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< GLAM | Newsletter | December 2015


Edit-a-thons and Editing Challenges

Editing Challenges

Wikimedia Argentina launched a new challenge to put the skills edition of the Spanish community in practice. We chose the category of writers and particularly notable and illustrious writers who died prematurely.
Here are the results so far.

Metrics Results
New users 2
Number of previous users 28
New articles 99
Bytes 455430
Total number of participants 30

Wikipedia Edit-a-thon 2015

On Friday, December 4, 2015 we had the first edition of RSG-Argentina Wikipedia Edit-a-thon. Simultaneously in three cities, groups of students and young researchers wrote Wikipedia articles on Bioinformatics and Computational Biology .
Members of each group selected ( with the assistance of RSG- Argentina ) an issue of work according to their interests and thematic vacancy in Wikipedia .
Here are the results so far:

Metrics Results
New users 12
New Articles 4
Bytes 71867
Total number of participants 12


Local Library weaves a community at Iurretapedia

Iurretapedia

Iurreta is a small village of Biscay, it has a population of 3.800 inhabitants. In 2015 they were celebrating their 25. anniversary of the constitution as single and independent municipality. Many events had been done during the year. In that context, the local library, seeing that Basque Wikipedia's article about the town was quite a stub, decided to organize the local associations and citizens to enrich all together the article about Iurreta. The most associations participated in this idea, specially Geridiaga Elkartea, which is dedicated to local history. They were inspired by Amarapedia, a similar event driven in Donostia.

As a result, one introductory conference and four training sessions were organized where the local associations participated. Each person worked at home the subject they wanted to develop, and on the 12 December all met up at the library for the, what we called, herripedia (townpedia): the construction of the local knowledge by locals with the help of Wikipedians. More than 20 people came to edit the day. The article in Basque was tripled in size, but more importantly, the people understood how Wikipedia works and how powerful could be the collaborative work. Besides, in this case, Wikipedia served as integration and convivence tool for the local community, as we could see people from very different political ideas working together to built their village knowledge.


Archives Challenge; 100 ancient coins from Philippopolis

The Archives Challenge resulted in more than 100 new articles in different languages

Isola dei Pescatori, Lago Maggiore, Italy: 1930s vs. 2014.
Nesebar, Bulgaria: 1929 vs. 2014.
St. Mary's Basilica, Kraków, Poland: 1930 vs. 2011.
Prizren, Kosovo: 1940s vs. 2004.

Since March 2012, there has been an established collaboration between the Bulgarian Wikimedian community and the Bulgarian Archives State Agency. This collaboration is the first GLAM project for this small Eastern European country, and the Bulgarian language Wikipedia which earlier this year celebrated their 200,000th Wikipedia article. In these almost 4 years, more than 5300 photos and documents have been researched, digitized and uploaded to Commons by the volunteers who visited the Archive. In November, an idea occurred to Spasimir Pilev, an active Wikimedian in Residence, of how to make the results from this GLAM cooperation more visible, tangible and better utilized across the different languages of Wikipedia. The idea, called The Archives Challenge, soon expanded to an international contest, successfully engaging a wider volunteering community, especially among the Wikimedians from Central and Eastern Europe.

The month-long contest was focused on improving and translating file descriptions in new languages, adding new categories to images, and new images to articles, as well as creating new articles related to the archival content. Due to the diverse options for contributing within the challenge, the rules included a detailed rating system used to measure the progress of the participants, and hence their overall ranking. Most points, of course, were assigned for the creation of a new encyclopedic article which directly incorporates archival documents as illustrations.

And in order to make it even more interesting and interactive, yet another direction of the challenge was developed, the “Then and Now” Gallery. The challenge there was to find pairs of images – historical and modern, which depict the same object under the same or similar angle. Notable buildings, natural and cultural sites, and even whole landforms and settlements – in sepia and colour, give us yet another, and thrilling proof of how precious – for us and for the world – is the memory collected in the Archives.

