User:AmandaRR123/Special Collections Intro

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A special collections-focused article: Community Resources for Justice

A more specialized article: Decipherment of rongorongo

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Welcome to Special Collections
What are special collections and archives? What makes something "special"?

What is "processing" a collection?

What is a finding aid, and what can you do with it on Wikipedia?

Special considerations for special collections topics on Wikipedia

 * 1) What makes something or someone notable? Wikipedia has particular guidelines for people.
 * 2) Primary vs. secondary, the role of finding aids, factual vs. evaluative sources.
 * 3) The finding aid should have bibliography for further sources. Do not only rely on the finding aid! It should be one of multiple reliable sources.

Sample finding aid citation
Medal, Dominique. "Collection Overview." Archives and Special Collections Finding Aids: Community Resources for Justice Records. Northeastern University Libraries, Archives and Special Collections, July 2013. Web. Accessed 03 March 2014.

Systemic bias

 * How many articles are on English Wikipedia?
 * How many pageviews does English Wikipedia receive?


 * How many active (more than 5 edits per month) editors are on English Wikipedia?


 * How many very active (more than 100 edits per month) editors are on English Wikipedia?
 * What are the demographics of the average editor on English Wikipedia?


 * What are the most common types of Featured Articles?

A sampling of the research
Geographic bias: The Information Geographies group at the Oxford Internet Institute has done some wonderful work on visualizing the geographic unevenness of Wikipedia coverage.


 * The Geographically Uneven Coverage of Wikipedia


 * Information Imbalance: Africa on Wikipedia


 * The Distribution of All Wikipedia Articles


 * "There is a clear and highly uneven geography of information in Wikipedia. Europe and North America are home to 84% of all articles. Anguilla has the fewest number of geotagged  articles (four), and indeed most small island nations and city states have less than 100  articles. However, it is not just microstates that are characterised by extremely low levels of  wiki representation. Almost all of Africa is poorly represented in the encyclopaedia. There  are remarkably more Wikipedia articles (7,800) written about Antarctica than any country in Africa or South America. Even China, which is home to the world’s biggest population of Internet users and is the fourth largest country on Earth contains fewer than 1% of all geotagged articles."

Topic bias


 * Wikipedia itself has documented gender bias in both editor demographics and topic coverage: Gender bias on Wikipedia


 * In 2008, researchers found a strong bias in coverage and that "predictors of these biases include recency, importance, population, and financial wealth [of business companies included]."


 * In 2011, when comparing English-language Wikipedia and Polish-language Wikipedia, researchers found a strong difference in coverage of cultural figures, but still a U.S./English-language advantage throughout both.


 * In 2011, when comparing Wikipedia and Britannica, researchers found that while Wikipedia is much larger than Britannica and thereore has more articles on women, when looking at each encyclopedia's missing articles, Wikipedia was more likely to be missing articles on women.

References

Wonderful WikiProjects and to-do lists
WikiProject LGBT Studies: Things you can do

WikiProject African Diaspora: Current goals

WikiProject United States/Hispanic and Latino Americans: Open tasks

WikiProject Indigenous Peoples of North America: Articles requested

WikiProject Feminism: Open tasks