Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Library/Library Wikipedians

In working more closely with libraries, we want Wikipedians to have access to library resources, but we also want librarians to have better access to Wikipedia. This proposal would help librarians and information specialists integrate their workflows with Wikipedia's editors who are seeking research assistance.

Goal

Find a way for professional librarians to integrate "reference enquiries from Wikipedians" into their workflow. Produce a working proposal for how reference librarians might work on Wikipedia that suits BOTH groups' needs.

Motivation

The advantage is obvious to GLAM-Wikimedians: Wikipedia editors ask good quality questions that, unlike most enquiries, will directly help the wider public who have similar questions in the future. Simply put, a librarian answering a reference enquiry to a Wikipedian will mean they never have to answer that question again and more of the public might learn about their library's original/rare materials.

Details

For reference librarians to start spending time on Wikipedia a couple of things would need to be addressed policy/technology-wise first. Specifically:

• Being able to account, statistically, for the number of enquiries received, answered, and in what time-frame. This is how their job is measured so it's not just numbers for-the-fun-of-it but hard facts required to justify public money spending. It's especially good to be able to report on how many enquiries came from the relevant jurisdiction (state, city, country) that is funding the public library - ultimately they're primarily there to help local taxpayers. This would be an easier task on WP editions where there is a high correlation between language and nation as opposed to en.wp.
• Being able to represent the organisation they work for - that means not every librarian would want to have a personal user-account, even a pseudonymous one. Having a group account (e.g. user:NationalLibraryofAntarcticaReferences ) would be in violation of en.wp policies (and probably most other language Wikipedias too) But perhaps there's a clever solution or an exception that can be made for specific project pages? (having a group account would also help with the stats gathering). Another option here is have User at Library named accounts, such as User:Jen at MIT Library. What are the strengths/weaknesses of these two approaches?
• Ideally, be able to have new enquiries "pushed" to them, by some kind of API presumably. There are several software systems used by libraries around the world that aggregate and log enquiries received by different methods (email, web-form, phone...). Effectively their OTRS system. It might not be possible to reply to enquiries from within those systems (O-Auth would be needed or something technical like that) but having their existing software platform logging new pending-WP enquiries would be good.
• Some form of targeting system so that there's a relatively low rate of irrelevant enquiries submitted. Say, for example, a New Zealand library was active in this project but they kept receiving questions by/about Canada. Their librarians wouldn't be able to help very much, nor share their own library's special/unique resources. Tying this to [[Wikiproject:<country>]] might be a way to do it, but I've not thought out the details beyond that.

Participants

• Liam Wyatt suggested this idea and wrote up the project proposal
• Ocaasi is helping to organize this idea.