WASHINGTON—The National Archives has appointed its first "Wikipedian in Residence" to help connect with the Wikipedia community.
The Archives announced Wednesday that Dominic McDevitt-Parks was hired to help shape the Internet's leading online encyclopedia. He is a graduate student in history and archives management at Simmons College in Boston.
The paid summer intern position is based at the Archives II facility in College Park, Md.
The Archives says McDevitt-Parks has more than seven years of Wikipedia editing experience. His job will be to foster collaboration between the Wikipedia community and the National Archives. That could include using some of Wikipedia's tools for ongoing digitization projects at the archives.
McDevitt-Parks says Wikipedia as the ultimate public history project, and he describes himself as a history buff, news junkie and "word nerd."
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Dominic McDevitt-Parks speaks during a January 2011  training event. 
The National Archives at , Maryland, known informally as Archives II, was built due to space constraints at the main building in Washington, D.C..
Dominic McDevitt-Parks, a prolific contributor to Wikipedia and a graduate student in history and archives management, agreed to answer a few questions about his new role as "" at the US .

"Wikipedians in Residence" are volunteers placed with institutions, such as museums and libraries, to facilitate use of those institutions' resources on Wikipedia.

According to a  report, 42 percent of Americans use Wikipedia as an online source of information. The online, collaborative encyclopedia boasts more than 3.5 million articles in English and versions in over 250 languages. Given the website's vast readership, the  has proclaimed himself "a big fan of Wikipedia" and emphasizes the need for the National Archives to work with the project. The Archives posted the internship listing in March, expressing its desire for an employee who "will work as a community coordinator and strengthen the relationship between the Archives and the Wikipedian community through a range of activities".

McDevitt-Parks, who describes himself as a "history buff, a word nerd, a news junkie and an occasional pedant," is a 24-year-old graduate student at  in Boston. On Wikipedia, he has contributed for more than seven years under the username "Dominic", his work focusing mostly on Latin American history.

He began his work at the Archives in late May, and since then he has undertaken numerous projects, including uploading onto Wikipedia 200 photos taken by  for the . Although those photos have always remained in the public domain, accessing their high-definition versions could be problematic. Researchers who wanted to view the files had to visit the Archives facilities in , Maryland.

McDevitt-Parks is also preparing a "" on Wikipedia, where works featured as "Today's Document" on the Archives' website are also the main focus of newly written or expanded encyclopedia articles displayed on Wikipedia's home page. The first — and so far only — winner of the challenge was the Wikipedia article "", which incorporated an Archives-held photo of the first African-American recruit to the . Before the challenge, according to McDevitt-Parks, "a thorough history of desegregation in the U.S. Marines didn't exist in Wikipedia's knowledge ecosystem. The topic wasn't totally ignored, but simply split among related entries; a devoted, focused article never existed solely in its own right."

The "Wikipedian in Residence" position falls within the Archives' social media staff within the Open Government division of Information Services, since the institution's goal is to distribute as much content to the widest audience possible. The internship is 40 hours per week from mid-May to late August.