FEATURE
How to Conduct a Wikipedia Edit-A-Thon
By Kim Gile and Monika Sengul-Jones
Photos by Clint Ashlock
| ‘IT SOUNDS
LIKE THIS IS THE
BEGINNING OF A
WIKIPEDIA JOURNEY
IN KANSAS CITY.’ |
[NOTE: This article appears in the November/December 2018 issue of Computers in Libraries under the title “Jazzing Up Wikipedia.”]
JAZZ is as much a part of Kansas City, Mo., as barbecue and baseball, but you wouldn’t have known it from scouring Wikipedia—until recently, that is. A local librarian noticed the lack of love from the ubiquitous online encyclopedia and decided to do something about it.
Kim Gile is the community reference manager at the Kansas City Public Library. She invited Monika Sengul-Jones, Wikipedian-in-residence working with WebJunction (a learning place for libraries in OCLC’s Seattle office), to join her cause. This—in their words—is the story of a librarian leaping into Wikipedia.
MONIKA: It’s a Monday afternoon at the American Jazz Museum on 18th and Vine in Kansas City, Missouri. A musician plays a saxophone. Nearly 2 dozen Kansas City residents are at round tables with laptops. Some are sipping gin cocktails. They’re listening intently to librarian Kim Gile describe the state of Wikipedia articles about Kansas City jazz.
Charlie Parker, Sammy Price, Mary Lou Williams, jazz improv, and a general article on Kansas City. “These articles are not very good; where’s our jazz history?” Large sad-face emojis look down over screenshots of an article.
“Kansas City deserves better than this, Wikipedia! So jazz hands for KC jazz, today we’re going to start to change this … by researching and editing Wikipedia together.” She smiles widely. Heads nod, jazz hands wave.
Nearby is a table with photocopies of newspaper articles, books, and magazines ready to pair with the Wikipedia articles that need work. After a tutorial, Kansas City’s jazz aficionados—library staffers, American Jazz Museum board members, musicians, and their friends—gather reference material and begin reading, highlighting, and discussing.
Does this sound like a librarian’s dream? It really happened. I was there.
KIM: Hi, everybody. On March 4, 2018, I hosted the Jazz Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon in partnership with the American Jazz Museum and the Kansas City Jazz Orchestra and with the support of Monika Sengul-Jones, a Wikipedian-in-residence to support libraries, in the hopes of improving Kansas City’s rich cultural history of jazz on Wikipedia.
People got into it—to the tune of 4 hours—talking about jazz, debating the quality of sources, then turning what they learned into a public repository of information on Wikipedia.
MONIKA: I knew something special was happening the moment I heard one man explain with excitement—before he dove into editing the article—how Benjamin “Bennie” Moten (November 13, 1894–April 2, 1935), a Kansas City jazz pianist, had actually died on the operating table.
Had you really done nothing like this before?
KIM: I’ve been in librarianship for 16 years. If anyone had told me even 6 months ago that I’d be writing about a Wikipedia event run by librarians, I would have laughed in their face. Wikipedia? This is what librarians have historically looked down on and steered people away from.
MONIKA: Let’s backtrack a little. I met Kim last fall when she was one of the nearly 300 library staff who took a Wikipedia online training program with WebJunction. I was one of the instructors.
KIM: I took the training program against my better judgment because I didn’t really have any interest in Wikipedia. We’ve all heard what a sham it is. But I also know everybody uses it. As a librarian, I felt obligated to get down to the bottom of it and figure out what I needed to know to offer information-literacy programming that would appeal to my patrons.
MONIKA: It was an intensive course, but designed for library staff working full-time. There were six live online sessions, evaluation homework [assignments], training modules, and many conversations, including with Wikipedia editors who participated to get to know public library staff better. Were you surprised what you learned?
KIM: I was continually surprised. Exercise by exercise, I was outside of my comfort zone. Not only did I get a Wikipedia account, but I used it. I edited articles, added citations, even uploaded images to Wikimedia Commons. I gained an understanding of how to determine when Wikipedia is a reliable source of information and saw all the ongoing editing work to keep it going. Wikipedia needs editors with a range of backgrounds and expertise. I also realized what a powerful tool it can be to share library collections [with] online readers.
MONIKA: It was clear during the course [that] Kim was ready to bring her learning back to her library’s community. Especially when we began talking about what’s missing on Wikipedia. Wikipedia has 5.4-plus million articles in English under development. But that big number is deceptive. There’s lots missing.
KIM: And libraries have resources to improve coverage. I saw that articles on Kansas City jazz and notable musicians, artists, and women in jazz had a dramatic lack of detail. That’s when a lightbulb went off. That was going to be the topic of my edit-a-thon.
