Sunday, March 18, 2012

Black Non-Believers on Wikipedia

While working on the Sikivu Hutchinson page I found this article "Blacks Say Atheists Were Unseen Civil Rights Activists".  Very interesting article.  I wondered what do their Wikipedia pages look like?  How is their non-belief presented to readers?  February was Black History Month, so school children all over America were accessing Wikipedia to learn more about people, events and places, what did they see?

All numbers are from Feb 2012

Richard Wright - 28,653 hits
Carter Woodson - 59,994 hits 
A. Phillip Randolph - 29,920 hits
Hubert Harrison - 2,610 hits
Lorraine Hansberry - 19,324 hits
W.E.B. Du Bois - 215,498 hits (in one day he received 48K hits alone)
James Baldwin - 40,160

The Black History Month page alone received 182,271 hits February 2012.

Check out these pages for yourself.  Do you think their non-belief is well represented?  Do you think these pages need improvement with content and are visually appealing?  The goal is to get students (and others) to stick around and read the whole page, click on the links and continue reading the references.  Can we say that this has been done in these cases?  If yes, then we need to keep an eye on these pages and work to improve the links that are fed from these pages.  If no, then please help by working on the page, or at least writing on the talk page with your observations so other editors can proceed.

As usual if you would like to help with this project but don't know where to start or how to edit, please contact me susangerbic@yahoo.com


 
 note: I know, I know.  Students aren't allowed to use Wikipedia as a source for schoolwork.  But guess what, they are.  They might not be able to cite a Wikipedia page, but they are going there to get an overview of that person and then following links to other Wikipedia pages and to the citations that are used.







3 comments:

  1. I've uploaded a photo of Dr. Hutchinson from the first AAH Conference at CFI DC in 2010. Feel free to add it to her Wikipedia page. It's here: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dr_Sikivu_Hutchinson-This_Far_by_Faith-Race_Traitors,_Gender_Apostates_and_Atheism_Question.JPG

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  2. Kiss Kiss Brian.

    I'm working on the page "off-line" at the moment and will include. Won't be public until I'm done with the page.

    Who else you got? I wanna see your albums.

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  3. The new African Americans for Humanism website has a growing resource page too, at http://aahumanism.net/history.

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