GLAMOut: Group Sharing of GLAM-Wiki Experiences

One of the hardest parts of working in the global community that contributes to Wikipedia, is that we have millions of content pages and thousands of contributors working on hundreds of different activities with hundreds of different approaches all the time. Global reach means global participation, and a more than overwhelming number of possible ways to intervene and different approaches to contributing (I talk about this diversity in an earlier blog post). One of the ways in which we create a more unified sense of community is through community communications. We have a number of different communications venues, from the English Wikipedia’s community newspaper (the Wikipedia Signpost), to the Wikimedia Foundation Blog (http://blog.wikimedia.org/) to Planet Wikimedia (an RSS aggregation of blogs like mine at http://en.planet.wikimedia.org/).

GLAM-Wiki Communications

For the GLAM-Wiki community (unaware of that term? Check out my previous post explaining GLAM-Wiki), the growing popularity of collaborations around the world makes it almost impossible to keep up. For this reason, globally, we have a GLAM-Wiki newsletter on Outreach Wiki which allows us to share reports about activities. However, textual documents often get overlooked in a world where we get a barrage of blogs, texts, tweets, emails and other activities. Also reporting through documentation can be hard, and spotty at times, because we all do a number of different and time consuming activities that don’t require active writing. To supplement this written venue of communication, as of this spring, the United States GLAM-Wiki consortium has been doing a series of Google Hangouts, called GLAMOuts, to communicate some of the major initiatives happening in the United States and post it in another public format online (YouTube video). The format is pretty simple: participants for the hangouts self select through a call for participants on the homepage for GLAMouts and an email list amongst US GLAM-Wiki participants; and the participants show up during an hour block to talk for 5, 10 or 15 minutes about what they are doing and why. These GLAMouts allow the U.S. GLAM-Wiki community to create a cohesion and energy within our activities, sharing best practices and knowledge.

September GLAMOut

This month’s GLAMOut (available in recording on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wI4x9rjhYlw&feature=youtu.be ) on Friday featured the Wikipedian in Residence at the Smithsonian Institution, the Wikipedian in Residence at the Metropolitan New York Library Council and the Wikipedia Library Initiative along with myself. All the attendees presented very innovative approaches for their projects. Though I won’t summarize all we talked about, I would like to highlight how each of the other presenters talked about work with libraries in the U.S.:

• The Metropolitan New York Library Council is working toward integrating Wikipedia into the workflow of Librarians, so as to ensure that Library resources of special significance (such as exhibits, special collections or digital resources) get used as references or foundations on Wikipedia (thus getting higher publicity). This is not entirely a new approach, Wikipedians and librarians have been talking about Wikipedia integration for a long time (take for instance this reflection on how to integrate library resources into Wikipedia, which bases its advise and reflection on this 2007 article in D-Lib Magazine). However, by systematically presenting to and conversing with a number of the libraries in New York City, they have built a very comprehensive “How to” guide in a LibGuide, a format many librarians are used to. 
• Dominic McDevitt-Parks, the Wikipedian in residence at the Smithsonian Institution, is also talking to a group of libraries in Boston, Massachusetts to create a across the city series of Massachussetts History editing events during Open Access Week (October 21 – 27).
• The Wikipedia Library Project is negotiating with big (often pay-walled) publishers and university libraries to allow Wikipedians free access to their research materials in order to improve Wikipedia (for more information about the resources and the effort check out the homepage for the project).

All these projects actively work to better integrate access to academic knowledge and resources into the Wikimedia community in order to improve public access and awareness of those materials. As I have mentioned previously on my blog, these activities and their overwhelming success hinges around the basic assumptions grounding field of knowledge management: that the best way for people to effectively find and use information is to gather it on highly visible and accessible digital platforms that allow interaction and collaboration. For these projects, the GLAM-Wiki look towards more traditional knowledge gathering organizations (libraries) and actively works to place that information in the most visible (and non-commercial) public space on the internet: Wikipedia. What an invigorating and exciting conversation! I am glad that I was part of it!

What’s Next?

It is the beginning of a new week, and the semester is already becoming very busy (9 meetings last week including the GLAMOut)! However, the Blake initiative is having lots of success both reaching out to Blake Scholars, Wikipedians and our own community at K-State. Hopefully, this week, I can write a couple more posts finishing up my conversation I started on GLAM-Wiki metrics and reporting on the Blake Archive’s impact on Wikipedia and then a more thorough blog post exploring the what, why and how efforts from different organizations both on and off Kansas States’s campus are effecting my internship.

