Wikipedia @ 20 Edit Loud, Edit Proud: LGBTIQ+ Wikimedians and Global Information Activism Rachel Wexelbaum Published on: Jun 10, 2019 Updated on: Jun 12, 2019 License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0) Wikipedia @ 20 Edit Loud, Edit Proud: LGBTIQ+ Wikimedians and Global Information Activism Image credit: Wikimedia LGBT outreach logo LGBTIQ+ Wikimedians are a diverse, intersectional group within the Wikimedia community. This chapter will focus on the history and impact of LGBTIQ+ contributions to Wikimedia projects, international journalism, public health education, and community activism through the personal narrative of one Wikipedian. This chapter will also explore the global thematic chapter Wikimedia LGBT+ and the community it builds and supports through the Wiki Loves Pride campaign, LGBTIQ+ themed edit-a-thons, and intersectional Wikimedia work. Wikimedia LGBT+ has grown from a handful of Wikipedia editors to a global, multilingual, multiracial community of Wikipedians, librarians, cultural heritage institutions, activists, scientists, open access enthusiasts, human rights supporters, Pride event organizers, and LGBTIQ+ youth and allies due to social media connections. Anyone can follow the group’s current activities through the Wikimedia LGBT+ Twitter account and Facebook page, innovations which have made the movement and its work much more accessible to those just learning about Wikipedia. For LGBTIQ+ people and those searching for LGBTIQ+ information, Wikipedia has proven invaluable in countries where LGBTIQ+ publications, media, or visibility may be criminalized or cut short due to AIDS NGOs leaving those countries. The author of this chapter will talk about how they got involved with Wikimedia LGBTIQ+, how it has changed over the years, and the impact of these changes for the future of LGBTIQ+-related Wikimedia projects and other LGBTIQ+ initiatives related to activism, community building, and social support. Introduction LGBTIQ+ people have engaged in Wikimedia projects from their inception. Over the past twenty years, their contributions have ranged from developing and improving LGBTIQ+-specific content in most language Wikipedias, making LGBTIQ+ people, landmarks, and events visible through the Wiki Loves Pride photo campaign, and implementing guidelines around using appropriate LGBTIQ+ terminology for Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia and WikiData. More importantly, LGBTIQ+ Wikimedians work hard to build a collegial, inclusive community through partnerships with multiple groups and the use of social media to collaborate and promote each others’ work, and to provide support and action steps for colleagues who may encounter harassment or discrimination in Wikimedia spaces. This work that we do to provide accessible, authoritative, frequently updated LGBTIQ+ information online—and building friendly, inclusive spaces to do this work—is activism, particularly for those individuals working from countries where LGBTIQ+ existence of any kind is under threat. A recent New York Times article has focused primarily on the negative aspects of Wikimedia work for LGBTIQ+ editors, perpetuating anxiety over hostile environments that exist in Wikipedia (Jacobs, 2019). While the hostility that some editors face is very real, it perpetuates a narrative as LGBTIQ+ 2 Wikipedia @ 20 Edit Loud, Edit Proud: LGBTIQ+ Wikimedians and Global Information Activism person as passive victim. The title of the article also implies that Wikipedia is not a social network (Jacobs, 2019). This is far from the complete story of what it means to participate in Wikimedia projects as an LGBTIQ+ person,. Veteran LGBTIQ+ Wikipedian Lane Rasberry (User:bluerasberry) asked me to contribute a chapter to this anthology because of my involvement in the movement and the research I have done on the history of LGBTIQ+ engagement in Wikimedia projects. I do not want to plagiarize myself, so I have listed the citations for those works at the end of this chapter. What I will focus on instead is my personal journey into the Wikimedia community, and my engagement in the movement, while crediting all of the people who have provided support and accomplished great things along the way. What initially attracted your attention to Wikipedia? Although Wikipedia launched on January 15, 2001, my memories of retrieving Wikipedia articles in Google searches only begin several years after that. Prior to 2008 I worked as a culinary school librarian, during a time when the most authoritative information about food history and food in culture came from print books, scholarly journal articles, or conference proceedings. At the time, Wikipedia articles about food were just emerging as stubs and starts—they could not replace the traditional