Web Writing: Why and How for Liberal Arts Teaching and Learning (archived site)

Indigenizing Wikipedia: Student Accountability to Native American Authors on the World’s Largest Encyclopedia

¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 6 In Spring 2013 I had my students write for Wikipedia. This is by no means an original idea, but the specific assignment was somewhat novel: in a senior class on 21^st Century Native American Literature, each student was to write a biography of a living Native American author (one not yet represented on the site), crafting an entry that met both the author’s and Wikipedia’s standards. ¹ It’s been a long time since I have had students so eager to get things right, and so proud of the results. Though we definitely flushed out some problems–namely Wikipedia’s “notability” requirements, discussed below–the assignment was a success. Students gained new skills, and a better grasp of the professional writing process. The Native authors were gratified to be represented on Wikipedia, and often eager to help with sources. And I got to enjoy the pedagogical role of facilitator, rather than gatekeeper, while helping to improve Wikipedia’s representation of indigenous literature.

¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 Contrary to popular belief, it is not the case that “anybody” can put “anything” on Wikipedia. The site has rigorous, surprisingly complex standards–although, in the interest of recruiting new writers, it boils these down to 5 “pillars”:

0. ¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 4
1. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia (containing no primary research or opinions);
2. It is written from a “neutral point of view” (NPOV);
3. It is free content that anyone can edit, use, modify and distribute;
4. Editors (contributors) should treat each other with respect and civility;
5. Wikipedia does not have firm rules (its guidelines are subject to contributor debate). ²

¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 6 Every hour, thousands of volunteer Wikipedians (with varying levels of editorial power) vet the site, accepting or rejecting articles, cleaning them up to meet basic editorial standards, and flagging them (e.g., “This article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it” or “The neutrality of this article is disputed”). ³ There are robots to root out common errors and predictable vandalism (e.g., high school students inserting profanities); and a “three-revert” rule to shut down edit wars (with some sites, like Justin Bieber’s, on lockdown). ⁴ As any thoughtful person who has used the site knows, Wikipedia is not unproblematic. It does contain errors, and some frankly appalling prose. It has bizarre imbalances in coverage (e.g., that incomprehensibly long entry on Bieber, compared with one just a fraction of that length on Cherokee chief Wilma Mankiller). It is not, however, the unscrupulous free-for-all that some people imagine. ⁵

¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 3 Wikipedia encourages School and University Projects, offering online tutorials and other support for teachers and students; hundreds of courses, all over the world, have signed up. ⁶ Several such experiments have been described in the volume Writing History in the Digital Age. Amanda Seligman uses Wikipedia in a historical methods course at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, to teach undergraduates about tertiary sources; Shawn Graham had freshmen in a Digital History seminar at Carleton University “blitz”-edit a single entry, on the Ottawa Valley. ⁷ In these case studies, historians use Wikipedia to reflect on their profession’s standards, comparing these to the practices of popular and crowdsourced history, particularly when it comes to the notion of neutrality.

¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 2 But, in that volume, only Martha Saxton, who teaches Women’s History at Amherst College, tackles the more global problem: “to the extent that popular judgment determines what history gets produced in this format, the significance of women’s role in it and gender as a discourse or a method of analysis are likely to be devalued.” ⁸ I, too, was concerned about Wikipedia’s failures in coverage—specifically, its lack of representation of Native American authors, and even more specifically, its lack of representation of Native American authors based in New England, though that last failure is not unique to Wikipedia. ⁹ Before Spring 2013, the site included only three Native authors from this region: eighteenth-century Mohegan minister Samson Occom, nineteenth-century Pequot minister William Apess, and contemporary Abenaki poet Joseph Bruchac). ¹⁰ This trifecta, repeated in many anthologies and a good deal of literary scholarship, perpetuates the misconception that Native people in New England assimilated early on, and exist only as isolated individuals today.

