Engaging with Wikipedia at UTA Libraries

The purpose of The Compass Rose is to raise awareness of Special Collections' resources and to foster the use of these resources. The blog series also reports significant new programs, initiatives, and acquisitions of Special Collections. 

In celebration of Open Access Week next week, this blog post highlights the three-part engagement and collaboration that the UTA Libraries has developed with Wikipedia. The first part, Learn to Edit Wikipedia Workshops, teach those interested the basics of editing Wikipedia in one hour. The second part, Wikipedia Meetups, bring Wikipedia editors together on a regular basis to create a new article (or expand an existing one) on a pre-determined topic within two hours. The third part, UTA Libraries' ongoing content collaboration with Wikimedia Commons, involves uploading public domain or freely licensed images from the Digital Gallery to Wikimedia Commons and integrating that content into Wikipedia articles.

Next Tuesday, as part of Open Access Week, the first two of these three parts will again be made available to the UTA community (and the broader public):

• Tuesday, October 26 at 9-10 am: Learn to Edit Wikipedia Workshop
• Tuesday, October 26 at 10 am - 12 pm: October Wikipedia Meetup

Both of these events will be held in the Parlor on the 6th floor of Central Library.

Learn to Edit Wikipedia Workshops are typically one-hour sessions that cover the basics of editing Wikipedia. As a Wikipedian with over 15 years of experience, I, Michael Barera, begin these sessions by introducing the essentials of editing Wikipedia: creating an account, editing text, creating references, and adding images to articles. I then spend the remainder of the workshop working one-on-one with participants, which allows everyone who attends the ability to work at their own pace and learn skills particular to their interests. No prior Wikipedia experience is necessary to attend these workshops, as they are designed to teach the basics of editing Wikipedia to people who are interested but have never edited the encyclopedia before.

The content of the slides I use to teach my Learn to Edit Wikipedia Workshops also exist in a repackaged form as my Learn to Edit Wikipedia LibGuide, which allows for asynchronous learning of the same content. The LibGuide also features an embedded video of the recording of the January 2021 Learn to Edit Wikipedia Workshop, which was conducted virtually. (Please note UTA login credentials are required to access the recording.)

Wikipedia Meetups are two-hour sessions that allow participants to meet other people on campus interested in Wikipedia and collaboratively create and edit an article together in a casual setting. I provide one-on-one editing assistance as needed, but the focus of meetups is on collaboratively creating an article, not on learning to edit. I highly recommended that attendees who are not yet comfortable with editing Wikipedia attend a Learn to Edit Wikipedia Workshop before they participate in a meetup.

I have lead Wikipedia Meetups a total of eight times here at UTA, not including the one occurring next week. At these eight meetups, on six occasions we created a new article from scratch, and on the other two occasions we expanded and improved an existing article. Here is a complete list of all eight meetups, with their dates and links to the articles that were created or expanded at these events (all articles were created unless otherwise noted as being expanded):

1. December 2019: UT Arlington Mavericks women's wheelchair basketball (Lady Movin' Mavs)
2. February 2020: Emerson Emory
3. April 2020: Climate of Dallas (expanded)
4. September 2020: Santa Fe Freight Building
5. November 2020: Anton R. Roessler
6. February 2021: Guadalupe College (expanded)
7. April 2021: UT Arlington Mavericks men's wheelchair basketball (Movin' Mavs)
8. September 2021: Africae Tabula Nova

Since May 2019, the UTA Libraries Special Collections has been contributing images to Wikimedia Commons, the image and media host behind Wikipedia. The images that are being contributed are either in the public domain or freely licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution license, and they have already been digitized and uploaded to the Digital Gallery. This contribution began with our map collections, and has since grown to include the entire digitized portions of the University of Texas at Arlington Photograph Collection, University of Texas at Arlington News Service Photograph Collection, and Jenkins Garrett Texas Postcard Collection. We have additionally contributed the digitized portions of numerous smaller collections to Wikimedia Commons, including the Clarence Denman Papers, Emerson Emory Papers, and Pancho Medrano Papers. As of October 2021, over 1,100 files from the UTA Libraries Special Collections have been contributed to Wikimedia Commons.

As of October 2021, 270 of the images contributed to Wikimedia Commons (24.5% of all images contributed) have been used in Wikipedia articles. These images have been used a total of 718 times. Note that images can be used more than once each, on different articles and in different languages, which explains the discrepancy between 270 individual images used and 718 "image usages." Of these 718 usages, 342 are on the English Wikipedia, 67 on the Spanish Wikipedia, 33 on the German Wikipedia, and 31 on the French Wikipedia.

Wikipedia page view statistics even more clearly illustrate the impact of having these UTA Libraries images on Wikipedia articles. As of September 2021, there have been more than 33.6 million views of all Wikipedia articles that include UTA images. In this time span, over 22.0 million of those views were on the English Wikipedia and over 9.0 million were on the Spanish Wikipedia. On average, Wikipedia articles with UTA images in them (across all languages) receive 1 million to 1.5 million views per month, although events (such as the anniversary of Mexican independence that always causes the corresponding "Independencia de México" article to spike on Spanish Wikipedia every September) can cause noticeable spikes of up to 2 million views in a month.