Wikipedia

Rethinking Wikipedia from a Library Perspective

Editor’s note: We welcome a guest blog post from Nathan Sonnenschein, User Services & Experience Librarian at Montana State University Billings.

During my first year as an undergraduate, my community college’s library handed out folders bearing a catchphrase: “Faster than Google. Better than Wikipedia. Your college library.” This gave me the impression that academic libraries saw Wikipedia as a usurper on their terrain—an upstart competitor of the digital age. This struck me as out-of-touch. I had to start my research somewhere, and Wikipedia was an easy, familiar way to learn the essentials about a topic before searching the library for books or articles. Furthermore, checking Wikipedia’s citations helped me find crucial sources I might have otherwise missed. I never would have cited Wikipedia directly in my papers, but then again, I would never have cited any encyclopedia.

In the decade since, I have been delighted to see many library professionals develop more nuanced approaches to Wikipedia. Past ACRLog posts reveal a few of these perspectives. Wikipedia is a handy partner for brainstorming, a clever means for disseminating new research, and a great case study for teaching info-lit students about systemic biases or the facets of the ACRL Framework. Many libraries over the years have even hosted edit-a-thons and other initiatives to promote active, critical engagement with the online information landscape.

Still, the belief that Wikipedia has no place in research or scholarship persists. Many of my students’ zealous high school teachers taught them to never use Wikipedia, ever. To be fair, Wikipedia is far from perfect. Its mechanisms can and do enable vandalism (though editors often revert vandalism within a few hours, or even a few minutes). Readers must watch out for uncited statements or promotional language. For new editors—Wikipedia’s term for its contributors—the site’s policies and style guidance can feel frustratingly arcane and difficult. Wikipedia’s editor base skews heavily white and male, which introduces the potential for unconscious bias, and can create an alienating environment for editors who are women and/or people of color. These are real issues, but they do not mean Wikipedia has no valid place in the information ecosystem. Any information source has its strengths and weaknesses, and we must approach all sources with a critical lens.

Optimistically, I hope the library field has reached a place where most of us understand how great Wikipedia is for certain uses. However, we need to go further. In our new world of generative AI and volatile American politics, our fields must approach Wikipedia as not just a tool, but as an ally. Let me explain.

A shared mission

Generally, the digital revolution in the library sector has been intertwined with the trends of corporate growth and consolidation. Academic libraries’ collection development funds funnel almost entirely to massive publishers and “information cartels.” These companies have a vested interest in keeping information behind paywalls, and in protecting their own rights. This pursuit of profit is actively at odds with our libraries’ economic realities—with flatlined or diminishing budgets, serving our communities’ information needs is increasingly challenging. (Quite frankly, it feels unethical to subsidize these corporations’ profit margins with the limited funds my library receives—especially when that funding comes from student fees.)

In contrast, Wikipedia is run by the Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit organization that seeks to “help everyone share in the sum of all knowledge.” (This is a big reason why Wikipedia has not suffered from the enshittification plaguing Google Search and other platforms.) The library field and the Wikimedia Foundation are both rooted in the belief that individuals benefit from information access. We are not competing, but working toward the same vision. As library professionals, we are not seeking to enrich our institutions by boosting profits. We are seeking sustainable mechanisms for keeping our communities connected to information.

The political climate

Just as libraries and Wikipedia have similar goals, we are facing similar challenges. On April 24, 2025, the Wikimedia Foundation received a letter from the U.S. Department of Justice claiming the organization may have violated nonprofit laws. Why? The letter levels several accusations: spreading propaganda, rewriting the details of events in American history, and failing to provide “neutral” educational content—content that allegedly benefits foreign powers. The inference is that Wikipedia must engage readers with a point of view that directly favors the United States, and should not even have “foreign nationals” on its board, despite Wikipedia’s international scope.