¶ 7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 3 Coincidentally, in that same spring, a new movement to revise Wikipedia was gathering steam. Moya Z. Bailey, a scholar and blogger well known in Digital Humanities circles, used the Twitter hashtag #toofew (for “Feminists Engage Wikipedia”) to recruit new writers and editors. ¹¹ She set March 15, 2013, as a day for scholars and students to gather (face to face as well as virtually) to edit the site in conjunction with some of the edit-a-thons run by THATCamp. ¹² The event had a Wikipedia meetup page, where people could sign in and propose content; and it was announced broadly on The Chronicle of Higher Education, HASTAC, and even Al Jazeera, where Bailey called for Wikipedia to “better reflect the diversity of our living.” ¹³ Since March 15, the editing initiatives have continued, including Adeline Koh and Roopika Risam’s “Rewriting Wikipedia Project.” ¹⁴ These scholars are responding to increasingly visible reports (including the Wikimedia Foundation’s own editor surveys) indicating that only about 10 percent of contributors are women. ¹⁵ They are also scrutinizing Wikipedia’s purportedly “objective” criteria. As Koh and Risam argue, these criteria depend on “the weight of already-existing knowledge, knowledge which postcolonial studies writers have systematically argued is racially and culturally charged. To subscribe to [these concepts] uncritically has the effect of reproducing uneven social forms of privilege against groups that deserve to be represented.” As my students found, when it comes to Native American authors, Wikipedia’s “notability” benchmark is particularly troublesome. ¹⁶

¶ 8 Leave a comment on paragraph 8 0 “Native American Literature in the 21^st Century” enrolled mainly senior and junior English majors (a couple from Journalism, one from History). I had planned from the beginning to have students write for a site I manage, called Writing of Indigenous New England. But after #toofew inspired me to try my hand at adding a very brief entry (on Abenaki poet Cheryl Savageau), I began to see the pedagogical possibilities of asking students to post their author profiles on Wikipedia first. ¹⁷

¶ 9 Leave a comment on paragraph 9 3 Professorial maligning of Wikipedia aside, I do not know too many who truly require their students to abide by standards as rigorous as those of Wikipedia, whatever we might wish or claim. This was an enormous surprise for me as well as my students, and I have colleagues who still refuse to believe it. But the students found there was simply no way to grade-grub or plea-bargain their way out of the site’s very basic writing standards. If they committed mechanical errors, an anonymous editor would correct those. If they committed too many, an editor could take their article down altogether, or at least flag it (“This article could benefit from an improvement in writing style”). If their research was thin, they’d be mortified to find some 17-year-old in Turkey declaring their article a “stub,” or someone with a silly handle nominating their work for deletion altogether. In the end, one of this assignment’s greatest boons was that students came to see me the way I’d always seen myself—as the facilitator, not the bad guy. They were in closer and more frequent contact with me about their drafts than any students I can remember, seeming unusually accountable and motivated.

¶ 10 Leave a comment on paragraph 10 4 Part of this was undoubtedly due to Wikipedia’s publicity and immediacy. It can take me days to reply to students’ blog posts, a week to return their essays; but a Wikipedia editor might respond in as little as 20 minutes. More profoundly, students responded to the intensely collaborative nature of the enterprise as a whole. One said, “I often feel that I am just taking, taking, taking from the Internet and rarely being a contributor. Now I can put something up online that is credible, academic, and a contribution to the World Wide Web.” ¹⁸

¶ 11 Leave a comment on paragraph 11 8 I gave students a clear sequence of steps, spread out over 3-4 weeks: 1. Sign up for a Wikipedia account, and take the tutorials. ¹⁹ 2. Begin drafting your article in your sandbox, and send me the link. ²⁰ 3. After I approve your draft, send the link to the Native author who is your subject for feedback. (Each author was someone with whom I was personally acquainted, and had contacted in advance, asking if they’d be willing to participate in this project, and I brokered the introductions of students to their assigned authors.) 4. “Create” the article. ²¹ I was fortunate to teach in a digital lab, so we devoted several class periods to reviewing what makes an article “stick” in Wikipedia, as well as to writing and editing. Many students, at least at my public university, still lack basic web literacy—signing up for accounts, following tutorials—and most were grievously intimidated by the prospect of using markup (which Wikipedia has since made optional). The assignment was thus an empowering one for our English majors, showing them that they can master more “tech” skills than they realized. Moreover, writing for Wikipedia is a powerful lesson in professional writing process. Some graduating seniors, who had grown rather accustomed to writing their essays the night before their deadlines, and squeaking through with Bs or Cs, found that this was simply impossible in this platform. Thus, some found their articles proposed for deletion, and did poorly on the assignment, because they skipped some of the interim, low-stakes (yet critically important) parts of the assignment designed to keep them researching, writing and revising.

