Report: “Wikipedia Has a Diversity Problem, But These Librarians Want to Help” (Interview with USC’s Elizabeth Galoozis)

From PC Magazine:

Wikipedia, which turns 18 this week, is now viewed 6,000 times every second and more than 200,000 editors contribute every month.

Before Wikipedia came along, information cataloging and dissemination used to be a matter of rigorous scholarship. Encyclopedia editors were revered and respected academics, mostly from privileged backgrounds, who focused on the “official canon” of what was known and needed to be preserved.

Wikipedia has changed all that, but it’s also been criticized for a lack of diversity in its subject matter and those deemed worthy of inclusion. So students at University of Southern California recently gathered in the library for a Wikipedia Edit-a-thon for Diversity and Inclusion, where they learned how to edit and get involved.

We spoke with one of the event’s organizers, Elizabeth Galoozis, Associate University Librarian and Head of Information Literacy at USC. Galoozis has a Masters of Science in Library Science from Boston’s Simmons University and moved west to join USC in 2014 after stints at many academic libraries, including MIT and Bentley University, also in Massachusetts. Here are edited and condensed excerpts from our email conversation.

Read the Complete Interview with Elizabeth Galoozis

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