Slides from national WIkipedia information sessions conducted by Wikimedia Australia for members of the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA).
This session considered ways libraries and Wikimedia Australia could work together, and provided an introduction to how Wikipedia works.
Meet key Australian Wikimedians from your area, and discover:
how Wikipedia really works
what other projects are associated with Wikipedia
why Wikipedia uses a Creative Commons licence
how libraries and Wikimedia are helping each other
how you, and your library community can get involved
answers to your wiki questions
3. Presenters
• ALIA member 20+ years
• Manager Library & Information Services, Australian
Council for Educational Research
• Committee member, Wikimedia Australia
• GLAM Wiki conference, Canberra, August 2009
Pru • Wikimedia Future of Education, London, June 2014
Mitchell
• President, Wikimedia Australia
• Editing Wikimedia projects for six years.
• Active in dispute resolution and mediation
• Created dispute resolution noticeboard
• Worked for Wikimedia Foundation as research fellow
Steve Zhang
4. Session overview
1. Why are we here?
2. Why Wikipedia and libraries?
3. How does Wikipedia work?
5. Using Wikipedia as a source
I have followed a link to Wikipedia
I have read a Wikipedia article to find
information
I know at least 3 ways to evaluate a
Wikipedia article
www.surveymonkey.com/s/WPLibraries
6. Editing Wikipedia
I have edited something in Wikipedia
I have edited a reference in Wikipedia
I have a Wikipedia username
I have created a new Wikipedia article
7. Contributing to Wikipedia
I understand Wikipedia's licence CC BY-SA
I have uploaded my own content to a
Wikimedia project
I have taught others about Wikipedia
I have conducted research about Wikipedia
I am involved in administration of
Wikipedia
I support Wikipedia financially
9. Our commitment
Imagine a world in which
every single human being
can freely share in the sum of all knowledge
Wikipedia’s five pillars
Neutrality - Verifiability – Consensus - Civility
Openness
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars
10. Open and free access
• Creative Commons licence CC-by-sa
• Actively promote open access
• Respect and raise awareness of copyright
• Proudly not for profit and neutral
– Volunteer donor funded
– No ads
• We value expertise – from anyone,
anywhere
11. Visibility and scale
• Site rank #6 globally
• Where your users are
• Where your users come
from
• Free to copy means
content can be widely
distributed, and linked to
School librarians transform learning 2014 AASL
12. Information standards
• Disambiguation = Authority control
• Wikidata: www.wikidata.org
• Metadata: categories, lists, media
files
• Fulfilment tool pilot OCLC
• Wiki infrastructure provided -
free with IT expertise included
13. Sources and citation
• Only as good as our sources
• Libraries have the best sources
• Wikipedia has the most eyeballs
• Wikipedia leads users back to
sources at libraries
• 8th largest referrer of DOI links
Jake Orlowitz: Future of libraries and Wikipedia
slideshare.net/JakeOcaasi
Trove Citation tool
14. Local and global
• Your community
– your community’s history
– your community’s interests and passions
• Note Notability and Conflict of Interest
– start small, grow at your own pace, mistakes can
be fixed
• Community languages
ACTION: Identify gaps for your community
15. Volunteers
• 20 million registered
editors
• 80,000 active users
• 1,400 administrators
• 200 employees
13ab37, 9 Feb 2014, Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon
CC-BY-SA
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Art%2Bfeminism_Wikipedia_E
dit-a-thon_(2).jpg
16. Working with Wikipedia
• Subscribe to news: GLAM, Libraries, Education
• Facilitate editor access to your collection
• Contribute unique local content AND
METADATA
• Host a Wikipedian in Residence
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlNT16gqHyo
• Webinar: oclc.org/research/events/2014/10-21.html
17. Wikimedia Australia
• We’re here to help …
• Advice on using Wikipedia (or other projects)
• Wikipedia edit training
– Groups or one-on-one
19. Terminology
• Wikipedia the encyclopedia
• Wikimedia Foundation (USA)
Not-for-profit organisation that runs Wikipedia
• Wikimedia Australia Inc
Australian chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation
– support Australia volunteers
– promote/develop Australian content
• Wikimedia
Totality of organisations and volunteers
20. Wikipedia statistics
• 492.11 million unique readers
• 21.29 billion page views (~43 each)
– 3.16 billion from mobile devices (~15%)
• 14.73 thousand “new editors”
• 77.06 thousand “active editors”
• Articles in 287 languages
– Number of articles in English : 4,324,379
– 7 other languages have over 1 million articles
July 2013 http://stats.wikimedia.org
21. What is a Wiki?
• A Wiki is a web page that anyone can
make changes to.
