I am taking on the article on TRAC (Trustworthy Repository Audit and Certification). It’s just a stub of an article of interest (but not much) of the WikiProjects Libraries and WikiProject Digital Preservation working groups. What I find interesting about it is that trustworthiness ought to be of concern but isn’t. Why not? It is deemed of Low Importance to the WikiProjecs Libraries group, and unrated beyond “stub” by the WikiProject Digital Preservation Group. Despite its stub status, TRAC is still more documented on Wiki than other measures of trustworthiness such as the Nestor system (an alternative) or the Trusted Digital Repository (TDR) Checklist (its replacement). It also lacks any named person as a major contributor; instead, it was developed in committee by organizations (OCLC and CRL/NARA). Last, it really needs a section on how TRAC has been implemented and adapted in real life contexts. There are a number of scholarly articles that explain how different repositories and scholars have received and interpreted TRAC (including this one by class favorites E. Yakel and A. Kriesberg!)

Ironically, the TRAC article itself has a trustworthiness problem. The strongest and most useful part of the article appears to be not its text, but a infographic illustrating the “family tree” of standards to which TRAC belongs. It clearly and succinctly lays out the influences on and of TRAC. That is problematic in and of itself because it was created by a user without any references or guide. A further look at the references also shows a shallow pool of sources that rely on institutional blogs as citations. The information doesn’t look wrong per se, but it does not conform to the standards of quality reference that Wikipedia lays out.

Coming from a history background, it feels a bit off to rate primary sources, such as the institutional web site or blogs describing the process of making the standard, as lesser than secondary sources. However, this article illustrates why building directly off of the raw evidence is problematic: it necessitates analysis that is unvetted (like the TRAC family tree). Citing academic publications potentially insulates Wikipedia from biased analysis and misinformation.

I’m still unsure of the approach I should take in expanding this article. For example, CRL (Center for Research Libraries) has the full checklist on its website; should I cite it? On one hand, it’s literally the most direct piece of information a user could find to let them know what TRAC is. On the other hand, it seems to violate Wikipedia’s preference against using institutional websites as sources. Another tack that I am debating is creating pages for Nestor and TDR so that TRAC could be contextualized more fully. However, I don’t know if that goes beyond the desired ambit of assignment, or if there is a good reason why this hasn’t been done by the invested WikiProject groups. I think I still need to do more to familiarize myself with the topic and the page’s culture before I feel comfortable mucking around with it.