scholarly and professional works in that discipline. During my culinary school years, I also began to freelance writing and editing encyclopedia articles. I learned a great deal about encyclopedia publishing during this time, in particular the dishonesty of some encyclopedia publishers. At the time, some encyclopedia publishers were compiling reference works about notable living people. In STEM and other fields, the most comprehensive, current information you will be able to locate about most of these people are from professional publications or blogs. Some of the most influential researchers and innovators—particularly those who are women, people of color, LGBTIQ+, or from the Global South—do not have books or other encyclopedia entries about them from which to cite. And yet some encyclopedia publishers want their contributors to “fake” a reference list. In other words, they will require a “Further Reading” section to accompany the entry, but the contributor cannot include the true sources of information for that entry—only what “looks” appropriate for high school or undergraduate research. In 2008 I started a new job as an academic librarian at a four year higher education institution. I taught an undergraduate course called “Research Methods” during my probationary years, where students learned how to locate, evaluate, and cite information from the library and from free online resources. This era marked the decline of encyclopedias and traditional print reference resources in libraries due to the ubiquity of free online resources like Wikipedia. I knew my students were using Wikipedia to do their research simply because it was easy and convenient, but not necessarily because it was better. I created an assignment for my students where they had to locate a traditional encyclopedia entry and a Wikipedia article on their semester research topic, and compare the two for 3 Wikipedia @ 20 Edit Loud, Edit Proud: LGBTIQ+ Wikimedians and Global Information Activism authority, comprehensiveness, citations, validity, and neutrality. In almost every situation, the Wikipedia article on their topic was much more effective in providing background knowledge on their topic than the encyclopedia entry. Development of the Wikipedia article was also transparent and honest, and one could see for themselves the sources of the cited information. People could make an educated decision on whether or not they would use the article based on references, or based on the WikiProject’s quality scale, commentary from Wikipedia contributors, and currency of edits. I began to wonder who all of the people were who worked on Wikipedia articles, where they were, and why they did it. As Collection Management Librarian and LGBTIQ+ Studies Selector, I focused on the digitization of print books, and realized that almost no award-winning core LGBTIQ+ texts were digitized at the time. I honestly believed that these books would be lost forever and wanted all librarians, LGBTIQ+ authors, and vendors to know! In 2011, I wanted to contribute a chapter to Ephemeral Material: Queering the Archive (Litwin & Kumbier, Library Juice Press) on this topic based on the research I presented at the Acquisitions Institute (Wexelbaum, 2011). I was too late to submit a chapter, but editors Rory Litwin and Alana Kumbier were kind enough to connect me with Library Juice Press’ Gender and Sexuality in Information Studies editor Emily Drabinski, who encouraged me to edit an entire book on LGBTIQ+ digital practices in libraries, archives, and museums. Of course I wanted to have a chapter on LGBTIQ+ Wikipedia and how libraries engaged with that work at the time. Katie Herzog from the Tom of Finland Foundation in Los Angeles reached out to me to co-author the chapter. To anyone’s knowledge, the Tom of Finland Foundation would host the first LGBTIQ+ edit-a-thon in the world—and they would be the first LGBTIQ+ cultural heritage institution to do so as well. Adrienne Wadewitz provided training and support at this event, a testament to her support of LGBTIQ+ Wikipedia work. Katie provided photos of this event, and I thank all of the people who graciously gave permission to have their photos published in the book. Thanks to Katie, I got connected with the LGBTIQ+ Wikipedians’ listserv—we were not yet an official thematic usergroup at the time. I believe that she used this listserv to promote the edit-a-thon, and I used the listserv to reach out for the first time to LGBTIQ+ Wikipedians who might want to contribute to the chapter. This is how I first met Lane Rasberry and Fae, who had both been engaged in the movement since the beginning, intentional about improving LGBTIQ+ content in Wikimedia projects and building the community. I co-wrote the chapter —“Queering Wikipedia”--with