Wikipedia: Why? Who? and How?
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Revised and updated version of a 2014 OLC presentation, given to staff at Cleveland Public Library on 13 April 2017.
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Wikipedia: Why? Who? and How?
- 1. Working with Wikipedia Why? Who? And How? Don Boozer BEL, GOV, SCI, SOC April 13, 2017 http://thepoliticalcarnival.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/SOPAblackout.jpg
- 2. DISCLAIMER This presentation is based on a similar one done for OhioNET recently. A complete list of clickable links from that version is at… https://sites.google.com/view/working-with-wp/ Please, don’t try and write everything down. There’s no need to panic. Sit back, and enjoy the ride!
- 6. How much stuff is actually on Wikipedia?
- 8. As of December 2016, the size of just the English Wikipedia (without images) in print volumes… 2,397 volumes 5,321,306 articles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_in_volumes https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/SummaryEN.htm http://what-if.xkcd.com/59/
- 11. Who adds all that stuff to Wikipedia? (It’s not the 280 staff members.)
- 12. https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/SummaryEN.htm Between 30 and 40 thousand active editors...a month
- 14. Peter Steiner. The New Yorker, July 5, 1993 (Vol.69, no. 20) page 61
- 16. Okay, so what does this have to do with us?
- 17. Wikipedia: #6 World 1. Google.com 2. Youtube.com 3. Facebook.com 4. Baidu.com 5. Yahoo.com 6. Wikipedia.org 7. Google.co.in 8. Amazon.com 9. Qq.com 10.Tmall.com US 1. Google.com 2. Youtube.com 3. Facebook.com 4. Amazon.com 5. Yahoo.com 6. Wikipedia.org 7. Reddit.com 8. Twitter.com 9. Ebay.com 10. Linkedin.com http://www.alexa.com/topsites as of 1/30/2017
- 22. https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews How many people are looking at our library’s article on Wikipedia?
- 23. 54% of visitors are using the English version of Wikipedia http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/wikipedia.org
- 24. http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/wikipedia.org 61% of visitors go straight to Wikipedia
- 25. 39% of visitors are coming from search engines http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/wikipedia.org
- 27. Wikipedia is a monster! http://www.ifc.com/fix/2012/01/godzilla-roars-onto-criterion-blu-ray
- 29. Peaceful Co-existence, Part 1: Know when to use and recommend Wikipedia! http://godzilla.wikia.com/wiki/File:SOG_-_Minilla_Sits_On_Top_of_Godzilla.jpg
- 30. Know When To Use & Recommend 1. Quick ‘n’ Dirty introduction to a topic 2. References, Further Reading, and External Links! 3. Pop culture e.g., 15-page article on Gorillaz album Plastic Beach 4. Language study (285 different languages!) 5. Local perspectives e.g., Else Lasker-Schüler English WP: 5 pages German WP: 12 pages
- 32. What institutions are already contributing to Wikipedia? See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedian_librarians
- 34. The British Library 40,000 views on April 17, 2012 20,000 views per year on-going
- 35. National Archives “The 4,000 Wikipedia articles featuring our records received more than one billion page views in Fiscal Year 2013.” ~ Open Government Plan 2014-2016
- 36. National Archives “We have organized six Wikipedia edit-a-thons and a Wikidata hackathon, as well as hosted WikiConference USA in 2015. NARA also secured grant funding which allowed us to fund and host a 2015 meeting of the GLAM-Wiki US Consortium's advisory board.” ~ Open Government Plan 2016-2018 https://usnationalarchives.github.io/opengovplan/
- 37. National Archives “NARA will continue to expand collaboration with Wikipedia and will seek to upload more digitized National Archives records to the Wikimedia Commons as well as continue assisting coordination of the GLAM- Wiki U.S. Consortium.” ~ Open Government Plan 2016-2018 https://usnationalarchives.github.io/opengovplan/
- 38. Thomas J. Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art “We see Wikipedia as a natural extension of one of our primary missions, which is to make our collections known and available to readers and researchers who can use them. By adding links in Wikipedia, we are helping ensure our material is discovered by a wide audience..., which is exactly what most libraries – and digital collections in general – strive to do.” http://www.metmuseum.org/blogs/in-circulation/2014/wikipedia https://nyc.wikimedia.org/wiki/Interview_with_William_Blueher Linked-in William Blueher Senior Library Associate Head of Outreach for Digital Collections
- 39. Thomas J. Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art “Over the last 30 days, we have had 14,898 visits to the Digital Collections. Over the same period a year ago, we only had 4,928 visits… Of the 14,898… 57% were referred by Wikipedia, whereas a year ago, only 31% came from Wikipedia. As we’ve put more into Wikipedia, it has referred more back out to us.” Linked-in William Blueher Senior Library Associate Head of Outreach for Digital Collections
- 40. “Wikipedia Edit-a-thons from Why to Edit” Wikipedia Edit-a-thons have become a popular way of improving the resource as well as a great way to help new Wikipedians learn to edit. This “train the trainers” workshop targets librarians and visual resources professionals who are new to Wikipedia but would like to learn how to edit Wikipedia pages and run Wikipedia edit-a-thons around local holdings or subjects of their interest… William Blueher will discuss Thomas J. Watson Library's on-going GLAM-Wiki project. A team of librarians and interns have added citations to over 2,000 Wikipedia articles, and as a result Wikipedia now drives over 50% of traffic to Watson's Digital Collections. https://arlisnavra2016.sched.com/elenastuart/list/descriptions/
- 41. “One of our primary missions [is] to make our collections known and available to readers and researchers.” We want people to use our stuff! “As we’ve put more into Wikipedia, it has referred more back out to us.” We want to generate stats!
