Page:Wikipedia and Academic Libraries.djvu/305

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Yon and Willey

as an indicator that implementing changes in older established library standards such as MARC, which has undergone several changes and updates since it was developed in the 1960s, may require more deliberation and testing than changes to a relatively new system such as Wikipedia (developed in 2001). It may also be an indication that this is a larger conceptual step for cataloging systems than it is for Wikipedia.

A similarity between the two systems is that both Library of Congress and Wikipedia require citation of evidence to show why a person is described using an ethnic or racial group in some instances but not in others. In Wikipedia, the List of African-American writers includes a note to consult the Who is African American section (which has undergone several renamings since a section by that exact name was last present in 2012) of the African Americans article (Wikipedia contributors, 2020c) and the individual pages should include citations to reliable resources justifying any claims of race or ethnicity. is can, however, lead to cases such as Stanley Bennett Clay (Wikipedia contributors, 2020d) where they are included in the List of African-American writers (Wikipedia contributors, 2020a), but their page does not describe them as Black, African American, or any equivalent term, and they are not listed in the category: African-American writers page (Wikipedia contributors, 2020e). PCC policy also requires that NARs include a MARC 670 Source Data Found field for demographic information included in the record at the time of creation; however, catalogers can edit bibliographic records and include demographic information in the MARC 386 Creator/Contributor Characteristics field without the requirement to include citations showing how they reached that decision, as shown in figure 1. Therefore, both institutions can be said to have requirements that users cite information supporting any addition of ethnic group information to certain records, and practices that specifically associate individuals with an ethnic group, but do not require citations to convey that information.

Additionally, there are differences in the structure of the LCDGT and Wikipedia lists. The LCDGT are generally broken down to a single facet, because they are intended to be used in individually repeatable