 Logo | |
| Formation | 2015 |
|---|---|
| Founder | Alice Backer |
| Website | afrocrowd |
AfroCrowd (stylized as AfroCROWD) is an initiative to create and improve information about Black culture and history on Wikipedia. The New York City-based project was founded by Alice Backer in 2015. [1] [2]
Some observers have noted a dearth in content pertaining to sub-Saharan African history on Wikipedia. [3]
In 2015, Daniella Bien-Aime of The Haitian Times called AfroCrowd "a multilingual initiative to increase Afrodescendant participation in crowdsourcing initiatives such as Wikipedia". [4] Described as a "do-it-yourself initiative", [5] AfroCROWD hosts edit-a-thons and talks across the New York metropolitan area. [1] The group has partnered with the Brooklyn Public Library [6] and other organizations such as the Haiti Cultural Exchange and Haitian Creole Language Institute to host these events. [7] AfroCROWD also seeks to increase the number of people of African descent who actively take part in the Wikimedia and open knowledge movements. [8]
In 2015, lawyer Alice Backer launched AfroCROWD to "rectify Wikipedia's lack of articles about black history and black culture". [1] [2] According to Backer, the aim of the project is to "give people of color opportunities to do more than participate in and consume social media". [9] Daniella Bien-Aime included Backer in The Haitian Times ' 2015 list of 10 "Haitian social media influencers you should follow". [4]
In 2020, leading up to Juneteenth, AfroCrowd hosted efforts to improve Wikipedia articles related to civil rights. [10] The group has received funding from the Wikimedia Foundation. [11]
Haiti, officially the Republic of Haiti, is a country on the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean Sea, east of Cuba and Jamaica, and south of The Bahamas. It occupies the western three-eighths of the island which it shares with the Dominican Republic. Haiti is 27,750 km2 (10,714 sq mi), the third largest country in the Caribbean, and has an estimated population of 11.4 million, making it the most populous Caribbean country. The capital is Port-au-Prince.
Navassa Island is a small uninhabited island in the Caribbean Sea. Located northeast of Jamaica, south of Cuba, and 40 nautical miles west of Jérémie on the Tiburon Peninsula of Haiti, it is subject to an ongoing territorial dispute between Haiti and the United States, which administers the island through the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Afro–Latin Americans or Black Latin Americans are Latin Americans of full or mainly sub-Saharan African ancestry.
Black History Month is an annual observance originating in the United States, where it is also known as African-American History Month. It has received official recognition from governments in the United States and Canada, and more recently has been observed in Ireland and the United Kingdom. It began as a way of remembering important people and events in the history of the African diaspora. It is celebrated in February in the United States and Canada, while in Ireland and the United Kingdom it is observed in October.
Afro-Caribbean people or African Caribbean are Caribbean people who trace their full or partial ancestry to Africa. The majority of the modern Afro-Caribbean people descend from the Africans taken as slaves to colonial Caribbean via the trans-Atlantic slave trade between the 15th and 19th centuries to work primarily on various sugar plantations and in domestic households. Other names for the ethnic group include Black Caribbean, Afro or Black West Indian or Afro or Black Antillean. The term Afro-Caribbean was not coined by Caribbean people themselves but was first used by European Americans in the late 1960s.
Kelefa T. Sanneh is an American journalist and music critic. From 2000 to 2008, he wrote for The New York Times, covering the rock and roll, hip-hop, and pop music scenes. Since 2008 he has been a staff writer for The New Yorker. Sanneh published Major labels: A history of popular music in seven genres in 2021.
Black Hispanic and Latino Americans, also called Afro-Hispanics, Afro-Latinos or Black Hispanics, or Black Latinos are classified by the United States Census Bureau, Office of Management and Budget, and other U.S. government agencies as Black people living in the United States with ancestry in Spain, Portugal or Latin America and/or who speak Spanish, and/or Portuguese as either their first language or second language.
Haiti is a majority Christian country. For much of its history and up to the present day, Haiti has been prevailingly a Christian country, primarily Roman Catholic, although in practice often profoundly modified and influenced through syncretism. A common syncretic religion is Vodou, which combined the Yoruba religion of enslaved Africans with Catholicism and some Native American strands; it shows similarities, and shares many deity-saints, with Cuban Santería and Brazilian Candomblé. The constitution of Haiti establishes the freedom of religion and does not establish a state religion, although the Catholic Church receives some preferential treatment.
