Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Library/Professional Interns
The Wikipedia Library
Wikipedia Cultural Professional Interns
A self-guided curriculum for student and professional editors working to profile library, archive, special and other cultural collection materials, while practicing digital librarianship
Libraries, special collection, archives have long been sending interns and student hires within their organization to Wikipedia to contribute content in order to expand the visibility of their collections and digital resources. This strategy works: there are a number of documented case studies within this professional community that show increases in traffic to organizations from the general public reading Wikipedia and moreover, from the Wikipedia community.
As part of The Wikipedia Library, this resources page and its support pages outline a curriculum (outlined here) that allows library consortiums, library schools and other cultural professional communities to organize interns and other employees to engage Wikipedia within community best practices. The self-guided curriculum is designed to help interns hired by libraries, special collections or archives get a better sense of the expectations of such contributions to the Wikimedia community, find support among fellow interns and community members, and ensure that they follow best practices that conform to the principles laid out by the GLAM-Wiki movement. We have multiple levels of participation for both students without formal library/archival training and students trained in librarianship or archival studies and the resource is appropriate for guiding groups of professionals in a professional development situation. As part of a student's education, it is important that interns understand the "why" of their contributions and how they can use the skills in their future. To provide information for interns and their supervisor, this page offers an overview of research, editing practices and educational goals that guide Wikipedia Library Internships.
Concept
editWikipedia Library Interns are interns, student hires, or specially allocated staff hired by partner libraries or archives to contribute new Wikipedia content which improves Wikipedia, improves the profile of digital resources, and gives the students an educational introduction to Wikipedia and best practices within professional use of social media. As is listed in the case studies section below a number of institutions have successfully deployed such interns and staff (often in the form of student hires), and have seen an increased access to their digitized special collections material.
Interns can be distinguished from Wikipedian in Residence, the dominant type of outreach person for interactions with Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAMS), in that they are not responsible for actively creating cooperations between the organization's staff and the larger Wikimedia community. Moreover, Wikipedia Library Interns are often inexperienced Wikipedia contributors, unlike Wikipedia Visiting Scholars, who are experienced Wikipedians editing content of interest to a library; the internship should provide novice contributors an educational introduction to Wikipedia, research skills, and best practices within librarianship.
Libraries/Archives and Wikipedia share a common mission of disseminating useful research materials; thus internships should be focused on including research materials from both within the institution's digital collection and the larger information ecosystem facilitated by Wikipedia (for further information, see the discussion of avoiding conflict of interest and SPAM).
Motivations
editInternships can be motivated by a number of institutional and student learning goals. Here are a few common ones:
Learning goals (see further at educational outcomes).
Learning outcomes are an important part of any internship, and some institutions create these internships expressly for their learning outcomes. Libraries/archives create internships to:
- Familiarize students with library/archival practices of accessing and communicating access to different types of research materials
- Familiarize students with public and digital communication of the resources in a library, special collection, or archive in a model supporting the goals of the digital humanities or other digital scholarly efforts
- Reinforce research and writing skills
- Introduce students to practicing research and writing for a new knowledge-based community of practice
Institutional motivations Institutional motivations often revolve around increasing the institutional impact, including:
- Increasing public service by the organization, by leveraging student labor to make meaningful public resources
- Increasing visibility of institutional collections, including special collections, archival materials and finding aids, by creating links on one of the most used research-focused websites in the world
- Building collaborative relationships with volunteers researching topics of interest to the library
Previous participants
editLibraries and archives that have participated in the program described in this outline, include:
- Corning Museum of Glass Library
- Pittsburg State University Libraries
- Oklahoma State Libraries
- Oregon State University Archives and Special Collections
- The Texas Collection at Baylor University
- Pritzker Military Museum & Library
- Cornell University Library
Published case studies
editThis following list includes case studies that highlight the use of interns or other library staff to improve the relationship between digital library/archival resources and Wikipedia.
- Belden, D. (2008). "Harnessing social networks to connect with audiences: If you build it, will they come 2.0?". Internet Reference Services Quarterly. 13 (1): 99–111. doi:10.1300/J136v13n01_06.
- Combs, M (2011). "Wikipedia as an access point for manuscript collections". In K. Theimer (ed.). A Different kind of web: New connections between archives and our users. Society of American Archivists. pp. 139–147.
