Wikipedia Cultural Professional Interns
A self-guided curriculum for student and professional editors working to profile library, archive, special and other cultural collection materials, while practicing digital librarianship
Libraries, special collection, archives have long been sending interns and student hires within their organization to Wikipedia to contribute content in order to expand the visibility of their collections and digital resources. This strategy works: there are a number of documented case studies within this professional community that show increases in traffic to organizations from the general public reading Wikipedia and moreover, from the Wikipedia community.
As part of The Wikipedia Library, this resources page and its support pages outline a curriculum ( outlined here) that allows library consortiums, library schools and other cultural professional communities to organize interns and other employees to engage Wikipedia within community best practices. The self-guided curriculum is designed to help interns hired by libraries, special collections or archives get a better sense of the expectations of such contributions to the Wikimedia community, find support among fellow interns and community members, and ensure that they follow best practices that conform to the principles laid out by the GLAM-Wiki movement. We have multiple levels of participation for both students without formal library/archival training and students trained in librarianship or archival studies and the resource is appropriate for guiding groups of professionals in a professional development situation. As part of a student's education, it is important that interns understand the "why" of their contributions and how they can use the skills in their future. To provide information for interns and their supervisor, this page offers an overview of research, editing practices and educational goals that guide Wikipedia Library Internships.
Wikipedia Library Interns are interns, student hires, or specially allocated staff hired by partner libraries or archives to contribute new Wikipedia content which improves Wikipedia, improves the profile of digital resources, and gives the students an educational introduction to Wikipedia and best practices within professional use of social media. As is listed in the case studies section below a number of institutions have successfully deployed such interns and staff (often in the form of student hires), and have seen an increased access to their digitized special collections material.
Interns can be distinguished from Wikipedian in Residence, the dominant type of outreach person for interactions with Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAMS), in that they are not responsible for actively creating cooperations between the organization's staff and the larger Wikimedia community. Moreover, Wikipedia Library Interns are often inexperienced Wikipedia contributors, unlike Wikipedia Visiting Scholars, who are experienced Wikipedians editing content of interest to a library; the internship should provide novice contributors an educational introduction to Wikipedia, research skills, and best practices within librarianship.
Libraries/Archives and Wikipedia share a common mission of disseminating useful research materials; thus internships should be focused on including research materials from both within the institution's digital collection and the larger information ecosystem facilitated by Wikipedia (for further information, see the discussion of avoiding conflict of interest and SPAM).
Internships can be motivated by a number of institutional and student learning goals. Here are a few common ones:
Learning goals (see further at educational outcomes).
Learning outcomes are an important part of any internship, and some institutions create these internships expressly for their learning outcomes. Libraries/archives create internships to:
Institutional motivations Institutional motivations often revolve around increasing the institutional impact, including:
Libraries and archives that have participated in the program described in this outline, include:
This following list includes case studies that highlight the use of interns or other library staff to improve the relationship between digital library/archival resources and Wikipedia.
Common on-wiki activities for Wikipedia Library interns include:
Most library interns, because they want to keep things simple, start with the first two activities. Make sure to get your feet wet on Wikipedia, but also don't be afraid to Be Bold and expand your approach. If you are interested in other types of activities related to Wikipedia, check out the next section about "Trained Librarian Interns" or the Wikipedia in Residence page.
Students trained in library or archival studies programs or with professional experience in the field have a different set of skills than the average undergraduate or graduate student employed as interns by libraries/archives. While contributing directly to content like other interns might be the activity originally intended by the organization that has hired you, the best educational experience might be in building resources on Wikipedia that reinforce common professional skills: creating research indexes, assisting editors with research queries and organizing networks of information. Open up the box below to get some ideas.
Trained librarian/archivist opportunities
|
---|
Here are some possible activities that could help expand your professional experience; you could:
|
In the past, many interns for libraries and other organizations have been tasked with editing Wikipedia and, because of the interns' approach to editing, they have become disruptive in the community. This disruption can lead to both interns and community members spending considerable time discussing the intern's contributions and reviewing edits. To prevent your internship from causing disruption and entailing excess intern and volunteer time on Wikipedia, it is important to understand two simple community guidelines: WP:Conflict of interest and Wikipedia:Spam.
The conflict of interest guideline recognizes that many editors have outside motivations affecting their contributions to Wikipedia, but that the goal of any editor should be to avoid promotion of a particular organization or position. Instead contributions should be made with the intention of furthering the five pillars of Wikipedia, which includes creating public educational resources.
