📑What we tried

How to prioritize Wikipedia editing?

There are several ways to prioritize Wikipedia editing work. I had freedom to choose our editing projects, so our editing prioritization shifted as we experimented with different ways of deciding what to work on. We often edited multiple pages at once, which were covered under multiple of these priorities.

Anticipate information needs

Landscape architects can look at desire paths to decide where to put pathways. What are the desire paths of information that BYU students are looking for? I wondered if we could anticipate their needs. We predicted that people mentioned in the Come, Follow Me (CFM) D&C curriculum would see spikes in their views the week they appeared int he CFM manual for the week in 2021. We were not able to improve all of the related pages, but we did improve many of them.

We also got access to the 50,000 most popular search queries to scholarsearch for 2021. I thought about using these to guide our editing, but most were indicating a desire to read a particular book, for example, How to Win Friends and Influence People. We could have improved the Wikipedia page for this book, but students would still be looking for the actual book to read.

Popular pages

One way to prioritize editing is to focus on the most popular pages within an editing area. Pageviews of individual Wikipedia pages is easy to access. Our work on the pages for Jimmy Stewart, Stephanie Meyer, and Orson Scott Card was due to their popularity. Recently, when we decided to work on pages related to Herman Melville, I used the page's popularity within the category of Melville pages to help me determine what we should work on first.

Broad Overview pages

Overview pages are very difficult for a casual Wikipedia editor to write. They require a broad knowledge of a subject area that only comes from reading multiple sources on the topic. It makes sense for dedicated library workers to improve these pages, because they can put in the necessary effort to write a cohesive summary of a movement. Our work on Mormon studies, Mormon fiction, Mormon folklore, Mormon cinema, Black People in Mormonism, and many others fall under this category.

Archives-related pages

We tried creating pages for the library's Mormon missionary diarists collection, but they are not especially useful for Wikipedia readers. More typical of our work on archives pages was for biographies of people with papers in our collection, like Laura Hickman, Nellie Gubler, Celestia Taylor, and Hugh Nibley.

Creating new pages

To create new pages, we have to see something that can be difficult to find: knowledge gaps.