Linkypedia is a site which provides data on how web content is used in Wikipedia
“linkypedia aims to help reveal the connections between digital curation communities. To let cultural institutions get a handle on the rich metadata and contextual information found in wikipedia and to serve as a sign post for rich seams of primary resource material on the web.”
It is of particular interest to us as the Library’s New Zealand Electronic Text Centre collection listed with 1,752 links coming from Wikipedia. That’s less than Library of Congress (4,750) but more than the British Library (1,379). We already knew from our web stats that the collection receives a lot of referrals from Wikipedia but this site lets us delve a bit further into the detail.
Not unexpectedly the largest number of links from Wikipedia to content in the NZETC collection are from pages about the Second World War - the Wikipedia page on Operation Crusader to relive the 1941 siege of Tobruk contains 49 footnotes links to digitised editions of The Official History of New Zealand in the Second World War, many to paragraphs and sections in “The Relief of Tobruk” by W. E Murphy.
Most Wikipedia pages only have one or two links to NZETC digital texts but a couple of other highly linked topics include early New Zealand politics and the 1860s Pai Marire movement. The page on Pai Marire is a nice example of Wikipedia authors drawing on a range of source material which, because it is made publicly available online, they are able to link directly to in their footnotes and offer the reader opportunities for further reading and research. The articles uses footnotes to reference two books in the NZETC collection, one in Auckland’s ENZB collection and an article in digitised edition of Te Ao Hou.
Great to see people making use of the resources we provide.