- Zentall, Lena; Cloutier, Camille (2008). "The Calisphere Wikipedia Project: Lessons Learned". CSLA Journal. 32 (1): 27–29.
- Galloway, Ed; DellaCorte, Cassandra (2014). "Increasing the Discoverability of Digital Collections Using Wikipedia: The Pitt Experience". Pennsylvania Libraries: Practice and Research. 2 (1): 84–96. doi:10.5195/palrap.2014.60.
- Lally, A. M.; Dunford, C. E. (2007). "Using Wikipedia to extend digital collections". D-Lib Magazine. 13 (5/6). doi:10.1045/may2007-lally.
- Lally, A. (May 18, 2009). Using Wikipedia to highlight digital collections at the University of Washington. The Interactive archivist: Case studies in utilizing web 2.0 to improve the archival experience.
- Pressley, L; McCallum, C. J. (2008). "Putting the library in Wikipedia". Info Today. 32 (5).
- Szajewski, M. (2013). "Using Wikipedia to enhance the visibility of digitized archival assets". D-Lib Magazine. 19 (3/4). doi:10.1045/march2013-szajewski.
Intern activities and community values
editGeneral activities
editCommon on-wiki activities for Wikipedia Library interns include:
- Finding already established pages, and using digital and physical resources from their institution to expand those articles. Expanded articles draw greater public attention to a topic and provide a more effective gateway to both institutional resources and the larger research ecosystem. Best practice is to contribute information that can be WP:Verified both from institutional resources and outside research materials, thus highlight more than just institutional webpages.
- Creating new articles that build upon an institution's strengths. When creating new articles, it is important that the intern provide citations and links to other research materials beyond the institution's resources. The most effective Wikipedia articles endure because they provide a thorough examination of a topic using a wide variety of sources, a few of which don't have a vested interest in the topic. Multiple reliable sources beyond the institution's digital content demonstrates to other Wikipedia editors that the topic is of interest to more than just your institution and meets Wikipedia's General notability guidelines.
- Announcing your internship on WikiProjects listed at Wikipedia:List of WikiProjects that have related content focuses to your organization, and helping users at that project find source materials within your organization's collection or database resources.
- Uploading images, videos, or sound to Wikipedia:Wikimedia Commons that are in the public domain or have been published under an open license, such as a Creative Commons or a GNU free license, and using those to illustrate articles on English Wikipedia. Wikipedia articles do a good job at drawing greater attention to media, and the media and their captions can profile information about what is available in your collections.
Most library interns, because they want to keep things simple, start with the first two activities. Make sure to get your feet wet on Wikipedia, but also don't be afraid to Be Bold and expand your approach. If you are interested in other types of activities related to Wikipedia, check out the next section about "Trained Librarian Interns" or the Wikipedia in Residence page.
Trained Librarian interns
editStudents trained in library or archival studies programs or with professional experience in the field have a different set of skills than the average undergraduate or graduate student employed as interns by libraries/archives. While contributing directly to content like other interns might be the activity originally intended by the organization that has hired you, the best educational experience might be in building resources on Wikipedia that reinforce common professional skills: creating research indexes, assisting editors with research queries and organizing networks of information. Open up the box below to get some ideas.
Trained librarian/archivist opportunities
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Here are some possible activities that could help expand your professional experience; you could:
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Avoiding COI and SPAM
editIn the past, many interns for libraries and other organizations have been tasked with editing Wikipedia and, because of the interns' approach to editing, they have become disruptive in the community. This disruption can lead to both interns and community members spending considerable time discussing the intern's contributions and reviewing edits. To prevent your internship from causing disruption and entailing excess intern and volunteer time on Wikipedia, it is important to understand two simple community guidelines: WP:Conflict of interest and Wikipedia:Spam.
The conflict of interest guideline recognizes that many editors have outside motivations affecting their contributions to Wikipedia, but that the goal of any editor should be to avoid promotion of a particular organization or position. Instead contributions should be made with the intention of furthering the five pillars of Wikipedia, which includes creating public educational resources.
Second, the spam guidelines recommend that articles not be created to promote items, people or positions, nor should links be systematically added as solely a means of directing user traffic. Instead content should be thoughtfully placed to promote information acquisition, rather than conversion of traffic or promotion of a particular position.
