Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Demystifying Wikipedia, Alie Visser, Erin Johnson

Western Libraries Presentations

Wikipedia: we all know it, and we all use it. As the 5th most visited website in the world, the English version of Wikipedia was viewed 92 billion times last year. Yet, in its short history, libraries have historically stigmatized this resource for its crowd-sourced editing system and inconsistent source quality. Increasingly, librarians from around the world are collaborating with Wikimedia to improve its authority by linking to open resources, hosting edit-a-thons, and integrating our organizational structures into Wikidata. In this workshop, we will highlight the power of the platform, the overlapping values of libraries and Wikipedia, and how both …