Page:Wikipedia and Academic Libraries.djvu/120

Rh Keywords

LGBTQ+, Queering Wikipedia, Liaison librarianship.

Introduction

The cultural capital of Wikipedia is such that existence within it denotes a level of power and importance. The phenomenon of considering something or someone truly significant or insignificant, through its presence or absence on Wikipedia, can be a damaging one.

—Kelly Doyle (Minding the Gaps, Ch. 5, Leveraging

Wikipedia: Connecting Communities of Knowledge)

Communities must be represented in the world’s premier information source—and more importantly in their native language. Kelly Doyle (2018) reminds us that Wikipedia is power, existing or not existing in Wikipedia is a cultural statement, and she alludes to Wikipedia having authority—if your community exists in it, it is important; if it does not exist in it, it is not important. Take the francophone nation of Québec as an example. Québec is Canada’s only francophone, or French-speaking, province, with a population of 8.5 million people out of an estimated 38 million people in all of Canada (Statistique Canada, n.d.). Of Canada’s 10.9 million francophones, 7.8 million (71 percent) live in Québec (Quéméner et al., 2019). On October 14, 2020, 1.37 percent of articles in the WikipédiaFR were linked to Québec’s Wikipedia Portal, 9.03 percent were to the U.S. portal, and 16.97 percent to France’s portal—this showed a possible underrepresentation of content about Québec. This representation may look bleak, but back in 2016, the Fondation Lionel Groulx, a historical society that focuses on Québec’s history, reported that approximately 5,000 WikipédiaFR articles were about Québec (Pierre Graveline, 2016). Today there are more than 30,000 articles about the Je me souviens, Québec, province (Portail:Québec—Wikipédia, 2020).

Wikipedia content is a reflection of the interests of the thousands of volunteers who contribute to it each month. that is to say, the more