With all these warnings about what not to do, it's also important not overthink your additions to Wikipedia! Interns shouldn't have trouble avoiding violations of these guidelines: the main goal of libraries and archives is the promotion of information acquisition. If you approach your editing with good faith and this goal in mind, the community will often provide additional guidance. Generally, if you avoid the following problematic contribution approaches, you shouldn't encounter problems related to these policies:
- Don't simply add links to a Wikipedia article's "External links" section without providing additional expansion to the article's content. Links are useful, but increased information or better organization of information on an article that accompanies a link demonstrates your commitment to improving Wikipedia.
- Don't place multiple links to the same resource on one page unless absolutely necessary. Significant expansions of an article's written content should be the only time that multiple links to a single resource might be added, and only as part of the footnotes verifying the content.
- Make sure to declare your involvement in an internship on your user page. Avoiding such a declaration might lead other users to believe that you are trying to covertly co-opt Wikipedia for other ends. Placing a conflict of interest statement on your user page will help users recognize your involvement in an organization aligned with Wikipedia's mission. For examples of such conflict of interest statements, see Wikipedia:COIDEC.
- Don't edit articles that describe the actual organization for which you are working: focus your edits on content that your organization has in its holdings, rather than on the organization itself. Writing about the organization for which you work will often be viewed as a Conflict of Interest or SPAM that is promoting your institution. It is generally more acceptable to write articles about, for example, the founder of your organization or any notable people who have worked at your organization, provided that you do not get paid by that person and that you have made a conflict of interest statement on your user page as explained above.
- Don't immediately re-add links to articles when other users have removed them. This can lead to other policy violations, like WP:Edit warring. Instead, approach the other user on their talk page or the article talk page, and ask why they removed it and how you can help improve such changes in the future. Feedback from experienced users never hurts.
- For further guidelines oriented toward other audiences besides institutions, see Wikipedia:Plain and simple conflict of interest guide#Advice. Remember, most of these apply to people whose conflict of interest derives from commercial employment, rather than employment by a cultural institution that shares a common mission with Wikipedia: to promote access to information. As long as you are working towards that common mission and openly discuss your editing approach, the community is often receptive to new and valuable content.
Reporting activities
editCommunication of activities during an internship is an important part of maintaining an ethical and transparent relationship to the Wikipedia community and provides supervisors and your hiring organization the ability to assess both educational and organizational outcomes. Here are a few ways that should help in reporting to these interested parties:
What do you need to share with Wikipedians?
editReporting to Wikipedians
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It is important to maintain a good relationship with the Wikipedia community; Wikipedia's main contributors are volunteers who spend many hours maintaining the accessibility and quality of the information on Wikipedia. They also have considerable power over what information stays in the encyclopedia. Here are a few pointers for interacting with Wikipedians:
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What should you share with supervisors?
editReporting to supervisors
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The following are some types of reporting that can be useful to supervisors, and help documenting learning:
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What should you share with sponsors?
editReporting to sponsoring organization
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Unlike supervisors who are interested in both the educational outcomes and work hours, most organizations need information that helps demonstrate the impact of your edits on their own digital presence. There are multiple types of metrics both within and without the organization that might be useful to help the organization understand and justify your internship. Here are a few of the most useful that could help supplement the supervisor reports mentioned above:
For examples on how to create reports of these and other metrics, see the published case studies above. |
Supervisors: Where to get started?
editIf you have reviewed this page and would like to learn more, host an intern or organize a class of interns email Alex Stinson (astinson
wikimedia.org), the project manager for the Wikipedia Library.
Organizing a class of interns
editThe program no longer organizes central classes of interns as it did in the pilot stage, but rather, organizational partners who coordinate classes within their own networks. Organizing a class of interns requires a relatively limited amount of resources: a coordinator and a network of organizations (cultural institutions, departments, or professional courses classes) that would be interested in hosting the intern. We recommend consortia, multi-unit organizations or professional development groups organize classes of interns. Institutions can also, but won't have the added benefit of a network of support, but are welcome to follow the curriculum (it's largely self-guided).
Further information about organizing a class of interns can be found at: Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Library/Processes/Interns class development.
