SheridanFord

Wikipedian Bio (2007 - )

I am a scholar, poet, social media researcher, and an ethnomusicologist. I make a living as a professor, speaker, and workshop convener. I have been editing Wikipedia since 2007 but became really curious about the power of using Wikipedia, a free-of-cost encyclopedia funded by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, in academic settings in 2012. I'd always imagined the possibility that academics and their students could really make a difference in knowledge for all if they weren't so vehemently biased against the idea of open knowledge and editing.

WHAT I EDIT

I edit articles related to social media, interactive new medias, racialized and gendered oppression, online racism and sexploitation, intersectionality, and other ephemereal subjects that tie into issues of power and voice in networked and real life public spheres. Anything that uncovers the biases of race, gender, and sexuality is an article worthy of editing to me.

Here is my first edit:

10:55, 29 April 2007 (diff | hist) . . (+240)‎ . . The Apprentice (TV series) ‎ (→‎External links: This is a powerful article written by two business school professors discussing the underlying issues of race, gender and class that scripted the group dynamics of the show .)

I am writing this just months before the 2016 Presidential election in which Trump may be the Republican nominee. The Apprentice was a show I rarely watched but as alluded to above, any article that gives me an opportunity to address marginalization, social inequality, as well as online racism and the sexploitation of girls of color. All these are perspectives to which many of the majority of Wikipedian editors, who are white and male, are structurally indifferent to and unawares while they unconsciously perpetuate marginalization. This is largely the result of inherent bias shaped by white superiority and patriarchal socialization in our social institutions from family, friends, workplaces, and schools of thought and education. We are often overlooked.

My role is to help diminish the gender gap on Wikipedia as well as the misogynoir that appears in the editing process, consciously or unconsciously. To bring it back to the real truth, check out the controversy about the lack of diversity in the Trump Syllabus published in The Chronicle for Higher Ed this week. Two previous POC-centered syllabi led to it. There are multiple versions of the #FergusonSyllabus and a #LemonadeSyllabus (Lemonade Syllabus) launched as an idea by Candice Marie Benbow and a larger version was co-curated by Janell Hobson.

DID YOU KNOW: 92% of children under the age of two have a "digital shadow" or presense online.

"Your digital footprint = items you upload about yourself. Your digital shadow = items that others post about you. Your digital stamp = the summary of information people will learn about you today and 300 years from now digitally, your digital legacy" (Erik Qualman, 2014).

I edit entries on black popular music and dance, girlhood, and media studies. My aim is to become an active editor with 5 edits or more a month. I also am interested in philosophy, feminism, and YouTube.

Winter 2013, Intercession course: Women in Hip-Hop Course, Baruch College-CUNY

In the Winter of 2013, my students and I tried to fill a void but creating an entry on women in hip-hop. At the time there was none. Focuse was on inequality and the democratization of tech/knowledge

March 2016 - , Joined Wikimedia NYC Chapter

This year I also became an active editor (more than 5 times a month) and joined the local NYC chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimedia New York City. I also have participated in meetups with AfroCrowd.

June 2016, NYU Faculty Resource Network Seminar: More Connected, More Disconnected

The Faculty Resource Network at NYU, where I was once on faculty, invited me to convene a seminar on millennials and social media for 25 college professors from Puerto Rico to Hawaii including members from HBCUs. We met for a week and I introduced them to editing Wikipedia. Two thirds of them started the week-long seminar with a disdain for Wikipedia. All had edited and were inspired to continue editing Wikipedia by the end of the week. I invited several members of WikiMedia NYC to lecture including AfroCrowd and Ann Matsuuchi, Long Island University. A member of Data & Society also visited the seminar.

We concluded the seminar with an insight from one of the professors turned Wikipedians:

If all knowledge is personal, than all politics are local. (acknowledgments to @Juantele: You created this idea!)

I will be publishing materials we crowdsourced eventually.

Summer Session I 2016, Intro to Sociology Course, Baruch College-CUNY

This summer, 12 students and I are learning the basics of sociology while we also learn to become Wikipedia editors or Wikipedians. Our final project involves studying the knowledge produced and the culture of editing using first-hand, personal study on the site.

