One of the best ways to drive traffic to an institutional repository site is by adding links to it from other, established sites. This could be your institutional website – adding links from a departmental page to the department’s scholarly work. Or from your social media platforms to a relevant article corresponding with a topical news event. Another option is Wikipedia. Have you considered leveraging Wikipedia’s astronomical base of users for your own ends? With an average of 200 million+ page views a day, Wikipedia is an excellent resource to drive traffic to your IR.

But HOW can you accomplish this? In the Fall of 2019, the William Knox Holt Memorial Library and Learning Center at the University of the Pacific hosted their first ever Wikipedia-Edit-a-Thon. Spearheaded by a cross-functional collaborative team from Academic Support Librarians, Special Collections, and Digital Initiatives, the event drew 48 editors who in total made 998 edits over the course of 4 hours.

What we learned from our first foray into editing – it’s easy to make a lot of tiny grammar edits to pages, but what we really wanted to explore was increasing traffic to our digital IR collections. We therefore planned a Spring 2020 Edit-a-Thon, unfortunately postponed due to COVID-19. In this session, we want to share our ideas and suggestions for a successful Wikipedia/IR event based on our initial experience and our completed preparatory work for the sequel. We will cover funding, attracting editors, and integrating institutional repository resources into Wikipedia.