in a library catalog, and Wikipedia users creating lists and categories with the expectation that users will engage in something more akin to browsing through search results.
Users of both systems face difficulty in creating complete and comprehensive lists of members of specific demographic groups. It was discovered that two authors with works in the local library catalog were not on the List of African-American writers but have Wikipedia pages. Benjamin Griffith Brawley was a prominent African American author and educator, and several of his books were standard college texts in the early twentieth century. Phillip Hayes Dean, an African American playwright, also has a Wikipedia page but was not on the List of African-American writers. Both have bibliographic records in the local library catalog with LCSH terms that included African American authors. This suggests that library catalogs may be useful in either populating or at least providing initial leads on populating demographic group lists, although they will only reflect members of that group for whom the library has holdings. Wikipedia also includes both Wikipedia lists and Wikipedia categories (and there are Wikidata items as well), and users may not always update all of these leading to lists and categories describing the same group but which include different items.
The Wikipedia List of African-American writers also included authors whose library bibliographic records did not record their status as African Americans, of course. One such author provided an interesting example in how Wikipedia lists can be useful in discovering works not directly cataloged by librarians. Clarissa Minnie Thompson Allen was included on the List of African-American writers but did not have an NAR or catalog record for their novel, Treading the Winepress. Investigation revealed that Allen’s novel was serialized in The Boston Advocate, a newspaper, and not published as a stand-alone work. The portion that could be located has since been printed as an open-access book by the Illinois State University publications unit (Allen, 2019), but as catalogers rarely create records for individual parts of newspapers, Allen’s work was never cataloged on its own record, and no NAR for Allen was created until long after the publication of her work. Historically marginalized creators often turned to publishing their works