As a result of the efforts of more than ten participants from Armenia, Belarus, Bulgaria, Georgia, Romania and Serbia, at least 3202 new descriptions have been created, and at least 2387 new categories have been added. No less than 597 articles have been illustrated with visual content from the GLAM collaboration, and 57 pairs of "Then and Now" images, depicting places from Warsaw to Thassos, and from Milan to Varna, have been discovered. By the end of the challenge, at least 94 new articles were written, many of them in Armenian.

The announced winners were the three top ranking editors: one from Bulgaria, Алиса Селезньова and two – from Armenia, Armineaghayan and Lilitik22. Both the organizers and the Bulgarian Archives State Agency considered the contest a pronounced success and an initiative worth repeating annually.

Coverage in the Blog of the Bulgarian wiki community

More than 100 ancient coins from Philippopolis donated to Commons

The end of December marked the successful completion of the work planned for 2015 along with the collaboration between the Bulgarian Wikimedian Vladislav Nedelev and the Numismatic Society "Philippopol". Vladislav, who was the representative from Bulgaria in the GLAM-WIKI Conference in the Hague in April 2015, uploaded to Commons a total of 236 photos of 118 ancient coins, minted during the Roman period of Plovdiv, when the city was named Philippopolis. The Numismatic Society released their collection of high quality photos under the free license Creative Commons Attribution, v. 4.0.

The collection contains some well preserved bronze coins, minted during the reign of eleven Roman emperors from 81 to 222 AD, like Antoninus Pius, Elagabalus, Publius Septimius Geta Caracalla Commodus, Marcus Aurelius and Septimius Severus among all. There are also coins with the faces of several emperors' wives like Commodus' wife Bruttia Crispina, Marcus Aurelius' wife Faustina the Younger or Elagabalus' wife Julia Cornelia Paula.

For each coin in the collection, the Numismatic Society provides two photos, obverse and reverse, as well as the additional encyclopedic value added with the readings of the inscriptions on the coins, made by expert numismatists, as well as the coin weights.

Given that for some Ancient Roman emperors our only images are their depictions on the coins they minted, numismatics provides an especially precious source of historical information.

The collaboration with the Numismatic Society "Philippopol" is the first of its kind for the Bulgarian Wikimedian community, but there is declared interest on both sides to have it extended in future with other initiatives and contributions, related to the illustration, creation and improvement of the articles in the field of numismatics and history of coins.

Coverage in the Blog of the Bulgarian wiki community


Wallraf Art and Focus on Zeiss

Close-up on microscopy images

Following an approach by Andy Mabbett, Carl Zeiss Microscopy GmbH have kindly open-licensed a number of images, with the promise of more to come. They include modern and vintage Zeiss microscopes, as well as portraits of people associated with Zeiss, educational posters, and more. One has already been declared a "featured image" on Commons. The images are in Commons:Category:Images donated by Carl Zeiss Microscopy; statistics are also available. Please add these images to Wikipedia pages and other projects!

  • 1847 "Praepariermikroskop" First simple microscope for Trichinella detection by Carl Zeiss Jena
    1847 "Praepariermikroskop" First simple microscope for Trichinella detection by Carl Zeiss Jena
  • Correlative Microscopy System Shuttle & Find
    Correlative Microscopy System Shuttle & Find
  • Microscope Objectives by ZEISS
    Microscope Objectives by ZEISS
  • 1924 Binocular compound microscope - a featured image
    1924 Binocular compound microscope - a featured image

Art exhibition photography

Photography by Raymond

In January 2015 I was allowed to take pictures in Museum Wallraf, Cologne from the art exbition "Die Kathedrale. Romantik – Impressionismus – Moderne". Due to various reasons I was not able to upload them to Wikimedia Commons before December 2015. Now they are here: c:Category:Die Kathedrale. Romantik – Impressionismus – Moderne.