• The version you see can be changed at
any time, by any person, without any tools
other than a web browser.
• This means that each Wikipedia page is in
a constant state of change as different
people make contributions.
22. Who creates Wikipedia?
• Unlike traditional encyclopedias,
Wikipedia is not created by experts.
• it relies on crowd-sourcing – having large
numbers of non-experts contribute what
they can, rather than a small number of
experts contributing large amounts of
information
• but references to reliable sources should
be made
31. Evaluating an article
• Check references
– Quality of sources
– Relevance of sources
• Check length and structure - relative to
importance of subject
• Check edit history for recent activity
• Check talk page for debates
• Check criteria for Featured article
32. Who can edit? Anyone!
“All are equal but …”
• Anonymous Editors
• are not registered
• first-time/occasional editors or vandals
• New Editors
• registered but not trusted, some are vandals
• Trusted Editors
• 4 days and 10 “good” edits to establish trust
• Administrators & Bureaucrats
33. Who does edit?
2011 survey revealed …
• Average age: 32
• But older editors make more contributions
than younger editors
35. Why do they edit?
• Started because:
• Continue because:
36. How safe is Wikipedia
when anyone can edit it?
• Yes, there’s vandalism and spam, but …
• Every edit is recorded, all old versions are saved and
can be easily restored after vandalism
• Abuse Filter – automated tool for preventing
common patterns of abuse
• Recent Change Patrol – people who monitor recent
edits across all topics for obvious errors or vandalism
• Watchers – people who monitor pages of interest to
them – monitor for subtle vandalism
• “The beast of one billion eyes” – readers want
Wikipedia to be right not wrong
37. Wikipedia decision-making
• Wikipedia is an ad-hoc-racy
• Decisions about the contents of Wikipedia
are made by the “community”
• The Wikimedia Foundation sets policies to
do with legal issues, but not with content
• Decisions are ideally reached through
discussion between interested parties, but
occasionally requires uninvolved help
(dispute resolution)
• Can be somewhat abrasive at times
38. Five Pillars of Wikipedia
• Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia
• Wikipedia is written from a neutral point of
view
• Wikipedia is free content that anyone can edit,
use, modify and distribute
• Editors should interact with each other in a
respectful manner
• Wikipedia does not have firm rules
The fact that we are here this evening is thanks to ALIA, and in particular Kirrin Sampson, ALIA’s Training and Strategic Programs Manager who coordinated the partnership and the national rollout of these information evenings. Thanks to Margie Anderson for local organisation and to RMIT for hosting.
We would also like to acknowledge Liam Wyatt, whose previous presentations on the links between Wikipedia and the GLAM sector inspired many of these slides.
Our plan for this session looks like this.
We hope this looks something like what you were expecting, but as this is a wiki session it should be possible for you to edit this to some extent – by consensus.
In a thing as huge as Wikipedia there are many ways people experience the beast.
You have a checklist of some ways some people engage with Wikipedia, and it would help us to know which of these boxes each of you ticks.
* Unless you have actively resisted, I suspect most of you have been led to Wikipedia from somewhere online at some point. It is pretty hard to avoid this. It ranks highly in search engines.
* By far the majority of people who use Wikipedia use it as an information source. It provides an overview or introduction to practically any topic.
We hope that all users of any information source have the information literacy skills to evaluate that source, and this forms a key part of our role as librarians and/or educators.
Can you complete the rest of the questions on this checklist, and then introduce yourself to the person near you and see if you can list at least 3 ways you would evaluate an article in Wikipedia.
Use the printed survey which helps us evaluate the program, or if you are online please use the online version at: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/WPLibraries
Editing Wikipedia is something anyone can do, and something we would love everyone to be part of.
It would be wonderful if every time you benefited from useful information in Wikipedia you resolved to contribute an edit that will enhance the encyclopaedia for someone else.
Note that individuals edit Wikipedia not organisations, and while there may be a ‘work element’ to your editing, please sign up in your own right – don’t set up a corporate wiki account. Many editors use a pseudonym – that’s fine. The sooner you get an account the more likely you will be able to get a username that is meaningful to you.
There are many other ways that librarians contribute to Wikipedia, and we will consider more of these later on.
A big thanks to any of you or your institutions that do contribute content, education or research – and to those who donate to keep the Wikipedia servers running.
As already mentioned, Wikipedia is big – and it is not possible to cover more than a fraction of the activities around Wikipedia and libraries.
We have selected some examples for this session.
Founded in 2001, Wikipedia is now the #1 encyclopaedia in the world.