Hosting an intern
editOrganizations that want to host an intern, should be tasking Wikipedia intern activities to a new or old student employee that is participating in an established practicum, intern or student hire program. When the institution sponsors an intern, the educational materials here about Wikipedia Library interns provide much of the guidance for that intern as well as tools for discovering community help when they encounter problems. The materials are designed around an 8-week or longer internship at 10-15 hrs a week; however, because all internships are different, the curriculum is designed for customization based on length of internship and amount of time devoted to it.
What administrative support do you need? When setting up support for a Wikipedia Library Intern, important infrastructure includes:
- an established practicum, intern or student hire program or professional development situation that allows for the role and is either credit-bearing or paid and provides a structure for reporting/supervision.
- Providing a supervisor for the intern.
- Staff willing to help help with initial orientation to topics of interest and research materials; typically this will be a librarian or archivist who has significant knowledge of the topic students are writing around.
Who should be an Intern? Typically, when looking for Wikipedia interns, most students trained as cultural professionals, either. Moreover, particular skills you are looking for, include:
- Self motivated researchers, in a field that encourages public writing and/or synthesis of cultural content; most interns have been Library/Information Science, Humanities or social science students.
- Writers ready to communication with a public audience - the best students already have a knack for public communications
- Flexible learning new technologies, platforms and technical skills - Wikipedia editing has a few small technical hurdles that most everyone can learn, but students who have experimented with web tools in the past, will often learn quicker
Sample call for applicants Here is a sample call for applicants, that you might find useful:
- The [Organization NAME] is offering [# AVAILABLE] internships during the [Period] that concentrate on increasing the visibility of our archival sources on Wikipedia. Based on our collection strengths, interns would be trained on how to add or edit articles on Wikipedia that pertain to primary and secondary source material held in the archives. The collections specialization in [Topics xyz] will focus much of intern research time; however, we are also interested in interns expanding on other topics relevant to our other collections. Interested applicants must provide a resume and sample of research and writing skills. Preferred candidates will be self motivated, have some experience writing for public audiences and/or developing websites or web content, have taken the research skills classes for their major program and have interest in the public communications of the [humanities or other topic].
- If you are interested in an internship at the [INSTITUITION NAME], contact [Name] at [EMAIL].
Getting started
When supervising an intern for the first time, typically you will be in unfamiliar territory in both understanding Wikipedia and leveraging it. Most previous participants have had little experience with Wikipedia! The materials are designed so that the student can go through self-guided training, instead of having to be introduced by the supervisor: so you don't need to master everything. We recommend exploring the following to help support the internship:
- Going through the assignment design part of the Education programs training for educators - this outlines frequent design concerns and pitfalls that teachers encounter when students edit Wikipedia. Note the Interns curricula is a bit different than a typical assignment, but they are based on the same principals!
- Become familiar with guidelines for paid editing from a cultural institution perspective: for example, see the guidelines laid out by the National Archives for their staff
- Preparing a list of notable topics from your collection, that a student could reasonably research. Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Library/Archivists outlines the best ways to think about adding information to your archival or special collections holdings! Once you read the Archivists page, we recommend that you create a list of notable topics that your student could work on, frequently topic discovery is the part of the semester that takes the longest, and you, as someone familiar with your holdings, will know best what both meets Wikipedia's WP:Notability policy . For topics related to archives, typically there is enough outside conversation about the topic that your student would be able to find secondary sources; primary sources should be used with care.
Educational outcomes
editActivities for interns should be tailored to both develop professional skills and other learning outcomes that help further intern education. Internships that don't work towards shared learning goals often don't help students reach their full potential. Fortunately for supervisors, the WP:Wikipedia Education Program and published case studies above provide significant accumulated experience in tailoring an internship to a student's learning needs. Here are some learning outcomes that might be used to tailor the kinds of work that you ask students to complete:
Basic Learning Objectives
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Contributing to Wikipedia provides a number of basic skills important to develop in all fields and educational settings. Editing and adjunct assignments might focus students on practicing:
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Field-specific skills and learning objectives
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Contributing to Wikipedia might also be tailored for other more field-specific goals.
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Related publications
edit- Roth, Amy; Davis, Rochelle; Carver, Brian (3 June 2013). "Assigning Wikipedia editing: Triangulation toward understanding university student engagement". First-Monday. 18 (6).