Find below examples of Wikipedia page editing and page creation by student and staff members of the Decolonising Wikipedia Network.
Carlos Leppe
DWN member Christie Johnson (Head of LCC Academic Support) identified that there was no Wikipedia page for Chilean performance artist Carlos Leppe, so they gathered content to create the Wikipedia page themselves, with a little help from fellow DWN member Alex Goodall and Wiki instructions online. The Carlos Leppe Wikipedia page includes a full introduction to the artist and a summary fact box, a biography and context section and a list of notable works.
1911 Festival of Empire
In May 2021, UAL Knowledge Exchange impact funding enabled DWN members Lucy Panesar and Lydia Wilks to collaborate on editing the Wikipedia page for the 1911 Festival of Empire. The screenshots below are before and after the page’s contents list was edited. Prior to their edit, the page had little to no information about the festival’s context, it’s exhibits and it’s critical appraisal, so Lydia and Lucy started by adding new sections for this.
They added a section entitled ‘Exhibits on the All Red-Route’, the red route being an electrical tramway that took festival visitors around scenes replicating the so-called “dominions”. They also added a series of archival images of these scenes, courtesy of the Crystal Palace Museum, and some contextual information pertaining to the colonial scenes that were depicted.
For Lydia and Lucy, adding the ‘Critical Appraisal’ section was a vital element of the Wikipedia edit and their position on writing this section was very much from a decolonial standpoint. They wanted to open up a critical dialogue to showcase an alternative perspective on the 1911 Festival of Empire, to highlight and really recognise the multitude of exploitation that occurred at the hands of the British Empire, and how this event played a role in further cementing pre-existing negative and inaccurate stereotypes of what it looked like to be from Africa or India.
Shirazeh Houshiary
DWN member and co-facilitator Alex Duncan (of Arts + Feminism) added exhibitions to this Wikipedia page of Shirazeh Houshiary, as found in the Recordings document, to increase the amount of reliable, widely available information on the artist.
Alvaro Barrington
DWN member Matt Lingard (LCC Head of Digital Learning) created this page from scratch – you can read about his process on his blog.
New York Cabaret Law
DWN member and former LCC Changemaker Alex Goodall, added information about the activism of Dance Liberation Network (co-founded by Frankie Decaiza Hutchinson) and its importance in the repeal of the law.
Armet Francis
DWN member and former LCC Changemaker Emma Sproat added in a most recent exhibition of photographer Armet Francis.
After