©© change your mind

Throughout 2015 we have tested a workshop for GLAM staff to empower their skills to use free licenses. It is a cooperation of Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek and Wikimedia Deutschland. We call it "©© change your mind“. It consists of 3 parts. Starting with an introduction talk (English version). It provides basic knowledge on Public Domain, the Creative commons license CC BY and debates reasons why to refrain from using either of the label. In the second part the audience works in smaller groups. In each group there are 3 roles: a moderator, a promoter and an opponent of free licenses. The roles are allotted by lot. Each group is handed out a set of media files including some additional information for each file (example). They are asked to discuss whether the file could be labeled as public domain, or under a Creative Commons license or whether other reasons such as privacy may lead to refrain from releasing it. In the last part all groups present their results and discuss them in the audience. We tested with good results the format both on conferences and in single institutions. We learned that 3 hours time for the workshop is best. Many institutions are interested to host a ©© change your mind workshop this year.


Prepare Coding da Vinci data for Wikimedia Commons

Through the art and cultural heritage hackathon Coding da Vinci many media files came under free license (more info) . Uploading them to Wikimedia Commons including their metadata is possible by using tools such as Vicuña and the GLAM Wiki toolset. In the end of November a dozen of volunteers gathered together at a specially designed workshop hosted by Deutsche Nationalbibliothek and Wikimedia Deutschland eager to learn how to apply the tools. We all learned it is not that easy. At least some programming skills are needed. Collaborating with the open source community is quite useful. We published a learning pattern on how to use the upload tools. This year we aim to have more workshops.


Fondazione Giorgio Cini donation and a new education project

Aldo Manuzio's edition from Fondazione Giorgio Cini

Aldo Manuzio
Iuuenalis Persius

Venetian libraries are working on an Aldo Manuzio edition donated by Fondazione Giorgio Cini, an important historical cultural institution in Venice.

This is a very remarkable result because of Venice's leading role in printing history, the importance of Manuzio in typography's modern development (his Aldine Press, started in 1494, defined a standard set of graphical conventions still in use), and because of the direct involvement of an important institution in such a relevant donation.

The work, 1508 Iuuenalis Persius, is now on Wikisource in Italian, still under revision and possibly destinated to Latin Wikisource.

The donation is part of Wikimanuzio, an articulated project focused on many aspects of Manuzio's work, that for instance produced a complete list of editions based on international bibliographies.

You already read about the project on June number of the Newsletter.



Wikibooks and Vivarium project

In December, the Vivarium project, aimed to support teachers and students of high schools in the educational use of the wiki platforms, was launched in Potenza. Vivarium is the name of the monastery school founded in the sixth century in the south of Italy by the great Roman scholar Cassiodorius, who composed his manual scholar, which had a great influence in the birth of the first medieval encyclopaedias. After 15 centuries, students and teachers are engaged in the collaborative creation of educational content on the wiki platforms.

The project provides, for the school year 2015/2016, two experiments, one in the High School "B. Mangino" of Pagani, in the province of Salerno, the other one in the High School of Human Sciences "E. Gianturco" of Potenza. In the school of Pagani, the Vivarium project started in November, with a series of meetings designed to support teachers in the use of MediaWiki and the collective creation of a newspaper-encyclopedia of the school. The experiments carried out by a group of teachers and students in Potenza is aimed instead to build educational ebooks to be published on Wikibooks. The first wikibook will be devoted to the cyberbullying, a very topical issue that will be treated from a multidisciplinary perspective.

Both experiences thus point to prove through the teaching experience the importance of sharing knowledge through the conscious use of the wiki platforms. The project is sponsored by the Centre for the Study of Late Antique, Medieval and Humanistic Philosophy (FiTMU), active at the Department of Cultural Heritage of the University of Salerno.

You can follow the development of the project on the Project Facebook page.


Physics experiments in glorious HD!

Physics videos from the Institute of Physics, Skopje

Wikiexperiments logo
Wikiexperiments logo
Prof. Oliver Zajkov demonstrating glow discharge in a low-pressure tube caused by electric current

This month saw the upload of the first round of high-definition videos of experiments conducted to demonstrate various laws and principles of physics. These 20 demonstrations were performed by Prof. Oliver Zajkov at the Physics Institute at the Ss. Cyril and Methodius University of Skopje, as part of a WikiExperiments project by Shared Knowledge.

