Remembering Negro Creek on Wikipedia
As part of our goal to raise awareness of the history of Negro Creek, we determined that a good step would be to publish a wikipedia article. This makes its history far more accessible. All someone would need to do is do a Google search; Wikipedia articles often appear in the first couple of results.
A wikipedia page also brings more visibility across Google.
For example, when someone googles “Africville”, not only does Google search show results, it also pulls up a nifty little text box on the right, which summarizes content from wikipedia.
In many ways, Wikipedia is wonderful. We love it. It is an ecosystem of knowledge production and sharing that operates on a radical humility: it embraces continual change, is built and maintained by an open community, and acknowledges that it won’t get everything right on the first go.
However, there are numerous barriers to publishing an article on a marginalized history, which is a result of the site’s (acknowledged but nonetheless present) systemic and design biases. The two largest demographics of Wikipedia editors are mid-twenties and retired men. In 2011, only 9% of editors were women.
The Negro Creek article was difficult to write, in a way that highlighted Wikipedia’s biases. For an article to be accepted, it has to be (1) noteworthy, (2) verifiable , and (3) written to conform to the website’s strict manual of style.
The noteworthiness of an article is balanced by what Wikipedia calls an article’s notability criteria. That is informed by whether the content of the article has received significant coverage, and/or is mentioned in other Wikipedia articles. This is tricky since the history of Negro Creek has been systematically excluded or erased from the area’s historical narratives, and the same is true of other many Black history sites in Canada. This is complicated further by the verifiability criteria - every fact in an article has to trace back to a ‘verifiable’ source. At present there is one academic paper published about the community, a dozen archived newspaper articles from the 1990s, and a wealth of oral history. The latter is not accepted as source material on the site, and I was worried that the archived newspaper articles wouldn’t pass verifiability criteria either as they weren’t available online (but rather collected and donated to the local museum by a community member 20 years ago).
Finally, Wikipedia’s manual of style is precise and picky - many articles are inevitably rejected for failing to conform to it. While I had the time and educational background to dive in and learn it, that privilege is not shared by many members of my community.
These difficulties stalled me for months. It was only much later that I realized how silly I had been to write this as if I was the first person to struggle through getting marginalized knowledge on the site. A quick google search pointed me to Art+Feminism, an organization which aims to bring invisibilized knowledges onto the world’s largest encyclopedia. It had helpful explanations of Wikipedia’s manual of style, citation guides, do’s and don’ts; all in language that was accessible to the wiki-uninitiated. Their guides saved me hours.
In the end, it took months of writing, revision, and worrying that my draft would get permanently rejected before I was ready to submit. After sending the draft to descendants of the settlement for their final review, I then published it. To my surprise, it was approved within a few days - and underwent minor and good-faith revisions by anonymous Wikipedia community members. It is now accessible here, and to my joy - a Google search now brings up a little box on the side!
From here, I hope the page grows - through contributions by me and the broader community. There are many other marginalized knowledges that have yet to be given space on Wikipedia, but we’ll keep chipping away at what we can.
