Promotions within Wikipedia

Front-page promos

From 2016-2023, we promoted most of the new pages we created by nominating them for the frontpage "Did you know...?" (DYK) feature. We also nominated some pages for the "good article" feature, and when they passed a review by another volunteer editor, they were also eligible for DYK nomination. Nominated pages received a lot more editorial scrutiny, but I saw this as helpful oversight for our writing. We nominated over 100 pages for DYK. When a page was featured on DYK, it received a spike in views, sometimes as little as a few hundred, and a few times over 10,000 (for a particularly good hook). One of my proudest moments as an editor was on April 1, 2023 when the leading DYK was about Seventh East Press's shoe mirrors.

Sharing library images on other-language wikis

Using imageview counts, we were able to see what images from library collections on Wikimedia Commons were most popular on English Wikipedia. We added some of these images to other-language Wikipedias. One successful instance of this was when I uploaded a higher-resolution version of J. Malan Heslop's famous photo of starving Ebensee concentration camp prisoners, which was already used on many Ebensee camp pages (I also improved the information on the English Wikipedia page). We also added images of Japanese battle standards (hata- and uma-jirushi) to relevant Japanese Wikipedia pages. These were highly successful, but we didn't concentrate our work on this because of the difficulty of communicating on foreign language Wikipedias if we needed to explain ourselves (and it can come across as spammy).

"Films shot in Utah"

Jim D'Arc, our former film curator, wrote a book on films shot in Utah with an appendix containing many, many films shot in Utah. We used this information to fill out the "films shot in Utah" category (although we never finished the entire list!), and occasionally to add filming location information to a film page.

New pages for LDS Women in hard science

I had the idea to increase visibility of notable LDS women in STEM by creating pages for them. However, since so many of the women were faculty at BYU, there were concerns that my team, as BYU employees, had a conflict of interest, so we stopped after creating only a few pages.

Translating pages into Spanish

One of my students translated the English Ezra Booth page she had worked on into a page on Spanish-language Wikipedia. It was an experiment that I didn't continue. Since I don't speak/read Spanish, I couldn't ensure editorial oversight.

Improving pages related to BYU

Look. I know that these days, improving any page related to BYU would get my team sent to the Conflict of Interest Noticeboard. I saw plenty of people doing COI editing on collegiate pages without properly disclosing their identity (usually PR-type people). We never hid that we worked for the BYU Library.

That said, we improved a lot of pages that relate to BYU. At the request of our University Archivist, we improved all of the pages of former BYU presidents. We created a page for the Education in Zion permanent exhibit and for the Primrose International Viola archive. We improved pages for the BYU Family History library and the L. Tom Perry Special Collections. We also improved pages about BYU performing arts groups, BYUSA, and Seventh East Press. I think we were able to do a much better job than a PR person would have in adhering to Wikipedia's policies about neutrality and sourcing. We may have provided too much detail in spots--but I believe that it's easier to remove detail than to add it.

Adding findingaid links

One of the first things the special collections department chair asked me to do was to add links to findingaids to relevant pages. The external links search tool can show you the exact pages (as of April 24, there are over 800 links). I found that the links weren't used very often, so I didn't prioritize this work.

Adding recently scanned/digitized work

I spent some time looking at our Arabic manuscripts collection on archive.org and trying to figure out if I could add images from or links to the books to Wikipedia pages. I didn't have enough knowledge to do this very effectively, but I did add an image of a 1760 prayer book to the Coptic Orthodox Church page. We also added many links to full scans of classical music scores from our collection on archive.org to pages dedicated to those works. For our work on other pages, especially church history pages, we often ended up using the library's collections without having to intentionally seek them out.

Citing publications by BYU people

We did some (edited 4-5 pages) experiments with adding citations to news articles about recent research by BYU professors, but it felt less productive than our usual approach of improving a specific page. One exception to this was our project to improve pages for German-speaking artists featured in the Sophie database. We improved information on the Wikipedia pages for many of these women, and we also added links to the database, which included full texts/scores of their work.