The experiments are in the process of receiving their proper descriptions in Macedonian and English, and are being added to articles on various language editions of Wikipedia. Although they are without narration, there was an idea to add closed captions explaining what is going on in various languages.

The Second of the two rounds of of experiments are currently being recorded. The editing of the raw footage should start in January 2016, and they will subsequently be uploaded.

The full gallery of experiments can be found at Category:Physics experiments by Shared Knowledge.


Donation of videos; about Wikimedia during 3 conferences; image donation from Dutch Parliament; workshop at City Archive Rotterdam

The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision donates 392 videos to Commons

We expanded the collection videos on Wikimedia Commons with historical newsreel footage. Hereunder you can see some examples in this category all 392 videos can be found. This donation involves footage and newsreels from WWII and the Dutch state mines (coal mines) and footage of daily life. If you would like to help in matching videos to articles relevant to the subject, you can use this tool and it will take you directly to an overview of all videos that have not been used yet on the Dutch Wikipedia.

  • Six thousand homing pigeons released, 1923.
  • Mills in Holland, 1927.
  • Two steamships stranded, 1930.
  • Liberation of Amsterdam, 1945.
  • War casualties, 1945.
  • Holidays in Holland, 1947.
  • Philips exists 60 years, 1951.
  • Opening new cokesfactory of the Dutch state mines, 1954.
  • European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) in Noordwijk, 1968.
  • Amsterdam 700 years, Sail Amsterdam, 1975.

[National Library of the Netherlands] Sessions about Wikimedia during 3 conferences

During three national conferences in December we've given sessions about our collaboration with Wikipedia/media.

1.) DISH 2015, 7+8 December 2015, Rotterdam.

Wikipedia, a library and an archive, a family portrait - DISH conference, 8-12-2015, Rotterdam

During DISH 2015 on Dec. 8th Olaf Janssen (National Library) and Tim de Haan (National Archives) spoke about Wikipedia, libraries and archives: A family portrait.

Tim and Olaf gave an overview of why and how the KB and NA have set up structural collaborations with Wikipedia and its sister projects. Starting from a brief historic overview of their joint Wikipedian-in-Residence project in 2013-14, they discussed the added value and best-practices of the current Wiki-activities both institutions are running along with the Wikipedia-community. They talked about the rationale and impact of image donations, a project to systematically describe all Dutch WW2 resistance newspapers on Wikipedia, the collaboration with public libraries and volunteer engagement activities.
 Slides on Commons and on Slideshare

2.) The national library congress, 9th December 2015, Eindhoven

Lieke Hoefs (KB) leading the session about the collaboration between Wikipedia and Dutch public libraries during the national library congress 2015, 9-12-2015, Eindhoven

On Dec. 9th Lieke Hoefs (KB) lead as session titled Wikipedia in the Library, who dares? during the national library congress 2015. It dealt with the emerging collaboration between Wikipedia and Dutch public libraries.

Wikipedia is an unmissable source for information seekers. It brings together people, information, knowledge and culture, pretty much the same fuel as public Dutch libraries are running on. There are valid opportunities for public libraries to collaborate with Wikipedia, but how do you do that? In this workshop we give examples of how it can be done in practice. In 2015 the public libraries Amsterdam, Amersfoort, Oosterhout and Arnhem have set up pilot projects to collaborate with Wikipedia in their activities, supported by the KB and Wikimedia Netherlands. The workshop focuses on three questions that have emerged: How do you deal with copyright? What happens with the quality of information the library can give if they give up control by getting the Wikipedia community involved in their activities? How do you ensure your are visible as a library in the project?

Wikipedia, cultural heritage and the city - Cultuur in Beeld, 14-12-2015, The Hague

3.) Cultuur in Beeld, 14th December 2015, The Hague.

