Silvia E. Gutiérrez De la Torre

“ Yet, without electricity, computers, or Internet, these librarians “collect and develop educational content” and they are in their own right a “fireplace” around which so many children have found not only knowledge but also warmth. In sum, feedback sessions, both with colleagues and with participants, can help to create better events (i.e., adjusting workshops with gender-specific Wikipedia issues) and to identify strategies and tools relevant to the communities they will bring light to. ”

“ I would like to underline that strengths can also mean passions. For instance, every year since 2017, my colleague Tomás Bocanegra writes reviews about Queer culture books in our library’s blog Amontonamos las palabras (Bocanegra Esqueda, 2017) . This year, in 2021, he will organize an edit-a-thon with different NGOs in Mexico City around this subject. ”

“ Innovation is risky. It is hard to know if a new idea will have the impact one hopes, especially since many factors tend to be at play (budget, community acceptance, technical difficulties, etc.) . The MVP approach has been extremely useful in this framework, and the BDCV’s Wikimedia engagement’s continuity plan was no exception. Thus, for 2019 we integrated only two Wiki activities to our annual plan: participating in the #1Bib1Ref campaign and organizing one edit-a-thon. ”

“ Romero suggested that we should analyze which type of edits are accepted and which ones are rejected to better guide edit-a-thon participants.
Finally, event participants raised interesting questions that provided a humbling perspective on Wikipedia as an open-access, public-knowledge project. Mixe activist Tajëëw B. Díaz Roble expressed that for some indigenous people who are dealing with invasive resource extraction companies and forced displacement of their communities, editing Wikipedia is not always a priority. ”

“ Camelia Romero, however, raised some interesting issues regarding the lack of information about how Wikipedia readers actually read the information we create.6 She also questioned the lack of a consistent criterion behind protected pages (Protection Policy, 2020) and pointed out a troubling pattern for accepted and rejected edits in gender-related articles: many gender-related articles are “protected pages” that cannot be edited. ”

“ Moreover, it was exciting to see how our own team made this project their own in a proactive and creative manner. For example, reference librarian Máximo Domínguez devised a strategy for our social networks using the 1Bib1Ref logo. In one month, Domínguez’s strategy got 139 likes and 72 retweets (Twitter Search, 2018) . Another reference librarian, Tomás Bocanegra, printed out of his own pocket stickers for the team and volunteered to run a Facebook group to answer questions from other librarians who wanted to join the movement. ”

“ From what we have seen, many edit-a-thons are initiated by institutional perspectives, which can be powerful if the institution holds a collection many are passionate about, or a community that usually engages with these types of events. ”

“ In May 2020, I conducted two in-depth, follow-up interviews with volunteer BDCV colleagues about the residency. In her interview, Claudia Escobar discussed her motives in joining the Wiki movement: one of these incentives was the fact that in our country there aren’t enough librarians5 and participating in Wikipedia is a way of amplifying our work by sharing what we do (whether it is curated information as bibliographies, Wikipedia workshops to teach critical information literacy, or participating in #1Bib1Ref initiatives in order to make articles more reliable) . ”

“ Creating A Model for Helping Women Thrive in Wikipedia—Women’s Media Center. WMC Speech Project. https://womensmediacenter.com/speech-project/creating-a-model-for-helping-women-thrive-in-wikipedia.
Education/Countries/México/El Colegio de México. (2019, February 13) . Wikimedia Outreach. https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Education/Countries/M%C3%A9xico/El_Colegio_de_M%C3%A9xico.
Escobar Farfán, J. I. (2019) . Nahuatl contemporary writing: Studying convergence in the absence of a written norm [PhD Thesis] . University of Sheffield. ”