2.3. Decolonising Wikipedia Network (2020-2022)

In the summer of 2020, I was invited to pursue a partnership opportunity with Wikimedia UK. LCC had connected with the organisation and learnt of their desire to address equity and decoloniality in collaboration with educational institutions. This was an opportunity for an extended partnership to address inequities beyond the curriculum and university. Wikipedia is edited by a narrow demographic of mainly white men based in the global north due to wider inequities in society permitting only the privileged to engage in so-called knowledge democracy (Nevell, 2021). Although I had no experience of Wikipedia editing, I learnt that UAL Librarian Alex Duncan had been running Wikipedia editathons for Arts + Feminism and that LCC Changemaker Alex Goodall was also an avid editor. We teamed up with Richard Nevell from Wikimedia UK to form the LCC Decolonising Wikipedia Network (DWN) in November 2020, initially to prompt and support students and staff to increase the visibility and credibility of under-represented artistic figures and topics on Wikipedia, and through doing so, expand the Eurocentric art history canon and tell untold art (hi)stories. I created the DWN website to promote the new initiative, initially to UAL students and staff.  

I then took DWN beyond the arts and the university walls to look at untold colonial (hi)stories, prompted by a piece I wrote for zine 2 (2019) entitled ‘Colonial Confessions Continued’ about the 1911 Festival of Empire that took place in London’s Crystal Palace Park. The festival was one of many grand-scale British Empire marketing events, opened by the reigning monarch and attended by public in the thousands from different social classes and colonies. I had started looking into this in my spare time, after moving to Crystal Palace, and found some details of the event in history books and the on-site Crystal Palace Museum, but I was only finding detailed information in blogs, archives and the minds of local enthusiasts. I published brief details for zine 2 with the intention of publishing more information later, after further collaborative enquiry. When I first looked at the Festival of Empire Wikipedia page in 2021, it contained selected details of the event (hi)story, its focus being on the Inter-Empire Championships held at the event and the legacy of this for subsequent sporting events in the park. The event’s imperial aims and design features were not detailed on the Wikipedia page, so I secured some LCC Knowledge Exchange funding to pay a student to co-edit it with me, this being LCC photo-journalism student Lydia Wilks.  

This funding also enabled me to host, in May 2021, my first live, online panel discussion recorded for YouTube: a 1911 Festival of Empire Project Roundtable in which Lydia presents our Wikipedia editing and then six guest speakers share different perspectives on the 1911 Festival. I documented my story of starting the project, the research, the Wikipedia editing and roundtable discussion on a dedicated 1911 Festival of Empire project blog. I then secured further UAL Knowledge Exchange funding to become UAL’s Wikimedian in Residence and host three more DWN panel discussions through 2021-22 on Wikipedia editing around other colonial histories, again with students, staff and external speakers. The work I did for this led to LCC receiving the Wikimedia UK 2021 Partnership of the Year award (Wikimedia, 2021).

In DWN Panel Discussion 1 (2 November 2021), Alex Goodall and Richard Nevell introduce the project. Guest presentations follow from Iqbal Singh, from the National Archives, and Kirsten Dunne and Sara Dos Santos, from the Mayor of London’s Culture Team. In Panel Discussion 2 (8 February 2022), Alex Duncan talks about the extra-curricula and in-curricula DWN activities and then guests present from organisations holding information related to diverse groups in London, including the Black Chiswick through History project, the Switching the Lens project and UCL’s Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery. The focus of Panel Discussion 3 (10 May 2022) is Wikipedia editing as a form of decolonial knowledge activism and how the project supports London’s diverse communities to edit colonial histories, including participants from a Heritage Lottery Funded satellite project I initiated with the South London Gallery called Places Never Seen: A youth-led digital exploration of the 1911 Festival of Empire. I ensured all event recordings went onto YouTube and the dedicated DWN website. 

Additionally, I co-presented Places Never Seen with youth researcher Harriet Vickers at the Audience Agency ‘Digitally Democratising Archives’ Dissemination Event (June 2022), and the broader Decolonising Wikipedia x London’s Colonial Her/Histories project with Alex Goodall and Sam Baraitser-Smith at the ‘DEL in Between: practice sharing in arts and design Higher Education’ event (May 2022). To further support Wikipedia editing, I prompted and supervised the production of an instructional Wikipedia Editing Introduction Video by Goodall and fellow former Changemaker Ana Blumenkron, who I re-employed as DWN Assistants and with whom I also co-authored ‘Decolonising Wikipedia: Opportunities for Digital Knowledge Activism’ (Blumenkron, Goodall and Panesar, 2022).