The Wikipedia Library/Newsletter/April-May 2017

Sign up for monthly delivery

In this issue we highlight new resources, global developments, and, as always, a roundup of news and community items related to libraries and digital knowledge.

We're excited about several new research partnerships:

• American Psychiatric Association – Psychiatry books and journals
• Bloomsbury – Who's Who, Drama Online, Berg Fashion Library, and Whitaker's
• Gaudeamus – Finnish humanities and social sciences
• Ympäristö-lehti – The Finnish Environment Institute's Ympäristö-lehti magazine

There are also expanded partnerships:

• Gale – Biography In Context database added
• Adam Matthew – all 53 databases now available

Sign up for these and many others!

Global branches are constantly evolving and bring potential in supporting editors who are in real need. New strategies and approaches are constantly being tried and results analysed to invigorate activities and ideally be of use to all editors on non-English branches. In this piece we will cover global highlights, news and updates for the last two months and for the time to come.

• Two new branches are in various stages of inception: the Korean TWL branch is wrapping up with pages translation and soon will begin talks for partnerships, and the Swedish TWL branch is in initial stages of creation.
• An hour-long Global Coordinators Meeting (IRC session) was held on 31 May. Invites were sent to all global coordinators and the reception was beyond what we had hoped. The agenda for the session was predetermined and overall, the meeting was productive and gave coordinators and the TWL team the opportunity to communicate. At the end of the meeting it was decided the meeting would occur bi-monthly.
• Two successful pitching by the Finnish coordinators resulted in TWL partnerships with Gaudeamus and Ympäristö-lehti. The Finnish TWL has been one of the most active global branches; thanks to its coordinators!
• Input from various language Wikipedias was invited and received for potential partnership suggestions. A number of suggestions were received and coordinators from different branches are updated about the list. Some have even started pitching.
• A significant rise in the number of coordinator sign ups was also seen in the past two months. Please join us in welcoming the new coordinators: Geraki (el), O.Koslowski (de), Unscheinbar (de), DejaVu (fa), Lentokonefani (fi), Rodrigo Padula (pt), Spartacus_VT (pt), Skottniss (sv), Shangkuanlc (zh), Shizhao (zh), -revi (ko), Motoko C. K. (ko), and 책읽는달팽 (ko). We are always in need of more help, please sign up!

This post is excerpted from the Wikimedia Blog.

It is no stretch to say that without books, Wikipedia would not exist.

The free encyclopedia relies on citations to ensure the information you find on Wikipedia is verifiable and based in reliable sources. Even in the digital age, many of the highest-quality sources are the books available in your local library.

Yet despite their importance, adding references to Wikipedia has been difficult at times, requiring at minimum a basic knowledge of wikicode. Steady improvements have been made over the years to make it easier to add citations, including through the cite tool on Wikimedia's visual editing interface. However, adding citations to books on Wikipedia is about to get a lot easier.

A new partnership between The Wikipedia Library and OCLC, a global nonprofit library cooperative, will allow editors to easily generate citations to millions of books on Wikipedia using OCLC's WorldCat—the largest database of books in the world, spanning the collections of more than 72,000 libraries.

The WorldCat database will be integrated into the cite tool so that an editor can type in an ISBN, an identifier available inside hundreds of millions of published books since the 1970s, and get back a Wikipedia-ready book citation, including authors, titles, and publishers.

A detailed step-by-step process on how to use this feature is here. It expands upon Wikipedia's current method of citation auto-filling, which allows editors to generate a citation from a single online identifier, like a web address (URL) or digital object identifier (DOI). This partnership empowers Wikipedia editors and readers to harness the impact of full and accurate citations. With improved access to references that back up the facts, Wikipedia becomes a better, richer free knowledge resource for all.

• How we know what we know: The Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) helps unlock millions of connections between scholarly research

• Library Offers Largest Release of Digital Catalog Records in History

• Untangling Academic Publishing
• Wikidata for Librarians
• Librarians Who Wikipedia (WebJunction)
• State of the Commons
• How I learned to stop worrying and love Wikipedia
• Unpaywall finds free versions of paywalled papers