[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia and libraries

[Ed Summers]

On Tue, Feb 8, 2011 at 7:33 AM, Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com> wrote:
> [Bit off-topic, but has anyone read that book?]

I have got it, but haven't finished it yet. Andrew spoke at the recent
GLAM-Wiki event last year, which has audio available [1]. There are
lots of good talks at that event (including one from Cory Doctorow),
if you are interested in the intersection of galleries, libraries,
archives, museums and WIkipedia.

I work at the US Library of Congress where we've been slowly materials
and putting them online since the Web was just being born in the mid
1990s. Like most Libraries we use web metrics software to track what's
getting used, but recently I've started thinking that it could be
interesting to show how library, museum, archive material is used in
Wikipedia, to demonstrate how important it is that GLAM institutions
continue to put content online. So I started working on Linkypedia
[2].

Linkypedia kind of turns Wikipedia inside out, and lets content
publishers see what articles reference their content. So for example
the British Museum can see what Wikipedia articles reference their
site [3]. And folks who are interested in keeping current with how
Wikipedia uses their content can subscribe to a feed that lists them
as they are added [4].

I'd like to scale this project significantly by allowing any domain to
be looked at, and include links from all language wikipedias [5]. But
this will require a small (but not insignificant) investment in a
server with a couple gigabytes of RAM. I was thinking of contacting
the toolserver people to see if I could potentially work in that
environment.

Sorry to hijack your thread, but I would be interested in hearing if
any feedback on the idea of Linkypedia, and if anyone had any
experience with what sorts of projects are possible in the toolserver
environment. Perhaps that question is best asked on their discussion
list though...

//Ed

[1] http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GLAMWIKI_UK_Fri_26_14.00_Stevenson_-_Andrew_Dalby.ogg
[2] http://linkypedia.info/
[3] http://linkypedia.info/websites/1/pages/
[4] http://linkypedia.info/websites/1/pages/feed/
[5] https://github.com/edsu/linkypedia/wiki/linkypedia-v2