The African diaspora in the Americas refers to the people born in the Americas with partial, predominant, or complete sub-Saharan African ancestry. Many are descendants of persons enslaved in Africa and transferred to the Americas by Europeans, then forced to work mostly in European-owned mines and plantations, between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Significant groups have been established in the United States, in Latin America, in Canada, and in the Caribbean (Afro-Caribbean).
On Wikimedia Foundation projects, an Arbitration Committee (ArbCom) is a binding dispute resolution panel of editors. Each of Wikimedia's projects are editorially autonomous and independent, and some of them have established their own ArbComs who work according rules developed by the project's editors and are usually annually elected by their communities. ArbComs generally address misconduct by administrators and editors with access to advanced tools, and a range of "real-world" issues related to harmful conduct that can arise in the context of Wikimedia projects. Rulings, policies and procedures differ between projects depending on local and cultural contexts. According to the Wikimedia Terms of Use, users are not obliged to have a dispute solved by an ArbCom.
Heather T. Hart is an American visual artist who works in a variety of media including interactive and participatory Installation art, drawing, collage, and painting. She is a co-founder of the Black Lunch Table Project, which includes a Wikipedia initiative focused on addressing diversity representation in the arts on Wikipedia.
Haitians are the citizens of Haiti and the descendants in the diaspora through direct parentage. An ethnonational group, Haitians generally comprise the modern descendants of self-liberated Africans in the Caribbean territory historically referred to as Saint-Domingue. This includes the mulatto minority who denote corresponding European ancestry, notably from French settlers. By virtue of historical distinction, the vast majority of Haitians share and identify with this common African lineage, though a small number are descendants of contemporary immigrants from the Levant who sought refuge in the island nation during World War I and World War II.
For a history of Afro-Caribbean people in the UK, see British African Caribbean community.
An edit-a-thon is an event where some editors of online communities such as Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, and LocalWiki edit and improve a specific topic or type of content. The events typically include basic editing training for new editors and may be combined with a more general social meetup. The word is a portmanteau of "edit" and "marathon". An edit-a-thon can either be "in-person" or online or a blended version of both. If it is not in-person, it is usually called a "virtual edit-a-thon" or "online edit-a-thon".
Serge Jolimeau is a Haitian metal sculptor born in Croix-des-Bouquets, Haiti in 1952. Renowned artists such as Georges Liautaud, Murat Brierre, the Louis-Juste brothers, and Gabriel Bien-Aimé were also from this same village.
The English Wikipedia has been criticized for having a systemic racial bias in its coverage. This bias partially stems from an under-representation of people of color within its volunteer editor base. In "Can History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past," it is noted that article completeness and coverage is dependent on the interests of Wikipedians, not necessarily on the subject matter itself. The past president of Wikimedia D.C., James Hare, asserted that "a lot of [Black American history] is left out" of Wikipedia, due to articles predominately being written by white editors. Articles about African topics that do exist are, according to some, largely edited by editors from Europe and North America and thus, they only reflect their knowledge and their consumption of media, which "tend to perpetuate a negative image" of Africa. Maira Liriano of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture has argued that the lack of information regarding Black history on Wikipedia "makes it seem like it's not important."
Jina Valentine is a contemporary American visual artist whose work is informed by the techniques and strategies of American folk artists. She uses a variety of media to weave histories—including drawing, papermaking, found-object collage, and radical archiving.
Art and Feminism is an annual worldwide edit-a-thon to add content to Wikipedia about women artists, which started in 2014. The project has been described as "a massive multinational effort to correct a persistent bias in Wikipedia, which is disproportionately written by and about men".
Mehrsa Baradaran is an Iranian-American law professor specializing in banking law at the University of California, Irvine. Baradaran is a noted proponent of postal banking to expand financial services to underserved communities. Baradaran has also stated that postal banking will not be enough to close the racial wealth gap and more recently, has proposed the necessity of a "Black New Deal."
Richard Rothstein is an American academic and author affiliated with the Economic Policy Institute, and a senior fellow (emeritus) at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. His current research focuses on the history of segregation in the United States with regards to education and housing.
Welcome to the Black Lunch Table: Jina Valentine and Heather Hart on Creating Space for Communities of Color in the Art World
