wikipedia

Wikipedia work in 2024

I do work on Wikipedia sometimes. Since I’ve been working for the Flickr Foundation, my life overlaps more with free content. Sometimes I try to combine work and play and add things to Wikimedia Commons, or to Wikipedia, or both. My username in the Wikipedia extended universe is Jessamyn, so it’s pretty easy to see what I’ve been up to. Here’s my wrap-up of 2024 Wikipedia stuff I did.

– Uploaded 81 images to Wikimedia Commons (see them)
– Uploaded 15 images to Wikipedia (usually for obits, or logos, cases where the image doesn’t have a free license, see them)
– Wrote 33 articles (see them)
– Made 755 edits.

It was a decent year. My absolute favorite thing from the year was finding this “selfie” of M. M. Hazeltine (above). Hazeltine was a photographer born in Vermont in 1827. He went out West to seek his fortune, came back to Vermont, learned photography, and went back out there. This image from the 1850s was taken when he and his brother were working a gold claim in California. It was in UC Berkeley’s special collections and I think I found it through Calisphere. One of the weird things about a lot of public domain images is that stock photography organizations tend to scoop up images that are publicly marked as public domain, put their watermarks all over them and try to sell them to people. This is legally allowed, but because of the way search engines work, it can be tough to find the original public domain images. Having those images on Wikipedia helps.

I’m aware that Wikipedia is imperfect. However, it’s a nice hobby for someone into free culture and photography, as I am. This year’s work didn’t feel like too much bored (or grumpy) editing and a lot more “Hey this neat thing should be in there” so here’s to more neat things going in there in 2025.

Ask A Librarian: Adding content to Wikipedia as a business or data provider

Posted on 29Jul2129Jul21 by jessamyn

I spoke with a woman who works for a website that is frequently cited on Wikipedia as a source for a particular kind of data–think IMDB for a different sector. They want to make sure their data is helping to increase representation of women and facts about women on Wikipedia but don’t know that much about the culture there and wanted some pointers on how to get started. We had a Zoom chat and then I sent along a list of links.

Every page on Wikipedia has a page (the main article) and a talk page (for kibitizing about the article). This includes even user pages. So here is my page and my talk page

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jessamyn (I made this, mostly, though anyone can edit it)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jessamyn (often for announcements, people who want to get ahold of me)

So talk pages can be good about getting what the “backchannel” discussions about pages can be. If you look up a controversial or hot current topics you can see people talking on them. Here’s one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Simone_Biles

Note also that since Simone is a living person that there is an even tighter set of restrictions that are for Biographies of Living people. Since you will likely be working in this space, good to know about it. Not too tough for the work you’re doing but just good to know. Here’s a zillion damned words on it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons
Continue reading “Ask A Librarian: Adding content to Wikipedia as a business or data provider”

How To: Adding fair use images to people’s Wikipedia pages

Posted on 18Apr2118Apr21 by jessamyn

collage of photographs of 41 librarians of color ranging from old black and white ones to much newer color photographs.
I’ve always got some nerdy Wikipedia project going. I think improving Wikipedia’s coverage of marginalized voices is worthwhile work, even as I understand and agree with many of the criticisms of the place. My most recent project was to look at the list of African American librarians (108 in total) and try to add as many photographs as I could (41, many articles already had images) to articles that didn’t have one. This is tricky work, because you can usually only add images that have free licenses–either public domain, or certain Creative Commons licenses. These can be hard to find.

However, there is a very useful loophole which is that if you are adding an image to Wikipedia–and not Wikimedia Commons where most image uploads happen–you can take a copyrighted image, shrink it to a small, low-resolution size, and use it to illustrate a page of someone who is deceased. Here’s a page that explains it but it’s a lot of reading. There are similar fair use exemptions for logos, cover art, and a few other categories; this is just about images of people. Here’s a short explainer. Continue reading “How To: Adding fair use images to people’s Wikipedia pages”

Ask A Librarian: How to get started adding citations to Wikipedia

Posted on 01Aug2001Aug20 by jessamyn

It is fine if you don’t like Wikipedia. I do, despite its shortcomings. An easy way to get started, if it’s the sort of thing you’d like to try, is by adding citations which is a kind of natural librarian thing. I wrote an email to an online friend spelling out ways to get started. There are a few helpful tools and some “good to know” stuff. Adding citations can be a good way to get started and has maybe three steps

1. Find something that needs a citation
2. Find a citation for that thing
3. Format and insert that citation (and add a note, and then if there are no more cites needed, remote the “citation needed” banner)

Continue reading “Ask A Librarian: How to get started adding citations to Wikipedia”

Todo: promote #1lib1ref project on Wikipedia

Posted on 14Jan16 by jessamyn

I am excited about the #1lib1ref project on Wikipedia. The goal is to get every librarian in the world (or a reasonable subsection) to add a citation to a Wikipedia article, just one. This helps make Wikipedia better in the process. I added my cite today to the Free Your Mind… and Your Ass Will Follow article. I’m not even trying to be sassy, that is just the page that was handed to me by this great tool that lets you know which articles need citations. I did some Googling, found a Google Book that had some supporting detail for the fact in question, used a book citation tool to turn it into Wikistyle and there you go. I might do two, just in case someone doesn’t have time to add a citation to Wikipedia this week. We have a facebook page and a lot of people using the #1lib1ref hashtag on Twitter. Join us!