Instead of Googling a subject for more info, should you be Wiki'ing it instead?
That's what University of Michigan graduate student Michael Barera, the Wikipedian in Residence at U-M's
Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, does. Since his freshman year in high school in 2005, Barera has been referencing Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia which anyone may contribute to or edit. The English version contains nearly 4.2 million articles, according to Wikipedia.
"It's very much built on the back of the open source software movement, things like GNU in the '80s and Linux in the '90s," Barera says.
As an undergraduate at U-M, Barera majored in history. Now as the library's resident Wikipedian for the winter semester, Barera receives academic credit towards his graduate studies in U-M's School of Information. He was recruited out of the
Michigan Wikipedians, the first student Wikipedia club in the country.
Barera calls the experience "a perfect fit for a history major who's studying archivism to work at essentially an archive. Even though it's called a library, it's really an archive because they don't have books, they have documents that are irreplaceable, that you can't check out."
He spends four hours a week on the
project, working with the Ford library's digital photo and document collection and writing articles. "The biggest focus of this internship, this [residency], is on collaboration between the two institutions, building a bridge between the Ford and Wikimedia," he adds.
A personal user page on Wikipedia, like Facebook, is a social network in itself – albeit much more of a hyperlink heaven.
Barera's user page has nearly 2,200 of his images (heavy on cars, hockey, and urban landscapes), and his vinyl collection dating back to 1880. There you can also see a record of his past postings of photos, text, and edits to get an idea of his interests. Counted among his countless contributions are those to sports groups (Pacific Coast Hockey Association) and the obscure (Toowong Village). Barera has also earned a gaggle of "Barnstars", Wikipedia's version of the trophy: he's significantly shaped the
Queens of Noise album and
"History of the hamburger" pages.
Barera updates
Concentrate's Tanya Muzumdar on his residency, future aspirations, and his take on the Wikipedia sphere.
What is your attraction to Wikipedia?
My first exposure to that was an article on the
Macedonian phalanx...it's a fighting formation designed and used in ancient Greece. It's designed to be used with long spears and body armor and shields....
The funny thing was this was an article that wasn't just about the phalanx, it was about the Macedonian variant of the Spalynx. It was invented by King Phillip and later used more famously by his son Alexander the Great. There would maybe be a sentence about that in a high-school history textbook, but there was a whole article about it on Wikipedia.
Just the whole scale is so much larger, and Wikipedia really does endeavor to cover everything, which is really an attractive proposition for someone like me...It doesn't use paid professional contributors, it's entirely dependent on volunteers, essentially collectors coming together and synthesizing an encyclopedia, in some ways very similarly to the way
[Encyclopaedia] Brittanica or traditional encyclopedias do, with editors who are essentially bringing together primary and secondary sources and synthesizing a readable usable tertiary source. Just like
Brittanica, Wikipedia does not do any original research, because it is a tertiary e-reference.
It doesn't have ads at all, it doesn't have subscriptions. You can get anything you want out of it. It doesn't limit you really in any way, other than content that hasn't been developed yet. And there no limits on anyone. It's a very deeply egalitarian thing and for someone like me that's really attractive...
170 of [my photo uploads] are used in Wikipedia articles in multiple languages. The vast majority of that 170 was not inserted by me... The vast majority were found by other users who were searching through the categories on Wikimedia Commons and then they inserted them into Wikipedia articles as they saw fit.
You've got the shout-out of being the first Wikipedian in residence at a presidential library in the nation.
That is correct. That is a rather large caveat, though. There are only 15 or so libraries, going back to Herbert Hoover, who is the first. Every president since him has one. I'm not the first in the U.S. I'm not the first at NARA, either (the National Archives and Records Administration), which is the parent organization of the presidential libraries, but technically yes, I am the first at a presidential library...I think it's a little overblown. To be honest with you, I think the bigger deal is...I'm the first Wikipedian to be recruited out of a university club into this kind of a position. The role that U-M has played both in having a club here and the School of Information being the catalyst that made this all happen.
I think this has opened a whole new discussion about what is the role of universities pertaining to Wikipedia.
What happens at Wikipedia club meetings?
Sometimes we just edit and socialize. Every once in a while we have a group project, like back in October and November we were all working pretty hard on this Ford [Library] collaboration. Before my internship began, we were already working on getting images that had been uploaded from what Ford used in Wikipedia articles...One of the interesting things was, you might think all those images were just going to pertain to Gerald Ford, but that wasn't the case. They have some fantastic pictures of everything from rain coats to 1930s leather football helmets to buttons and T-shirts and typewriters and suitcases and all these different things that can illustrate articles about those topics, not just about Ford himself....For instance, the article on football helmets now has a picture of Gerald Ford's helmet from the 30s because it's probably the best picture Wikipedia has now of one of those old-style leather football helmets.
Could you point me to a specific article that is just really outstanding in some way?
Check out the articles on
Ann Arbor and the
University of Michigan. In the time I've been on Wikipedia, they've both run on the main page as the article of the day. They're
featured articles – the highest quality of any Wikipedia articles...The
Detroit article is fantastic too.
What's your career goal?
I will be trained as an archivist and to put it in lay terms, it's essentially somewhere between a librarian and a museum curator....there's a greater emphasis on preservation. Instead of a librarian that's working with valuable but replaceable books, generally as an archivist you're working with documents that are irreplaceable. You're working with actual things like diaries or you're working with photographic collections of the White House photography core, things like that. The distinction is libraries are typically open-stack, where anyone can just go in and pick up a book off the shelf, whereas archives are closed stacks, where everything is more controlled because of that issue of preservation.
One of the things I'm super interested in with archivism is the push towards digitization in the last 10-15 years or so. I'm a big believer in taking these irreplaceable things like irreplaceable photo collections and then digitizing them in a way that doesn't damage the actual photograph and that creates digital surrogates that can then be put online.
I won't be making a living by writing Wikipedia articles, but I hope to one day make a living by working with an archival institution.
What's your favorite subject to delve into?
Most of my stuff is local history-related, Ann Arbor, U-M especially. A lot of it too is local sports teams, like Michigan sports teams or Detroit sports teams. There are really two other classes of articles that I edit. One is stuff I was introduced to in school...I will often make edits related to stuff that is photographic. So if I take a picture of a Ford Mustang, in the description I write 'This is a Ford Mustang.' And then I make it so that when you click Ford Mustang, it takes you to the English Wikipedia article on Ford Mustang. I always try to do that to make it easier to use. Whenever I do that I will often find little things I can fix on those articles.
A lot of it's serendipitous. Every once in a while I'll find something really off the wall that catches my fancy and I'll work on that for a while. I try not to restrict myself too much. There's so much wonderful stuff, and you never know where the next opportunity's going to be.
Tanya Muzumdar is a freelance writer and the Assistant Editor of Concentrate and Metromode. Her last article was "On Many Questions, Ethics Hangs in the Balance."
All photos by Doug Coombe