Librarians = great allies to Wikimedia’s vision: A #1Lib1Ref story series
Each year, the #1lib1ref campaign invites librarians across the world to add missing references to articles towards, making Wikipedia more reliable. Wikipedia is only as strong as it sources, and only when we invite knowledge stewards like librarians to our community do we get the strongest sources. In the face of a world full of digital misinformation, Wikipedia’s trustworthiness starts librarians, other knowledge stewards and everyday people.
Year round we hear about the amazing work of librarians and library communities in strengthening our Wikipedia and Wikimedia communities. This year we are highlighting this work through #1lib1ref Stories on Medium! We will be updating this post with each of the stories.
If you inspired by the stories, we would like you to get more involved! #1lib1ref only works when people like you add a reference, tell the Wikipedia and libraries story, and encourage your library community to participate!
Join the campaign today, and learn more at out the resources page for #1lib1ref.
January 2020 #1lib1ref Stories
We hope you are also inspired as we are by these library champions and ambassadors:
- Laurie Bridges
- Ingrid Thompson
- Coming soon!
- Coming soon!
Story #1: Teaching Research through Wikipedia at Home and in the University
For our first story we want to introduce you to Laurie Bridges!
Laurie Bridges is an Instruction and Outreach Librarian at Oregon State University in the US. She was introduced to Wikipedia by her son: at age 9, he was assigned a class project to research and present about a species of frog, and was told to only use Wikipedia for his research. When he related this to her, she thought, “If 9-year-olds are being introduced to research using Wikipedia, I better learn more about Wikipedia”. So she got involved because she wanted to better understand the resource her son, and the students at her university, use. She explains:
Students and faculty are familiar with [Wikipedia] because many use it daily, although they do not cite it in their papers. As a librarian I teach about information literacy and help students and faculty with their research. Wikipedia is a familiar website that I can use to teach information literacy and afterwards students and faculty leave equipped with a better understanding of how the information source works.
Students are used to teachers and professors saying, “Don’t use Wikipedia.” However, this dismissive statement doesn’t teach the students how, why, or when they can use Wikipedia or other online resources. We are living in a time of misinformation and I want students to understand the information they are using and become critical consumers of that information.
Using Wikipedia to teach students about information literacy is fun! In addition, it’s fulfilling because I can see students’ excitement as they learn more about Wikipedia, a website they use on a daily basis. I’ve found teaching with Wikipedia to be so rewarding that I want to spread the word.
If librarians don’t teach students about Wikipedia and what it is (or isn’t), who is going to teach them? I’d like to see more activity and interest from librarians related to Wikipedia. This is why whenever I get a chance, I will introduce other librarians to … the Wikimedia Movement.
Laurie Bridges has since introduced other librarians, students, encouraged her colleagues to host #1lib1ref and also taken advantage of any opportunity she gets to meet other librarians across the world. We find that her enthusiasm and support is crucial in our global work: she played a key role in an upcoming partnership with AfLIA to improve the campaign in Africa for the May edition.
Story #2: Advocating for librarian involvement in Africa
During the pre-conference of Wikimania 2018, the Wikipedia Library Team led by Felix Nartey organised a training session for librarians in South Africa dubbed “Wikipedia 101”. The session focused on projects that were directly relevant to the library profession, with a goal to grow activity around #1lib1ref in South Africa.
And were we successful: at the event we met Ingrid Thomson! After the training, Ingrid became the main coordinator of #1lib1ref in South Africa. A librarian from the University of Cape Town, she led over 12 1lib1ref activities in 2019 that introduced librarians and institutions to the January and May campaigns. We wanted to share with you her story:
I first learned about Wikipedia through the Library and Information Association of South Africa (LIASA) in the Western Cape — where Douglas Scott ran an edit-a-thon for librarians in 2014 and followed by a presentation at the annual LIASA Conference. The edit-a-thon had a learning curve and it’s not easy to write for Wikipedia even though anyone can edit. Essentially I had been lurking on the fringes for a number of years until Wikimania 2018 came along …. and I had the opportunity to attend, especially the pre-conference workshop for librarians and that was probably the catalyst for me.
There I was also introduced to the #1lib1ref campaign 2018 — even though I had seen posts in the past from various listservs and the local chapter mailing list. However the bigger question on my mind was, how on earth do I find where a citation is needed? This and many other questions were answered by Felix and his team, which led me to making a promise to Felix and Jake that I would attempt to run the #1lib1ref campaign here in South Africa. There certainly hadn’t been much uptake previously (well, look at me, I didn’t really participate), but it certainly seemed to need some sort of a librarian champion. That conversation inspired my participation and involvement in the campaign to ensure support from my country and the continent.
The campaign is a relatively easy introduction to Wikipedia. Additionally, it helps dispel the misconceptions about Wikipedia among librarians and ensuring increased verifiability on the platform — librarians are in a position to provide verifiability. These misconceptions are a part of the challenge of getting colleagues to participate, and also my motivation and opportunity to spread the word. As my library director, Ujala Satgoor, commented: she hoped as many South African librarians get involved as dispelling misconceptions about sources of information was definitely one of our roles as librarians.
This support and motivation from colleagues and my supervisors urged me on to organising the first national #1lib1ref drive, ever, in South Africa. I organised for the campaign both during the January and May campaigns. I also led a couple of webinars to talk about the campaign and take colleagues through the steps of adding a reference.
The webinars spurred other librarians and libraries to organise the campaign, some of which include: a “cite-a-thon” by the National Library of South Africa’s Pretoria campus, a “coffee hour” at the UCT Libraries, two editing sessions at the University of the Western Cape Libraries ran, etc.
I also spoke at a librarian training day at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology Libraries about the campaign, led several coffee-hours in my own library, which included a number of postgraduate students and also had the opportunity to talk to our postgraduate librarianship students. I shared the campaign via all available library and librarians listservs that I knew. My message was simple, librarians can make Wikipedia better by adding a citation to lead the world to right information about Africa!
The campaign keeps having ripple effects: Earlier this year, the Digital Humanities Association of South Africa (DHASA) held a national conference. Through connecting the Wikimedia Chapter and DHASA, a pre-conference edit-a-thon was arranged. As a result of the promotion and advertising of the pre-conference, there was a request for an edit-a-thon for the South African School Librarians Conference.
The list of opportunities for Wikipedia and Libraries in South Africa goes on. But, if I had the chance to share one thing about Wikipedia with my colleagues, it would be “to look at Wikipedia and sister projects with different eyes and perceive your own narrative of the platform without just passively believing the misconceptions being shared.”
