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1 Librarian, 1 Reference (#1Lib1Ref) started when someone realized how many claims on Wikipedia were missing citations. Participating is easy:

  1. Find an article that needs a citation (you can even use this handy randomizer!)
  2. Do some research to back up or debunk the claim
  3. Insert the reference, or edit the article to make a factual statement
  4. Add the #1Lib1Ref hashtag to your edit, in the Wikipedia Edit Summary
  5. Save the article – you’re done!

Adding citations is a great way to learn how to edit Wikipedia, if you haven’t done it before. And librarians are the obvious choice for sorting out truth from fiction!

This year’s campaign runs from January 15th to February 3rd, 2017. We’d love to see participants from our community – especially if you want to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of Ontario history!

There are lots of Ontario-related articles that need sprucing up, with links to websites, newspapers, images, documents, or other historical materials hosted in VITA or OurOntario.ca. Check out the Ontario Portal or the WikiProject:Ontario for some ideas, or just get started with some people, places, or things that are close to your heart.

I did a few edits as an example:

  1. I went to the Wikipedia page for Chesley, Ontario.
  2. I noted sentences that had no citations whatsoever. For example, who says Chesley used to be called “Sconeville?” How do you know that’s the town slogan? What’s the history of Durham Furniture? What mills were around in 1858, and what’s this about a great fire?
  3. I did a quick Google search for “Chesley Sconeville” and found a few links that supported the claim: one is a printing of the text on the historical plaque in Chesley’s downtown. I tried to steer away from anything that looked it had copied the Wikipedia article verbatim.
  4. I went back to the Wikipedia page, clicked “Edit,” navigated to the end of the sentence with the Sconeville claim, and clicked “Cite.”
  5. I pasted in the URL and let the automated citation generator do its stuff. Finished!

I then decided to improve the page with some images:

  1. I searched “Chesley” in OurOntario.ca.
  2. I found this great public-domain postcard of the downtown street (there’s the post office!) that was shared by the Toronto Public Library.
  3. I uploaded the image to Wikimedia and filled out the item-level metadata to give credit to TPL and certify that it was in the public domain.
  4. I went back to the Chesley page and inserted the image using the “Insert … Media” buttons. I wrote a caption and alternative text.

Main_Street,_Chesley,_Ontario.jpg

If you want to work on improving Ontario’s local history in Wikipedia, let us know.

I’m hoping to do an edit every day from January 15th to February 3rd, and I’d be happy to provide some friendly competition or support to anyone who’s doing the same, or just wants to learn more about Wikipedia editing. You can see other volunteers and regional initiatives on the #1Lib1Ref Connect page. Happy editing!