Black History Month edit-a-thons tackle Wikipedia’s multicultural gaps

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Black History Month is celebrated annually in the United States in February, to commemorate the history of the African diaspora. For this occasion, Wikipedians worked together to honor black history and to address Wikipedia's multicultural gaps in the encyclopedia, hosting Wikipedia edit-a-thons throughout the United States, from February 1 to 28, 2015.

Black WikiHistory Month Edit-a-thons include:

• Edit-a-thon at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem
• AfroCROWD Edit-a-thon at the Brooklyn Public Library
• Events at Howard University in D.C.
• Edit-a-thon at NPR Central headquarters in D.C.
• Events at SUNY Purchase and Nashville

Maira Liriano, one of the key institutional organizers of the #BlackLives Matter Edit-a-thon in New York, summarized the goals of this project to to reporters at Innovation Trail: "There is a bias and a lack of people of color involved in creating Wikipedia and many subjects are also missing from Wikipedia. So events like today are in part to make people aware of that and then to empower them and give them the information they need to correct that bias."

To kick off this project, the New York #BlackLivesMatter Wikipedia Edit-a-thon was held on Saturday February 7th at the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, New York. This event took place in the Aaron Douglas Reading Room of the Jean Blackwell Hutson Research and Reference Division of the library. Satellite #BlackLivesMatter Edit-a-thons were held on February 7th at the SUNY Purchase College Library and the Nashville Public Library, and the AfroCROWD initiative kickoff event was held on February 7th and 8th at the Brooklyn Public Library Central Branch. Wikimedia D.C. also co-organized three events including: the First STEM Heroes Edit-a-thon at the White House and the NPR Black History Month Edit-a-thon on February 24th, as well as the Black History Month Edit-a-thon at Howard University on February 19th.

Libraries proved to be ideal places for these edit-a-thons. At the Aaron Douglas Reading Room, librarians located reference texts and provided suggestions for further research. A list of Wikipedia articles to edit and create was prepared for the Schomburg Center Edit-a-thon and used by many of the satellite events.

These events received wide press coverage from diverse news sources, including:

The #BlackLivesMatter Edit-a-thon at the Schomburg Center was organized in collaboration with NYPL, the Metropolitan New York Library Council, Wikimedia NYC, Wireless Harlem, and the West Harlem Art Fund for the Black WikiHistory Month outreach campaign.

Over 50 experienced and beginning Wikipedians attended throughout the day, and almost every seat was filled.

The New York Edit-a-thon was an overwhelming success, which led to the creation of 19 new Wikipedia articles, including:

• Leonard Harper, producer/stager/choreographer in New York City during the Harlem Renaissance.
• Judy Dearing, American costume designer, dancer, and choreographer.
• Mildred Blount, American milliner, costume designer, and clothier.
• National Black Theatre, a non-profit cultural and educational corporation, and community-based theatre company.
• Ruth Jean Baskerville Bowen, first black female booking agent and the president of Queen Booking Corporation
• Harlem Book Fair, the United State’s largest African-American book fair.
• Maritcha Remond Lyons, educator, civic leader, feminist, and writer from Brooklyn, NY; first African American to graduate from Providence High School in Rhode Island in 1869.

On February 7th and 8th in Brooklyn, kickoff events took place for a new initiative, the Afro Free Culture Crowdsourcing Wikimedia (AfroCROWD), which seeks to increase the number of people of African descent who actively partake in the Wikimedia and free knowledge, culture and software movements. The workshops were open to all Afrodescendants, including but not limited to individuals who self-identify as African, African-American, Afro-Latino, Biracial, Black, Black-American, Caribbean, Garifuna, Haitian or West Indian.

Events were held at the Brooklyn Public Library. Wikipedia trainings and overviews were given in some of the many languages spoken by our target population: French, Garifuna, Haitian Kreyòl, Igbo, Yoruba, Spanish and Twi. Affiliate project pages such as WikiProject Haiti were also introduced -- and organizers announced the new Garifuna language Wikipedia incubator, the fruit of a collaboration between AfroCROWD and Wikimedia NYC.

