One of our past guest bloggers, Rebecca Blakeley, tweeted a little while ago about this Online article of interest. In it, Lauren Pressley and Carolyn McCallum talk about how libraries should participate in Wikipedia. Besides the easy step-by-step directions, Pressley and McCallum give a compelling argument for librarians adding content to Wikipedia in order to raise awareness of library collections and, more importantly, to "change academicians’ minds about Wikipedia." Please read it, think about it, roll your sleeves up and get wiki-ing :-)

Putting the Library in Wikipedia By Lauren Pressley and Carolyn J. McCallum. Online. Vol. 32 No. 5 — Sep/Oct 2008.

As everyone knows, wikipedia has been in the news recently because several large corporations got caught scrubbing their wikipedia entries -- Wired is keeping track of the most shameful wikipedia spin jobs. Well now it's been shown that the CIA and FBI has gotten in on the act. Anyone got the time to use Wikiscanner to see what other government agencies are scrubbing their wiki images?

There's a very interesting article in Wired about a data mining tool developed to discover instances of whitewashing (e.g. editing in one's self-interest; presumably inappropriately) of Wikipedia entries. As has been noted before, Wikipedia has no authority control over the entries and is therefore particularly subject to self-serving or highly partisan edits. Now a clever grad student has developed a tool to identify those instances based on the version tracking built into wikis. While it doesn't necessarily identify a particular person, just knowing that, as described in the article, someone at Diebold HQ removed negative information about Diebold voting machines is adequate because it forces Diebold to prove they weren't the ones to make the changes. In short, it provides accountability by making use of the Wikipedia equivalent of the historical record.

I mention this story because I think that this kind of activity is going to be increasingly important in determining what constitutes a real and/or official government publication. Traditionally, you held a government accountable by getting offiical documentation of its activities and holding on it for comparison with other official documentation. However, government information published electronically has made this a lot harder because of the changable nature of digital files. A longstanding concern of government information librarians with respect to electronic govnernment information has been how to know when changes have been made, what the changes consisted of and who made them.

In this respect, the surging popularity of web 2.0 -style tools may be a great boon for government information. These tools -- wikis, online collaborative software like Google Documents or Zoho and so on -- derive their value from their ability to be shared. Government agency personnel are no different from anyone else - they've got work to do, a limited patience with messing around with how to do it and a desire to take the path of least resistance. So, for government employees, i.e. the folks creating government information, there's just as much reason to use these kinds of software as there is for me right now writing this post.

And that means that neither the historical record nor legal accountability is necessarily lost, although it will entail expanding the definition of preservation of the historical record to include methods of acting on databases (creating data mining software to run against databases) in addition to the collection of objects (finding that last copy of a Serial Set volume) and any other activities that may become necessary as technology evolves.

As with everything, the possibilities are not limitless. The Wikipedia Scanner was developed in cooperation with Wikipedia and required a full download of the whole database. Allowing that level of access is an option that individual agencies could turn on or off and certainly some agencies would never allow those levels of access to their publications. However, the agencies unlikely to play well with others in this scenario probably already don't provide much access to their information. For agenices that would be amenable to this kind of datamining, a benefit would be not just automated archiving (which the version tracking amounts to), but no-cost-to-the-agency management of those archives since they'll be allowing others to do it for them.

Diplomats take a shine to Wikipedia-like app

Not strictly documents related, but the latest issue of D-Lib features a library using Wikipedia in a ethical way to raise awareness and usage of their digital materials:

Lally, Ann M., and Carolyn E. Dunford. "Using Wikipedia to Extend Digital Collections" D-Lib Magazine 13(5/6)(May/June 2007)(http://www.dlib.org/dlib/may07/lally/05lally.html)

The UW folks seems to have good before and after tables and graphs to demonstrate that it has been well worth for librarians to add quality library-based content to Wikipedia.

Anyone else in the documents world doing this besides UNT?

In a new discussion over at the Library 2.0 Government Documents group, librarian Dreanna Belden comments on how the University of North Texas libraries have ramped up usage of their locally housed digital document and photograph collections by adding relevant links to Wikipedia. For example, they added a link to Congressional Research Reports about Justice Sandra Day O'Connor to her Wikipedia entry.

What has been the result of adding article-appropriate library links to over 600 Wikipedia articles? Dreanna says (emphasis mine):

Since adding links back to our collections into over 600 Wikipedia articles, we have experience dramatically increased usage of our online collections. In the past year over 400,000 unique users have clicked through Wikipedia into our digital collections.

Way to go UNT! If there other libraries doing this sort of thing, let Dreanna know what kind of response you're getting. Or leave a comment here and we'll send it her way.

If you're not up for adding your collection links to Wikipedia, or if you don't have a local digital collection to link to, consider blogging your reference questions and watch what you found on average tarrif levels rise to the top of Google.

So Wikipedia has been in the news - big time - lately. There was the Seigenthaler stink, in which bogus information was inserted into the Wikipedia entry of John Seigenthaler Sr., former assistant to former Attorney General Robert Kennedy, alleging Seigenthaler's role in the assasination of both Kennedy's. The spurious allegation made its way into supposedly authoritative sites like Answers.com and Reference.com. In response, Seigenthaler wrote a vitriolic editorial in USA Today damning Wikipedia and the practice of wiki as a legitimate venue for public record. In the aftermath of Seigenthaler and other stories of erroneous Wikipedia content, Nature comes out with an expert-led, peer-reviewed investigative story that lauds Wikipedia as near on par with Encyclopedia Britannica in terms of accuracy of its science content. Where Britannica exceeded Wikipedia, the differences were not great. So I bring all this up as context to the delicate and critical position that the publicly-recorded record holds and why the latest story on Wikipedia - its infiltration by congressional staffers - is alarming.

According to the Lowell Sun:

The staff of U.S. Rep Marty Meehan wiped out references to his broken term-limits pledge as well as information about his huge campaign war chest in an independent biography of the Lowell Democrat on a Web site that bills itself as the "world's largest encyclopedia," The Sun has learned.

The Meehan alterations on Wikipedia.com represent just two of more than 1,000 changes made by congressional staffers at the U.S. House of Representatives in the past six month. Wikipedia is a global reference that relies on its Internet users to add credible information to entries on millions of topics.

This wholesale wikiwiping is more than vanity cosmetics or a malicious hack - as intolerable as such transgressions are - it is the publicly-recorded record of our public servants unwriting itself.