The Internet Archive's massive repository of scanned books will help Wikipedia fight the disinformation wars

For years, the Internet Archive has been acquiring books (their goal is every book ever published) and warehousing them and scanning them. Now, these books are being "woven into Wikipedia" with a new tool that automatically links every Wikipedia citation to a print source to the exact page and passage from the book itself, which can be read on the Internet Archive.

Citations to print materials are both a huge potential strength and weakness for Wikipedia: a strength because there's so much high-quality, authoritative information in print; and a weakness because people can make up (or discount) print citations and bamboozle other Wikipedians who can't see the books in question to debate their content, context, or whether they should be included at all.

Archive founder Brewster Kahle kicked off the initiative after a discussion with Wikimedia's executive director Katherine Maher, who was "worried that truth mightfracture."

Wikipedia is a key battleground in the war against disinformation, and the Internet Archive's measures -- which were presented to Congressional staffers yesterday -- are a huge advance on the state of the art.

"I want this," said Brewster Kahle's neighbor Carmen Steele, age 15, "at school I am allowed to start with Wikipedia, but I need to quote the original books. This allows me to do this even in the middle of the night."

For example, the Wikipedia article on Martin Luther King, Jr cites the book To Redeem the Soul of America, by Adam Fairclough. That citation now links directly to page 299 inside the digital version of the book provided by the Internet Archive. There are 66 cited and linked books on that article alone.

Readers can see a couple of pages to preview the book and, if they want to read further, they can borrow the digital copy using Controlled Digital Lending in a way that's analogous to how they borrow physical books from their local library.

Weaving Books into the Web-Starting with Wikipedia [Brewster Kahle/Internet Archive]