- 42. Okay, but where would we start?
- 44. Cleveland Public Library 8 random items from CPL’s Digital Gallery that I decided to add to Wikipedia
- 51. Oh My!
- 52. More ideas are limited only by our imaginations …Well, and our time, too.
- 53. Hey! An article mentions us! Don’t use citations from your own institution!
- 58. How do I do it?
- 59. How do I do it? Jump right in and start editing!
- 73. Ya know, if we all worked together and added good content to Wikipedia, we could... http://www.fs.usda.gov/detail/scnfs/learning/safety-ethics/?cid=fsbdev3_037391 Ya know, people are actually finding our stuff online! Great work, everybody! Let’s keep going…
- 74. Thank You! Questions? Resource List Available At https://sites.google.com/view/working-with-wp/ Don Boozer don@cpl.org
Editor's Notes
- Introductions, etc.
- Wikipedia is a topic that can elicit strong emotions. In addition to working at Cleveland Public Library, I also teach reference at Kent State’s School of Library and Information Science. When I’ve had students share their experience with and thoughts on Wikipedia. a number of them relate how, in the past, they were told not to even LOOK at Wikipedia. Teachers at all levels will ban the website from their classrooms, pretending that their students aren’t going to use it. Many librarians look askance at the “Free Encyclopedia” for its lack of authority control and editing oversight. In researching this talk, I even came across a site known as Wikipediocracy which, according to its mission, exists “to shine the light of scrutiny into the dark crevices of Wikipedia.” Ooo, scary. While acknowledging that Wikipedia has some issues what I’d like to do today is provide another perspective and show you how you can work with Wikipedia and leverage it to serve your patrons and, yes, the world. This webinar will not be “how to use Wikipedia as a reference tool.” I’ve discussed that aspect in the past at a number of presentations. No, my goal this afternoon is to get you to at least *consider* editing Wikipedia! More to the point of today’s presentation, I want to talk about how we can ALL make it a *better* reference tool to serve our own selfish needs as well as the needs of our patrons. My perspective is that the more credible information that is added, the more effective a tool it will be for us and for our patrons. I know everyone has a lot on their plates and now I’m asking you to consider adding something else. I’d like to build a case for why we, as librarians, should be editing Wikipedia and striving to understand how it works so we can better explain it to our patrons including students and teachers. And then, to help you get started, I will share a little of the “how” you can do this, what kind of edits I’m proposing, and what I’ve done myself along these lines. So, let’s start at the beginning...
- What is Wikipedia? I know you all know how to find it online, but I want to just briefly touch on where Wikipedia comes from.
- Wikipedia is just one of the projects of the Wikimedia Foundation based in San Francisco. Some of the other projects that the Wikimedia Foundation facilitates are Mediawiki, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, and the Wikimedia Commons. I’ll be referring to several of these throughout the talk, and I think it’s important to understand how all these fit together. To use just one example, images uploaded to Wikimedia Commons can be used to illustrate articles on Wikipedia or Wikiquotes. So everything feeds into each other.
- So, we have the Wikimedia Foundation overseeing its various projects of which Wikipedia and its language versions are a part. We can now ask “How much stuff is actually on Wikipedia?”
- Well, this graph shows the growth in number of articles on the English version of Wikipedia since 2001. As you can see there are currently well-over five million articles on the online encyclopedia. That’s a lot of articles. Of course, they range widely in size, content, and quality.
- However, to start to get an idea of the breadth of coverage in Wikipedia, compare that 5 million plus articles to some other benchmarks: The World Book Advanced encyclopedia has 25,000 articles. The Oxford English Dictionary has over 225,000 words The US Geological Survey’s Geographic Names Information System has over 2 million named places around the country in its database Everyone’s favorite movie reference tool, IMdB, has over 11 million titles and people. So, even if some of the articles on Wikipedia are let’s say, not-so-good, there are still a lot that are quality resources.
