In honor of Women’s History Month, arts’ institutes worldwide are organising events this Saturday (March 23, 2019) to improve Wikipedia entries related to notable women artists and art world figures. We (at CaribbeanReads) have occasionally updated lists of Caribbean writers on Wikipedia just to ensure that some of the more recently established Caribbean writers are represented, however, these writers often do not have pages or their pages are incomplete.
Wikipedia is a great example of a Catch-22. What makes it most useful, the fact that anyone can contribute and edit posts, makes it most dangerous. According to the Pew Research Center, “Wikipedia averages more than 18 billion page views per month, making it one of the most visited websites in the world,” data they extracted from Alexa.com, a Web tracking company owned by Amazon. Wikipedia is notoriously unreliable, but widely used and so it is important that all artists, (but of course our main concerns at CaribbeanReads are Caribbean artists), make sure they are accurately represented on this platform.
And so, while we are not organizing an official “wikipedia editathon” (maybe next year?), we encourage Caribbean artists to join with other artists and set aside some time tomorrow to look up your profile on Wikipedia and make sure you are accurately and effectively represented. Also feel free to post here about what you found and what you changed.