#1Lib1Ref

A few of us at Tech Connect participated in the #1Lib1Ref campaign that’s running from January 15^th to the 23^rd . What’s #1Lib1Ref? It’s a campaign to encourage librarians to get involved with improving Wikipedia, specifically by citation chasing (one of my favorite pastimes!). From the project’s description:

Imagine a World where Every Librarian Added One More Reference to Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is a first stop for researchers: let’s make it better! Your goal today is to add one reference to Wikipedia! Any citation to a reliable source is a benefit to Wikipedia readers worldwide. When you add the reference to the article, make sure to include the hashtag #1Lib1Ref in the edit summary so that we can track participation.

Below, we each describe our experiences editing Wikipedia. Did you participate in #1Lib1Ref, too? Let us know in the comments or join the conversation on Twitter!

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I recorded a short screencast of me adding a citation to the Darbhanga article.

— Eric Phetteplace

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I used the Citation Hunt tool to find an article that needed a citation. I selected the second one I found, which was about urinary tract infections in space missions. That is very much up my alley. I discovered after a quick Google search that the paragraph in question was plagiarized from a book on Google Books! After a hunt through the Wikipedia policy on quotations, I decided to rewrite the paragraph to paraphrase the quote, and then added my citation. As is usual with plagiarism, the flow was wrong, since there was a reference to a theme in the previous paragraph of the book that wasn’t present in the Wikipedia article, so I chose to remove that entirely. The Wikipedia Citation Tool for Google Books was very helpful in automatically generating an acceptable citation for the appropriate page. Here’s my shiny new paragraph, complete with citation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronautical_hygiene#Microbial_hazards_in_space.

— Margaret Heller

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I edited the “Library Facilities” section of the “University of Maryland Baltimore” article in Wikipedia.  There was an outdated link in the existing citation, and I also wanted to add two additional sentences and citations. You can see how I went about doing this in my screen recording below. I used the “edit source” option to get the source first in the Text Editor and then made all the changes I wanted in advance. After that, I copy/pasted the changes I wanted from my text file to the Wikipedia page I was editing. Then, I previewed and saved the page. You can see that I also had a typo in my text  and had to fix that again to make the citation display correctly. So I had to edit the article more than once. After my recording, I noticed another typo in there, which I fixed it using the “edit” option. The “edit” option is much easier to use than the “edit source” option for those who are not familiar with editing Wiki pages. It offers a menu bar on the top with several convenient options.

The recording of editing a Wikipedia article:

— Bohyun Kim

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It has been so long since I’ve edited anything on Wikipedia that I had to make a new account and read the “how to add a reference” link; which is to say, if I could do it in 30 minutes while on vacation, anyone can. There is a WYSIWYG option for the editing interface, but I learned to do all this in plain text and it’s still the easiest way for me to edit. See the screenshot below for a view of the HTML editor.

I wondered what entry I would find to add a citation to…there have been so many that I’d come across but now I was drawing a total blank. Happily, the 1Lib1Ref campaign gave some suggestions, including “Provinces of Afghanistan.” Since this is my fatherland, I thought it would be a good service to dive into. Many of Afghanistan’s citations are hard to provide for a multitude of reasons. A lot of our history has been an oral tradition. Also, not insignificantly, Afghanistan has been in conflict for a very long time, with much of its history captured from the lens of Great Game participants like England or Russia. Primary sources from the 20th century are difficult to come by because of the state of war from 1979 onwards and there are not many digitization efforts underway to capture what there is available (shout out to NYU and the Afghanistan Digital Library project).

Once I found a source that I thought would be an appropriate reference for a statement on the topography of Uruzgan Province, I did need to edit the sentence to remove the numeric values that had been written since I could not find a source that quantified the area. It’s not a precise entry, to be honest, but it does give the opportunity to link to a good map with other opportunities to find additional information related to Afghanistan’s agriculture. I also wanted to chose something relatively uncontroversial, like geographical features rather than historical or person-based, for this particular campaign.

— Yasmeen Shorish