[The greatest exposé ever written about The Pretend Encyclopedia:
“‘Wikipedia on Race’: My American Renaissance Exposé.”]
Photo: Screenshot, Wikipedia.org"
Re-posted by Nicholas Stix
Let me get this right. Rancic is holding the generosity of white American socialists and communists against them, as if the same people funding The Pretend Encyclopedia were discriminating against would-be black contributors? My heart just breaks over such… poetic justice!
Can “Black Wikipedia” Take Off Like “Black Twitter”?
Gatekeepers of black culture and history would like it to.
By Carla Murphy
Feb 4, 2015
Color Lines
This coming weekend, in honor of Black History Month, modern-day griots of black history and cultures are holding Wikipedia editing meet-ups to diversify the site's pool of volunteer editors and add more content about the African diaspora.
[Scholars are not “griots.” Griots are story-tellers, for whom the truth is irrelevant. On the other hand, for Wikipediots, the truth is irrelevant. And why would there need to be public events, in order to get additional people to participate in an entirely voluntary activity?]
There is certainly a demand: Of the more than 100 million edits made last year to Wikipedia, Ferguson protests ranked among the most edited topic. In 2013, "race and intelligence" was one of the top 10 most controversial articles--ahead of Christianity--on the English-language version of the site. And the person most likely involved not only in global edit wars over race and racism but in the daily drip of crowd-sourced Wiki knowledge is a "technically inclined white male."
[The need, then is to stop “technically inclined white male[s]” from contributing to The Pretend Encyclopedia.]
Khalil Muhammad, director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, calls Wikipedia a vital resource. "[Wikipedia] is for [millennials], the source of information that they go to," Muhammad recently told Huff Post Live. "Therefore, if they are looking up Ida B. Wells and Ida B. Wells isn't there, then Ida B. Wells doesn't count."
["[Wikipedia] is for [millennials]…” What did he really say, before the writer changed it? “Young black folks”? And what kind of person calls a fraudulent “encyclopedia” “a vital resource”?]
A household name to anyone with Internet access, Wikipedia, a project of the nonprofit Wikimedia, is the sixth-largest website in the world. Over the past 14 years, according to the all-things-digital site Mashable, it "has re-shaped the knowledge industry." [That’s dreadful news.] Who doesn't read a Wiki entry at least once a week? Even Maira Liriano, associate chief librarian in the Schomburg's research and reference division browses it. And that's "usually when I discover that something is missing," she says via e-mail.
Established articles on, say, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. or Langston Hughes don't worry Liriano; "those entries get edited constantly," she says. But in addition to those who're simply absent, Liriano says, "I'm more concerned about lesser-known figures that get shortchanged by brief and incomplete entries, people like Lawrence D. Reddick, King's first biographer and the second Schomburg curator, or Aaron Douglas, the leading painter of the Harlem Renaissance."
Wikipedia doesn't track frequent contributors by race. But, "it's a known fact inside our movement that black people are not well represented within the Wiki community," says longtime editor Milos Rancic via e-mail from Serbia. (Indeed, Wikipedia has a detailed "systemic bias" article on its demographics.) Rancic, a former president of Wikimedia Serbia, one of the organization's early chapters, has volunteered with Wikimedia for 11 of its 14 years in existence.
[“[B]lack people are not well represented within the Wiki community” because they’re too lazy to be bothered. As with most things, they choose to live off of the labor and money of white men.]
"If the situation wasn't so striking, I wouldn't recognize it as a problem," says Rancic who has consistently noted the lack of black editors--African-Americans in particular--at annual global Wikimedia events and hackathons. The dearth of black American editors is particularly striking given that the United States is Wikimedia's top source of private donations--$24.5 million in 2012 compared to just $2 million from the No. 2 donor, the United Kingdom. And nearly 20 percent of page edits originate in the United States, three times more than the U.K., the second country on the list.
[Let me get this straight. Rancic is holding the generosity of white American socialists and communists against them, as if the same people funding The Pretend Encyclopedia were discriminating against would-be black contributors? My heart just breaks over such… poetic justice!]
Several "editathons"--a Wiki world phenomenon of unrelated [?] editor meet-ups that began in 2009--are scheduled for this weekend. Rancic came together with AfroCrowd's Alice Backer to launch a Black WikiHistory Editathon at Brooklyn Public Libraries [sic]. The Schomburg's Black Lives Matter Editathon for amateur documentarians of black history and culture has reached capacity. [Thus is the Schomburg Library, a public agency, paid for largely by white taxpayers, a black Nazi operation. And were these “meet-ups” racially segregated? It sounds like it. That would be illegal. But what do blacks care about the law? ] Others are also planned for Nashville and Washington, D.C. Backer's Brooklyn Library [sic] event appears to have a global black diaspora bent, in particular.
For Backer, a central aim of the project is to give people of color [read: black] opportunities to do more than participate in and consume social media. She wants people of color to create and interact with the technology itself. [How can you give colored people “opportunities to do more,” when they already have unlimited opportunities?]
"This exposure, especially with the younger folks, could inspire some to take a closer look at STEM in the long run," she says.
[Non sequitur alert! How on earth did she get from Black Lives Matter to STEM? And how could people with IQs of 70-100 contribute anything to STEM fields? And why would the few blacks with intelligence sufficient to contribute to STEM fields need black supremacist imbeciles to get them interested? The only tie-in I can see, would be in her hope to inspire low-IQ blacks to extort money out of companies and agencies in STEM fields.]
Librarian Liriana [“Liriana” or “Liriano”?] has a wish list of Wikipedia entries she'd like to see added to or improved this month. They include unsung figures such as dancer and educator, Dr. Glory Van Scott, Violette Neatly Anderson, the first black woman lawyer to argue a case before the U.S. Supreme Court, South African political prisoner Molefe Pheto and novelist Charles A. Smythwick, who wrote a critically acclaimed novel in 1954 but then disappeared.
[Charles A. Smythwick didn’t “disappear.” He got caught in a massive conspiracy to commit tax fraud, and went to prison! Is “librarian” Liriana/Liriano an ignoramus, or a liar? The following images come form me, not from this article.]
Like Black Twitter, "it would be great to have a "Black Wikipedia" phenomenon," Liriano [?] says. "Perhaps it will become the next big thing."
4 comments:
I'm actually confused. If these people have a list of character they wish had more of a Wikipedia profile, why don't they just edit the wikipedia profiles? Seriously, what is the problem here?
You’re absolutely right. Maybe they’re just too lazy, stupid, and entitled to do the work themselves?
It's about complaining. When it comes to actually doing the grunt work, well, that's another thing altogether. The first phase is to identify and then to complain about something. The next phase is to demand that mo' money be sent to black groups xxxx so as to rectify the situation, to close the gap and such. Always wait for the money pitch.
@Cingoldby -> why? Because it's all about the negro "looks at me!" Negroes are *desperate* for attention from whitey. If they just did the entries, how would that get them any attention and (even more precious) recognition from whites?
Post a Comment