first collaboration of this type with an organization. The initiative from Rutgers’s side was directed by ... Grace Agnew, who has been accessible, friendly, and resourceful throughout the whole exchange. As part of this initiative, twelve members from the Rutgers University team have learned more about how to add content to Wikipedia. Aside from teaching librarians and students about Wikipedia, I have also been the student. Graduate students Yingting and Yu-Hung jointly held a video conference with me on how to access the library resources of Rutgers remotely and how to use Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) to investigate healthcare-related subjects.”16
While the program is focused on content creation it also clearly opens a channel for exchange of ideas, making it an ideal entry-point for institutional partnerships. The Visiting Scholars program was piloted by TWL in 2014 and was passed off to the Wiki Edu Foundation for all North American positions in 2016.
The #1lib1ref campaign (http://1lib1ref.org) goes further, calling upon librarians all over the world to add a single citation to Wikipedia themselves. It was created by TWL to offer a low-barrier-to-entry option for engagement, using a combination of a microcontribution, a semi-automated interface, and a viral hashtag. The #1lib1ref campaign took advantage of the volunteer-developed Citation Hunt tool (https://tools.wmflabs.org/citationhunt), which automatically isolates sentences flagged with a “citation needed” tag, and presents them to the user for fixing. This simple workflow fostered significant participation rates in both English and other language Wikipedias.
#1lib1ref was conceived in fall 2015 by TWL project manager Alex Stinson, who recognized the potential of Citation Hunt. He took the functionality and connected it to an opportunity: other GLAM communities had not yet developed a way to celebrate the upcoming 15-year anniversary of Wikipedia in January 2016. Inspired by the changing conversation about the role of Wikipedia in research and among libraries, the TWL team developed a campaign with the goal to develop increased literacy and understanding among librarians about how Wikipedia’s content is created and improved through verifiability, while generating awareness that other libraries are taking advantage of Wikipedia as an environment in which to further public programming. "Give Wikipedia the gift of a citation. Because facts matter #1lib1ref" was seen widely throughout social media platforms.
The campaign’s first two years have proven to be quite successful. In 2016, there were over 29,000 views of the campaign page, coverage of the event in over 50 different venues (blogs, professional newsletters, etc.), over 1,100 Twitter posts using the hashtag, and at least 1,232 edits to Wikimedia projects. Though 1,232 citations barely scratches a dent in the number of citations needed for Wikipedia (English Wikipedia has over 300,000 “citation needed” tags), it did generate broad interest.17 In 2017, the campaign expanded by a factor of three to over 4,171 contributions in 18 languages, with continued positive press, and more events and support from local language Wikimedia communities.18 One particularly motivating story: the State Library of Queensland committed to and accomplished contributing 1,000 references during the campaign from among their staff. This kind of campaign builds awareness and interest among the library community and allows for a dialogue that further shifts the Wikimedia community closer to the needs of libraries, and libraries closer to the goals of the Wikimedia community.
TWL, recognizing a need for persistent meeting and conversation spaces, has supported and helped develop two new venues to further dialogue between Wikipedians and Librarians: 700 members have joined the Wikipedia + Libraries Facebook group, and over 130 participants are signed up to the newly formed Wikipedia Library User Group. These fora spark regular mingling, noteworthy updates, and cross-pollination of ideas among Wikipedians and librarians, fostering a shared sense of identity and belonging to a community of practice around Wikipedia and Libraries.
The capstone of advocating for such mutually a beneficial and interconnected relationship came when TWL worked with the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) to publish two seminal white papers (http://www.ifla.org/node/10871): one on the opportunities for academic and research libraries to engage with Wikipedia, and a similar paper aimed at public libraries. These papers outline multiple areas of potential collaboration. For example, Wikimedia projects provide a venue to showcase cultural heritage resources in order to convey diverse perspectives to a diverse audience. Another path forward lies through structured data on Wikimedia's multimedia repository site Wikimedia Commons and the sister project Wikidata, which can enhance linkages between items and collections to support research across multiple semantic frameworks. The papers also express opportunities for professional development within library communities, in which Wikipedia editing skills can benefit a librarian's ability to grasp popular contemporary research practices, teach about digital information literacy and collaborative knowledge production, initiate community programs, and highlight their collections to the world.