This week, I am continuing NARA's work to improve the transparency of our contributions to Wikipedia by rolling out a user page template which will be used for all NARA staff accounts. Here is an example of the template in action, on the user page of a staff member from our Office of the Federal Register: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Woo_24>.

To recap our work so far, NARA has published:

The new template includes language approved by NARA's general counsel's office for this purpose. It serves the dual purpose of enforcing standard conflict of interest disclosure language on all NARA staff user pages, while also giving staff members new to Wikipedia an automatic, visually appealing user page to start off with. It also places the users into a category, so that we can easily track all staff accounts.

My hope is that it will also serve as a visual cue for when an account is operating outside of the bounds of our approved rules of engagement for Wikipedia—if someone from NARA is editing without this template on their user page, it probably means they haven't been trained in Wikipedia and management is unaware of their actions. And finally, of course, I have written the statement so that it is more than just a disclosure, but also a positive message to the Wikimedia community about our intentions. Here are two of the more important statements:

There is also a note that directs any Wikimedians with concerns about any NARA staff's edits that they can contact me, as I act as NARA's liaison to Wikipedia.

I am hoping this method is useful for other institutions. I'd love to hear any feedback others have on this approach we're taking.

Dominic