Wikipedia and Libraries

Pru Mitchell & Steven Zhang

Wikimedia Australiacontact@wikimedia.org.au

INTRODUCTIONS AND EXPECTATIONS

Presenters

• 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

• ALIA member 20+ years• Manager Library & Information Services, Australian

Council for Educational Research• Committee member, Wikimedia Australia• GLAM Wiki conference, Canberra, August 2009• Wikimedia Future of Education, London, June 2014Pru

Mitchell

Steve Zhang

Session overview

1. Why are we here?

2. Why Wikipedia and libraries?

3. How does Wikipedia work?

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

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

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

WIKIPEDIA AND LIBRARIES

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

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

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

• Disambiguation = Authority control

• Wikidata: www.wikidata.org

• Metadata: categories, lists, media files

• Fulfilment tool pilot OCLC

• Wiki infrastructure provided -free with IT expertise included

Information standards

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

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

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-SAhttps://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Art%2Bfeminism_Wikipedia_E

dit-a-thon_(2).jpg

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 Residencehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlNT16gqHyo

• Webinar: oclc.org/research/events/2014/10-21.html

Wikimedia Australia

• We’re here to help …

• Advice on using Wikipedia (or other projects)

• Wikipedia edit training

– Groups or one-on-one

HOW DOES WIKIPEDIA WORK?

Terminology

• Wikipedia the encyclopedia

• Wikimedia Foundation (USA)Not-for-profit organisation that runs Wikipedia

• Wikimedia Australia IncAustralian chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation– support Australia volunteers– promote/develop Australian content

• WikimediaTotality of organisations and volunteers

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

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.

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

Structure of an article

Content of article

References

Finding related information

About an article

Talk page

History page

Useful things

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

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

Who does edit?2011 survey revealed …

• Average age: 32

• But older editors make more contributions than younger editors

Above average education

Why do they edit?

• Started because:

• Continue because:

How safe is Wikipediawhen 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

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

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

Wikimedia projects

Questions?