We are not the first to notice how closely Wikipedia’s mission and ideology mirror those of libraries, particularly public libraries.
It is a huge commitment, and Wikipedia works actively to make it a reality for all human beings and for all knowledge.
As a librarian I find it is a useful exercise to consider how well our library networks and practices are doing in this area.
It is particularly useful to consider how Wikipedia and libraries can work in partnership to realise this more effectively.
Throughout this presentation there are links to key Wikipedia documents and policies which we won’t necessarily have time to cover in full. We will provide ALIA with slides and links.
These keywords: neutrality, verifiability, consensus, civility and openness sum up the statements contained in the Wikipedia Five Pillars document: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars.
It is appropriate in Open Access Week that we start with Openness - one of the five pillars, and one of non-negotiables in Wikipedia.
It is not possible to reach every human being if some content is only accessible by members, or in some countries, or in certain software formats.
All content in Wikipedia is released under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License (CC-BY-SA)
This means that as long as you attribute it [acknowledge the creator], all material from Wikipedia can be used by anyone, for any purpose, including commercial purposes
[Note - These slides are licensed under the same licence so as long as you acknowledge Wikimedia Australia when you use them, you can present this to your staff, or repurpose the slides for another session]
Therefore, nothing can be added to Wikipedia unless it permits such re-use.
Wikipedia is very strict on removing copyright-protected material that does not meet the requirements of this licence.
Wikipedia’s neutrality is also relevant when we consider openness. Transparency of content and process, and no-ads policy means we are not favouring content or selling search results or rankings according to commercial interest.
Libraries are excellent at creating, maintaining and applying standards BUT have tended to keep them locked within the library sector ‘silo’ and sit back while other web-based information standards grew up in parallel.
Cataloguers and Wikipedia share problems of disambiguation between people with the same names, unique/persistent identifiers and authority control over topics. Just as library users don’t want to search under multiple subject headings to find all the resources on a topic, no Wikipedia editor wants to spend time creating a Wikipedia article to find there is a article already under a different title. The article titles in Wikipedia form a subject taxonomy more universal and comprehensive than any other thesaurus.
Wikipedians share librarians love of metadata - they create categories, make lists of everything, tag multimedia files. Finding a comprehensive list of instances is a valuable service in a keyword, fulltext dominated world. Not something a search engine does.
The human readable wiki is supported by machine readable versions through wikidata – Structured data exported in a machine readable form for re-use – at scale. The BOTS are great wiki workers.
It is good to see links being made between Wikipedia and library organisations, especially collaboration with global standards organisations, eg OCLC
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:The_Wikipedia_Library/Pages. The goal of the fulfilment pilot is to lead users from a Wikipedia citation to the fulltext of that source in one click.
One of the areas where standards are helping both Wikipedia and libaries is bibliographic data. All those years of cataloguing resources, especially books and journals are paying off.
Citation is important to Wikipedia’s encyclopaedic style of writing. Wikipedia is not somewhere to post original research, all content must be verifiable. This fits well with library resources, expertise and philosophy. Scroll to the bottom of any Wikipedia article and check
It is important to point this out to students, who are taught by everyone (especially Wikipedia) not to cite Wikipedia. Encourage them to read the article as a starting point/overview of a topic and then to follow the references.
How does this help libraries?
Lead Wikipedia readers to good sources by adding quality citations and references. The Trove citation tool makes this easy..
Ensure Wikipedia editors in your community know the benefits of library membership, especially access to e-journals.
Make it easy for your members to link directly from a citation to your resources by participating in technical projects such as Wikipedia Library and OCLC fulfilment
[see ALIA2014 paper on university template: http://nationalconference2014.alia.org.au/content/digital-doorway-gaining-library-users-through-wikipedia]
So far, I have been talking about the need for scale and global reach - but Wikipedia also offers much at the very local level.
Not many traditional publishers are interested in the history of your local war memorials, but Wikipedia will publish an article about this along with the latest popular fad, or a local cultural festival.
Three important things to be aware of:
* Notability
* Conflict of interest
* No original research
There are currently 287 Wikipedias in different languages – not simply translations
Wikipedia runs on volunteers
Stats from http://www.slideshare.net/JakeOcaasi/wikipedia-and-libraries-increasing-your-librarys-visibility
Wikipedians in Residence are Wikimedians who dedicate time to working in-house at an organization
http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedian_in_Residence
From http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/
New editors – registered, made 10th edit in that month
Active editor – made 5 edits in that month
2011 survey
But older editors do more edits
Gender issue: mostly male editors