The web has a humongous amount of information. But still, there are information it doesn't yet have, and many of them came from books.
Traditionally, people scan papers, documents and books, when the information contained within couldn't be easily re-written, or have historical value, for example, The Internet Archive has done a great job in archiving books, and here, it's partnering with Wikipedia to give it a hand.
The Internet Archive which has a goal to give "universal access to all knowledge", has linked 130,000 citations on various articles on Wikipedia, to 50,000 of its digital book repository, with language editions including English, Greek, and Arabic.
According to the Internet Archive on its blog post:
The blog post also tell one of the motivations of this partnership.
The Internet Archive mentioned Carmen Steele, a neighbor of librarian and Internet Archive founder Bewster Kahle, who said that "at school I am allowed to start with Wikipedia, but I need to quote the original books. This allows me to do this even in the middle of the night."
In how Internet Archive's book referencing method works, is by directing users of Wikipedia that are looking for citation of books, to the page inside the digital version of the book provided by the Internet Archive.
In an example, the Internet Archive gave an example of a Wikipedia article on Martin Luther King, Jr that cites the book To Redeem the Soul of America, by Adam Fairclough.
With the partnership, that citation links directly to page 299 inside the digital version of the book.
There are 66 cited and linked books on that article alone.
This way, people using Wikipedia can see references of information, directly from sources that haven't been fully documented on the World Wide Web.
From there, readers can see and read a couple of pages in the preview of the book.
And if they want to read further, they can borrow the digital copy using Controlled Digital Lending in a way that’s analogous to how they borrow physical books from their local library.
The Archive says it’s hoping digitize at least 4 million more books "within the next several years."
Kahle hinted that this collaboration might be part of a larger effort to incorporate digitized book references into other sites, saying that: