Wikipedia and Special Collections: A Special Relationship
Bob Kosovsky, Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts
Music Division - New York Public Library
Preconference of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of ACRL / ALA June 25, 2013
• Over 4.2 million articles in English Wikipedia• 286 Wikipedias by language• Over 30 million articles in all Wikipedias • 6th most-used website on Earth1
• 365 million readers worldwide• 8th most-used website in the United States• “Most popular reference work on the Internet” 2
1 Alexa.com, accessed 10 June 20132 “Wikipedia” in Wikipedia, footnotes 5-9, accessed 10 June 2013
Editors of Wikipedia• As of November 2011, 31.7 million registered
users; 270,000 active any given month
For English Wikipedia (figures as of April 2013)
• 33,511 active Wikipedians• 3.3 million edits per month• 910 new articles per day
Source: http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm#wikipedians
“Verifiability, not truth”
Among Wikipedia editors, this is often phrased as "verifiability, not truth" to express the idea that the readers, not the encyclopedia, are ultimately responsible for checking the truthfulness of the articles and making their own interpretations.
Wikipedia:Core Content Policies• Neutral point of view• Verifiability• No original research
• “…all material in Wikipedia must be attributable to a reliable, published source. Articles may not contain any new analysis or synthesis of published material that serves to advance a position not clearly advanced by the sources.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Core_content_policies
Digital project: creating metadata for thousands of songs. I wanted to include performance information for the 1891 musical “Wang” by composer Woolson Morse.
“Catalogs are not the methods by which the community learns about things”
-- Katherine Reagan, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University
From the article on Special Collections:
There is currently no article on hidden collections. How can we highlight the issues with hidden collections if it’s not possible to find a definition and explanation of the phrase?
Behind the articles, Wikipedia is also a social network dedicated to a mission – don’t be shy asking for help
some"If Wikipedia is good enough for the Archivist of the United States, maybe it should be good enough for you” – David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States