Did you know that you can use Wikipedia to direct web traffic to you? Long over are the days of information hoarding, and putting information on Wikipedia about your local and unique collections is one more way to disseminate!!

 This is especially helpful for your locally oriented special collection, or books that you have about your local hsitory… and not just for scholarly or academic libraries with a lot of unique resources. Let’s say you have a book that is about the history of a neighborhood in your city. You can go to Wikipedia, create an account, add content, put in a link to your library, and viola! 

There are pitfalls however, such as being labeled as a spammer. You can’t really go into Wikipedia and just add links, that makes you a spammer.  

 The idea was written about by Ann Lally and Carolyn Dunford: 

The Idea
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/may07/lally/05lally.html

They suggested that we put links to our NWDA finding aids online: 

NWDA
http://nwda.wsulibs.wsu.edu/

More than 50% of all Google searches lead to Wikipedia: 

Wikipedia Users
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/460/wikipedia

So we tried, and because we only put up links, and not content, we were spammers according to Wikipedia standards. If you add content – try creating a page about your library, your town, something important to your community, or something you get asked about a lot, and then add links! It works!! Read Lally and Dunford’s article!

 Here is the wikipedia article for the Idaho State Historical Society: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idaho_State_Historical_Society