Kai Alexis Smith

“ Black Wikipedians, White supremacy, Wikipedia, Libraries and archives.
Introduction
There is no way to talk about liberational value if you don’t address the needs communities are facing. LGBT and black and indigenous communities—we need to have them as central. We need to center on justice and not be afraid of politics. Archives have never been neutral—they are the creation of human beings, who have politics in their nature. ”

“ There is a great deal of work to be done addressing white supremacy in libraries and archives. Librarians and archivists partially contribute to inequities in source materials and by defining authority. Black-led projects have been doing important and critical work around information activism connected to the African diaspora in Wikipedia. Where there is no content, some of these projects are creating it and opening conversations around authority of sources including marginalized communities’ definition of what an authoritative source is. ”

“ Within Wikipedia, libraries, and archives, personal values and behaviors have to match. Prior to COVID19 and during the pandemic, Black Wikipedian leaders, organizers, and information activists are partnering, organizing within, and creating new knowledge resources to make information more equitable and accessible through Wikipedia, libraries, and archives. We are at a pivotal time in history as we live through two pandemics that are colliding to impact civil rights and change information systems and hopefully global systems as we know them. ”

“ Black women face both marginalization and tokenization in white spaces like Wikipedia; however, they are often at the forefront of organizing projects and communities platforming BIPOC voices in the Wikipedia movement. After experiencing erasure and systemic disparities on Wikipedia, these leaders still decided to organize, fill gaps by creating knowledges, and partnering with libraries and archives in different ways. The following groups are a small sum of all of the projects and leaders in the movement to shape a more inclusive Wikipedia. ”

“ Some, especially Black and Indigenous people, are facing other storms on top of two pandemics: systemic racism and COVID-19. Just a week after George Floyd’s death on June 3, 2020, the Wikimedia Foundation’s executive director Katherine Mayer and the chief operating officer Janeen Uzzell released a statement titled, “We Stand for Racial Justice” where the Foundation committed to supporting Black community members, readers, and editors and the movement for Black Lives (Maher & Uzzell, 2020) . ”

“ Educator and founder of Design Justice Network Sasha Costanza-Chock (2020) advocates for design liberation and exclaimed that concepts can help people “move beyond the frames of social impact design or design for good or human centered design to challenge people working on design processes to think about how good intentions are not enough to make sure design processes and practices are really tools for liberation. ”

“ Roots in White Supremacy: Libraries and Archives
The roots of many professions in the United States are in white supremacy. Librarianship in the United States is no different. Many library scholars, such as Hathcock (2015) , Bourg (2014) , Espinal (2001) , Galvan (2015) , Hall (2012) , and Honma (2005) , have documented and highlighted this in literature. Scholar and activist April Hathcock (2015) described the invisible normativity of whiteness in librarianship’s origins as “a fundamental role in the profession from the start. ”

“ In 1962 at a conference to launch the encyclopedia, Du Bois expanded on his grand visionary project, “The encyclopedia hopes to eliminate the artificial boundaries created on this continent by colonial masters. Designations such as ‘British Africa,’ ‘French Africa,’ ‘Black Africa,’ ‘Islamic Africa’ too often serve to keep alive differences which in large part have been imposed on Africans by outsiders. ”

“ Therefore, there is no data to show how editors from Africa and the African diaspora are represented among those who make the encyclopedia. A low-stakes way to support Black lives is to measure race and ethnicity among the community as they do gender. ”