One passage in particular sticks out to me: “Masking propaganda that influences public opinion under the guise of providing informational material is antithetical to Wikimedia’s ‘educational’ mission.” If you swap “Wikimedia” for “libraries,” this statement rings similarly to the accusations unrelentingly leveled against libraries over the past few years. Whether it be the supposed spread of anti-American narratives, the “indoctrination” of children via books with queer themes, or the dissemination of scholarly materials on Critical Race Theory, libraries are challenged for providing information that does not align with the agenda of certain powerful political factions. While the DOJ’s accusations against Wikipedia differ in form from the censorship pressures faced by libraries, the underlying logic—targeting institutions for disseminating perspectives that do not align with a certain political agenda—is strikingly similar. The result? Even as federal library grants are revoked, the Wikimedia Foundation has its nonprofit status threatened.

The rise of AI

The information landscape is quickly shifting as generative AI tools, like ChatGPT and Google Gemini, are revolutionizing information discovery. For libraries, this just means adapting to yet another wave of technological innovation. However, because Wikipedia is relatively young, its resilience is being tested. There has already been some doom and gloom about Wikipedia’s continued existence in a world where AI can conveniently provide encyclopedic information. Yet, many AI platforms are heavily dependent on information sourced from Wikipedia (and from libraries’ digital collections, for that matter). This creates a new paradigm: an information landscape where AI-generated information proliferates, but traditional, human-generated sources—primary, secondary, and tertiary alike—take on a new dimension of reliability and authority. The latter cannot exist without the former.

In other words, with so much machine-generated content on the internet, Wikipedia’s content takes on new value. The Wikimedia Foundation recently reaffirmed its commitment to “putting humans first.” On the editing side, this means relegating AI to technical tasks while continuing to rely on real people for knowledge curation. For the everyday reader, Wikipedia remains committed to creating for the sake of human learning, not for AI ingestion. Meanwhile, libraries continue to exist for the purpose of serving people, prioritizing access, privacy, and reliability. To say that another way, Wikipedia and libraries put people first—not for the sake of profit, but for the betterment of society.

What does this mean?

If I were a first-year college student today, I hope that the librarians would not tell me to ignore freely available online research tools in favor of books or databases. Rather, I hope they would nudge me to navigate all information sources critically and thoughtfully—including Wikipedia.

Why? Wikipedia is not perfect, but it is one of the last vestiges of an earlier, idealized vision of the World Wide Web: a place where anyone can sail the wide-open seas of human knowledge. We cannot take it for granted. Even as the information paywalls in the scholarly world continue to grow higher, Wikipedia remains an incredible resource for discovering information written by humans, for humans. In an information ecosystem dominated by corporate interests, information paywalls, and tech oligarchs, libraries must stand with Wikipedia as catalysts for a more equitable future.

#1Lib1Ref: An Easy Gateway to Wikipedia Editing

If you haven’t heard yet, the latest round of #1Lib1Ref is currently underway. This initiative, running from January 15 to February 5 this round, encourages librarians to add one missing citation to a Wikipedia article. Much has been written before about Wikipedia, its uses in libraries, and how librarians can help to improve Wikipedia. Check out Siân Evans’s post from a few years ago to read a bit more about that.

In the case of #1Lib1Ref, the idea is simple: as librarians, we’re good at finding resources, so even if writing a whole Wikipedia article seems daunting (which it certainly did for me!), we can bring those resource-finding skills to bear by editing articles that have already been written but aren’t up to Wikipedia’s citation standards.

I’ve been interested in learning to edit Wikipedia, but haven’t managed to get to an edit-a-thon yet, so hadn’t done any editing at all until I learned of #1Lib1Ref. When I did, it sounded like the perfect opportunity to get started. I was especially drawn to the idea of adding citations. Lately, I’ve been thinking about librarians (like me) with specialized subject knowledge, and how we can make use of that knowledge in our work. Yes, I have a degree in Southeast Asian studies, but I don’t know everything about Southeast Asia, nor can I know everything. That said, I do know enough to edit some Wikipedia articles, so spurred on by #1Lib1Ref, I set out to do just that.

