From the special edition of #DLFcontribute, Kelly Doyle (West Virginia University Libraries) and Ashleigh D. Coren (University of Maryland, College Park) discuss how they leveraged Wikimedia Foundation’s #1lib1ref (1 librarian, 1 reference) campaign “to highlight how librarians use Wikipedia to fill in public knowledge gaps about local and marginalized knowledge.”
We wanted to challenge our participants’ preconceived notions about the value and legitimacy of Wikipedia, and encourage them to add to the collective knowledge of the African diaspora. Each event was split into three parts: Kelly provided an overview on Wikipedia and the gender and racial gaps on the site, and Ashleigh continued the conversation on Wikipedia’s assessment of articles and used the pageview analysis tool to highlight how traffic to pages and content gaps can hurt public understanding of a topic. We used two examples, TaNehisi Coates vs. Lena Dunham, and the Black Panther Party vs. the Ku Klux Klan, to get our audience to think about intentionality and purpose.
Doyle and Coren’s work will be of interest librarians seeking examples of the intersections of digital pedagogy, information literacy and social justice vis-à-vis special collections.