Black Reconstructions: Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon with Black Lunch Table

Join Black Lunch Table for a workshop on updating Wikipedia entries to share, explore, and tell stories about architecture, design, and Black cultural production. The edit-a-thon will include training for beginner Wikipedians, reference materials, and group and individual editing. While participants are invited to choose their own entries to edit, this edit-a-thon focuses on the architects, artists, and designers featured in the exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America and the related online course Reimagining Blackness and Architecture. This program will be facilitated by Eliza Myrie, Heather Hart, and Kearra Gopee.

No prior Wikipedia editing experience is required. Participants will receive an email in advance of the program with instructions on how to create a Wikipedia account and other information to help you get started.

Schedule
11:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m. Wikipedia editing training
12:00–2:00 p.m. Group and individual editing breakout rooms

This event is free, open to all, and takes place over Zoom meeting.

Black Lunch Table’s (BLT) primary aim is the production of discursive sites wherein artists and local community members engage in dialogue on a variety of critical issues. BLT mobilizes a democratic rewriting of contemporary cultural history by animating discourse around and among the people living it. In its 16-year existence, Black Lunch Table has taken a variety of forms, including Wikipedia edit-a-thons. Black Lunch Table Wikipedians mobilize the creation and improvement of a specific set of Wikipedia articles that pertain to the lives and works of Black artists.

In the field of mainstream contemporary art, Black artists are still marginalized. Wikipedia estimates that 77% of their editors are white and 91% of their editors are men. Our work shifts this demographic and empowers people to write their own history. Our sessions and events, including BLT Photobooth and edit-a-thons, equip new editors with the skills and resources to create, update, and improve Wikipedia articles and encourage existing editors to focus on Wikipedia knowledge gaps.