Wikicelebrating Loretta: How One Librarian Brought Wikipedia into the Classroom and Beyond

It all began with a student thesis.

Back in 2015, Saul Hoffman, a student at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, was deep into his research on how Wikipedia could be used as a tool to boost critical thinking, collaborative skills and research abilities among students. As part of his work, he organized a Wikipedia editing event and invited educators and librarians to join.

One of the attendees was Loretta, a librarian with 30 years of experience, and expertise in electronic resources, institutional repositories and information literacy courses for students. From the moment she clicked “edit”, something clicked for her too.  

“I realised the enormous potential this activity had as a teaching tool”, she says, “Writing, editing and translating an article gives students a way to put their language skills into practice, It helps them learn about cultures, which are often underrepresented, critically evaluate sources, to learn how to use the bibliographic resources and experiment with knowledge-sharing activities in an open collaborative environment.” . 

Inspired, Loretta began weaving Wikipedia into her bibliographic research courses.  Her focus? Articles on topics overlooked or not well developed in Italian Wikipedia (such as Japanese theatre, multicultural London, and more). She also began organizing events promoted by Wikidonne and centered on women’s biographies and cultural themes, such as Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas, women writers of crime fiction, and artists from the Sinsombrero movement or Japan’s Edo period. Her students also worked on individual Wikipedia contributions, as a part of their assignment.  

Over the course of three years, 317 students participated in those activities and over 400 articles were  added to Wikipedia. 

And something else started to shift. The academic view of Wikipedia began to change.

“Thanks to these courses, the “reputation” of Wikipedia also improved over time on an academic level”, Loretta notes “Several professors were involved and offered this training activity to their students as a certified internship”. 

“I am pleased to have given many students the opportunity to get to know Wikipedia and how it works. To shift from passive readers to active, shared approach to the production and use of knowledge, placing research, selection, and the use of reliable sources at the center of this work”, she reflects. 

A commitment that continued even after reaching retirement, extending her collaboration to other schools and institutions in northern and central Italy, and this year, the University of Roma Tre, where the internship started with several students is about to conclude with the publication of a wikibook on the History of Italian Feminism. 

But Loretta’s contributions don’t end in the classroom. 

To date, she has authored 164 Wikipedia articles on a kaleidoscope of topics – from the anti-Nazi cabarets in Munich in the 1930s to Burmese women writers and from the ancient Japanese nomadic puppeteers to the Querelle des femmes. 

“I don’t like collecting edits, I like to take my time,” she says. “Most of my articles take a week to a couple of months to write. They’re rarely translations. I focus on little-known subjects and cultures.”

As an active member of the WikiDonne project, Loretta is especially passionate about articles that spotlight diversity – cultural, social, and gender-related. She enjoys writing female biographies, and is also interested in Japanese art and culture. She has written about Pauline Boty, a pop art pioneer; the Japanese Hari-Kuyō festival, which honors broken sewing needles; an impactful essay by Joan Scott, and about Samoan female tattoos.

She hopes her work helps others, especially those who may not have the same resources she does: access to academic libraries, a fast internet connection, or time to spare. And acknowledges the importance of access to scientific resources and the fact that many of them are accessible thanks to the Wikipedia Library project (a valuable initiative that has already been used by nearly 9,000 editors to improve articles across more than 200 Wikimedia projects).

For Loretta, Wikimedia is a way to connect to the values she holds as a librarian: a belief in open access to knowledge, and the importance of developing a critical and conscious capacity for judgement – one that helps people recognise when information or knowledge is being misused or distorted. 

She would like everyone to know that Wikimedia is  “a great community, you can discover and learn about everything, you just need to be a little curious and proactive”.

When asked about the challenges ahead she points to the need of reducing the gender gap and more diversity. She is also wondering about what the future holds with the technological changes around us: “I am concerned about the effects that artificial intelligence and the growing monopoly of information may have on the future of Wikimedia projects. I think that AI is a great opportunity, but we must be prepared to manage it; our challenge is to remain free from external constraints, cultivate diversity, knowledge sharing and quality.”

Thank you for all your important work, Loretta. We are confident that thanks to people like you: curious, dedicated to accuracy, knowledge sharing and passionate, Wikipedia will continue to be a center of human-curated, high-quality knowledge on the internet.