Discovery in the Age of Wikipedia - Exposure on the world's most-visited reference site

Discovery in the Age of Wikipedia
Exposure on the world’s most-visited reference site

 Jake Orlowitz      @WikiLibrary       goo.gl/vsBSkV

Wikipedia’s mission
Imagine a world in which every
person on the planet shares in the
sum of all human knowledge

“And the pile grew and everyone jumped up and
down in it having a wonderful time. And it grew
some more, and it became the biggest leaf pile
anyone had ever seen anywhere, a world wonder.”

                           - NY Review of Books

http://listen.hatnote.com/

"Our revolution is like Wikipedia. Everyone was
contributing small pieces, bits and pieces. We drew this
whole picture of a revolution. And that picture - no one is
the hero in that picture."

                         -Wael Ghonim, Egyptian Activist

Wikipedia’s scale
30 million articles
2 billion edits
288 languages
8000 views per second
500 million monthly visitors
6th most popular website
2000x larger than Britannica
8th highest doi referrer

Wikipedia’s ubiquity
● 50% to 90% of physicians use Wikipedia

● 94% of medical students use Wikipedia

Wikipedia’s why
Fast, easy, and free to access
Understandable
Comprehensive
Generally accurate

Wikipedia’s volunteers

20 million registered

80,000 active users

1,400 admins

Wikipedia’s pillars
Neutral point of view

Verifiability

Consensus
Civility

Open copyright

An early study in the journal Nature said that in 2005,
Wikipedia scientific articles came close to the level of
accuracy in Encyclopædia Britannica and had a similar rate of
"serious errors".[2]

Between 2008 and 2012, articles in medical and scientific fields
such as pathology,[5] toxicology,[6] oncology,[7] pharmaceuticals,
[8]
    and psychiatry[9] comparing Wikipedia to professional and
peer-reviewed sources found that Wikipedia's depth and
coverage were of a high standard.

--Reliability of Wikipedia, Wikipedia

Virtual filter
 1.   Edit Filter automatically rejects known vandalism patterns
 2.   ClueBot reverts and flags suspicious edits with a machine-learning bot
 3.   Humans review malicious changes tagged with language recognition tools
 4.   Vandalism patterns are checked against metadata and historical trends
 5.   Recent changes patrollers scroll through new edits
 6.   Editors alerted to each change on all pages in their article watchlist
 7.   Specialists and experts report and fix mistakes when they see them
 8.   Millions of readers identify and correct errors when they come upon them
 9.   Link blacklists lock out known spam sites and unreliable sources
10.   Detection mechanisms to determine conflict of interest
11.   Administrators to block disruptive editors and protect pages

Wikipedia literacy
●   Engage with global audience
●   Identify bias and evaluate credibility
●   Review literature with proper citation
●   Avoid plagiarism and respect copyright
●   Construct knowledge to fill content gaps
●   Discourse in a community of practice
●   Think critically and reflect on process
●   Digital citizen in an online collaboration

The Scholar Connection
Wikipedia is as good as its sources

Scholars are the best sources
Wikipedia has the most eyeballs

Connect a circle of research & dissemination

Wikipedia as starting point for deeper learning

The Wikipedia Library
Gain access to paywalled sources

Facilitate research for editors

Connect to libraries and librarians

Lead to free and local sources

Promote more-open access

Access partnerships
Incorporate closed-access sources

Donations for mutual benefit
Vetted most-active subject editors

Requirements in line with terms of use

High impact metrics

Links from 361 to 574 (+ 59%, in blue)

Links from 645 to 2690 (+ 417%)

External Links to Newspapers.com

  TWL
  partnership
  launch

Links from 1,198 to 3,975 (+330%)   OA clippings from 358 to 1,856 (+520%)

+186% sessions   +252% new users   +100% transactions   +44% revenue

“Things changed
when the
international
sanctions against
Iran expanded...

However, thanks       By getting global editors like me free
to the Wikipedia      access to rich digital libraries, we will
Library, I received   be even more encouraged to write
JSTOR access          decent articles about our
                      culture.”

Thinking big

    What if every publisher donated
   free access to the 1000 most active
     Wikipedians in that subject area?

Wikipedia Visiting Scholars
Academic tradition

Research affiliates

Unpaid, remote
Full access to collections

Conduit to Wikipedia’s community

Scholarly impact
Successful pilot

25 articles each

4 schools
5 scholars

Exposing collections

Featured Impact
By one TWL Visiting Scholar Wehwalt at George Mason
 1.   John Tyler
 2.   Franklin Pierce
 3.   John Hay
 4.   Judah P. Benjamin
 5.   The Bread-Winners
 6.   Babe Ruth
 7.   William H. Seward
 8.   Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette
 9.   Horace Greeley
10.   Benjamin R. Tillman
11.   Wreck of the S.S. Arctic                  815,373 views in last 90 days
12.   Jules Massenet
13.   WINC (AM)
14.   Thomas Bayard

Thinking big

 What if every library or research institution
had one Wikipedian on staff to access their
  collections and build the encyclopedia?

Wikipedia in the Workflow
Use Wikipedia to solve public knowledge
problems, as an integrated part of process

●   National Archive
    Policy encourages Wikipedia editing

●   New South Wales Library
    Program has created hundreds of articles

Linking archives
BALL STATE University

●   40 assets viewed 13,000 times--an increase of 600%
●   10,000 pageviews were referred via Wikipedia
●   5 times greater than the total pageviews via any source
●   Pageviews for the whole 149 asset collection tripled

 “an overwhelming success...remarkable in its efficiency”

Thinking big

What if every scholar or knowledge institution
  exposed the best research in their field on
                  Wikipedia?

g
    Thinking Out Loud
    What if Wikipedia helped readers research?

Wikipedia + Scholars = Natural allies

Wikipedia is the starting point for research

We lead readers back to scholarly sources
so they can engage critically with knowledge

Questions?
                               Tweet Us!
Jake Orlowitz
                              @WikiLibrary
    jorlowitz@wikimedia.org
    wikipedialibrary.org

Alignment-of-interest
Using material you have written or published is allowed within reason, but
only if it is relevant, conforms to the content policies and is not
excessive. Citations should be in the third person and should not place undue
emphasis on your work. When in doubt, defer to the community's opinion.

Curators, librarians, archivists, and similar are encouraged to help improve
Wikipedia, or share their information in the form of links to their
resources.
                              -Wikipedia policy

Alignment-of-interest
REGISTER: Create an account, for you individually – not your organization
DISCLOSE: Mention and explain your institutional affiliation
HIGHLIGHT: Expose your most relevant, substantial collections neutrally
INCLUDE: Add relevant collections from other archives that you know of
ENGAGE: Respond thoughtfully and clearly to any community concerns
  Overview: http://enwp.org/WP:TWL/UNILIB
  Conflict of interest: http://enwp.org/WP:TWL/COI
  Guide for professionals:http://enwp.org/WP:TWL/Archivists
  Library training course: http://enwp.org/WP:TWL/I