from readers really is the incentive to pro- duce content that is meaningful and can be used to change lives in a meaningful way. “Those are some good signs, and finally we look at Putin and Trump and all of that – these things are hopefully passing phenomena, but although it is a pass- ing phenomenon it is real and it does matter.”
Wikipedians don’t fall for fake news While the rise of fake news has not ham- pered Wikipedia, according to Jimmy, he is worried that the general public are at a disadvantage. He says: “The phenomenon of true fake news – websites set up to spread viral content that has no discernible truthful element to it and has no concern for the truth whatsoever – has had no impact on Wikipedia. That’s because the kind of people who become Wikipedia volunteers and who become experienced, spend their lives judging sources. To fool a Wikipedian with ‘Pope endorses Trump’, they are going to say ‘hold on a second, that doesn’t sound right’. That kind of skill is not rocket science and I think most people who are avid consumers of news or information gain those skills and learn those skills quite readily. But they need to be taught more widely – it’s crucially important.
Teaching key skills
“The librarian is a key point in this because students do turn to them to sort through and find information. Obviously, a school librarian’s task is not just to say ‘here’s something good, now go do your homework’, but to say ‘here’s how you judge what is good. Let me show you how to think through why you use this as a source, and not that’. That is really impor- tant and I think it should be embedded in the school curriculum as well.”
Libraries and librarians in the
digital age Looking at the digital transformation that is happening in the world, there are par- allels in the shift to digital between news production and libraries. Both are born from a paper and ink world and both are having to find their places in an electronic world. The media is slowly finding its place in that world and is continuing to experiment and innovate.
Jimmy says the same must be true of libraries and librarians, who he sees as guides to information, knowledge and the skills needed to navigate the digital infor- mation sphere. He said: “One of the things I think is really interesting about libraries and librarians is the challenge of technol- ogy. I don’t think we should be looking at the meaning of the word library in the future as effectively a museum for old objects, with paper in them. That is kind of a dead idea of what a library is. Funda-
18 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL September 2018
Orit Kopel, co-founder of WikiTribune. Photo © Clara Bellés
mentally, that is not what a library is. “A library 50 years ago was a living and breathing place that happened to be full of books because that was the most efficient way of getting and storing information. Now books are still, in many cases, the most effective ways of getting and storing information – but not in all cases. “People forget that the job of the librar- ian is not to tell you ‘It is on aisle 7, on the right’, but to actually help people with the process of research and the process of working things through. The digital trans- formation has been a challenge for that. A lot of libraries have had a hard time finding their place in that world.” And while he happily admits he is not
the first to point this out, he says there is still a need for libraries, their staff and their users to explore new ways of work- ing. He said: “I’m not saying anything
particularly new, a lot of people have said that a library shouldn’t be a place for dead books. But there is the challenge of how do libraries serve a community, if that community is not coming to you for a rec- ommendation for a history book but they are actually interested in exploring a range of resources that are available to them at their fingertips all the time. I don’t think we really know what the future library looks like yet, except it’s going to have a big online component to it.”
Better to question
Having spoken about trust in sources, Jimmy says he is sanguine about Wikipedia retaining trust issues from its very early days when there was a small community of editors, limited numbers of articles and more opportunity for malicious or unmalicious falsehoods to perpetuate within articles. He says: “My approach is that I’m happy for people to question their information sources. If that means people question Wikipedia as a source, then I’d rather have that than no questions at all.” IP
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