Two missions collide: Free, Open, and Global! Wikipedia we love you.
Since
2009, we have been looking at Wikipedia as a way to drive new user traffic to
the Biodiversity Heritage Library while improving the content and accuracy of Wikipedia’s
articles. This symbiotic relationship has had a few bumps along the way but,
our recent attendance at the 8th Annual Wikimania Conference held
in Washington, DC,
reaffirmed our commitment to increase our Wikipedia efforts which include
adding our Flickr images to the Wikimedia commons file repository as well as
inserting species citations, and external links to auto-generated BHL taxon
name bibliographies. During this week-long conference, we were inspired by the
sense of mission, ingenuity and passion that our fellow Wikipedians demonstrated.
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| Photographed by Adam Novak |
Early
on, we ran into some obstacles with our Wikipedia edits. It seems we lacked the
user “clout” necessary to add BHL links en masse. As newcomers who had
not been "validated" by the Wikipedia community, we found that many
of our citations were subsequently deleted which proved a tad bit frustrating
since we had no idea why this was happening! At this year’s conference, we
learned that Wikipedia is subject to rampant vandalism and many links from unverified
or new users will be deleted. You must earn authority over time in Wikipedia.
Top users are awarded virtual honors dubbed “barnstars.” Yes, anyone may edit but, in
Wikipedia only the unbiased vetted truth sticks.
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| Wikipedia's Article Quality Rubric |
Contrary
to popular derision, Wikipedia’s standards for trusted citations, fact checking
and article quality are intensely rigorous. They have developed rubrics for
quality, tutorials for
writing articles, and lists of
articles that need user help.
Wikipedia is built upon the hard-work of a global network of altruistically
motivated (as opposed to financially), passionate and tech savvy people who
have developed a highly complex information ecosystem. Frankly, we were in awe
at the spirit Wikipedians had for Open Knowledge not to mention the amount of
free work they seemed willing to do. Beyond traditional editing efforts, Team
BHL has also been exploring potential tech developments for two out of the ten official Wikimedia foundation
projects; those
being, Wikisource and Wikimedia Commons.
Wikisource
Wikisource is a project that gives users the
opportunity to augment open content texts with corrections, hyperlinks and
notes. This really piqued our interest because free-text searching in the BHL
has been one of the most requested improvements for functionality by our users
and remains on our tech development to-do list. The main obstacle that we face
is that optical character recognition software (OCR) is marginally accurate at
best and the errors present in uncorrected
OCR texts remain
one of the insurmountable hindrances to free-text searching of the BHL corpus.
After sitting-in on the Wikisource presentation given by Andrea Zanni, a
Wikisource sysop, advocate, and volunteer, we were extremely impressed by this
project and its potential future application for BHL text files. Finally: a
platform that opens up the possibility of crowd-sourcing BHL user-generated
corrections for OCR text! Moreover, the multi-layered djvu file format that Wikisource accepts allows
users to add their own links into the text's OCR, further augmenting the
usefulness of the original resource. Lastly,
perhaps the most exciting application of Wikisource is its potential use with
manuscripts. For instance, handwritten scientific field notes or Linnaeus’ personal letters are not accompanied by a text
file; these invaluable scholarly resources could be transcribed by Wikisource
users and thus exposed to user search and discovery.
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| Users can correct OCR using Wikisource's dual-pane interface. Also, they have linked the term "cattle-plague" to the Wikipedia article "Rinderpest." Linked data or Wikisourcery?! |
Currently,
there are still few options for extracting the corrections and re-integrating
them into the BHL. Nevertheless, the Wikisource developers were among the most
enthusiastic and driven folks at the conference; we will be watching them
closely for future improvements to Wikisource that might help make the
"Full-text Search Dream" a reality. As users, how likely would it be
for you to help make corrections to BHL texts using the Wikisource
interface? (Screenshot above)
Wikimedia Commons
Another project already in the works as part of our recent NEH grant is to batch upload our 37,595 Flickr images into the Wikimedia Commons. The Commons provides Wikipedians with a central repository that stores photographs, diagrams, maps, videos, animations, music, sounds, spoken texts, and other free media, all of which can be re-purposed and reused for Wikipedia articles and projects. For our purposes here at BHL, we just see this as another avenue to expose the fabulous illustrations that we already have in our Flickr account and have them used for article creation and species description in the future. We are particularly interested in providing images to species that have been identified in Wikipedia that are lacking illustrations. Stay tuned for more information in the future about the progress of our Wikimedia Commons work.
Current State of Team BHL's Efforts
As
of yesterday, there were 3,181 BHL
links in Wikipedia.
We can only hope that this number continues to grow as word about BHL spreads.
Our continued efforts are only a small piece of the pie. We count on our users
to help us vet Wikipedia's biodiversity articles, all of which benefit from
citations pulled from the BHL. Please help us spread knowledge about life on
Earth to new user communities by becoming a Wikimanian yourself. We may hold an
"edit-a-thon" in the future for interested
users -- if the idea takes hold. Tell us what you think by voting in our poll
below. In the meantime, feel free to sail solo by adding BHL links and
citations to Wikipedia. For helpful tips on how to do this, our Technical
Director, Chris Freeland put together a presentation that offers a quick primer on
Wikipedia editing for BHL.
We depend on user feedback to drive our technical development efforts, so
please let us know what you think about our involvement with Wikipedia and the
two aforementioned projects.
2 comments:
Actually a lot of editors reference BHL scanned books - sometimes via the Internet Archive links (which tend to be faster). The BHL works have in some cases helped fix errors in literature that have been copied along without actual source checking and there are instances where the Wikipedia articles are far more accurate than even established specialist literature simply because the entire taxonomic history is traceable to the original pages of descriptions. Thank you BHL for all the excellent work being done.
Thanks for the lovely complement Shyamal! You are completely correct: it is so important to go straight to the original source of a taxonomic name and sometimes this means sifting through piles of historical literature. The BHL is dedicated to simplifying this "sifting" process for wikipedians, scientists, taxonomists, nature-loving hobbyists -- and now editors! We are always happy to hear that we are reaching new audiences. We hope that people continue to cite the historical literature from the BHL in wikipedia, blogs, articles, books and all other publication types that are available to us in today's growing cyberecology of information sources.
How are you citing BHL? We would love to hear from our users about how they integrate the literature in the BHL into their own work. Email us @ http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/Feedback.aspx
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