There’s a lot of ways to get started with editing. I decided to start with finding an article to edit. Citation Hunt is a fun tool that scans through articles and shows you the snippets tagged with “citation needed.” If you think you can add the citation, it will take you that page for you to edit it. I found, though, that this cast too wide of a net, so I instead turned to the WikiProject Cleanup Listings. This page has articles grouped by topic, which made it much easier for me to drill down to a topic I felt I knew something about. Clicking on “by cat” takes you to a list of articles that need various sorts of attention: the neutrality has been called into question, or the article has been flagged for redundancy and possible merger with another article. On this page, I paid particular attention to articles under “Cites no sources,” “Cites unreliable sources,” and “Unsourced passages need footnotes {{citation needed}}.” This gave me enough options to find an article on a topic I knew something about that also needed a citation or two.

Which meant it was time for editing. The #1Lib1Ref page has a quick guide to editing Wikipedia articles, and Eric Phetteplace has also made a short video documenting his edit for #1Lib1Ref.

Beyond the technical aspects, though, I had questions about sources. What kinds of sources does Wikipedia favor? What’s this about valuing secondary sources over primary sources? There’s extensive documentation available to learn more about sources on Wikipedia, as well as a helpful guide addressed specifically to librarians and other cultural professionals. One major takeaway is that Wikipedia favors open access sources, which makes sense: people using Wikipedia might not have the access necessary to view the full text of books or articles cited, which means that the citation doesn’t allow them to read more. That said, Wikipedia also recognizes that sources will not always be open access, and there is no open access requirement. Again, though, this is where librarians can help: can we find alternate sources that are open access?

With all that reading under my belt, I finally felt ready to start editing, and began by combing through some of my favorite sources on Javanese gamelan and dance. Look for me poking around through related articles for the rest of #1Lib1Ref!

Are you participating in #1Lib1Ref, or do you run other sorts of Wikipedia-related events in your library? Let me know in the comments!

Working on Wikipedia Redux

Last weekend I had a great time participating in the Wikipedia Art+Feminism editathon, an annual event to increase the representation and coverage of women in the arts on Wikipedia. You may remember Art+Feminism co-organizer Siân Evans’s guest post last December — Why GLAM Wiki — which well-explains the editathon’s aims and accomplishments.

I’m a huge fan of Wikipedia — for my (and my family’s) own use as well as in teaching undergrads and graduate students. I also think working on Wikipedia is a perfect fit for academic librarians, with our research skills and our ability to access paywalled academic literature (though the latter I hope will someday become unnecessary as open access continues to gain ground). But I confess that I’m not as active in editing and adding content to Wikipedia as I’d like to be.

Indeed, last weekend I found myself thinking about the last editathon I attended two years ago, which I wrote about on my very infrequently updated professional blog. That semester I participated in the editathon in part because I was co-teaching a graduate class on interactive technology and pedagogy with Michael Mandiberg, another Art+Feminism co-organizer. We included a couple of Wikipedia assignments for our students in our grad course, and I wanted to put myself in my students’ shoes by doing a bit of editing and adding content, too.

This semester I’m teaching the course again (though solo this time), and again students are working on a Wikipedia assignment. We’re also spending more time in the course reading and talking about Wikipedia as a community as well as a collaboratively-created resource. Again I find myself thinking, as I did two years ago, about undergraduate work on Wikipedia, especially in the context of single- (or 2-3) session instruction as opposed to an entire semester of work on a Wikipedia assignment. I know my grad students — many of whom are teaching right now or will be soon — are also thinking about this. How can we incorporate Wikipedia content creation into instruction in smaller ways than spending a whole semester on an article or series of articles?

This year the editathon I attended was at Interference Archive, a volunteer-run archive in Brooklyn, NY that focuses on social movements. Editathon co-organizers Nora Almeida and Jen Hoyer went through the archives before last weekend to pull particularly relevant files for us to work on if we were looking for inspiration. My background is not in the arts, so I especially appreciated these efforts and was glad to be able to jump into finding info about an artist whose work I found in one of the files. And it strikes me that this might be a good way for students to jump into Wikipedia editing, too — beginning with archival or historical materials and synthesizing them with sources we can find online.

