Education/News/March 2023/Florida graduate students complete Library History edit-a-thon for credit

Florida graduate students complete library history edit-a-thon for credit

Author: CatacombParty

Summary: University of South Florida graduate students participated in a week-long edit-a-thon, and got introduced to the ways of becoming active Wikipedians.

A class of Library and Information Science graduate students at the University of South Florida School of Information learned how to be active Wikipedians with a week-long edit-a-thon.

The course on library history had previously discussed how useful Wikipedia is as a reference tool, and many students expressed that they had not contributed to or edited Wikipedia pages before. The assigned edit-a-thon was a first foray into the Wikipedia world for most of the class, but with the guidance of a seasoned Wikipedian for a professor, they ended up with an impressive result of 208 total edits on Wikipedia articles related to libraries and library history, especially those pertaining to the state of Florida.

These edits included adding information on new library branches, revising information added to reflect the reinstatement of programs that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, and adding more nuanced information and sources to key figures, innovations, and developments that were key to the history of libraries.

This assignment taught students the mechanics of editing Wikipedia articles and was an interesting way to get the class to do personalized individual research if they felt so inclined. These future librarians and information professionals will come away from this experience armed with a new understanding of Wikipedia, how they can help contribute to it, and how it can be used in their future careers.