A group of six­teen enthu­si­as­tic vol­un­teers, includ­ing Prince­ton under­grad­u­ates, Prince­ton com­mu­nity mem­bers, Wikipedi­ans from the Wikimedia-New York City, and Mudd Library staff, gath­ered in the Wiess Lounge on Sat­ur­day, 18 Feb­ru­ary 2012, to write and update Prince­to­ni­ana Wikipedia articles.

In July 2011, I par­tic­i­pated in an edit-a-thon about the Armory Show at the Archives of Amer­i­can Art in Wash­ing­ton, D.C. A Wikipedia edit-a-thon is a gath­er­ing of indi­vid­u­als cre­at­ing Wikipedia arti­cles and upload­ing media related to a theme, events, sub­jects, or places. Once I saw first­hand how GLAM (Gal­leries, Libraries, Archives, and Muse­ums) insti­tu­tions and Wikipedia can ben­e­fit one another, I returned to Prince­ton and my stu­dent job at the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Archives inspired to act on this expe­ri­ence. After dis­cussing the idea with Uni­ver­sity Archivist Dan Linke, we decided to host an edit-a-thon in Feb­ru­ary with the theme of “A Valen­tine for Prince­ton.” The goal was to have par­tic­i­pants update pages on Princeton’s pres­i­dents and other Prince­to­ni­ana materials.

On the day of the event, after intro­duc­tions over pizza and Indian food, I gave a brief Pow­er­Point pre­sen­ta­tion describ­ing basic prin­ci­ples of Wikipedia arti­cles: nota­bil­ity, neu­tral point of view, reli­able sources, and indi­vid­ual account­abil­ity. Ref­er­ence Archivist Christie Peter­son intro­duced the ref­er­ence room and the sources avail­able for par­tic­i­pants to browse. After that, we were off!

While writ­ing arti­cles about top­ics such as See­ley G. Mudd Library to the Put­nam Col­lec­tion of Sculp­ture to the East Asian Stud­ies Depart­ment, and updat­ing arti­cles about the Log Col­lege, the Two Dick­in­son Street Co-op, and the Joseph Henry House, we used ref­er­ence room pub­li­ca­tions and online resources to increase the num­ber and reli­a­bil­ity of Wikipedia arti­cles about Prince­ton University.