On Dec. 14th Olaf Janssen (KB) spoke about the relationship between Wikipedia, heritage and the city during Cultuur in Beeld 2015

In this talk Olaf shows which opportunities Wikipedia can offer to make the cultural and historic heritage in a city more visible and reusable by collaborating with citizens, libraries, institutions and other communities. Wikipedia is not only the free encyclopedia used weekly by over 70% of the Dutch population, but also a community of volunteers, writers, photographers, software developers, teachers, project leaders and other active citizens. Culture, art and heritage comprise a substantial part of Wikipedia. Within this sector the Wiki volunteer community closely collaborates with cultural institutions in the city, including public libraries, archives and museums. These parties increasingly make their knowledge, data and collections freely and openly accessible, sharable and reusable for citizens, artists, companies and institutions via Wikipedia. Reversely, via citizen participation projects like Wiki Loves Monuments more city-based, open and free cultural content becomes available for all. Olaf illustrates these developments by discussing practical projects the National Library, Wikipedia and a number of public libraries have set up over the last few years.
 Slides on Commons and on Slideshare

[National Library of the Netherlands] Donation of 512 images from Dutch Parliament

Last November we did an donation of 512 maps and images from the proceedings of the Dutch Parliament (the so-called States General from the period 1885-1995.

The images are in Category:Media contributed by Tweede Kamer. Every image has geo coordinates for the map centre.

The set has some unique content, not only about the Netherlands, but also about its former colonies Dutch East-Indies (now Indonesia) and Suriname. Themes include the Delta Works, polders, land reclamation and the construction of roads, railways, and ports.

To foster reuse, we started assigning thematic categories to some images, for example Eastern Scheldt, Delta Works, Canals in Friesland, IJsselmeer and Railway lines in the Netherlands

Wikipedia workshop City Archive Rotterdam

On 14 December 2015 an Wikipedia workshop was organised at the Stadsarchief Rotterdam (City Archive Rotterdam). The participants were staff members of the organisation itself. First an introduction was given to introduce them to Wikipedia/Wikimedia. After that they started editing Wikipedia to bring the heard information into practise. Before the workshop there was a short tour through the archives.

See also:

  • Building
    Building
  • Archived posters
    Archived posters


GLAMing Madrid and Wiki Loves contests

GLAMing Madrid

Wikipedia training session at National Archaeological Museum

In December, GLAMing Madrid project continued. In this month were held 6 Wikipedia training sessions open to the public in the three museums. As well, another 3 Wikipedia training sessions and talks were held for the staff of the three museums.

As part of the collaboration, from December 14 until January 14, a writing contest about the three museums and their collections is running. Due to the importance of these institutions in conservation, documentation and diffusion of the historical and artistic Spanish heritage, we seek to create or improve articles in both Wikipedia and Wikidata about the three institutions, their collections and personalities related to them. Also, in December nearly 400 images donated by the museums were ready to be uploaded.

WLM and WLE awards ceremony

On December 5, we celebrated the Wiki Loves Earth and Wiki Loves Monuments Spain 2015 Awards Ceremony WLM and WLE 2015 awards ceremony in Seville. Firstly Diego Delso gave a talk about Wikimedia Commons, how to use, categorize and upload images, and then such awards were presented.

Wiki Loves Folk

Wiki Loves Folk (WLF) is a public photo competition around folklore, organized by Wikimedia Spain. In line with the celebration of other Wiki Loves contests, another important aspect of the culture of a country or territory is its folklore. Along with its monumental or natural wealth, Spain has a rich and varied folklore worth to value; for that reason, in 2016 we organize this new contest, focusing on this type of cultural heritage.

We propose the promotion of those celebrations or traditions (religious celebrations, carnivals, festivals, food festivals) that have any of the following statements: International Touristic Interest, National Touristic Interest, Regional Touristic Interest and Provincial Touristic Interest. As part of the preparations, from December 10 to January 31 a public logo competition is running for select the WLF logo.


Riksutställningar

Exhibitions, ending and continuing

During December the final four workshops in the project between Wikimedia Sweden and Riksutställningar were held. The total number of participants during the fall were 63 from over 15 different museums and organisations. Articles about both GLAMs, topics, exhibitions and people in the area has been created and extended, images uploaded and new ideas about free and open licenses thought of and added to guidelines. The plan right now is to continue with the tour during the spring and to have an event at the GLAM spring meeting in the middle of April to end this project.


