User:Dominic/FAQ

I am posting this introduction to myself, my beliefs, and my position as a paid employee at the U.S. National Archives in the interest of transparency. I understand that there will occasionally be questions about what I am doing or my intentions, and I would like to address them head on. Cultural or academic staff who edit Wikipedia as part of their paid work are strongly encouraged to make a conflict of interest statement on their user pages disclosing their affiliation. This personal statement is intended to go beyond that in order to answer any questions or allay any fears from the Wikimedia community. This statement has been vetted and approved by the National Archives.

Quick links

These are all mentioned below with more context, but if you'd like to jump right to the most important information, here are the links:

Who are you?

My name is Dominic McDevitt-Parks. I've been an active Wikipedia editor since 2004, and I am very much of the Wikimedia community. I've written dozens of articles and made thousands of edits. I became an administrator in 2005, and later served as an arbitrator, oversighter, and CheckUser. I have also been an administrator on the English Wiktionary, English Wikisource, and Meta-wiki. I helped organize dozens of meetups or editathons for Wikipedians, given workshops and presentations about Wikipedia. I was a Wikimedian before I was an archives professional, and I still am one. I am aware of the culture of the Wikimedia movement, and believe in its mission and principles. I am drawn to cultural institutions as a profession for the same reason I first joined Wikipedia—my passion for making information more freely accessible, discoverable, and shareable.

What is a Wikipedian in Residence?

In 2011, I began a one-year internship as the Wikipedian in Residence at the United States National Archives and Records Administration. In 2013, I served as the Wikipedian in Residence for the Smithsonian Institution. As a Wikipedian in Residence, I have never written articles for the institution, but instead tried to serve as a liaison to the Wikimedia community on behalf of the institution, fostering a mutually beneficial relationship. By providing content, data, assistance, expertise, and incentives from the institution I endeavor to help seek to facilitate the work Wikimedians are already engaged in.

In the fall of 2013, more than two years after I first came to the National Archives as an intern, I was hired full-time to work on Wikimedia-related initiatives. My official job description is completely public and viewable. Now that I am a full-time employee, I hope to pursue more long-term projects and involve more areas of the agency.

What are you doing?

You may see me making a number of types of edits. Many of my activities will focus on NARA's media files, including uploading NARA images, editing metadata, replacing duplicates, and so on. On occasion, I may edit articles to add information or provide citations. The NARA WikiProject also being used to tag and assess articles, create to do lists, and encourage collaboration on important articles.

Why are you doing that?

The following is the National Archives' mission statement:

The National Archives and Records Administration serves American democracy by safeguarding and preserving the records of our Government, ensuring that the people can discover, use, and learn from this documentary heritage. We ensure continuing access to the essential documentation of the rights of American citizens and the actions of their government. We support democracy, promote civic education, and facilitate historical understanding of our national experience.

Accordingly, the National Archives' main, overriding goal in working on Wikipedia is, according to David Ferriero, the Archivist of the United States, "to drive access to the National Archives' records, which is, after all, at the heart of our mission." No one can deny the fact that Wikipedia has a vastly larger audience than any cultural institution's website. There are many articles on Wikipedia which, alone, see more viewership annually than the entire archives.gov domain. Wikimedia's mission, as well, is about providing access—not just to cultural heritage holdings, but to the sum of all knowledge. By cooperating with Wikimedia to, for example, upload our digital content to Wikimedia Commons so it can be used in Wikipedia articles, we recognize that we are improving Wikimedia projects by fulfilling our mission.

Additionally, Wikimedia represents a vibrant, innovative community, both online and in real-world. Wikipedia editors who edit articles related to NARA's holdings, work to digitally restore images, or otherwise contribute to our mission by improving Wikimedia projects provide an incredible benefit to our institution, and I seek to assist and incentivize that work however possible.

What are you not doing?

