BIPOC in the Built
While working with communities in the art, architecture, and planning professions across multiple U.S. institutions, Kai Alexis Smith, author of this chapter, noticed the lack of visibility of BIPOC contributors connected to the built environment in Wikipedia content and the lack of secondary source material of BIPOC individuals that didn’t work at large institutions or firms and/or weren’t “big names” in the profession. In summer 2020, Smith partnered with the student chapter of National Organization of Minority Architects and student group of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning’s Students of Color Committee with support from the School of Architecture and Planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology to launch the first BIPOC in the Built edit-a-thon. Inspired by Porter, Du Bois, and Gates, Jr., Smith is building a coalition of practitioners, scholars, and librarians around ways to ll these gaps with contributions to Wikipedia. Smith educates and organizes around this campaign in the United States and abroad.
The Future Is Black
Search engines and other technologies also create barriers to sources in libraries and archives, and equitable access to information in person and online. Digital access is lauded as the great equalizer, but it simply emphasizes the problem of unequal access. Many sources are behind paywalls, and computer scientist and digital activist Joy Buolamwini and cofounder and codirector of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry Safiya Umoja Noble (2018) both document that the algorithms behind commercial search engines like Google are biased and reinforce racism (Lee, 2020; Tucker, 2017). This extends to the technology used to create content added to Wikipedia, Wikidata, and WikiCommons.
Cofounder of Wikipedia Jimmy Wales said the aim of Wikipedia is to provide access to the sum of all human knowledge (“Wikipedia,” 2020). Wikipedia is a community-based platform created in Western society, which is organized and governed with white supremacy.