Second, the spam guidelines recommend that articles not be created to promote items, people or positions, nor should links be systematically added as solely a means of directing user traffic. Instead content should be thoughtfully placed to promote information acquisition, rather than conversion of traffic or promotion of a particular position.
With all these warnings about what not to do, it's also important not overthink your additions to Wikipedia! Interns shouldn't have trouble avoiding violations of these guidelines: the main goal of libraries and archives is the promotion of information acquisition. If you approach your editing with good faith and this goal in mind, the community will often provide additional guidance. Generally, if you avoid the following problematic contribution approaches, you shouldn't encounter problems related to these policies:
Communication of activities during an internship is an important part of maintaining an ethical and transparent relationship to the Wikipedia community and provides supervisors and your hiring organization the ability to assess both educational and organizational outcomes. Here are a few ways that should help in reporting to these interested parties:
Reporting to Wikipedians
|
---|
It is important to maintain a good relationship with the Wikipedia community; Wikipedia's main contributors are volunteers who spend many hours maintaining the accessibility and quality of the information on Wikipedia. They also have considerable power over what information stays in the encyclopedia. Here are a few pointers for interacting with Wikipedians:
|
Reporting to supervisors
|
---|
The following are some types of reporting that can be useful to supervisors, and help documenting learning:
|
Reporting to sponsoring organization
|
---|
Unlike supervisors who are interested in both the educational outcomes and work hours, most organizations need information that helps demonstrate the impact of your edits on their own digital presence. There are multiple types of metrics both within and without the organization that might be useful to help the organization understand and justify your internship. Here are a few of the most useful that could help supplement the supervisor reports mentioned above:
For examples on how to create reports of these and other metrics, see the published case studies above. |
If you have reviewed this page and would like to learn more, host an intern or organize a class of interns email Alex Stinson (astinsonwikimedia.org), the project manager for the Wikipedia Library.
The program no longer organizes central classes of interns as it did in the pilot stage, but rather, organizational partners who coordinate classes within their own networks. Organizing a class of interns requires a relatively limited amount of resources: a coordinator and a network of organizations (cultural institutions, departments, or professional courses classes) that would be interested in hosting the intern. We recommend consortia, multi-unit organizations or professional development groups organize classes of interns. Institutions can also, but won't have the added benefit of a network of support, but are welcome to follow the curriculum (it's largely self-guided).
Further information about organizing a class of interns can be found at: Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Library/Processes/Interns class development.
Organizations that want to host an intern, should be tasking Wikipedia intern activities to a new or old student employee that is participating in an established practicum, intern or student hire program. When the institution sponsors an intern, the educational materials here about Wikipedia Library interns provide much of the guidance for that intern as well as tools for discovering community help when they encounter problems. The materials are designed around an 8-week or longer internship at 10-15 hrs a week; however, because all internships are different, the curriculum is designed for customization based on length of internship and amount of time devoted to it.
What administrative support do you need? When setting up support for a Wikipedia Library Intern, important infrastructure includes:
Who should be an Intern? Typically, when looking for Wikipedia interns, most students trained as cultural professionals, either. Moreover, particular skills you are looking for, include:
Sample call for applicants Here is a sample call for applicants, that you might find useful:
Getting started
When supervising an intern for the first time, typically you will be in unfamiliar territory in both understanding Wikipedia and leveraging it. Most previous participants have had little experience with Wikipedia! The materials are designed so that the student can go through self-guided training, instead of having to be introduced by the supervisor: so you don't need to master everything. We recommend exploring the following to help support the internship:
Activities for interns should be tailored to both develop professional skills and other learning outcomes that help further intern education. Internships that don't work towards shared learning goals often don't help students reach their full potential. Fortunately for supervisors, the WP:Wikipedia Education Program and published case studies above provide significant accumulated experience in tailoring an internship to a student's learning needs. Here are some learning outcomes that might be used to tailor the kinds of work that you ask students to complete:
Basic Learning Objectives
|
---|
Contributing to Wikipedia provides a number of basic skills important to develop in all fields and educational settings. Editing and adjunct assignments might focus students on practicing:
|
Field-specific skills and learning objectives
|
---|
Contributing to Wikipedia might also be tailored for other more field-specific goals.
|
Wikipedia Cultural Professional Interns
A self-guided curriculum for student and professional editors working to profile library, archive, special and other cultural collection materials, while practicing digital librarianship
Libraries, special collection, archives have long been sending interns and student hires within their organization to Wikipedia to contribute content in order to expand the visibility of their collections and digital resources. This strategy works: there are a number of documented case studies within this professional community that show increases in traffic to organizations from the general public reading Wikipedia and moreover, from the Wikipedia community.