Afrocrowd's next 3 events will be HaitiCROWD on 3/14, AfricaCROWD on 4/4 and AfrolatinoCROWD on 4/12. HaitiCROWD will focus on resources in the Haitian Kreyòl, French and English Wikipedias, as well as growing the Haitian Wikipedia, which is now available free of charge to many Haitians in Haiti through the Digicel/Wikimedia Foundation Wikipedia Zero initiative. The workshop series will culminate in an edit-a-thon on June 20th at the Brooklyn Public Library.

Here is a visual recap of the AfroCROWD kickoff event.

Three Black History Month events were held in Washington D.C.; one at Howard University on February 19th, as well as the STEM Heroes Edit-a-thon at the White House (learn more) and another one at the National Public Radio (NPR) headquarters on Tuesday, February 24th.

The Howard University event led to the following additions to Wikipedia:

• Charles Henry Thompson. Added photograph.
• Jacob Carruthers. Added bibliography
• Violette Neatley Anderson. Added image.
• Houston Conwill. Entry expanded.
• Farish Street. New article created.

A #BlackLivesMatter Edit-a-thon was also held at SUNY Purchase, Westchester County, NY on Saturday February 7th.

We wish to thank all participants who made these edit-a-thons possible! It's really exciting to see so many new editors join forces to help fill the multicultural gaps in Wikipedia -- and honor black history together.

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• It's nice to see such programs. I wonder if Asian editors or editors with an interest in Asia would be willing to do something similar. The dead white men bias remains too prominent in Wikipedia. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 06:01, 6 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

• Crisco 1492 I agree that a true encyclopedia must be as unbiased as possible in its coverage and obviously this isn't the case of wikipedia yet. However, this bias is not voluntary but rather comes from a bias in who edits wikipedia. In turn this reflects variations in the general level of education (especially higher education) among minorities, due I believe to both history and societal constraints. It is important to encourage editing on non-"dead white men" subjects but the most important thing to do is really to encourage non-white-men people to edit; the article bias will then disappear. This holds true for black history, articles on women etc. Wikipedia suffers from at least another pervasive bias receiving far less attention, the named topic bias. Iry-Hor (talk) 13:58, 6 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

• It's not only a matter of getting non-White men to edit, but getting interested parties in general. Although I am pretty much the stereotypical Wikipedian, my own area of expertise (both professionally and on Wikipedia) is Indonesian literature, history, and cinema; hence, our coverage of that is generally better than the related subjects in neighboring nations. My ethnic background has little to do with it. I'm not saying that everybody can write equally well on everything, but that interest in a subject is more vital in getting coverage than editors' own ethnic backgrounds. One of the nice things about the editathons was that they drew together people from all backgrounds with a shared interest in black history, to get better coverage of this important but underrepresented field. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 14:45, 6 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

• Crisco 1492 Well I assumed that non-white-men would edit mostly on other subjects that those which interest white-men. Of course this is not a rule: the variablity of interests in any important population of editors guarantees a large coverage. For example your editing of Indonesian literature while being (from what I gathered on your user page) a white(?) male Canadian demonstrates this point. Yet it is the average behavior that matters the most when it comes to covering extensive topics, such as Black History: on average people edit what interest them and, on average, populations with different cultures tend to be interested in different things (their own culture in particular). Thus, while editathons are important in improving under-represented topics of importance and creating momentum for these, I doubt that they change our average behavior. Therefore, while I would like to spend a day improving articles on Black History (under guidance given my ignorance of the subject), I would still likely spend the 364 other days working on my usual set of interests. Hence, I believe that attracting editors from minorities is likely to increase the absolute number of editors whose average interest is the under-represented subject in question. Iry-Hor (talk) 15:21, 7 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
• Agree, if we look on average, and we should definitely be increasing the number of non-White editors, both men and women, no matter what. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 17:03, 7 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]