A low-stakes way to support Black lives is to measure race and ethnicity among the community as they do gender.
Another idea for change is to update Wikipedia’s Five Pillars policy, which have not been changed since the platform was founded. If the community and the Foundation are committed to change and not claiming neutrality, they can benefit from the principles of the Design Justice Network, a community of design practitioners and community organizers that work in social justice (“Design Justice Network,” n.d.). The principles would be one framework that could be used to revise the pillars of Wikipedia and invite BIPOC into the room to redesign this community encyclopedia. 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. And to develop, together, principles that might help practitioners avoid what is often an unwitting production of existing equalities” (Guzman, 2020, para. 8). More examples include decentering Western white sources as the only “authoritative” sources and inviting BIPOC to the table to reimagine the sources they deem authoritative for usage in Wikipedia and for the Foundation to support more Black leaders and information activists in their efforts to make Wikipedia more equitable through grant funding.
Conclusion
Black people live with a cognitive dissonance within the diaspora between burning the house (system) down or grabbing a hose and putting the fire out (Belafonte, 2008). 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
