Page:Librarians as Wikipedians - From Library History to “Librarianship and Human Rights”.pdf/5

 LIS Course: “Wikipedia and Knowledge Management.”

A geographical, sociological and chronological overview of knowledge management beginning with the printed encyclopedia. How Wikipedia came about and how a virtual army of volunteers crowd-sourced a user-built encyclopedia of over 4 million articles. Class activities will include editing, writing and organizing knowledge to be included in Wikipedia.

Biographical contributions

Out of the gate one student added a new entry on The Librarian (Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s painting).



Another student observed: “Wikipedia’s list of librarians was looking male dominated and Eurocentric so I added some notable female and international librarians. While I was glad to see that so many had Wikipedia pages, I thought it was important they be included in an overall view.” By including a few examples of this student’s work taken from the “history” tab of each page we can see how this was accomplished (see endnote 17).

For the human rights class a new entry was written for Clara Breed, a librarian in San Diego, California, remembered chiefly for her support for Japanese American children during World War II. This entry was featured in