Page:Wikipedia and Academic Libraries.djvu/110

Rh creating knowledges, and partnering with libraries and archives in different ways. The following groups are a small sum of all of the projects and leaders in the movement to shape a more inclusive Wikipedia.

Black Lunch Table

Artists and educators Jina Valentine and Heather Hart founded Black Lunch Table (BLT) in 2014. They attended an artists’ retreat and quickly realized that they were the only Black people there, so they decided to sit with one another at lunch, which inspired the name Black Lunch Table (H. Hart, personal communication, August 25, 2020). They came to editing Wikipedia in the late 2000s, but Hart was briefly deterred when an article she wrote about a musician was speedily deleted (H. Hart, personal communication, August 25, 2020). Valentine and Hart did not try again until around 2014 when they contacted well-known artists to make them aware that they had no presence on the Wikipedia. Valentine and Hart further educated and encouraged the Black arts community around the impact of editing. Soon after, they hosted their first BLT edit-a-thon at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and they have been organizing these events ever since. Hart and Valentine understand the lack of visibility in Wikipedia is not the only place where Black artists’ stories are not readily accessible. To add breadth and depth to oral histories, they decided to interview and document the work of Black artists through their creation of BLT and a partnership with the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Hart and Valentine have partnered with both museums and libraries nationally and abroad.

Wiki Indaba

In 2013, Wiki Indaba started as the first Wikipedia regional conference on the continent of Africa (D. Ndubane, personal communication, September 18, 2020). This conference is an official Wikimedia-funded conference that aims to build community around African Wikipedians and to increase growth and coverage of African Wikimedia Projects. Now it has grown to include other African countries and the African diaspora. While the conference itself doesn’t partner with libraries and archives, the affliates do run partnered programs, which include