He describes himself as a “history buff, a word nerd, a news junkie and an occasional pedant.”
His job this summer is to “foster collaboration between the Wikipedia community and the National Archives for their mutual benefit,” as Archivist of the United States David Ferriero put it, making the permanent records of the Archives available to the public through Wikipedia to reach a broader audience than ever before.
The Post chatted with McDevitt-Parks about his new job.
Q. Do a lot of institutions like the Archives have people like you on staff?
A. It is kind of novel. There are half a dozen Wikis in residence at cultural institutions. The first one was at the British Museum; he invented the whole concept. Since then, you’ve got them at Museu Picasso in Barcelona, the Children’s Museum in Indianapolis and, in the D.C. area, the Archives of American Art. Most of them have been volunteer positions. The National Archives actually put out a real job posting and I applied.
Q. How did you get started volunteering for Wikipedia?
A. That was more than six years ago. I started over the summer one year [in high school]. It wasn’t much of a big deal back then. I’m the kind of geek that wants to spend my time doing that kind of thing. I grew up in San Francisco, then moved to Phoenix for high school. Everybody contributes what they want to. I studied history as an undergraduate. I was interested in Latin America, in particular Chilean history and politicians.
People ask, how does it work if someone can just change [an entry]. It works in practice and not in theory. It’s a meritocracy. I like the term do-ocracy.
Q. What is your mission at the Archives?
A. I started last Monday. The bigger picture is it’s a collaboration between the Archives and Wikipedia. Both institutions are like-minded and have different approaches. The Archives is trying to enter the 21st century. If their documents can’t be accessed, there’s not really a point in preserving them. If you put something on the National Archives Web site, you might get 1,000 page views. Yesterday the main Wiki page got 12 million hits. The way I look at it, I’m trying to act as a catalyst to help improve the content on Wiki and help improve discoverability for the content. The idea is to bring the holdings outside our four walls and into the digital space.
Q.What did you do in your first week?
A. The first big thing we did was we brought some of Ansel Adams’s photographs to the public, which was a big deal. He took a series of photos for the National Park Service — he was commissioned. They’re in the public domain. But for the last 70 years they’ve been in an archive. They weren’t visible to the public except for people spending money to buy prints. So the Archives had the photos cataloged digitally. They were online but they were small-resolution photos. So we took these 200 photos and put them up on Wikipedia with the highest-resolution photos. Now millions of people can see them. You don’t even know you’re looking at a National Archives photo.
Also, did you know a photo of the first African American recruit for the U.S. Marine Corps is in the National Archives? We uploaded it. It’s brand new. I posted a challenge over the last couple of days on Wiki and someone created the entire article about him. It was totally spontaneous. It happened because the Archives had this great image.
Q. How will you choose which images and other documents to feature on Wikipedia?
A. The Archives has a daily feature on their Web site; each day the staff collects a document and they have a little blurb about the image. That’s what we want to do, to create challenges on Wikipedia with these. It’s a huge opportunity. Most of the photos the Archives tends to use are scaled down for the Web. But through the principles of public access we want to get the highest quality photos out there. I also have some things I personally think would be a good idea, but it also is about what the community wants. The Archives a while back determined the 100 milestone documents in history — that might be a place to start, too.
Q. Do you have other projects you hope to work on?
A. Another project is related to Wikisource. This is a sister project to Wikipedia. It deals with primary source material. They transcribe pages and scans of documents. That’s what I’m figuring out right now, which documents to tackle.
Q. So how would you describe the job so far?
A. It’s been a pretty intense first week and a half!
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.