Westernized people designed the systems that govern Wikipedia; therefore, Wikipedia is awed and a reflection of society. Wikipedia inherently has white supremacy woven throughout its systems and governance. “While we try to be neutral our work on Wikipedia will always involve bias. Bias can appear in many areas like Wikipedia’s policies, practices, content, and participation,” qualitative research analyst Jackie Koerner (2019) wrote in the article entitled “Wikipedia Has a Bias Problem,” Bias leads to barriers to inclusion. These barriers mean imbalanced participation and distorted knowledge. Most recognizable barriers relate to contributor retention, emerging communities, and content exclusion” (p. 4). In essence, Wikipedia has the same problems experienced in the fields of librarianship and archival science.
Wikipedia was not designed for Black people and they were not involved in its creation. In fact, the system of white supremacy is working the way it was designed, to marginalize dissenting opinions that are critical of the Wikipedia platform. Some examples of this include the exclusion of sources from African, Black, and Indigenous communities that are deemed authoritative by these very communities. Wikipedia relies on Western media sources that often negatively document Black people, exploiting and profiting off of their suffering (Kulaszewicz, 2015; Sancto, 2018). Western news sources also have origins in white supremacy (Gonzalez & Torres, 2011; Mathis, 2018). There is often the rapid deletion of articles on Black topics (D. Cuba, personal communication, September 11, 2020). This creates a barrier for editors learning to contribute to the Wikipedia platform and often deters them from the desire to continue contributing.
There is much more to be done both by accomplices or collaborators for Black Wikipedians and information equity in libraries and archives in general. This brings us back to what the Wikipedia Foundation can do to provide equitable solutions for Black editors on Wikipedia. The Foundation periodically surveys contributors, among other things, to measure gender (“Community Insights/2018 Report—Meta,” n.d.). However, the survey does not identify race, ethnicity, or people from marginalized communities within the Wikipedia community. Therefore, there is no data to show how editors from Africa and the African diaspora are represented among those who make the encyclopedia.
