Getting citations into Wikipedia – can you spare 16 minutes to mark Wikipedia’s 16th birthday?
#1Lib1Ref – 1 Librarian adding 1 Reference
It’s been quite the week in politics this week. #CitationDefinitelyNeeded
#1Lib1Ref – 1 Librarian adding 1 Reference
On Sunday 15th January 2017, Wikipedia will turn 16 years old. How often do you think you have used the free online encyclopaedia in this time?
In this Google Talk, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Executive Director, Katherine Maher, speaks engagingly about Wikipedia’s humble beginnings in 2001, where it is now and, importantly, where it is going.
To mark Wikipedia’s birthday, the Wikipedia Library are repeating their successful #1Lib1Ref campaign from last year. This global campaign “1 Librarian 1 Reference” (#1Lib1Ref) is to get Information Services professionals and educators adding citations to Wikipedia.
Events are taking place at the National Library of Scotland, the Bodleian Library in Oxford and all over the globe from January 15th To February 3rd 2017 but here at the University of Edinburgh we are kicking things off by asking you to spare a mere 16 minutes to mark Wikipedia’s 16 years on Friday 20th January 2017. (You won’t even need to leave your desk).
Your 1,2,3 to taking part in next Friday’s #1Lib1Ref event.
- Have a nosy at what is involved: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/The_Wikipedia_Library/1Lib1Ref – This link runs through what is involved (essentially finding one reference to back up a statement on Wikipedia that has no citation backing it up).
- Create a Wikipedia account ahead of Friday’s event. This 3 minute video shows what you need to do to setup your account. (NB: It is better if you do create an account at home ahead of time as Wikipedia limits the number of accounts that can be created from a single IP address within a 24 hour period to a mere 6 accounts.)
- On the day itself – This 5 minute video demos what you need to do. Essentially using the Citation Hunt tool to find a Wikipedia page that is both missing a citation & that you are interested in helping out; and guiding you as to how to go about finding a suitable reference to fill that knowledge gap. NB: This post from the Biodiversity Heritage Library also illustrates the process too.
As you save your citation, please remember to add the hashtag #1Lib1Ref in your edit summary so that we can track participation in the event. We will announce these contributions on social media with the strengthening Wikipedia’s links to scholarly publications and celebrating the collective expertise of the world’s Information Service professionals (so any pics you can share with the #1Lib1Ref hashtag would be greatly appreciated).
- Wikipedia – We are not in a Post Fact World #FactsMatter (4 minute video)
This is a chance to create incoming links or citations from articles that are usually the top Google hit for their topic. Citations can be to paper or electronic sources, that you are interested in professionally or otherwise. If you can supply citations for topics or authors that are under-represented in Wikipedia, then all the better. In January 2016, librarians around the world made thousands of edits to Wikipedia, with publicity seen by millions of people. You can read more about last year’s event here.
“We live in the information age and the aphorism ‘one who possess information possesses the world’ of course reflects the present-day reality.” (Vladimir Putin in Interfax:Russia & CIS Presidential Bulletin, 30 June 2016).
To mark Wikipedia’s 16th birthday, and to assert that facts really do matter, let’s find Wikipedia pages we can help improve… and spend a few moments improving them with a reference (or two).
#FactsMatter #1Lib1Ref