Wikipedian-at-large informs LIANZA Aoraki

Kate McWilliam and Sarah Tester, LIANZA Aoraki Committee members, report back from the recent event with Mike Dickison >>

Wednesday June 5 was a cold, dark, winter’s night, but that didn’t stop a group of keen librarians, library staff, and even future librarians from coming along to LIANZA Aoraki’s presentation by Dr Mike Dickison, New Zealand’s own Wikipedian-at-large. Mike was in Christchurch to talk about Wikipedia and about how librarians can contribute to making this a reliable and credible information source.
 
We went into the evening thinking we knew about Wikipedia, how it worked, and how to share our knowledge with my library customers.  An hour later we walked out thoroughly aware of just how wrong that assumption had been!

Over the course of the evening Dr Dickison took us through the history of Wikipedia (its growth from a small group of wiki pages into the massive online phenomenon that it is now), gave us an insight into what goes into keeping it as accurate  as possible (a mixture of software searching for ‘naughty words’ and human volunteers checking for comments that sneak through), and shared with us his thoughts on how we as library and information professionals can contribute to Wikipedia.

Mike advocates for the digitisation of as many primary sources as possible and to make images, and supporting metadata, openly accessible for everyone to use as Wiki Data.  He also suggests that we should seek to create professional blogs with defined authors and clear references to enable them to be referenced as part of Wikipedia articles. 
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Finally he stressed that we should all be working to fix errors in Wikipedia articles, and support others to do the same through creative events and awareness raising.
 
Thanks Dr Dickison for providing interesting food for thought over the course of the evening.