The Wikipedia Library: A million links and beyond

The Wikipedia Library (TWL) has crossed an important milestone: more than a million links have been added to Wikimedia projects by Library users! Since its inception in 2012, The Wikipedia Library has been providing Wikimedians with access to paywalled content that they can use for their research and citations on Wikimedia projects. This milestone marks how TWL turned out to be a critical companion for Wikimedians in their journey towards a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. 

The milestone

Since the Wikilink tool began collecting data in 2019, The Wikipedia Library has been used by nearly 9,000 editors to add links to 207 projects. The majority of links (more than 610,000) have been added to Wikipedia articles (predominantly as citations). The most used collection available in the library is Newspapers.com, accounting for more than half of the links added! Currently around 2,500 users access The Wikipedia Library on a monthly basis. 

History

The Wikipedia Library was founded by Jake Orlowitz (user: Ocaasi) in 2011, and given early support by a Wikimedia Individual Engagement Grant in 2012. Wikipedia needs sources, and many of the most reliable sources are behind paywalls, inaccessible to the volunteer editors of Wikipedia. Jake set out to solve this mighty problem by persuading academic, scholarly, and journalism publishers to provide free access to a small number of Wikimedians in need. In return, publishers would get additional visibility and visitors from Wikipedia citations. The project was an instant success, gaining traction among Wikimedians immediately. Highbeam, JSTOR, Cochrane, and Oxford University Press were some of the first partners to join the library. In 2014, The Wikipedia Library moved inside the Wikimedia Foundation as a Community Resources initiative, fully funded to grow and develop into a mature program.

Jake Orlowitz at WCNA 2024. Credits: Kevin Payravi, CC BY-SA 4.0

Strategic partnerships

Publishers taking part in The Wikipedia Library program give the most dedicated Wikimedia editors free access to their content. The Wikimedia Foundation does not license this content; instead, we communicate to publishers the many benefits of  visibility within one of the most widely used sources of information on the internet. Wikimedia projects have about 15-20 billion pageviews every month and Wikipedia is available in more than 300 languages. Being cited on Wikimedia projects can lead to significant website traffic for publishers. This is all the more important as the search ecosystem and way of consuming content on the internet is changing rapidly. Publishers also benefit by amplifying the reach of their authors when their work is cited on Wikipedia articles. 

The Library now has over 100 collections from partners, with content in more than 34 languages. Many of the world’s top academic publishers, university presses, content aggregators, and newspapers are Wikipedia Library partners. Building these partnerships requires a fair amount of time as it involves establishing contact with the right people, persuading them of the benefits, addressing legal concerns, and implementing different access configurations. However, we added 12 new partners to the library in the 2023-24 financial year, alongside renewing and extending existing partnerships. IEEE Xplore, British Online Archives, ACM Digital Library and The Journal of American Medical Association are some of the partners who joined the library in the last financial year. 

Looking ahead

The millionth link is definitely a moment for us to celebrate but looking forward, there’s a lot more for The Wikipedia Library to accomplish. Many more resources that Wikimedians need are not yet available in the library. The Wikipedia Library also faces a disparity in language and regional representation, as we see in other Wikimedia projects. Most of the content in the library today is in English and from North America and Europe. We build new partnerships in response to requests from volunteers and six of the partners we added last year hold significant collections in languages other than English such as Mohr Siebeck and de Standaard. If there are resources you’d like to access that are not yet available, you can add or upvote those collections in the Suggest page of the library. 

Celebrating the community

This is an important milestone and we would love to hear from you. Do you have any stories or memories you’d like to share about The Wikipedia Library? Is there something you would like us to develop or improve? We welcome your thoughts here to celebrate this milestone and shape the future of the library together.