Recap: #1Lib1Ref January 2020 campaign key results and takeaways

The first iteration of the 2020 #1Lib1Ref campaign ran from 15 January through 5 February, calling on librarians around the world, and anyone who has a passion for free knowledge, to add missing references to articles on Wikipedia.

In total, more than 730 editors made 18,032 edits in nearly 60 languages. We were impressed by the community’s innovation and dedication as part of this campaign and hope it can serve as an inspiration for future initiatives.

Some of the key learnings from the campaign include:

• Growing interest in non-English languages. The most active language to participate in the campaign was Hebrew Wikipedia, garnering first place with 4,536 edits. Serbian and French Wikipedia came in second and third place, respectively. The Catalan and English communities, which were first to adopt #1Lib1Ref, continued to be active as well. Though the first few years of the campaign were heavily English-focused, the growing community participation on non-English wikis shows the global potential of future #1Lib1Ref campaigns.
• Attracting new and active editors. On average, the campaign recorded over 52 percent new editors and over 18 percent reactivated editors. Additionally, 22 percent of the participants were active editors. (See chart 1 below.)
• Last-minute participation surge. We saw an impressive spike in participation at the end of the campaign: more than 3000 edits (about 20 percent of the total campaign edits) happened in the final few hours.
• Partnerships matter. We held a webinar with our partner IFLA to train a community of librarians through their network. We have also launched a partnership and webinar series with the African Library and Information Associations & Institutions for the second phase of the campaign beginning 15 May, 2020.

Here are some additional key stats from the campaign:

• There were over 500 edits across 15 projects in the opening hours of the campaign.
• 1.32 million words were added as recorded on the dashboard
• 731 editors participated
• 572 articles were created, and 6,110 were edited
• 21 wikis saw more than 10 edits, 9 more than 100, and 5 more than 1000

Globally, the campaign saw over a 65 percent increase in edits over last year’s campaign and recorded over 40 in-person sessions registered through our campaign.

Participation by editor type

What’s next:

The second iteration of the 2020 #1Lib1Ref campaign will run from 15 May — 5 June 2020. It will be an entirely virtual campaign, given the current COVID-19 pandemic. We know that the crisis will surely affect the ability of many librarians and other volunteers to participate, and we are asking interested participants to complete this survey so we can better support them during this unprecedented time. To learn more on connecting with us, please see here.