I will not be writing articles about NARA, any NARA facilities (including presidential libraries), NARA staff, or any other subjects related to NARA as an agency and its image, rather than its subject matter expertise. Editing articles related to our holdings on Wikipedia is a much better way of fulfilling even our own mission than editing the articles about our agency. It is also not my intention to encourage articles which do not meet Wikipedia's notability policy. NARA has many holdings that may be historically significant but not notable to Wikipedia, and we accept that. Generally, though, I'm not writing articles at all; I find it more efficient to spend my time enabling the broader Wikimedia community to work on topics of relevance to NARA by providing resources, rather than just spending all my time as one person editing individual articles.

Isn't that paid editing?

I do make edits to Wikimedia projects while in the course of my paid job. On Wikipedia, the term "paid editing" is sometimes conflated with the concept of "paid advocacy" or "conflict-of-interest editing." Considering that I am paid to edit in a way that is furthering Wikimedia's mission as well as NARA's, I feel that I am a "paid editor" only in the very literal sense, the same way that developers and other staff of the Wikimedia Foundation who edit Wikimedia projects while performing their job are paid editors.

Isn't that editing with a conflict of interest?

I do not edit for the purposes of self-promotion or advocacy. As a cultural institution with an educational mission, we believe that there are certain activities we can undertake where NARA and Wikimedia have a shared interest, rather than a conflict of interest. For example, NARA and the Wikimedia community have a shared interest in the article on the United States Bill of Rights being excellent and including NARA resources (like the high-resolution scan of the document) where appropriate, since NARA is the authority on the document. The two organizations have a conflict of interest when it comes to, for example, the National Archives and Records Administration article itself, but we do not have an interest in editing those types of articles. I add links, text, or images to articles only when I feel it is appropriate to the article and following Wikipedia's norms. If you ever disagree with a change I have made, do not hesitate to talk to me about it so we can come to an agreement. One of my most important roles within NARA is providing guidance to other staff about how they can abide by Wikipedia's COI expectations. When there is an issue, I may assist NARA staff in posting to talk pages or reaching out to editors in order to avoid directly editing an article where we have a conflict of interest, but this sort of activity is not my primary goal.

My goal is for my editing, and any other editing from NARA staff, to be always transparent and accountable to the Wikimedia community. I will not make edits that I do not believe are in Wikipedia's best interest, even for pay. I value the community's opposition to paid advocacy, and hope it is apparent that we are approaching this issue in a more thoughtful way than most others have, in order to avoid even the appearance of paid advocacy. That is why I've written this FAQ, and why last year, in the wake of the Gibraltarpedia controversy, we drafted and published on-wiki our internal guidelines related to Wikipedia editing for NARA staff (including me). At the time, I wrote a long post on NARA's official blog that goes into even more detail about our thoughts on how to work with Wikipedia in a mutually beneficial ways, avoiding potential conflicts of interest: "How does NARA avoid conflicts of interest on Wikipedia?"

What if I disagree?

If you disagree with any actions or my understanding of Wikimedia's policies or practices, you are free to contest them just like you would any other Wikimedian. Representing the National Archives gives me no extra authority on Wikimedia projects, where I am just an editor like everyone else, hopefully being judged by the merit of my edits. Equally, however, expect me to engage in a dialogue back with you, because I'm a Wikipedian too!

Why do you edit under your personal username?

I have not created a new account for my NARA edits, nor do I generally specify in any way which edits were done on the clock, though many unrelated edits I make in my personal capacity should be obvious. This does not mean I am being non-transparent. I do this because I recognize that all of my edits are subject to scrutiny by the community, just like every other editor. From Wikipedia's standpoint, since editors from a cultural institution have no special status, there is no reason to treat the edits differently or flag them in some way. I don't stop being the same Wikimedian I have always been once I get to my work desk—instead, it is my history as a Wikimedian, the standing within the community that I have build up over the years, and the insights I have gained as a long-time editor, that inform my actions as editor working for NARA.