The May round for 1Lib1Ref is back with a more diverse campaign and even more languages!

We are happy to announce the next iteration of the 1Lib1Ref campaign, from May 15th, 2022 to June 5th, 2022! The May round is an opportunity for people in the southern hemisphere (Africa, Asia, Latin America & Oceania) to participate. 

This time, we are also bringing updates: even more languages and a new way of interacting with the campaign. Please, join us to make Wikipedia more credible, reliable, and diverse, one citation at a time!

How can you engage?

We invite you to engage in three ways:

• Make an edit – Participate globally and virtually by adding citations to Wikipedia; or 
• Organize – Lead a community activity or event in your library, country, or region.
• Amplify –  Share and just keep sharing the campaign within your networks and help us reach out to library and research communities around the world.

Ensure all edits are registered using the #1Lib1Ref hashtag in your edit summary! Don’t forget to add your local events to the campaign dashboard, so we can learn and track activities happening across the world and make them count for the campaign.

The updates from the May 2022 campaign!

Since its start, the Wikipedia Library Team has been “Imagining a world where every librarian added one more reference to Wikipedia” and taking action to make that into a reality, with help from librarians, bibliophiles, and Wikimedia affiliates. In this round, inspired by the conversations around the Wikimedia Movement Strategy, the 1Lib1Ref campaign also wanted to make sure we were representing and engaging more areas of the movement, from even more communities. 

In our way to make the campaign more inviting, we started adding new contribution methods. Last January, the campaign encouraged the creation of new articles and linking Wikisource books to Wikidata.

This May, that activity will still happen, but we are also adding another possibility: the addition of references to decrease gender bias on Wikipedia. There are two ways of contributing to this activity.

1. Add references written by people who identify as women.
   The goal of this activity is to decrease the gender bias in references used on Wikipedia. Just like we have the gender gap in the content, in which articles about women or women’s-related topics are less created, female authors are less cited and less used in references. That’s a problem because the knowledge produced by women is not being seen, read, and used on Wikipedia.
   
   You can participate in this activity just by choosing to add a reference written by a female author to a Wikipedia article or by organizing an event with your local library and Wikimedia community to add the female writers part of the institution’s collection.
   
2. Add references to a customized Citation Hunt list.

The Citation Hunt tool allows users to create customized lists of articles to add references. The goal of this second activity is to help improve the quality and verifiability of content in articles related to gender discussions.

Over the 1Lib1Ref campaign page, you can find customized Citation Hunt lists related to gender topics in English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese. 

Feel free to participate by adding your own list or converting the current lists to your language!

During the January 2022 campaign, we added 9 more languages from the Central Eastern Europe region (CEE) to the CitationHunt tool. This May, we are also adding 12 more languages, thanks to Guilherme Gonçalves (volunteer developer). The new languages chosen, from the African and Asian continents, are the following: Afrikaans, Assamese, Azerbaijani, Bihari, Malay, Burmese, Odia, Punjabi, Sindhi, Tamil, Tagalog, and Vietnamese. 

If you are part of those communities or speak one of these languages, please, consider translating the Citation Hunt page. Just add your language here and start translating it! We are especially in need of translations for Assamese, Bihari, and Tagalog.

In case you want to add another language to Citation Hunt, the documentation for it is available here: Citation Hunt#Adding support for a new language.

We hope to see you on May 15th, 2022! If you want to learn more and get involved, visit 1lib1ref.org. You can also join the 1Lib1Ref community via the Libraries (libraries@lists.wikimedia.org) and the 1Lib1Ref (1lib1ref@lists.wikimedia.org) mailing lists or be part of the Wikimedia + Libraries User Group.