As Wikipedia turns 21 years old on 15th January 2022, we are happy to announce the next iteration of the 1Lib1Ref campaign. Join us to make Wikipedia more credible and reliable, one citation at a time!
For the past six years, the Wikipedia Library Team and Wikimedia Affiliates around the world have been carefully and proactively working on our vision of âImagining a World where Every Librarian Added One More Reference to Wikipediaâ and hundreds of librarians and bibliophiles have joined us in this endeavour.
Following the growth of misinformation, censorship, and the keen search for information on the web in the heat of the pandemic, our goal to improve the quality and authenticity of articles on Wikipedia through 1Lib1Ref has been heightened and is being made more apparent. We have been working with information professionals and our communities across the world to improve our content through a simple activity of adding one citation to an article on Wikipedia.
“Verifiability” is one of the core content policies of Wikipedia and that’s what the 1Lib1Ref campaign focuses on. It helps direct the world to free, yet verifiable and reliable information. This is a goal that clearly aligns with the skills and values of information professionals (librarians, archivists, information managers, information scientists, and researchers) and the campaign allows them to share that work with billions of readers across the globe. Want to get involved? Check out the simple steps on our website to help make Wikipedia more reliable.
We have some exciting updates for you!
As much as the campaign focuses on bringing new contributors in through quick tasks, we have noticed that many information professionals are keen to do more. This year we’re piloting new contribution methods, such as creating new articles and linking Wikisource books to Wikidata. Organizers are encouraged to innovate further and discover what works best for the editors that they will be engaging for the campaign.
We also have some good news for participants from the Central Eastern Europe region (CEE). Thanks to the amazing volunteer efforts of Guilherme Gonçalves (volunteer developer) and Gorana Gomirac (coordinator, 1Lib1Ref CEE), seven more languages from the region are now supported by the CitationHunt tool! These languages are Bulgarian, Belarusian, Belarusian (Taraƥkievica), Serbian, Slovakian, Slovenian and Turkish. Here is some documentation that can help you add your language to this tool: Citation Hunt#Adding support for a new language.
The 2021 campaign was a success, thanks to your contributions! There were 68,000 citation additions (33% increase YoY) to 37 projects, 2,307 newly created articles (261% YoY), 18,060 existing articles edited or improved, and over 4.2 million words added. Read more about the impact of the campaign from the January and May campaign reports.
See you on 15th January 2022. Remember to add your local events to the campaign dashboard, so we can learn and track activities happening across the world. Visit 1lib1ref.org to learn more and get involved!
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