User digest/What do the Footnotes mean
User Digest Title: What do the Footnotes mean? The Implications of Wikipedia's Verifiability Policy
Date:Friday 24 June 2016
Time: 1600
Venue:Gym Palace (map)
Presenter: Alex Stinson
Biography of Presenter: Alex Stinson is the GLAM Wiki strategist at the Wikimedia Foundation. For the last two years, he has been supporting the Wikipedia Library program developing partnerships with publishers and libraries that improve Wikipedia's importance in the research ecosystem. His professional and educational background is in English Literature and Digital Humanities. Before working at the foundation, Alex was an active volunteer as first an editor on English Wikipedia (User:Sadads ~98,000 edits), a Wikipedia Education Program Ambassador and a GLAM-Wiki Advocate. In those roles, he has supported over a dozen university course in in the Education program, and helped start the conversation with the Smithsonian, and supported other GLAM-Wiki partners.
Overview of topic: This talk examines the changing landscape of Wikipedia's need for citation, verification, and other kinds of authoritative sources, to answer the question "Why are Wikipedia's interest in Verifiability so important for our community and outreach?" I will provide some high level overview of how sources came to be so important in various Wikipedias, recent research on the value and impact of our current citations, and community programs that focus on the importance of citations, such as the Wikipedia Library, it's #1lib1ref campaign and Wikicite 2016.
Supporting material: on Commons and on Google Docs