IKIPEDIA & CULTURAL HERITAGE INSTITUTIONS: OPPORTUNITIES FOR PARTNERSHIP

“Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely

share in the sum of all knowledge”

WIKIPEDIA’S UNIQUENESS

• Fifth most visited web property worldwide

• Rare among the top 100 sites:

o volunteer-driven project (only other - archive.org)

o non-profit (only others - archive.org and BBC)

• Most widely read publication in history (?)

• Sophisticated decision-making model

• Anyone may participate

WHY SHOULD INSTITUTIONS PARTNER WITH WIKIPEDIA?

• Demands for information met at the places where people are seeking it

• Wikipedia is widely used for cursory research

• Attracting new audiences to materials and catalogs.

• Review publicly available information on topics relevant to your institution

• Put institutional materials in context

DIFFICULTIES FOR INSTITUTIONS

• Losing control• Losing academic prestige, uniqueness• Rights management• Low reliability/quality• Experts don’t want to ‘waste time’ on

Wikipedia• Wikipedia editing usability, technical

training needed

DIFFICULTIES FOR WIKIPEDIA

• Wikipedia is not a place for original research

• Entries must have a minimum notability

• Wikipedia is about reliability, not about advertising institutions

• Desire to avoid promotional external links

• Frustration that institutions will not share content

LET’S TOUR THE COMMUNITY!

WHAT ORGANIZATIONS HAVE BENEFITED FROM WIKIPEDIA-RELATED PROJECTS

• Museums, libraries, archives

• Philanthropic foundations

• Academic and professional schools and

societies:

• For-profit companies***

U.S. GLAM-WIKI CONSORTIUM

• First 3 years

• WiRs in constant communication, GLAMouts, listserv, resource sharing

• Most events, meetups are posted on Wikimedia, Meta Wiki

• Not funded by the Foundation

INTERNATIONAL GLAM-WIKI• US Wikimedia Conference, Annual GLAM-Camp

• Some GLAM-Wiki organizations are governmentally funded

• Global Wiki-Mania conference

• International resource sharing

HOW IS GLAM CONTENT DEVELOPMENT UNIQUE?

• Adding links to online, digitized materials.

• Drawing from finding aids, archives, rare books.

• Unique content which might not otherwise be shared

• Question of where in the institution GLAM fits best

• Encourages open access paradigms

SCIENCE AND HEALTH INSTITUTIONS CONTRIBUTE TO WIKIPEDIA• Most consulted health website in the world

• Encouraging open research

• Vast improvements in article quality, frequency of update

• Setting goals: medical and health researchers contributing to Wikipedia

• Wikipedians at Consumer Reports, National Institute of Health

LIBRARIES: INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGYAND WIKIPEDIA

• Instructional Librarianship

• Education Programming

• Consult with teachers Wikipedia lesson

• Help your community understand Wikipedia

• Open Access and open image movement

• Help community “not be afraid” to use Wikipedia as a research tool.

• Opportunities for professional development

WIKIPEDIA AS A TOOL FOR EDUCATORS

• Wikipedia Education Program

• Wikipedia Campus Ambassador Program

WIKIPEDIA IMPLEMENTED IN HISTORY OF DESIGN AND DIGITAL MEDIA COURSES AT CUNY COLLEGE OF STATEN ISLAND

• CUNY professor Michael Mandiberg:

• Asked students to upload freely licensed images from Flickr to Wikimedia Commons

• Past students have contributed to Wikipedia Illustrated

• Michael asked students to write Wikipedia articles on designers and design principles

• Recruited a reference librarian at the College of

Staten Island to help with Wikipedia

• Organized a special “Wikipedia” tour of a Museum

of Modern Art exhibit.

WIKIPEDIAN IN RESIDENCE PROGRAM

• Serves as a liaison between the organization and Wikimedia

• Promotes understanding of Wikimedia policies and practices

• Works with organizational staff to digitize, compile, and organize resources

• Coordinates events, such as Hack-a-Thons, Edit-a-Thons, or Backstage Passes.

• Generally short-term: NARA just employed 1st permanent WiR

NARA HIRES 1ST PERMANENT WIKIPEDIAN IN RESIDENCE

•Dominic, a Masters student in History and Archives Management at Simmons College • Releasing open access images, over 200 high resolution Ansel Adams photos, JFK assassination collection audio recordings, encouraging transcriptions on Wikisource, adding content

HOW DOES ONE BECOME A WIKIPEDIAN IN RESIDENCE?

• Strong experience editing Wikipedia content, Wikimedia Commons, and utilizing other Wikis

• Editing experience in ‘non content development’ tasks

• Understanding of GLAM community structures

• Experience running trainings, holding workshops

• Interest in open access movement, open data

• Jobs are generally posted on the WiR page, twitter

• Jobs within Wikimedia Foundation: prominently technical, fundraising.

MY WORK AT THE METROPOLITAN NEW YORK LIBRARY COUNCIL

• Collaboration with Wikimedia NYC

• Project development: constant consultation with other WiRs

• Consortium-based practice- utilizing existing networks

• Training oriented

• Consultations and staff trainings on editing and GLAM

• Encouraging workflow editing practices

• Follow and communicate updates in GLAM-Wiki

METRO ORGANIZED WIKIPEDIA EVENTS

• Edit a thons:• Brooklyn Public Library Public Library, Central Info Commons • Queens Library Central (Archives, backstage pass)• NYPL Jefferson Market Library in Greenwich Village, Greenwich

Village Collection• In my position, public libraries have been the most receptive to

Wikipedia programming. Reasons?