As part of The Wikipedia Library, this resources page and its support pages outline a curriculum ( outlined here) that allows library consortiums, library schools and other cultural professional communities to organize interns and other employees to engage Wikipedia within community best practices. The self-guided curriculum is designed to help interns hired by libraries, special collections or archives get a better sense of the expectations of such contributions to the Wikimedia community, find support among fellow interns and community members, and ensure that they follow best practices that conform to the principles laid out by the GLAM-Wiki movement. We have multiple levels of participation for both students without formal library/archival training and students trained in librarianship or archival studies and the resource is appropriate for guiding groups of professionals in a professional development situation. As part of a student's education, it is important that interns understand the "why" of their contributions and how they can use the skills in their future. To provide information for interns and their supervisor, this page offers an overview of research, editing practices and educational goals that guide Wikipedia Library Internships.
Wikipedia Library Interns are interns, student hires, or specially allocated staff hired by partner libraries or archives to contribute new Wikipedia content which improves Wikipedia, improves the profile of digital resources, and gives the students an educational introduction to Wikipedia and best practices within professional use of social media. As is listed in the case studies section below a number of institutions have successfully deployed such interns and staff (often in the form of student hires), and have seen an increased access to their digitized special collections material.
Interns can be distinguished from Wikipedian in Residence, the dominant type of outreach person for interactions with Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAMS), in that they are not responsible for actively creating cooperations between the organization's staff and the larger Wikimedia community. Moreover, Wikipedia Library Interns are often inexperienced Wikipedia contributors, unlike Wikipedia Visiting Scholars, who are experienced Wikipedians editing content of interest to a library; the internship should provide novice contributors an educational introduction to Wikipedia, research skills, and best practices within librarianship.
Libraries/Archives and Wikipedia share a common mission of disseminating useful research materials; thus internships should be focused on including research materials from both within the institution's digital collection and the larger information ecosystem facilitated by Wikipedia (for further information, see the discussion of avoiding conflict of interest and SPAM).
Internships can be motivated by a number of institutional and student learning goals. Here are a few common ones:
Learning goals (see further at educational outcomes).
Learning outcomes are an important part of any internship, and some institutions create these internships expressly for their learning outcomes. Libraries/archives create internships to:
Institutional motivations Institutional motivations often revolve around increasing the institutional impact, including:
Libraries and archives that have participated in the program described in this outline, include:
This following list includes case studies that highlight the use of interns or other library staff to improve the relationship between digital library/archival resources and Wikipedia.
Common on-wiki activities for Wikipedia Library interns include:
Most library interns, because they want to keep things simple, start with the first two activities. Make sure to get your feet wet on Wikipedia, but also don't be afraid to Be Bold and expand your approach. If you are interested in other types of activities related to Wikipedia, check out the next section about "Trained Librarian Interns" or the Wikipedia in Residence page.
Students trained in library or archival studies programs or with professional experience in the field have a different set of skills than the average undergraduate or graduate student employed as interns by libraries/archives. While contributing directly to content like other interns might be the activity originally intended by the organization that has hired you, the best educational experience might be in building resources on Wikipedia that reinforce common professional skills: creating research indexes, assisting editors with research queries and organizing networks of information. Open up the box below to get some ideas.
Trained librarian/archivist opportunities
|
---|
Here are some possible activities that could help expand your professional experience; you could:
|
In the past, many interns for libraries and other organizations have been tasked with editing Wikipedia and, because of the interns' approach to editing, they have become disruptive in the community. This disruption can lead to both interns and community members spending considerable time discussing the intern's contributions and reviewing edits. To prevent your internship from causing disruption and entailing excess intern and volunteer time on Wikipedia, it is important to understand two simple community guidelines: WP:Conflict of interest and Wikipedia:Spam.
The conflict of interest guideline recognizes that many editors have outside motivations affecting their contributions to Wikipedia, but that the goal of any editor should be to avoid promotion of a particular organization or position. Instead contributions should be made with the intention of furthering the five pillars of Wikipedia, which includes creating public educational resources.
