Photographs from Edit-a-Thons
kundiman’s Wikipedia Edit-a-Thons:
Kundiman hosted our first Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon with Wikimedia NYC for Asian Pacific American Heritage Month in 2018. We noticed the lack of visibility of Asian American literature, writers, and literary organizations online. To bolster their online presence, we worked with Wikimedia NYC to gather our community to address inaccurate and missing Wikipedia pages related to Asian American literature. Writers from different backgrounds and writing disciplines came together to add details and pages to make information on Asian American literature more accessible, ultimately to celebrate the work produced by our vibrant community of writers. For 2021 APAHM, we took the opportunity of social distancing and extended our traditional one-day Edit-a-Thon into a weeklong marathon of Wiki editing. We partnered together with Wikimedia NYC and provided online training sessions and a Slack channel to answer our communities Wiki-questions. We’re so thankful for everyone who showed up to help us combat the erasure of Asian American writers!
With just 6 Edit-a-Thons held in the past 3 years, we have added 94,598 words to Wikipedia on Asian American writers. We’ve created 72 articles and edited 306 articles. The articles that we’ve edited and added have had over 1,479,000 views as of May 2021!
Press:
At our first Edit-a-Thon in 2018, Karen Ho from The Outline reported on the event:
It may not seem like a big deal that entries on authors such as Whiting Award winner Alice Sola Kim, author Weike Wang, or novelist R.F. Kuang were added during the event, but participants like Sandra Chen said events like the Edit-A-Thon highlight how our understanding of what literature — and specifically American literature — is ‘very iterative.’ ‘I learned that there is so much knowledge that is not being captured,’ she said. ‘We all have so much information and knowledge in ourselves and it is so important to record that.’
Saleah Blancafor from NBC Asian America reported on Kundiman’s Edit-a-Thons in 2019:
“It’s just a tangible way for us to work against the erasure of Asian American voices, to work toward visibility and accessibility,” Wu said. “Wikipedia is one of the most popular websites in the world. When are you ever allowed to take a popular platform and change it? There’s so many things that we cannot change about Asian American representation, but through this, we can actually help those information gaps, and that’s why it’s so important for us.”
Statistics:
These represent all the words that we added together on Wikipedia and all the views of the articles which we’ve either added or edited.
Total (from may 2018 to may 2021):
1,479,000
ARTICLES VIEWED
2nd Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon
(May 2018 at the Ace Hotel):
11.5K words added
51.4K article views
94, 598
words added
1st wikipedia edit-a-thon
(May 2018 at AAWW):
9.85K words added
82.6K article views
5TH Wikipedia edit-a-Thon
(May 2020 virtual wiki-week)
45.7K words added
1.07M article views
We want to thank Wikimedia NYC and Wikimedia DC for partnering with us and providing training on Wikipedia editing. We also want to thank Asian American Writers Workshop and the Ace Hotel New York for providing us the space to gather and make an impact online. Lastly, we are so thankful to our community for showing up to do this important work with us!