Fighting Whitewashed History With MIT's Diversity Hackers
Joyce Park stashed this in History
Stashed in: History!, Awesome, Wikipedia, History, Corporate Diversity, Diversity
History is LITERALLY being written by young white males who use their group membership to keep out people who want to edit Wikipedia entries about, for instance, 20th century Black female doctors.
It's an important time for Wikipedia to include more perspective.
Wikipedia's skewed perspective is a well-known problem, acknowledged by the Wikimedia Foundation and much of the larger community, some of whom who have formed groups and campaigns to address it. What to do about it is much less clear. The issue is deeper than the site itself: as Ayers says, "there are a lot of inherent problems in how knowledge is represented," throughout history and across media.
Since Wikipedia is a compendium of information that already exists elsewhere, it reflects this long-standing bias. In addition, Wikipedia’s editorship–the tens of millions of volunteers who add, tinker with, and argue about articles–is not particularly diverse.
4:23 PM Feb 08 2016