National Library of Wales; Bodleian Libraries of Oxford

By Jason Evans, Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing) & Martin Poulter

Wales

There was plenty of festive cheer in Wales this December as the Wikipedian in Residence at the National Library of Wales was granted funding to extend the residency until the end of August 2016. Several edit-a-thons have already been planned for the new year including a Authors of Wales Edit-a-thon to coincide with Wikipedia's 15th birthday on the 15th of January. Between now and August the Wikipedian in residence will continue to share the library's digital content via Wiki Commons, Manage volunteer projects and events, and hopes to take Wikipedia into local schools and colleges, creating a blue print for an outreach program for the education sector.

Oxford

Having uploaded hundreds of images in batches of a few dozen, the Bodleian Libraries are getting ready to make larger batch uploads using the GLAMWiki Toolset. Martin has created custom Perl scripts to convert the Digital Bodleian's metadata to flat XML for use by the Toolset.

In December, Martin gave a Wikipedia training session for the Free Speech Debate project, which is going to improve articles relating to free speech in a variety of different languages. Differences in the interface between language versions of Wikipedia caused some headaches, but it was pleasing to see that so many had enabled the Visual Editor.

Coming up in Oxford in early 2016 are an editathon at the Oxford Internet Institute, a Tudor Music Editathon, and, in an exciting first for the UK, a four-part Open Knowledge Ambassador training course.

Help needed: The Bodleian Libraries source template has been translated into Arabic, Czech, Welsh, German, Esperanto, Spanish, Farsi, French, Polish, Russian, Swedish, Turkish, and Urdu. If you can translate the short sentence into any other languages, please edit commons:Template:Bodleian_Libraries/i18n or email martin.poulter﹫bodleian.ox.ac.uk . To see what "Bodleian Library" looks like in your language, see Wikidata.

Other news

See the this month's report from Germany for news of Andy's success in securing an image donation from Carl Zeiss Microscopes.


Open Access stats; recent uploads

Open Access stats

At the time of writing, there were 33175 files in the Commons category Open access (publishing), of which 9297 were used a total of 97698 times across the main namespaces of Wikimedia projects, where they are receiving a daily average of over 1 million page views.

Recent uploads: video support for improving pronunciation; autophagic plants; open science podcast

The following represents a selection of the files that have been uploaded this month from open-access sources. Most of these came from PubMed Central through the Open Access Media Importer, whose uploads now total over 21,100. If you can think of wiki pages where these files (or other files from the same source articles) could be useful, please put them in there or let us know.


Books & Bytes

In this issue of Books & Bytes, we're happy to announce some new partnerships, branches, coordinators, and news. October and November have seen more non-English branches launching signups, the creation of a new Norwegian branch, and an exciting series of Open Access Week events. We also announce our #1Lib1Ref campaign for the Wikipedia 15 celebrations, and cover an interesting presentation about citations on Wikipedia.

New accounts

English resources

  • Gale (Signup page)- A very large educational publisher based in the United States starting with a small trial of 10 accounts. Gale is offering access to four of their huge collections:

Global resources

New global branches

We are very excited 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/Norwegian. If you're interested in helping to start a branch on another language Wikipedia, please get in touch! wikipedialibrary﹫wikimedia.org

New volunteer coordinators

We want to welcome eight new awesome members to our Coordinators team!

We always need volunteers to help coordinate account distribution or perform other tasks. This role takes only 1–2 hours of work a week, and brings with it the satisfaction of connecting writers and researchers with the resources they need (and the occasional barnstar from happy recipients!). If you have benefited from a TWL account or are interested in helping out, sign up here.

Open Access Week

During Open Access Week on October 19–25, 2015, there was a global, virtual editathon to improve Open Access-related content on Wikipedia. Check out the improvements made as part of this effort.