¶ 12 Leave a comment on paragraph 12 2 Proposed deletion is not the only interesting thing that happened during this class experiment; but it was, for students, the scariest thing, and it is probably the thing that reveals the most about the politics of “indigenizing” Wikipedia. Some of my students who wrote what were, in my estimation, very good articles nevertheless had their work proposed for deletion, on the grounds that their subjects did not meet Wikipedia’s “notability” criterion. To be considered “notable” enough to pass muster with Wikipedia, a subject has to have received “significant coverage” in “reliable, published [secondary] sources.” Like many college professors, Wikipedians favor newspaper and magazine articles, along with scholarly books and journals. But telling students that something published by Harvard University Press is “better” than anything published on a tribal website isn’t really teaching them critical thinking, in any event. As my students delved further into their topics, and began actually consulting with Native writers and historians, they found what historian Roy Rosenzweig pointed out years ago, so beautifully and succinctly: “the general panic about students’ use of Internet sources is overblown. You can find bad history in the library.” ²²

¶ 13 Leave a comment on paragraph 13 1 Two journalism majors, who I would say had been only modestly engaged with course content up to that point, were suddenly on fire at 2 a.m., when their article on Narragansett journalist John Christian Hopkins was proposed for deletion: ²³

¶ 14 Leave a comment on paragraph 14 0 Click to view full version of excerpt from “Talk” page on John Christian Hopkins entry in Wikipedia, 2013.

¶ 15 Leave a comment on paragraph 15 0 Aside from the mortification of being called out by someone called “duffbeerforme,” these students were invested, and wanted that article to stick. And they had ample opportunity to improve their piece: as indicated in Wikipedia’s five pillars, the site’s rules are seldom carved in stone, and editors try to operate by consensus, rather than outright votes. In the debate that ensued, “Vizjim” pointed to institutional biases against Native intellectual sovereignty, a concept that eluded “duffbeerforme”: ²⁴

¶ 16 Leave a comment on paragraph 16 0 Click to view full version of excerpt from “Talk” page on John Christian Hopkins entry in Wikipedia, 2013.

¶ 17 Leave a comment on paragraph 17 3 Participating in such forums, students engaged in real conversations about real matters affecting Native people, while getting practical experience in convincing readers that their topic matters–not least by improving their research and writing. The Hopkins debate was finally closed for lack of consensus, and (at least as of this writing) the article remains live.

¶ 18 Leave a comment on paragraph 18 2 Very few things on Wikipedia are permanent, so I told the students it wasn’t the end of the world if their articles were flagged or proposed for deletion. I granted favorable grades to those who conducted their research scrupulously and polished their drafts assiduously, no matter the outcome among Wikipedians. Perhaps the most vexing “notability” debate came over the article on Trace DeMeyer, an award-winning journalist from The Pequot Times and Indian Country Today who has published a memoir, an anthology about Indian out-adoptees, and a book of poetry, among other works. ²⁵ But here’s the rub: her books are mainly self-published, and she has received little coverage by sources not already affiliated with her. At the end of the semester, and well after the student writer had graduated, this article—as well researched as any of those our class produced—had still been declined. Some weeks later the discussion was revived and, as with the John Christian Hopkins article, the DeMeyer piece was allowed to stand for lack of editorial consensus:

¶ 19 Leave a comment on paragraph 19 0 Click to view full version of excerpt from “Talk” page on Trace DeMeyer entry in Wikipedia, 2013.