- Heck, let’s say only 20% of all Wikipedia articles are worth looking at (which I would have to seriously look at). That still leaves over 1 million articles with potential. Wikipedia itself lists 4,926 “featured articles” which have been chosen as the best; but there are also over 25,566 “Good articles” that have been voted on for quality of writing, factual information, verifiability, and a neutral point of view. You can spot featured articles by the little gold star that will be in the upper right corner of an article’s page. Good articles get a little green + sign.
- Now, we can ask, “Who adds all that stuff to Wikipedia?” The Wikimedia Foundation currently has around 280 staff members, but the real work of Wikipedia is done by the volunteer editors or Wikipedians as they’re commonly called. Heck, I’ll say “we’re” called since I edit the site as well. More on that later…
- Here’s a chart showing the number of active editors from Jan 2003 through December 2016. As you can see it hovers for the last few years between 30 and 40 thousand people...a month…for those making between 5 and 25 edits. There are far more registered users/editors/Wikipedians than active ones, but this is still a lot of people.
- And you can get an idea of their activity by checking out a fun little site that lets you listen to Wikipedia edits in real time: larger circles equal larger edits, etc. Each has a different tone. It’s an interesting visualization.
- But, as everyone knows, there is sometimes an issue with the expertise of Wikipedia editors and with the information that they post on the encyclopedia. To paraphrase this classic cartoon from 1993, nobody knows you’re a dog on Wikipedia. The only information we have is what Wikipedians are willing to share with everyone…
- But sometimes that a lot. For example, here is the user page for a Wikipedia editor who uses the name BrownHairedGirl. This page lists her (and it is a “her”) contributions if you click on each of those question marks at the top, some of her interests, her thanks to the community for facilitating her administrator-ship, etc. There’s no real way of knowing who she actually is or what her real name is. But in the end, I would ask, does it matter? On Wikipedia, I’m not as concerned about who people are as I am what they’ve added. I’m looking at the content. If BrownHairedGirl has added good, verifiable content with plenty of citations and provided some quality references and external links… That is what I’m looking for in Wikipedia.
- Okay, so what does this have to do with us? Glad you asked.
- We know people are using Wikipedia. It’s consistently in the Top Ten Most Visited sites on the Internet both globally and in the United States. It’s interesting to realize that Wikipedia, which remember is run by the Wikimedia Foundation, is in the same league as for-profit companies like Google, Facebook, and Yahoo! It’s not a for-profit corporation, it’s a non-profit foundation and they put 69.1% of revenue back into their programs and services, which is actually pretty good and helps garner them a score of 91.02 out of 100 overall from Charity Navigator. But let’s put that into a library-related context…
- According to IMLS, the total number of public library visits in the US in 2014 (the most recent year available) was almost 1.5 billion. That’s a lot of visits!
- The total number of materials checked out from all public libraries in the US in 2014 was well over 2 billion items! That’s a lot of stuff. However...
- However, the page views of just the English Wikipedia FOR ONE MONTH were well over 7 BILLION! Think about that: The English-version of Wikipedia received over THREE times the number of page views IN ONE MONTH than all the materials patrons checked out from ALL of our public libraries combined for a YEAR. So, whether some try to discourage it or not, people - our patrons - are using Wikipedia to find information.
- https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/Case_studies/British_Library,_St_Cuthbert_Gospel_to_Featured_Article The St Cuthbert Gospel is a manuscript dating to about 690 which, among other things, is the oldest Western book with its original bookbinding. After having it on loan for many years, the British Library in London arranged to buy it for £9 million, a record price for a manuscript. The BL wanted to have the existing short article in the English Wikipedia expanded to a Featured Article, and ideally to see it on the main page on the day the purchase was announced, which was all achieved on 17 April 2012.
- Richard Power of the library's web department, our regular contact, approached Wikimedia UK, who suggested User:Johnbod, who had experience of both medieval art and the Featured Article process. There was a meeting at the library in summer 2011 between Johnbod and Claire Breay, the Senior Curator responsible for the manuscript, and Johnbod agreed to undertake the task. Claire Breay supplied a reading list, some new photographs, and answered queries by email, and Richard Power mailed photocopies of the main monograph on the manuscript. Claire reviewed the completed article and had another meeting with Johnbod to discuss final points, in fact this was after it had already passed the featured article review process or FAC. The article received some 40,000 views on the day it was on the main page, and receives about 20,000 per year ongoing.
- From 2014
- Art Libraries Society of North America + Visual Resources Association March 2016 joint conference panel discussion
- Editing since August 20, 2009. Over 7 years off and on.