Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia.
and medical treatment online where you have people claiming all manner of complete nonsense. And some of them are on nice looking websites, with credentials that sound impressive if you don’t actually know,” according to Jimmy. He adds: “Because we have this incredible access to both low quality in- formation and high quality information that may be hard for us to contextualise, people really do need skills to help them work through that.”
#1Lib1Ref campaign Wikipedia has been running its #1Lib1Ref campaign for a number of years, asking librarians to become Wikimedians and add their own pages or edit existing ones. The aim is not just about getting more trusted contributors to update pages (although that inherent trust in the profession is one reason why the campaign is aimed at librarians), but also to help libraries make more of their collections by making them discoverable through to the Wikipedia community. It is clear that the value of libraries and librarians is not lost on Jimmy and he sees the potential for the profession to become the facilitators for improving information literacy understanding and skills in local communities.
He says that while individuals within the profession, and the profession as whole, already understand how they can help, there are constraints because deci- sion-makers do not have the same grasp. This leads to a scenario where librarians are undervalued and misunderstood.
Give a man a fish…
“There is no big surprise that it is skills that are important – ‘give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day, teach him how to fish and he’ll eat for a lifetime’. That is what education is fundamentally about – helping people to gain the skills they need to explore the world in an effica-
September 2018
cious manner,” Jimmy says. “I think a lot of educators get that, but unfortunately the systems we have in place don’t always recognise that. It’s one of the paradoxes we have that groups of individuals can understand something but the system hampers that.”
Having said that he believes that things can be changed, and it could be the rise of fake news that helps force the change. The traditional news media has seen an opportunity to regain some of its lost trust by focussing on fake news and trying to tackle it. The idea that fake news is real and potentially dangerous to society is now part of the media agenda as they look to regain readers, regain trust and ultimately regain advertising revenue. For librarians there is an opportun-
ity to be at the forefront of that agenda. Librarians are already widely trusted and well-placed in local communities, with a genuine public service ethos.
Devalued concept of news
Summing up the rise of fake news, Jimmy says it has stemmed from an over reliance on cheap-to-produce content which has undermined professional journalism. He said: “What has changed a lot is the busi- ness models. The advertising-only model has been incredibly destructive for jour- nalism. It leads even quality publications to feel a financial pressure to go for click- bait – vast amounts of low quality con- tent. Rather than go for long-form, good quality, well-researched pieces which are expensive to produce and require a
certain degree of professionalism. “If you make the same amount of money
revenue-wise, from something that takes a senior reporter three weeks to work on compared to something an intern churned out in an hour, then it’s hard to justify from a business perspective.” That skewing of news provision has devalued the concept of news, and has allowed the growth of fake news (or lies) to take hold. Jimmy cites Hannah Arend’s treatise on fascism and totalitarianism in which she views the first step on the road to tyranny, not as indoctrination in a belief system but to undermine people’s belief in anything at all.
“The fact that Donald Trump calls fake news anything he doesn’t like hearing is problematic because it undermines people’s trust in media and in professional journalism. That makes them vulnerable.” Says Jimmy. “If people do not know what is true or not, then they find it very difficult to evaluate.”
Revenue from readers
Jimmy does see some positives in the way news organisations are looking at differ- ent business models, from the Guardian’s supporters model – one he pushed for during his time on the paper’s board, and which he has since adopted with the launch of WikiTribune; and The New York Times’ push for digital subscriptions, which has seen a rise in paying-users from one million to more than three million in just a couple of years. He says: “That is huge because revenue
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