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The publication of this book—in 2021—will coincide with Wikipedia’s twentieth birthday. Much has been written about Wikipedia’s beginning and evolution over the past twenty years, and we won’t go into detail here, but you can read about the history in other publications such as The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia by Andrew Lih (2009) or Wikipedia @ 20: Stories of an Incomplete Revolution edited by Joseph Reagle and Jackie Koerner (2020). What has remained constant since its inception in 2001 is Wikipedia’s radically open model. As a result, Wikipedia was initially derided in higher education because this model allowed anyone to edit its content. However, what was initially seen as a flaw in many education circles has now become Wikipedia’s strength, when compared with other social media platforms (Cooke, 2020). Although opinion has slowly started to shift over the past decade, Wikipedia is still often considered a “forbidden space” for educators and students in the classroom (Lockett, 2020, p. 208).

In 2019, when we began this project, we set out to create a book that would represent different perspectives from around the globe. Wikipedia and Academic Libraries: A Global Project contains nineteen chapters by fifty-two authors from Brazil, Canada, Hong Kong, Ireland, Kyrgyzstan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Scotland, Spain, and the United States. In keeping with the Wikipedia commitment and spirit to open access, each chapter has a CC BY 4.0 license, which means that DOI: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11778416.intro.en