Page:Wikipedia and Academic Libraries.djvu/70

Rh to more nuanced discussions about appraising sources or con icting historical narratives.

The longest-lasting impact that writing Wikipedia articles has for any student is the knowledge that their work has life beyond the traditional essay. The information they gathered has been added to the largest encyclopedia ever written, instead of languishing in an essay that only themselves and their lecturer will read. This has been one of the main rallying calls for many Wikipedia-based education programs across the world (Wikimedia Education, 2019).

By editing Wikipedia, students are enabled to use their access to university library resources in order to free information from paywalled and specialized information repositories. They are taking this information, to which most people outside of educational institutions do not have free access, and adding it to “the sum of all human knowledge.” In their research, they access a wide and varied corpus of information, from newspapers to dictionaries of national biography, many of which they are using for the first time. In exploring what it means to be able to draw on resources, such as paywalled journals, expensive academic publications, and specialized materials, the students are experiencing their library collections in a new and pragmatic way.

In recruiting student editors to contribute to Wikipedia internationally, we come closer to bridging gaps in representation regarding gender, geography, language, sexuality, or nationality on Wikipedia. In this case, working with students in Ireland, they are confronted with a platform that has a number of recognized gaps in knowledge and that is making a concerted effort to map all of these gaps as part of a wider movement strategy (Zia et al., 2019). One nuance of editing content relating to Ireland on English-language Wikipedia is the issue of being a nondominant culture within the Anglophone world. Many of the histories of Ireland have been historically dominated by the narratives from the United Kingdom and the United States.

From the simple problem of historic figures being misidentified as British, rather than Irish, to misconceptions about the impact of historic moments within a specific Irish context, Wikipedia can act as a clearing house for these issues. This is best illustrated with an example.