• METRO Workshops: • (1) “Wikipedia for Libraries Archives, Museums” • (2) “Advanced Wikipedia Workshop”

• Staff Trainings:• Frick Art Reference Library• Guggenheim Library and Archive• Queens Library Central • Brooklyn Public Library, Central Library

• Building METRO member-Wikipedia partnerships

• Write articles on member libraries, collections, and resources

“WIKIPEDIA TAKES BROOKLYN AT THE BROOKLYN PUBLIC LIBRARY” ON SEPTEMBER 7TH

• BPL, Wikimedia NYC, METRO, Wikiotics Foundation,

• Introduction and training

• Wikipedia Photo-hunt

• Tutorial on uploading images.

• 9 Wikipedians attended

• 17 new users were registered

• Wikimetrics 5 pages created 229 edits made 73 images uploaded

EXAMPLE: COVERAGE OF BPL ON WIKIPEDIA

• 13 External Links in Wikipedia for http://www.bklynpubliclibrary.org/

• 1786 page views for BPL Wikipedia article in last 30 days

• 175 page views for Central Library in last 30 days

• 168 views for List of Brooklyn Public Library Branches in last 30 days

NYC WIKIPEDIA ACTIVITY

Local GLAMs with strong Wikipedia projects:

1. NYPL, NYPL Performing Arts2. Queens Public Library3. Center for Jewish History, Leo Baeck Institute 4. MoMA5. Metropolitan Museum6. Brooklyn College7. CUNY Graduate Center, CUNY system8. Consumer Reports in Yonkers

FURTHER GLAM IDEAS: METROPOLITAN MUSEUM AND WIKIPEDIA: WATSON LIBRARY

• Adding references to digitized materials • Adding references to books in the collection•Now, over 50% of the traffic going to the library's Digital Collections is referred by Wikipedia.• Pages views to the Watson Digital Collections website has increased from over 5,000 a month to over 45,000 in the 30 days following their project to add links from Wikipedia.•Website averages 412 visitors per day, up from original 62. • Remote collaboration

GLAM PAGES

WIKIPEDIA TOOLS

REMEMBER: WIKIPEDIA HAS ITS OWN RULES• Neutral Point of View

• Conflict of Interest: What does this mean for institutions

• No paid editing

• Editors should treat each other with respect and civility

• It offers free content that anyone can use, edit, modify, or redistribute

• Wikipedia is a ‘community’ of editors

• Governance- Administrators,

WIKIPEDIA TOOLS FOR LIBRARIANS AND ARCHIVISTS

• Basics: Article Traffic, Talk Pages,

• Templates

• Wikipedia Article Assessment (AA)

• Infoboxes

• Authority Control Tool/ bot

• Wiki RAMP Editor

• Wiki-Metrics Tool

• Issue Specific WikiProjects

THE BASICS

Talk Pages:

• Communicate your potential biases, affiliations, concerns.

• Use talk pages when you plan to make a major change

• Post on a talk page requesting an article

• Other users will communcate with you on your User: talk pages

You can check any article's traffic!

1. Click "View history"!

2. 2. Click "page view statistics"!

Other tools:

• Templates

• Wikipedia article assessment work to create “feature articles”

INFOBOXES

• Pulled by Google, Dppedia, Search engines

• Persondata: metadata template added to the bottom of biographical articles- pulled directly by Google (850,000 articles with person data)

AUTHORITY CONTROL TOOL

• Developed by Max Klein, Wikipedian at OCLC

• Automated, bot adding Authority Control Tags to articles

• You can add these yourself

• VIAF, LCCN, GND (German National Library), SELIBR (National Library of Sweden), SWD and GKD (pre GND), ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID), ULAN (Union List of Artist Names)

WIKI RAMP EDITOR: FROM FINDING AIDS TO WIKI PAGES

• Released Oct, 2013

WIKI-METRICS TOOL

• Generate data on editing activities of groups “cohorts”

• Use for Edit-a-Thons, trainings, events to measure tangible results

• Available data: Edits made, articles added, bytes added

• Can run for desired time frame, long term, short term

WIKI-PROJECTS

Editors gather and do things!

•GLAM Pages•Wikipedia Loves Libraries•WikiProject New York City•Wiki Project Women’s History

RECENT CHALLENGES

• GLAM-Wiki is still not incorporated into Wikimedia Foundation

• Funding for GLAM-Wiki Projects is still uncertain

• MIT study- there has been a recent drop in editors and retainment

• Widely dispersed learning resources for beginners

• Visual Editor Debate

• Articles tend to have a Western focus

• Gender Gap, Multicultural Gap• Recent projects to recruit women• Edit-a-thons with Women’s History, Cultural History

focus• Emphasizing social impact of editing

• Looking Forward: NYC GLAM-Wiki Network

BIG PICTURE: WIKIPEDIA AND THE OPEN ACCESS MOVEMENT

• Wikipedia lays the groundwork for future open data releases, and open image sharing

• Institutions want to donate materials but are looking for precedents among like institutions

• Encourages an ethic of sharing, open access to students

• Encouraging researchers to share their data with the public

• Information stewardship model, over ‘private ownership’ model

IKIPEDIA & CULTURAL HERITAGE INSTITUTIONS: OPPORTUNITIES FOR PARTNERSHIP

“Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely

share in the sum of all knowledge”

Dorothy Howard: dhoward@metro.org