I’m happy to see that the edits I made last weekend — creating a stub for the Australian artist Arlene TextaQueen, are still live as I type this. And even more pleasantly surprising? The edits I made 2 years ago are still live, too.

Why GLAM Wiki: Wikipedia and Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums

ACRLog welcomes a guest post from Siân Evans, Senior Implementation Manager at Artstor.

In the fall of 2013, I was thinking about how every year I attend the ARLiS Women and Art Special Interest Group at ARLiS NA’s annual conference. And, every year, we as a group would lament the lack of representation of cis and trans women in the arts, as well as the lack of focus on gender issues in art librarianship. So, I teamed up with some amazing friends and colleagues to co-found Art+Feminism, a rhizomatic campaign to improve coverage of cis and trans women and the arts on Wikipedia, and to encourage female editorship. The current highlight of my career is that if you Google “art and feminism” we’re the top 5 results. But, rewind to two years ago: I hadn’t edited a single article on Wikipedia. So, I’m not going to go into the details of the work we do as Art+Feminism. You can find out more about that here, here, and here. Instead, I’m going to talk about why you should care about creating a Wikipedia program on your campuses and how you can get started, without any editing experience.

For those of you who are Wiki newbies, like I was, Wikipedia is the world’s largest open-source and open-access encyclopedia. Founded in 2001 by Internet entrepreneur Jimmy Wales and project developer Larry Sanger, Wikipedia is hosted by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation. But its content and policies are largely the product of a vast community of volunteers, often called “Wikipedians”. There are over twenty-four million named user accounts (not counting IP address editors), but there is a much smaller cadre of roughly 31,000 “active editors,” which the Wikimedia Foundation defines as five or more edits in any given month. As of February 2014, Wikipedia had roughly eighteen billion page views and nearly five hundred million unique visitors a month. This means that it is the seventh most-visited site in the world. Not only that, but its content is often pulled into other sites using APIs (application programming interface).

As librarians, we should care about Wikipedia because it is so often where our patrons start their research process and, because it’s open source, we have the tools to improve it. Studies show again and again that college students use Wikipedia throughout their research process. Many universities have responded to this trend by employing Wikipedian-in-Residence programs, wherein experienced editors spend time working in-house at an organization. The benefits of these programs aren’t simply fulfilling meet-your-user-where-they-are outreach but also that they provide a platform to make your digital collections more broadly available and useful to researchers. For example, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has been collaborating with local Wikipedians to train librarians to add bibliographic citations to relevant articles. Since undertaking this program, web traffic has “increased exponentially.” According to William Blueher, collections and metadata librarian at the Thomas J. Watson library, the library’s digital collections got over one million page views last year, up from around 100,000 in 2012.

Wikipedia edit-a-thons also provide a space in which you can connect your institution to local communities. A number of institutions — including Notre Dame University, Ohio State University, and the Art Gallery of Ontario — that have participated in Art+Feminism edit-a-thons, have gone on to hold local edit-a-thons in their community. These can be an excellent opportunity to connect your institution to local Wikipedians or historians interested in contributing their specific knowledge to Wikipedia.

Furthermore, Wikipedia’s only study on its community of editors suggests that its editor base is largely homogenous in terms of gender and ethnicity. While the numbers on gender are dire (estimated less than 10% of Wikipedia editors identify as cis or trans women), the numbers on race and ethnicity are murky, at best. There’s no data on the ethnicity of all Wikipedia editors except that only 7% of all surveyed editors believe their ethnicity is different from most of the editors who edit their home Wikipedia (e.g. their country’s version of Wikipedia). Projects like Art+Feminism, AfroCROWD, and Wiki Loves Pride are just a few examples of grassroots efforts to improve content via participation. By promoting new editorship on Wikipedia and by training young people while keeping intersectional politics in mind, you would be actively working to build a better, more robust encyclopedia.*

