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Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-09-16/Serendipity

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Serendipity

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no paywall, for thou, Wikipedia Library, art with me

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By Benedict Udeh, Sam Walton, Vipin SJ

Are you an active editor who has made more than 500 edits and has an account more than 6 months old? If so, did you know you can access The Wikipedia Library, which provides free access to research materials to make it easier to write content on Wikipedia!

The Wikipedia Library homepage August 2023
Homepage for The Wikipedia Library

Eleven years ago, Wikipedia editor Jake Orlowitz asked Highbeam – an aggregator of news articles, academic journals, and other reliable sources – if they could provide him with a free account to their website so he could do research for a Wikipedia article. They offered him 1,000 accounts and encouraged him to distribute them amongst Wikipedia’s editing community so that everyone who wanted to use their resources on Wikipedia could do so!

Since then, more than 80 organisations have partnered with the Wikimedia Foundation to provide thousands of Wikipedia editors free access to paywalled sources. Over this time, the program became a fully resourced project at the Wikimedia Foundation, and it is now accessible through a distribution tool that can be accessed with your Wikipedia login and is capable of providing seamless searching and access capabilities for library users.

Wikipedia Library partners include large aggregators (such as EBSCO and ProQuest), prominent publishers (like Springer Nature and Wiley), newspaper databases (like Newspapers.com and British Newspaper Archive), and numerous niche collections across a wide range of topics.

Using The Wikipedia Library

To use The Wikipedia Library, simply head over to https://wikipedialibrary.wmflabs.org and log in via Wikipedia. Users with trivial account blocks can contact us to request an exemption. Once logged in, every collection under the "My Collections" tab can be accessed right away via the Access Collection button. Additional collections are available under the Available Collections tab, but these ones require an application before access is granted (we generally have a limited number of accesses available to distribute for each). For application-based publishers, you will receive further instructions via email after being approved.

The Wikipedia Library when logged in
The Wikipedia Library when logged in

If you don't know which collection you need, simply enter your search term into the search bar at the top of the page - this will search across most of the default set of available resources and provide direct access to search results. To help us expand the library, you can make suggestions for new content to be added.

Over the past year we have been working to move as many of these collections over to the proxy-based access method to make editor access as seamless as possible. Nearly 70% of collections are now available via proxy, with most of those being accessible without an application!

For resources accessible via proxy (which includes all of the resources that are available to all eligible users without requiring an application), there are some additional access tips and tricks that can help you get to full text from outside the Library - whether an external search engine or an on-wiki citation.

These solutions won't work on every link, but we hope they can help improve your access to paywalled resources available through The Wikipedia Library! You can find more guidance and tips on using the library in the recording for a recent conversation hour from the Deoband Community Wikimedia.

If you want to hear more about the Wikipedia Library, you can subscribe to Books & Bytes.


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  • The Wikipedia library has been a boon many times as I've been doing research. I doubt I could have gotten any of the articles I've worked on to FA without it. If you've never tried it, I strongly recommend it! Thanks for writing this article to spread the word. —Ganesha811 (talk) 06:14, 16 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • My thanks also for this article. I use the Wikipedia library frequently, especially JSTOR and Project Muse. I recall my pre-Wikipedia library days when I had to go to the local university library to access scholarly articles. On each visit, I would print several dozen pages of relevant articles at ten cents per page, but the library (perhaps because they noticed me printing sizeable amounts of stuff?) put a restriction on printing articles. Oh, the travails of writing articles for Wikipedia! Anyway, Wikipedia library has relieved me of the task of doing research at the university library and for that I am grateful, more efficient, and have a few more dimes in my pocket. Smallchief (talk) 08:31, 16 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Great resource, if you can use it, you should. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 11:03, 16 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • A very useful resource for every Wikipedian editors, a must have!--Vulcan❯❯❯Sphere! 00:01, 17 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • WPL is a great tool we all should know about. That said, let's not be hush-hush about extremly useful Library Genesis/Z-library. Last but not least, Internet Archive has a useful library of books too (although copyright trolls are about to kill it, I fear). --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 04:11, 17 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Aye, I'd be pretty SOL if I were to try to write the volcano/natural sciences articles w/o access to these sources. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 07:19, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Очень странно: меня не пускаю в этот проект, утверждая, что я имею активную блокировку. Однако, за все годы моего вики-участия я не был ни разу заблокирован. --VladimirPF (talk) 06:51, 19 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@VladimirPF You have a self-imposed block on ru.wikinews. Per the instructions in that image, you can contact us to request an exemption. Since you've posted here and I've looked into this, I've just granted you one, so you should now be able to use the library if you log out and back in :) Samwalton9 (WMF) (talk) 12:18, 19 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • I noticed it says "automatic access" and not general access... did I miss the part where it said how to gain access manually, or was there just not a way? UnexpectedSmoreInquisition (talk) 13:53, 20 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    @UnexpectedSmoreInquisition We don't currently grant access to editors who are below the requirements, so access to the library in general is automated by those criteria checks. Samwalton9 (WMF) (talk) 13:56, 20 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Understood. UnexpectedSmoreInquisition (talk) 13:57, 20 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • WML is an exceptional resource. Thanks to all who work to source these databases for us and all the engineers that keep it working. jengod (talk) 21:11, 22 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • I adore the Wikipedia Library; I've tracked down more sources than I can easily remember in it. Many thanks and much gratitude to the people who keep it working. Happy editing, SilverTiger12 (talk) 00:09, 30 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Constantly great for the military sciences!! Buckshot06 (talk) 08:00, 1 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]


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