Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Library/Newsletter/April-May2016

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 17, April–May 2016
by The Interior, Ocaasi, UY Scuti, Sadads, and Nikkimaria

In this issue we announce two new global branches and a new partnership. Our global pageviews analysis is unveiled. We spotlight recent research and upcoming events. As always, we have a roundup of news and community items related to libraries and digital knowledge.

New global branches

We are very happy to announce two more global Wikipedia Library branches:

Hebrew Wikipedia Library, created by Daryag
Sindhi Wikipedia Library, created by Jogi don

We'd also like to take this opportunity to highlight the Global Wikipedia Library on Meta. This portal showcases the projects and accomplishments of each of our language branches. New and growing branches also have their own Meta planning pages to coordinate and track their progress, for example: meta:The Wikipedia Library/Portuguese. If you're interested in helping to start a branch on another language Wikipedia, please get in touch! wikipedialibrarywikimedia.org

New accounts

We're excited about a new research partnership:

Nomos, a German-language publisher of law, social sciences, and humanities books and journals.

New coordinators and call for volunteers

We would like to welcome Lingzhi as a new account coordinator and EVDiam as a metrics coordinator on our team!

We are looking for a Interlibrary Branch Coordinator. This is someone who would work with and across global branches to discover and disseminate learnings, stories, best practices, ideas, and challenges. Using surveys, email, Wikipedia talk pages, the wikipedialibrary mailing list, this newsletter, and the WMF blog, the coordinator would help share these findings. Please sign up if you're interested, especially if you are comfortable working across language projects (in English) and even better if you already have worked on a global Wikipedia Library branch.

New volunteers for this or other roles are always welcome. If you have benefited from a TWL account or are interested in helping out, sign up here.

New TWL Pageview Analysis: 1 million views per year!

By using the incredibly convenient Wikipedia Tools add-on for Google Sheets, we've been able to collect monthly page views for Wikipedia Library pages across all language Wikipedias dating back to August 2015. This has revealed that over the past 10 months TWL pages have been viewed on average a total of 85,000 times per month, combining to over 1 million predicted page views for a 12-month period! While the majority (~94%) of these views come from English Wikipedia pages, the next highest view count comes from the Polish Wikipedia (~2000 views per month) where editors have created categorised pages for editors to collate and share their resources.

Other recent findings include the statistic that 40% of all TWL signups are from an editor active on a non-English Wikipedia.

CrossRef finds Wikipedia the #6 highest referrer to DOIs online!

Crossref has been an increasingly important ally of the Wikimedia community, supporting improvements to Wikipedia's citation ecosystem, and helping sponsor WikiCite 2016. In the past few months, they have also been helping the Wikipedia Library team on reaching out to their members, following a blog that we helped them post in April – helping us contact some of the most needed publishers for various communities, especially partners that have hard-to-find academic research about non-Western communities.

In May, Crossref released more research on Wikipedia and academic citations by Joe Wass, in the blog post entitled "HTTPS and Wikipedia." Following the HTTPS conversion of Wikipedia in June 2015, Dario Taraborelli of Wikimedia Research and Wass, worked to convert Wikipedia's usage of Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to HTTPS by default. The transition operated smoothly, and in tracking the incoming traffic over the course of nearly a year, Wass and Taraborelli discovered that Wikipedia had risen to become the 6th top referrer to the DOI resolver – a tool supported by Crossref that helps researchers access research articles. The increase pushed Wikipedia past Google as one of the most useful tools in helping academics.

#1lib1ref think-piece explores the intersection of Wikipedia and social technologies

"This campaign was more than an outreach effort: it helped us to explore new technologies that facilitate diverse communities to participate in Wikipedia. To support a clear call to action for librarians, we incorporated three social technologies to grow the campaign: social media, hashtags (both inside and outside of Wikipedia), and microcontributions. Together they helped us share an inviting and compelling story of collaboration between Wikipedia and libraries..."

Read the full piece on the WMF blog:
Engaging librarians (and others) through social technologies: A #1lib1ref think-piece

Events

Alex attended WikiCon in Berlin to talk with community leaders about the opportunities for developing branches in more language communities. He also had a poster presenting the results and impact of the #1lib1ref initiative from last January.

Jake attended WikiCite 2016 in Berlin to discuss how Wikipedia's citations can be better structured and shared. His particular projects looked at a long-requested means of exposing open-access scholarship. OABOT is the result of tremendous work by Dissemin developer and Wikipedian User:Pintoch (Antonin Delpeuch). It queries core databases that contain thousands of repositories looking for free-to-read versions of paywalled articles linked in citations. A bot will soon be proposed to run and add these links (and possibly some phrase or icon indicating their open-ness).

The Wikipedia Library team also reserved a booth at the International Federation of Library Associations conference in Ohio in August. The booth will include updated and internationalized outreach materials from the Library's bookshelf on Meta.

If you want to share some of the library outreach your community is doing at one of these conferences, please email Alex at astinsonwikimedia.org.

Bytes in brief

Community roundup

Newsworthy

Worth reading (or watching)

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