Another highlight of the week was the Open Access Roundtable (full recording) at the Wikimedia Foundation. Melissa Hagemann introduced and Pete Forsyth moderated the panel, which comprised TWL Head Jake Orlowitz (m:User:Ocaasi (WMF)), Michael Eisen (an open-access advocate who co-founded PLoS), Rich Schneider of the University of California San Francisco, Wikimedia Foundation legal counsel Stephen LaPorte (m:User:Slaporte (WMF)), and John Dove, the former CEO of Credo Reference. John Dove followed up with a thoughtful Wikimedia Blog post.

DOIs, Wikipedia, and scholarly citations

On 4 December, Geoffrey Bilder of CrossRef and Dario Taraborelli of the Wikimedia Foundation hosted a presentation on scholarly citations in Wikipedia. CrossRef assigns digital object identifiers (DOI) to scholarly articles. Wikipedia is now the fifth largest referrer of citations to the scholarly literature – Bilder discussed the implications of this for Wikimedia and academia. Crossref also maintains an intriguing livestream of DOI citations added to Wikipedias (see link below). Taraborelli talked about the possibility of extracting and storing all source data from Wikimedia via Wikidata, to create a human-curated citation repository.

Spotlight: 1Lib1Ref

Librarians have nuanced opinions about Wikipedia. In the early days of the project, many in the library world were openly critical of the crowdsourced approach to knowledge creation. This was for a variety of reasons, but a major factor was the lack of focus on the reliability and authority of the information presented in Wikipedia articles. As Wikipedia evolved in the mid-2000s, the emphasis on reliability and good sourcing increased. However, some librarians still choose not to engage with Wikipedia, and urge their patrons not to use it in their research.

Part of the Wikipedia Library's mandate is to build relationships with librarians and professionals in the information world. One very easy way for librarians to contribute to Wikipedia is by adding references. Librarians are specifically trained to locate and organize the best available sources of information on a topic. They know where to look, and how to look. So TWL is issuing a challenge to librarians worldwide:

add one reference to any Wikipedia article!

We're calling this global, crowdsourced campaign #1Lib1Ref, and you can read all about it on Meta.

A librarian might ask: "Sure, I can contribute to Wikipedia. But why should I?" A simple answer would be that library patrons, especially the younger generations, are already using Wikipedia, and that librarians should be more familiar with how it works. Editing is the fastest way to get a deeper understanding of the inner mechanisms of the project. A second, often-overlooked reason is that Wikipedia can be a publicly available bridge between the Internet and the resources in brick-and-mortar libraries. Items used as references in Wikipedia articles have much higher discoverability than they would otherwise, and the more the reading public becomes aware of them, the higher the chances are that people will want to access them at the institution. Many libraries have unique collections of excellent resources; Wikipedia can be an avenue to let the world know about them.

If you are a librarian, please join the project! If you have librarians in your social or professional circles, let them know about the initiative. The Meta project page is still under development; please join us there to improve the instructions and strategy, and sign up as a coordinator. The #1Lib1Ref drive is scheduled for January 15–23 in the new year (coinciding with Wikipedia's 15th birthday!) We hope to use social media heavily to get the word out about the project. If even a small percentage of the world's hundreds of thousands of librarians participate, Wikipedia will be a more reliable source to the public.

Strategy and planning: Q3 goals

This is what we're planning for January through March in 2016. Note that these are a draft and won't be finalized until the end of December. We'd love to hear your thoughts on our direction and focus. Click through to see the second slide with 3 more goals.


caption=Slide 1 of 2

Bytes in Brief

Community roundup

Newsworthy

Worth reading (or watching)

Data dump

Further reading

There's lots of great digital library information online. Check out these neat resources for more library exploring.


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Wikidata this month

By Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing)

Tech developments

GLAM news

Presentation on using Wikidata for "the sum of all human citations"

For full Wikidata news, see the weekly status updates.


January's GLAM events

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1Lib1Ref, a week-long global microcontributions campaign with one goal: for every librarian in the world to add *one* reference to Wikipedia.
Just For The Record: Heroines
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New year's drink 2016, Utrecht
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Edit-a-thon during writing week
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Public Domain Day Celebration in the European Parliament, Brussels
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Check back for a new edition next month.
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