became almost a cathartic session, we learned how some of the participants have to close their library earlier in the day during the winter months because they have no electricity—let alone computers or Internet. Yet, without electricity, computers, or Internet, these librarians “collect and develop educational content” and they are in their own right a “fireplace” around which so many children have found not only knowledge but also warmth. In sum, feedback sessions, both with colleagues and with participants, can help to create better events (i.e., adjusting workshops with gender-specific Wikipedia issues) and to identify strategies and tools relevant to the communities they will bring light to.
Final Remarks
As a student attending a state university in a country where all major bureaucratic, productive, and cultural units are around the capital city, Wikipedia changed the opportunities I had to access knowledge. For this reason, I have tried to give back to this amazing project and share the power I have had the privilege to cultivate. Working in an academic library, I have been able to fulfill this sense of purpose, thanks to the open hearts and minds of my university’s authorities and my colleagues who have supported and broadened the Wikipedia initiative in our library. More importantly, I have had the privilege to encounter others who fulfill this mission in other ways, and who have allowed me to understand the multiplicity of platforms from which we can reach the goal of open knowledge. I would like to finish this chapter with a photograph that illustrates these final thoughts (see figure 6). is photograph was uploaded to Wikimedia Commons during the Movimientos Sociales edit-a-thon. In it one can see people of different ages burning paper to illuminate the night of the 1968 protests in Mexico. I imagine some of them were using newspapers, others an old magazine. But that does not matter, because their faces are all lit. In a similar way, I believe it is less important which tools we choose to light up our “fires.” What matters is that if we understand librarianship as an opportunity to share the privilege of knowledge some of us have,