¶ 20 Leave a comment on paragraph 20 0 Wikipedians are justifiably concerned about individuals (and other entities, from garage bands to corporations) attempting to use the site for promotional purposes. But these editorial debates over Native American public figures allow students to see that this concern can also have racial and political overtones. In the DeMeyer case, at least, some editors appear to be sensitive to the proposition that “notability” itself is not an apolitical concept (unlike “duffbeerforme,” who seemed unwilling to entertain the idea that the Native American Journalists Association was not just some fringe entity). And here was another powerful lesson for students: editors are often not objective, or informed, or even that smart. They carry their own agendas, no matter how “neutral” they may claim or try to be.

¶ 21 Leave a comment on paragraph 21 0 DeMeyer was one of a handful of Native authors whom I was able to bring into my class (others emailed, or Skyped with the students). By the time she visited, students had some insight into the forces that keep indigenous literature and indigenous issues invisible. They were impressed, and surprised, by her career, her productivity, her connections and her knowledge. Their surprise is only partly attributable, I think, to their youth, or to their location at a public university in New Hampshire. Settler colonial society, of which the United States is undeniably one, has to do a great deal of work to keep indigenous presence invisible. Spring 2013 was the heyday of #IdleNoMore and the Violence Against Women Act, indigenous issues that received only modest coverage in “notable” sources like The New York Times. ²⁶ When I required students to follow these issues on Twitter, they found huge numbers of Native American people (indeed, images of huge Native American crowds), using social media, fighting for sovereignty, speaking their languages, protecting their traditional homelands, and writing. But to find those, of course, they had to bother to look.

¶ 22 Leave a comment on paragraph 22 3 Wikipedia’s “notability” standard mimics the centrifugal force exercised by literary canons, even within such ostensibly canon-busting fields as Native American literary studies. In the context of a course on 21st Century Native American Literature, this was a critical lesson. Our class started with novels by Sherman Alexie and Louise Erdrich, who have published with major houses; moved on to Craig Womack’s beautiful novel, Drowning in Fire, published by a university press; then to a poetry chapbook by Mihku Paul—part of the “Native New England Authors” series at Bowman Books, a Native publishing venture run by Joseph Bruchac and his son Jesse; and finally to a self-published memoir by Wampanoag elder Joan Tavares Avant. ²⁷ I wanted students to think about the politics of Native publishing, to engage with the concerns articulated by Elizabeth Cook-Lynn and others over non-Native aesthetic assumptions and mainstream publishing demands. These writers have found that the indigenous texts that garner the most critical and commercial success are those that most closely mimic Western literary aesthetics; tribal authors who express tribally-specific values in tribally-specific forms are often dismissed as “too political” or “too hard to follow.” ²⁸ At the end of our Alexie-to-Avant trajectory, most students were fully prepared to appreciate lesser-known Native writers from New England. But the argument made by Vizjim—that “numbers matter,” and that tribal sovereignty is a reality worth respecting—is still just beginning to be heard on Wikipedia.

¶ 23 Leave a comment on paragraph 23 2 Crowdsourced knowledge presents itself, deliberately, as contingent, as always subject to further input and revision. Wikipedia changes to reflect not only changing facts, like shifting national borders; it has the potential, too, to reflect shifting intellectual paradigms. In this respect, wikis are not unlike oral traditions, which in Native communities still carry enormous weight, even—interestingly—when it comes to preserving and transmitting literary history. There are writers who, like Joan Tavares Avant, are revered within their tribes and beyond, whose work is read and recited at public events, who are honored at community gatherings. ²⁹ While they might not yet have attracted much attention from university-based scholars or mainstream publishers, Wikipedia offers one space in which students with the skills, access and time can mediate between Native authors and Wikipedia’s own editors to improve the representation of Native culture and history. Indeed, Joseph Reagle has argued that Wikipedia is successful not as a technology (the wiki) but as a culture–a community of “good faith collaboration.” ³⁰ Entering this community together, students and indigenous authors can help ensure that Wikipedia represents the knowledge genuinely available, without simply replicating those sources considered, in a facile way, “notable.”

¶ 24 Leave a comment on paragraph 24 0 About the author: Siobhan Senier is Associate Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire, and editor of Dawnland Voices: Writing from Indigenous New England (University of Nebraska Press, 2014) as well as Writing of Indigenous New England. She can be found on Twitter @ssenier, and in the blogosphere at http://indiginewenglandlit.wordpress.com/author/ssenier/.