Alex Jung was a young environmental activist in South Korea when he became interested in Wikipedia.

“When I was in high school, I was involved in a wetland preservation project, and one of the problems that we encountered was that there was fairly little information available on Korean wetlands,” Jung said.

He said that because of this gap, people lacked an understanding of the phenomenon. “When you say wetlands, then people just kind of assumed that it’s just something after rain, which it is not,” he remarked.

The group he was working with put up pages on Wikipedia about the issue to spread awareness.

Jung, an MA candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto, is the institution’s first Wikipedian in Residence.

It’s a new role.

“The purpose behind the position, ultimately, is to go where our community is,” said Jesse Carliner, Communications Librarian. “Everybody, whether they admit to it or not, uses Wikipedia as a starting point for their research if they don’t know anything about a topic.”

Carliner said that the hire would allow the library system to enrich online learning resources and improve the quality of information people access.

Although a great resource, Wikipedia should never be cited in an assignment, Carliner noted, and should only be used as a starting point and as a background for a student’s research into a topic.

Jung said, in particular, that libraries and other similar institutions are valuable “because there’s a lot of knowledge and information that people would find useful in here.”

He added that a large part of his role “would be not only me as a single individual doing it, but building the capacity for the institution in general to be able to do more of that to … be able to link the sources that they’re working with closely to Wikipedia and help facilitate that process.”

Jung, who studied a mix of ethics, gender studies and media studies at the University of Chicago and is now involved with the civic tech community in Toronto, said he was excited when he was brought on board.

“I am all for making information in general more accessible to people, and not even just any library, but this is one of the largest research libraries in the world,” Jung said. “I think U of T Libraries, and what they’re able to bring to the communities, is massive.”

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Jung’s duties will include sharing U of T research with Wikipedia, adding content to Wikimedia Commons, improving U of T’s online presence on the site, and organize special events like editing workshops.

Wikipedians in Residence have been hosted at institutions across the globe, including the Palace of Versailles in France, the National Library of Norway, TED and the New Art Gallery Walsall in the United Kingdom.

With files from Rhianna Jackson-Kelso