Non-profit global library cooperative OCLC and the Wikimedia Foundation's Wikipedia Library are working together to make it easy for editors to link citations in Wikipedia to millions of library materials represented in WorldCat, the world's most comprehensive database of information about library collections.
References and reliable sources help Wikipedia editors verify facts included in articles. They also provide additional resources that might be of interest to readers who want to delve deeper into research topics. However, adding references has not always been easy, and often required cutting and pasting or re-typing information.
The ability to generate citations has improved significantly and now Wikimedia's cite tool, a companion to its visual editing interface, allows editors to generate a full citation from a single identifier. The integration of OCLC's WorldCat Search API into the cite tool helps editors automatically generate and add citations that link back to resources represented in WorldCat.
OCLC has worked with the Wikimedia movement on several projects in recent years. In 2012, OCLC worked with a Wikipedian in Residence to explore ways that library metadata could contribute to Wikipedia. The result was a Wikipedia bot that adds VIAF authority control data to easily and consistently identify people in articles. Later, in collaboration with the Wikipedia Library, OCLC Research helped to establish the Wikipedia Visiting Scholar position at five universities.
In 2016, OCLC was a winner of the Knight News Challenge for a project to promote collaboration between public libraries and Wikipedia. In March 2017, OCLC hired a Wikipedian-in-Residence, a position funded by a project grant from the Wikimedia Foundation, to facilitate the Wikipedia + Libraries: Better Together project.
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