Second, the spam guidelines recommend that articles not be created to promote items, people or positions, nor should links be systematically added as solely a means of directing user traffic. Instead content should be thoughtfully placed to promote information acquisition, rather than conversion of traffic or promotion of a particular position.
With all these warnings about what not to do, it's also important not overthink your additions to Wikipedia! Interns shouldn't have trouble avoiding violations of these guidelines: the main goal of libraries and archives is the promotion of information acquisition. If you approach your editing with good faith and this goal in mind, the community will often provide additional guidance. Generally, if you avoid the following problematic contribution approaches, you shouldn't encounter problems related to these policies:
Communication of activities during an internship is an important part of maintaining an ethical and transparent relationship to the Wikipedia community and provides supervisors and your hiring organization the ability to assess both educational and organizational outcomes. Here are a few ways that should help in reporting to these interested parties:
Reporting to Wikipedians
|
---|
It is important to maintain a good relationship with the Wikipedia community; Wikipedia's main contributors are volunteers who spend many hours maintaining the accessibility and quality of the information on Wikipedia. They also have considerable power over what information stays in the encyclopedia. Here are a few pointers for interacting with Wikipedians:
|
Reporting to supervisors
|
---|
The following are some types of reporting that can be useful to supervisors, and help documenting learning:
|
Reporting to sponsoring organization
|
---|
Unlike supervisors who are interested in both the educational outcomes and work hours, most organizations need information that helps demonstrate the impact of your edits on their own digital presence. There are multiple types of metrics both within and without the organization that might be useful to help the organization understand and justify your internship. Here are a few of the most useful that could help supplement the supervisor reports mentioned above:
For examples on how to create reports of these and other metrics, see the published case studies above. |
If you have reviewed this page and would like to learn more, host an intern or organize a class of interns email Alex Stinson (astinsonwikimedia.org), the project manager for the Wikipedia Library.
The program no longer organizes central classes of interns as it did in the pilot stage, but rather, organizational partners who coordinate classes within their own networks. Organizing a class of interns requires a relatively limited amount of resources: a coordinator and a network of organizations (cultural institutions, departments, or professional courses classes) that would be interested in hosting the intern. We recommend consortia, multi-unit organizations or professional development groups organize classes of interns. Institutions can also, but won't have the added benefit of a network of support, but are welcome to follow the curriculum (it's largely self-guided).
Further information about organizing a class of interns can be found at: Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Library/Processes/Interns class development.
Organizations that want to host an intern, should be tasking Wikipedia intern activities to a new or old student employee that is participating in an established practicum, intern or student hire program. When the institution sponsors an intern, the educational materials here about Wikipedia Library interns provide much of the guidance for that intern as well as tools for discovering community help when they encounter problems. The materials are designed around an 8-week or longer internship at 10-15 hrs a week; however, because all internships are different, the curriculum is designed for customization based on length of internship and amount of time devoted to it.
What administrative support do you need? When setting up support for a Wikipedia Library Intern, important infrastructure includes:
Who should be an Intern? Typically, when looking for Wikipedia interns, most students trained as cultural professionals, either. Moreover, particular skills you are looking for, include:
Sample call for applicants Here is a sample call for applicants, that you might find useful:
Getting started
When supervising an intern for the first time, typically you will be in unfamiliar territory in both understanding Wikipedia and leveraging it. Most previous participants have had little experience with Wikipedia! The materials are designed so that the student can go through self-guided training, instead of having to be introduced by the supervisor: so you don't need to master everything. We recommend exploring the following to help support the internship:
Activities for interns should be tailored to both develop professional skills and other learning outcomes that help further intern education. Internships that don't work towards shared learning goals often don't help students reach their full potential. Fortunately for supervisors, the WP:Wikipedia Education Program and published case studies above provide significant accumulated experience in tailoring an internship to a student's learning needs. Here are some learning outcomes that might be used to tailor the kinds of work that you ask students to complete:
Basic Learning Objectives
|
---|
Contributing to Wikipedia provides a number of basic skills important to develop in all fields and educational settings. Editing and adjunct assignments might focus students on practicing:
|
Field-specific skills and learning objectives
|
---|
Contributing to Wikipedia might also be tailored for other more field-specific goals.
|