Speakers:
| Dr. Diana Strassmann |
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| Dr. Kerry Ward |
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| Prashanth Pai |
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| Kayla Hurley |
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This monthly event is part of a Teaching and Scholarly Learning series that will feature instructor successes and will be a place for anyone who is teaching to ask questions, give feedback, share success stories, and get advice.
Date: April 2, 2021
Summary: The Rice University Program in Poverty, Justice, and Human Capabilities (PJHC) hosted a Black Lives Matter Wikipedia Edit-a-thon on October 17th 2020, prompted by the Black Lives Matter protests the previous summer and spurred on by the goal of PJHC to advocate against a “single story”. This edit-a-thon was supported by the Center for Engaged Research and Collaborative Learning (CERCL), the Fund for Racial Justice Teaching and Programming, and the Center for Women, Gender, & Sexuality (CSWGS).
The presenters explained that goal of the edit-a-thon was to create and revise Wikipedia articles with the goals of addressing the social, political, and legal contexts and issues that underlie disparities targeted by Black Lives Matter, discuss campaigns against systemic racism, providing information on notable Black people and organizations, and empowering students to support racial justice and counteract anti-Black racism.
The project planning began in the Summer when goals and outcomes were set and proposal and budget were drafted.
Once they received approval and funding from CERCL, the project coordinators gathered volunteers, identified potential topics
and articles that needed improvement, advertised to various college groups, and set up a dashboard with a timeline and links to training modules. Students were involved in the project as part of their coursework: PJHC 371 students were required to create or edit an article for the edit-a-thon, while students from other classes completed optional assignments where they gathered sources and identified topics. PJHC alumni and community partners contributed to articles and proposed changes to be implemented While participants attended the event, networked with partners, and participate in Wikipedia training workshops, on a single day, the organizers tracked participation throughout the Fall semester.
The presenters reported that PJHC students gained experience and training in editing Wikipedia articles and gained a deeper understanding of the topics that they researched. The dashboard for the project showed that 7 articles were created and 99 edited, with 2.34k edits, 54 editors, 126k words added, 1.22k references added and 2.67 million article views. They also described challenges, including difficulties with shifting to a completely remote format, and balancing the number of content experts with the technical experts who volunteered. For future events, the organizers said they would advertise and look for volunteers earlier, involve more content volunteers and student organizations across Rice, and work more with participants after the edit-a-thon.
Links: Black Lives Matter Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon Dashboard
PJHC 371 – Poverty, Justice, Capabilities course description