Lorcan Dempsey

Lorcan Dempsey is a librarian who was a vice president and Chief Strategist of OCLC, where he worked for 21 years between 2001 and 2022.

[2] In August 2023, Dempsey joined the faculty at the University of Washington Information School as Professor of Practice and Distinguished Practitioner in Residence, teaching in its MLIS and undergraduate informatics programs.

[8] Dempsey maintains a blog[4] aimed at the wider library and digital information sectors, and tweets[9] on similar issues.

[20] Rather than continuing a tedious Wikipedia good/Wikipedia bad conversation, we should recognize the attraction it has as an addressable knowledge base, understand the variety of uses to which it is put, and remind folks of the judgments they need to make depending on those uses.In 2012 he noted: "Wikipedia is already an 'addressable knowledge base', which creates huge value.

Perhaps more importantly, Wikidata is an initiative to create a machine- and human-readable knowledge base of all the entities in Wikipedia and allow them to be augmented with further data and links.