Page:Wikipedia and Academic Libraries.djvu/203

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Silvia E. Gutiérrez De la Torre

literacy, or participating in #1Bib1Ref initiatives in order to make articles more reliable). Camelia Romero, however, raised some interesting issues regarding the lack of information about how Wikipedia readers actually read the information we create.6 She also questioned the lack of a consistent criterion behind protected pages (Protection Policy, 2020) and pointed out a troubling pattern for accepted and rejected edits in gender-related articles: many gender-related articles are “protected pages” that cannot be edited. Romero suggested that we should analyze which type of edits are accepted and which ones are rejected to better guide edit-a-thon participants.

Finally, event participants raised interesting questions that provided a humbling perspective on Wikipedia as an open-access, public-knowledge project. Mixe activist Tajëëw B. Díaz Roble expressed that for some indigenous people who are dealing with invasive resource extraction companies and forced displacement of their communities, editing Wikipedia is not always a priority. As a librarian, we o en wish to use our privilege as a platform to write about these subjects. However, the “nothing about us without us” slogan has also made me rethink how Wikipedia, despite being a powerful tool to communicate to a part of the world—that part that has Internet access, technological devices, electricity, written knowledge culture, and proficiency in one of the Wikipedia Languages—well, it is just a part of the world. Moreover, even if people who belong to that part of the world can use Wikipedia, they may not necessarily want or need to communicate that way. In other words, to unlearn the unquestioned urgency (and illusion) of global impact. In November 2019, for example, the BDCV created a series of workshops for public libraries in Mexico City. One of them was about Wikipedia, and Claudia Escobar and I were in charge of it. We created a round of presentations where we asked participants to talk about their responsibilities in their library expecting to use those answers as a bridge between their activities and the Wikimedia Foundation’s mission: “to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license” (Wikimedia Foundation, 2018). But then the answers came: painting furniture and fixing the light were not uncommon activities. Later, in what