The partnership is intended to benefit both Wikipedia and the library. Ben Vershbow, the manager of NYPL Labs, the library’s research and development unit, acknowledged “a relatively recent history of suspicion and antagonism” between libraries and open-source Internet databases, but he said he believed that relationship had healed. “We’re training our staff to learn best practices of Wikipedia, to add links and content, in appropriate ways, to articles which correspond with their areas of expertise,” he said.

Those links, which appear as references at the bottom of an entry, can be valuable. “We’ve found that we get a good amount of traffic from Wikipedia articles where someone has taken the time to add an appropriate link out to a primary resource that we have,” Mr. Vershbow said. “Some people talk about search engine optimization — making sure that your Web content is well-formed and can be found easily — but Wikipedia is its own discovery mechanism.”