Now that I’ve talked a little bit about why you should care about GLAM-Wiki programs, I’d like to talk about how you can participate. One of the goals of Art+Feminism is to expand beyond art. As such, we’ve created organizer’s kits, training videos, and more on our Resources Page. These materials can easily be reused for a non-gender gap edit-a-thon, and we’ve aggregated lots of other great Wikipedia training materials on this page, as well. You can also get in touch with the helpful folks at The Wikipedia Education Foundation, a small nonprofit organization that “serves as the bridge between academia and Wikipedia.” They can provide excellent resources and information on teaching with Wikipedia, among other things.

Go ahead and be bold.

*If you’re interested in reading about Art+Feminism, and the relationship between librarianship and information activism on Wikipedia, you can find more of our thoughts here.

Curiouser and Curiouser: Guiding Students through the Information Wonderland

This week I taught a research instruction session for a learning community that pairs an introductory English Composition course with a Speech course. I love teaching this class because I get to work with colleagues in our English and Humanities Departments with whom I’ve long collaborated; we have a good rapport in the classroom and the students always seem to get a lot out of the class. Because the library session runs for twice as long as usual — we use the class periods for both classes — we always have lots of time for students to practice doing research. Because the students are usually more engaged in learning communities and there are 3 instructors in the classroom, we also typically get into discussions about topics in information literacy that we often don’t have room for in the other sessions I teach.

This time around we found something very interesting. The students were researching the Brooklyn Theater Fire, an infamous late 19th-century disaster that happened just steps from our college’s campus. We’d been using the library catalog to look for books on Brooklyn and New York City history, talking about the kinds of keywords that work best for broad or narrow topics, the usual. Recently I’ve noticed that during the internet research part of my instruction sessions students sometimes find books on commercial sites like Amazon, so I’ve started to suggest that students note down the author and title of books they find on those sites and search for them in the library catalog. I recommended that to this class, too, and a student called me over to help him do the search in our library’s catalog for a book he found on Barnes & Noble.

The student was trying to search by ISBN in the keyword search field, but that wasn’t really the problem. The problem was that our library (and our university system) doesn’t own the book. And, actually, we’ll never own the book, because the book he was looking for was a book of Brooklyn historical information pulled directly from Wikipedia. It took a few minutes of poking around on the B&N website to figure that out, and then we all (as a class) found a long list of books “published” by the company LLC Books:

llcbooks

(Hey, at least they’re relatively inexpensive, right?)

This phenomenon is not new, nor is it restricted to Wikipedia content — I remember hearing a few years ago about a similar “publisher” printing up and selling dissertations without their authors’ knowledge. And it’s pretty easy for us to discard these kinds of books from our own searches online. The listing the student found actually cites Source: Wikipedia as the author, but even those that don’t are highly suspicious: they’re on a huge variety of topics with very similar covers each with an image of a flower on it which is not at all relevant to the book’s content. Red flags everywhere, right?

But first year undergraduates are not librarians, and the student I worked with was, I think, legitimately confused by this book, especially seeing it in a set of search results that included traditionally published, “real” books. We ended up having a great conversation with the entire class about who owns the content on Wikipedia (and an introduction to open access and Creative Commons-licensed content), how print-on-demand publishing technology is changing information production, and why it’s important to evaluate information in all formats, not just online.

It was a great class; I left happy that we’d been able to cover such complex topics and hopeful that the students will continue to think critically about information the way they did in the class. However, I worry about other students, the ones in all of the classes that don’t have an extra-long library session, in which we don’t have time to get to print-on-demand Wikipedia scam books as well as everything else we need to cover. While not about library sources, I think this is important content that’s well worth discussing in our classes. But it’s tricky to accommodate all of the nuances of the information landscape in our instruction, especially when it’s both/and: real books both in print and electronic (both in the library and on the internet), and fake books, and… How do you incorporate new (and evolving) information literacy issues into your instruction?