Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Library/Newsletter/February-March2016

The Wikipedia Library
Books & Bytes
Issue 16, February–March 2016
by The Interior, Ocaasi, UY Scuti, Sadads, and Nikkimaria

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In this issue we cover some new resources in the sciences, humanities, religious studies, and a unique library of video content. Our global system of branches expands, a new coordinator joins the ranks, the Visiting Scholar program comes to Wales, and we have news on upcoming conferences. Alex Stinson and Stephen LaPorte talk hashtags in edit summaries as an effective new social tool, and a new citation template for archival holdings is born! As always, we have a roundup of news and community items related to libraries and digital knowledge.

New accounts

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We're excited about four new research partnerships:

New global branches

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We are very happy to announce two more global Wikipedia Library branches:

We'd also like to take this opportunity to highlight the Global Wikipedia Library on Meta. This portal showcases the projects and accomplishments of each of our language branches. New and growing branches also have their own Meta planning pages to coordinate and track their progress, for example: meta:The Wikipedia Library/Portuguese. If you're interested in helping to start a branch on another language Wikipedia, please get in touch! wikipedialibrary@wikimedia.org

New coordinator and call for volunteers

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We would like to welcome Checkingfax as a new account coordinator on our team!

New volunteers are always welcome; help is always needed to manage distribution of accounts or to do other tasks. Many hands make for light work!

We are in particular need of a volunteer for metrics coordination. These volunteers help analyze and report metrics for Wikipedia Library partners and open-access publishers. If you have benefited from a TWL account or are interested in helping out, sign up here.

Upcoming Events

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Alex Stinson, project manager of the global Wikipedia Library program at the WMF, will be attending both the Wikimedia Conference in Berlin and Wikimania in Italy to talk with community leaders about the opportunities for developing branches in more language communities. If you are attending, please get in touch! We will also have a poster presenting the results and impact of the #1lib1ref initiative from last January.

The Wikipedia Library team also reserved a booth at the International Federation of Library Associations conference in Ohio in August. The booth will include updated and internationalized outreach materials from the Library's bookshelf on Meta.

If you want to share some of the library outreach your community is doing at one of these conferences, please email Alex at astinson@wikimedia.org.

Visiting Scholars Expand to Wales

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As an extension of his Wikipedian in Residence role at the National Library of Wales ( see reports), Jason Evans announced two Visiting Scholar positions – the first ever Wikidata Visiting Scholar filled by User:Sic19 and an application for the first ever Wikipedia Visiting Scholar position outside of North America. The LLGC blog described how the WikiData Visiting Scholar has already engaged in expanding the coverage of library on Wikidata to take advantage of tools like Histropedia.

Cite those archives with a new template!

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With much valuable feedback from community members and practicing librarians and archivists, we are happy to announce the activation of a new Wikipedia citation template: {{cite archive}}! Designed to streamline and standardize how archives are cited in Wikipedia, the template can support a variety of uses, from simply citing a finding aid for an archive, to specifying a unique item within folders, fonds, series and other organizational standards. We would like to thank all who contributed to the discussion, and the template experts who did the final coding. As with all things wiki, there is still room for improvement of course. Let your archivist friends and colleagues know about it!

Spotlight: Growing hashtags for expanding outreach on Wikipedia

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By Alex Stinson and Stephen LaPorte and originally published on the Wikimedia blog

WMF report

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Quarterly report

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Quarter 3 of the 2015–16 fiscal year ended March 31st. Below is a summary update of how we did with our goals. Click here for the full 3-slides.

It is worth noting that we are always ambitious about our targets, and so we don't always hit them! Also, the WMF had a lot of internal disruption last quarter which explains why our focus was sometimes limited to maintaining core work rather than pushing ahead on new efforts.

TWL's Quarter 3 goals with color-coded status updates. Click on the image to get access to the full PDF

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

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One of the way we track our progress is with specifically measurable goals. Below is an update on how we did with our targets this past quarter.

The Wikipedia Library (KPIS) Q3-2016
Total
Difference from Last quarter (q-q)
Percent change from last quarter (q/q)
Difference from last year (y-y)
Percent change from last year (y/y)
Jan-Mar '16
PUBLISHERS
Number of partners 57
q-q 7
q/q 14.00%
y-y 33
y/y 137.50%
Number of accounts distributed 5,637
q-q 295
q/q 5.52%
y-y 1585
y/y 39.12%
Number of unique editors receiving accounts 2,683
q-q 85
q/q 3.27%
y-y 536
y/y 19.98%
Number of citations added to partner content (per quarter) 19,353
q-q 4,311
q/q 28.66%
y-y n/a
y/y n/a
Number of days from signup to distribution of access 40
q-q 7
q/q 21.21%
y-y n/a
y/y n/a
Access Frequency (0= Very low- 5= Very high) 2.8
q-q 0.01
q/q 0.36%
y-y n/a
y/y n/a
Citation Frequency (0= Very low- 5= Very high) 2.21
q-q -0.1
q/q -4.33%
y-y n/a
y/y n/a
Resource Usefulness (1= Not Very, 5 = Very) 3.81
q-q -0.02
q/q -0.52%
y-y n/a
y/y n/a
BRANCHES
Number of global branches 20
q-q 5
q/q 33.33%
y-y 15
y/y 300.00%
Number of coordinators (NDA) 55
q-q 4
q/q 7.84%
y-y 41
y/y 292.86%
Number of global library pages/projects 191
q-q 17
q/q 9.77%
y-y n/a
y/y n/a
Number of global library pages/projects created by TWL 103
q-q 15
q/q 17.05%
y-y n/a
y/y n/a

Bytes in brief

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Community roundup

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Newsworthy

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Worth reading (or watching)

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Data dump

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