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Black Lives Matter on Wikipedia

tschuetz

I'm currently learning more about Wikipedia for another course project, mostly focused on how I could use it to teach undergraduates. I've used Wikipedia countless times but never looked further into how the contribution process actually works, nor did I ever contribute anything. Below are a few brief observations about BLM on Wikipedia: 

Every article has a "talk" page where users discuss changes. As events are unfolding, there are various discussions about the Black Lives Matter entry. For example: should there be separate entries for BLM as an organization and social movement (like Black Panther Party and Black Power Movement). Currently, COVID-19 is only mentioned once, in a sub-section on protest in New Zealand.

In addition to the talk page, there is an entire WikiProject, a sort of overview site to cover activity about BLM. Throughout June 2020, they are hosting an edit-a-thon to improve articles related to BLM, racism, racial justice, and policing. 

Sidenote: there is also an entry for #AllLivesMatter – which according to the talk page was split off sometime in 2016. The "criticism" section opens with a reference to David Theo Goldberg (in our department here at UC Irvine).

As you can tell from my notes, I'm still very new (and slightly overwhelmed) by the different layers of participation. Since I will keep learning more, we could think about whether and if our own transnational project could contribute to discussions (see the WikiProject site for COVID-19). 

TS: COVID-19 Biography

tschuetz

I am a Ph.D. student in Cultural Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. My email is tschuetz@uci.edu.

I have been working on a series of projects that could intersect with the COVID-19 work (running on Disaster STS Network or other PECE instances):

  • Quotidian Anthropocenes – uses a similarr cross-scalar analytics and place focus
  • Visualizing Toxic Place – could help to analyze and create ethnographically rich COVID-19 visuals
  • Environmental Injustice – could be supplemented with COVID-19 disaster case studies (beyond its current focus on California) and other teaching interventions that

I also edit the monthly newsletter for the PECE platform, which can be used to feature COVID-19 project content. You can sign up here to receive the newspaper. 

Cutting across the COVID-19 project (and the others above) is my interest in "archiving for the Anthropocene." I ask what kind of new knowledge and data infrastructures that is necessary to support civic capacity in different places. I currently focus on sites of the Quotidian Anthropocene project, including Taiwan, Germany and Turkey.