Why Wikipedia Matters for Academia

When I was teaching freshman writing this last year, I got several student papers that cited Wikipedia for opinions about gender, race and economic issues, and I found myself in a full body cringe (almost as much as when I hear Wikipedia referred to as just “Wiki”). Though I am a Wikipedia evangelist, I never want to see any encyclopedia, much less the crowd sourced encyclopedia, as the foundation for academic research: the whole point of teaching students college level research and writing is so when they enter their next career able to engage with specialist research – adequately communicating that specialist knowledge and its interpretation. Encyclopedias are anything but specialist! That being said, there are a number of reasons why Wikipedia matters for academia. In an earlier post, I talked about the misconceptions many academics bring to the table when thinking about Wikipedia, and here I will follow that conversation up with reasons Wikipedia matters for Academia. Below are just a few that I find important:

Wikipedia for research

First, and foremost, like any encyclopedia Wikipedia offers a vast collection of citations and useful links to get anyone’s research started. This appears to be the most common advice given by academics, professors and students and is the first thing people say when I tell them I want to talk about Wikipedia. It seems that the years of bad press about Wikipedias quality and the popular pressure to use it has forced this conversation without Wikipedian intervention.

Gateway to Shaping Public Knowledge

Second, as science fiction writer and internet thinker Cory Doctorow points out, Wikipedia is an “an infinite supply of gateway drugs to engagement” with knowledge, its distribution, and its construction (Minute 1:00 of this recent interview from him supporting London Wikimania 2014). Wikipedia offers openly to everyone the opportunity to find a topic and shape public knowledge about it. Does everyone do it? No, but clearly the possibility is there to create public individuals who don’t shy from asserting themselves in public spaces. Take myself for instance, I started editing because I noticed a big gap in coverage of contemporary fiction from around the world, and now I am engaged in literary studies and digital humanities. Academia’s desire to cultivate quality researchers and knowledge shapers can start with Wikipedia. Many of our students from the Wikipedia Education Program, find themselves impacting much larger communities then they ever thought they would be able to (take, for example, these case studies from the Wikimedia Foundation blog at Rice University or the University of San Fransisco ). When I helped professors run editing assignments at James Madison University, a number of students told me that their experience with Wikipedia helped them become more confident in their knowledge and even helped some of them do better in internships over the summer! Wikipedia allows students and other interested individuals to meaningfully and thoughtfully shape public participation in the knowledge they care about.

Gateway for academics to access the public

Third, and perhaps most importantly, Wikipedia is the only one of the top ten websites that is aligned with what we do in Academia. Above is a screenshot from a Prezi I use when talking about Wikipedia . In the image, I attempt to show just how small digital academia is in the grand scheme of the World Wide Web (the little circle lost between Google, Amazon and Wikipedia). A large fraction of internet users choose to negotiate the internet through one of these top ten websites, and if you want someone to discover a piece of knowledge or information, you need to be present through these venues (this is a basic principle of Knowledge Management). Unfortunately for academics, many of these organizations also stand for commercial values, and their activities are meant to draw more customers. Wikipedia is clearly not commercial, and it’s customer base, though always expanding, does not really factor into the everyday concerns of most contributors. For the Wikimedia Foundation, whose job it is to build readership, projects like Wikipedia Zero are designed to create opportunities for the underprivileged to access knowledge, not for building a customer base. Thus an external link or citation on the academically aligned Wikipedia allows interested individuals to discover high quality academic work about the subjects they care about without anyone benefiting commercially. This is precisely why GLAM-Wiki projects are so successful: GLAM resources become linked to the relevant topics on Wikipedia and interested users get a direct path to the authoritative resource! And beyond that simple access, the GLAM invested resources primarily benefit the public and Wikimedia volunteers instead of creating more money in the pocket of big business.

Anything else?

I hope this was a helpful. This conversation about the importance of Wikipedia in Academia happens in a number of contexts (for example this recent blog post on Simply Sociology), and I am sure their are plenty of other reasons why Wikipedia matters for Academia. However, these seem to be the ones that most tellingly show how Wikipedia influences the academic space. What do you think? How else does Wikipedia benefit academia?