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Emerging Technology for Wikipedians & Librarians

This post was originally published as an assignment for INFO 200 Information Communities at the School of Information at San José State University.

Start here
the Wikipedia Community portal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Community_portal

“The editing process is simplified by the Wiki technology- the underlying technology of Wikipedia. People with almost no technical background can add or remove content using a simple markup language: (Kuznetsov, 2006).

Find a Wikipedian: Projects, initiatives, and user groups
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup

Find a Wikipedian near you
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Geonotice

“Wikipedia also has tools, such as Geonotice, to assist reaching out to editors in geographic areas. Geonotice will put a notification on editors’ profile pages so they know about the event ” (Marks, 2016).

Find in-person and virtual events
Social media Tools.
So far the Twitter hashtags and FaceBook Groups have the most global reach.

“We used Facebook in particular because it was an efficient way to reach a multi-generational audience. Of all Internet users, 67 percent use some form of social media, and all of those are on Facebook. Twitter and Tumblr fall behind at 16 percent and 6 percent, respectively, according to a 2013 Pew Research Center poll..We used the hashtag#artandfeminism across all social media platforms and encouraged people to take photographs and post them on Instagram using this hashtag at their events.” (Evans et al., 2015)

According to more recent data from Pew, it looks like YouTube have to most outreach potential

YouTube 73%
Facebook 69%
Pinterest 28%
Instagram 37%
LinkedIn 27%
Twitter 22%
Snapchat 24%
WhatsApp 20%
Reddit 11%
(Pew Research Center, 2019)
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/social-media/

Here is a list of popular hashtags to follow

#5WomenArtists
#AfricanDiaspora
#arthyve
#BlackLunchTable
#BLTBINGO
#conference
#culturalheritage
#Editathon
#EmpoweringLibraries
#glamwiki
#iloveWikipedia
#libraries
#noweditingAF
#openaccess
#openGLAM
#publicdomain
#saveart
#TeamAfLIA
#WikAfLIbs
#wikidata
#Wikipedia
#womenedit

“As the central organizing feature of Black Twitter, the hashtag transmits information that is “culturally relevant” by providing users a technique to “identif[y] topics of interest, but [also establishes] who was generating those topics” (Stewart & Ju, 2020)

Librarians Can…

Be a Wikipedian!
Promote and share on social media
Create a libguide
https://library.louisville.edu/art/wikiedit or https://infoguides.rit.edu/WomenWikiRIT/welcome
Host an edit-a-thon
Get funding and support for your event from the Wikimedia Foundation.
Look for more projects on: https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/

References

Evans, S., Mabey, J., & Mandiberg, M. (2015). Editing for Equality: The Outcomes of the Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thons. Art Documentation: Bulletin of the Art Libraries Society of North America, 34(2), 194–203. https://doi.org/10.1086/683380

Kuznetsov, S. (2006). Motivations of contributors to Wikipedia. ACM SIGCAS Computers and Society, 36(2), 1. https://doi.org/10.1145/1215942.1215943

Marks, S. (2016, July 28). Local History Wikipedia Edit-a-thon. Programming Librarian. https://programminglibrarian.org/programs/local-history-wikipedia-edit-thon

Pew Research Center. (2019, 12). Demographics of Social Media Users and Adoption in the United States. Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/social-media/

Stewart, B., & Ju, B. (2020). On Black Wikipedians: Motivations behind content contribution. Information Processing & Management, 57(3), 102134. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ipm.2019.102134

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