MONIKA: So, you’d gotten your bearings with editing at this point, and you began to plan.
KIM: I reached out to four organizations that I already had relationships with to gauge interest and feasibility.
MONIKA: How did you get everyone on board to host this? How did you plan it and get all the equipment and materials you needed?
KIM: Initially, the community partners thought I was crazy. No one knew what an edit-a-thon was. I sent around videos and materials from our course to help people wrap their heads around it. Then I prepared the materials. We invited participants from our respective institutions. At one point, we were going to send out a press release to get more people to come, but I’m glad we didn’t. We had more people than laptops. Having nearly 30 people stay for 4 hours and work together to improve 10 articles—that was a huge success.
Our museum partner, Marissa Baum, director of communication, said she went from knowing nothing about Wikipedia to having trust and confidence that it’s important for her community—she learned a lot. It was a learning experience for everyone. A success, all around.
Monika, you deserve a special shout-out here because of your help creating the training for our participants. Without that content, our participants would have been lost.
MONIKA: Thanks, Kim! I got to connect the dots by starting with a Wikipedia article about a musician from [my] hometown, Seattle—Jimi Hendrix (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimi_Hendrix)—then demonstrated editing by including a mention of Kansas City’s jazz history in the intro of the article on Kansas City. Participating in the event was a treat because I love falling into the Wikipedia rabbit hole.
Beyond stoking the imagination of your participants, what specific outcomes did you hope to achieve by hosting this event?
KIM: There were biggies. First, participants would meet others around a common interest and build community. Second, and key, participants would learn something new and put skills into action, whether those skills were related to digital literacy, research, writing, or even social. Third, the library has so much information on jazz history that is hidden behind database paywalls or inaccessible if you can’t get to the library. By adding content with citations from our collections, we are able to make these resources discoverable on a global scale. Fourth, we wanted to move the needle on editor demographics. Editors on Wikipedia are predominantly white and male. We wanted to ensure that the participants represented the Kansas City community.
MONIKA: What would you recommend to someone who wants to host an editing event at their library?
KIM: First, you have to learn about it yourself. Check out the Wikipedia + Library course materials (webjunction.org/explore-topics/wikipedia-libraries/training-curriculum.html), and go through the exercises. Look through the conflict-of-interest guide (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest) to understand what editing means. It will be a lot easier to plan something when you understand what you’re asking your partners and your audience to do. Once you’ve gotten some edits under your belt, it really comes down to doing it. Event planning feels a little like jumping off a building, so be prepared for some nervousness. Wikipedia’s How to Run an Edit-a-Thon (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:How_to_run_an_edit-a-thon) provides a practical and logistical overview, and WebJunction has library-specific planning resources to train staff on the project homepage (webjunction.org/explore-topics/wikipedia-libraries.html).
Working with partners spreads out the workload—and it’s fun! The event generated a lot of enthusiasm. We improved 10 articles, created one new article, and had a great time. Our participants were surprised and relieved to find that it wasn’t a quiet room of strangers. The event was bright and fun, with live music and a signature cocktail. The atmosphere of merriment led to nice connections.
MONIKA: Totally! That merriment made people want to be there. We also saw it’s important to guide first-timers on Wikipedia’s policies about verifiability. Treats, music, and community help facilitate those conversations with ease.
KIM: Part of my preparation was to go through the library’s collections (our vertical files, reference books, databases, etc.) to find materials that would be quality citations in Wikipedia. This was time-consuming, but it made the participants’ job much easier. They didn’t have to hunt for information because it was all laid out on a table for them. We had discussed verifiability, what makes a source “independent,” and how the library has more resources about topics than they’ll find on the internet. The participants took a leadership role in bringing access to that content to the world by editing Wikipedia and adding those citations.
For a future event, I’d recommend doing what we did—pulling out books and photocopying articles for people to write about. I’d also recommend having samples of high-quality Wikipedia articles that don’t need much improvement.
MONIKA: It sounds like this is the beginning of a Wikipedia journey in Kansas City. What’s on deck?
KIM: Partnerships with Kansas City’s Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, something on Kansas City’s burlesque history, our Latin jazz roots, or the “Boss Tom” Pendergast era are all directions we might go. Local history and stories are a natural fit for this kind of thing. Kansas citizens love to show their city pride.
MONIKA: If Kim has inspired you to learn more, check out Wikipedia + Libraries: Better Together training materials.
KIM: Go make the bold leap into Wikipedia for your community!
|
Kim Gile [left] is community reference librarian at the Kansas City Public Library and earned a WebJunction continuing education certificate by completing a 9-week online training program on Wikipedia and libraries. 