For 2-3 weeks, we will conduct participant-observation as Wikipedians to examine questions of power and representation (or the matrix of domination) among Wikipedians (editors) using a mixed method approach of quantitative and qualitative data. The View History page of any article offers a lot of rich data to analyze.

The question we are collaboratively exploring by editing articles of our choice is this: What issues of power and oppression can be discovered in the free-of-cost encyclopedia that provides knowledge to the world as the sixth most visited site on the Internet? We are applying the three main sociological perspectives -- functionalism, conflict theory, and symbolic interactionism -- as well as examining how personal troubles as an editor reflect public or political issues.

Participants are editing articles including Lacrosse, Trump, Brexit, Transactionalism, Mass Shootings, microsociology, symbolic interactionism, Barbeque, SpongeBob SquarePants, Xenocentrism, Gatekeeping, Twerking, Jambole, and more. Among the 12 participants and myself we represent four women, a black woman, eight men in all, two blacks, two Chinese men, a Latino and two Latinas, and five white men. Several were born outside the US. By allowing our diverse interests to thrive (you can edit anything you want), we should also witness the barriers that editors encounter in a complex way. Who is being reverted for what and could the reverting process be a function of neophyte editors making mistakes?

The rules of Wikipedia -- its five pillars -- concludes with the fifth pillar:

Wikipedia has no firm rules: Wikipedia has policies and guidelines, but they are not carved in stone; their content and interpretation can evolve over time. The principles and spirit matter more than literal wording, and sometimes improving Wikipedia requires making exceptions. Be bold but not reckless in updating articles. And do not agonize over making mistakes: every past version of a page is saved, so mistakes can be easily corrected.

What fascinates me about Wikipedia is how a free democratic space self-polices its members and helps undergrads and professors who use it learn the process of resocialization around social capital. You must develop trust. It is not granted without earning it -- or so it seems. In some cases, oppression is surfacing. The only way to really truly appreciate and examine oppression on Wikipedia is to become an editor and become part of the crowd sourcing its knowledge to the world.

The Wikipedia Community has produced over 5 million articles in the English version but just over 100,000 editors who have been almost exclusively white and male. Learning how to negotiate the production of knowledge in an information economy provides many critical insights into what knowledge (and thus power) is organized by individuals and social institutions and groups. It provides insight into how it is used, who gets access, and who has control over it using what tactics and by way of what kind of beliefs and practices (conscious and unconscious).

I'll end with a quote from Frederick Douglass (1857):

The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

26 June 2016, Mentioned in NYT Tech article

Staff writer Jenna Wortham was a panelist for the MoMA Art+Feminism meetup and edit-a-thon co-hosted by WikiMedia NYC chapter in March 2016.

After the session, I mentioned my concerns about how my twerking edits (to which I am continue to contribute) were constantly reverted. It made becoming an editor difficult. I felt my contributions were being thwarted due to the racialized and gendered bias of editors who were not being neutral. It always seemed (and still does to a degree) that anything from a black perspective was being reverted. Anything from prior to the history of Miley Cyrus twerking wasn't as legit or notable. Even as of June 28, 2016, according to a search of WikiBlame on the View History page of the article, Miley Cyrus is mentioned in the twerking article but not the Queen of Bounce, transgender female rap artist Big Freedia.

Jenna Wortham mentioned our interactions after my comments during the Q&A at MoMA in the article "How an Archive of the Internet Could Change History" published in a technology segment of New York Times Magazine on Sunday, June 26. 2016. I am very grateful to her.

I love being a Wikipedian and learned a great deal at the event. Most notably, that I was being reverted more than once because I wasn't aware of the norms and guidelines for editing. Some of my edits on the twerking article have been reverted since but less and less so. What I still see is a bias or whitewashing of its neutral history that includes the performances of black cis and transgender girls and women.

2016-2019, Wikipedian in Residence for Influence Ecology

I have been a student and member of Influence Ecology since 2012. After three years of study in transactionalism, I agree to serve as the Wikipedian in Residence for Influence Ecology. I will be editing the main philosophical article and related articles during this period.