Kansas City Black history to get its due on Wikipedia
The Kansas City Library, which has been holding virtual edit-a-thons during the pandemic to make contributions to Wikipedia, announced it is focusing on boosting accounts of famous Black Kansas Citians. —— KCUR photo from the Kansas City Public Library
Kansas City Black History available online at kclinc.org/blackhistory
For more than a decade, researchers with the Kansas City Public Library and the Black Archives of Mid-America have been working with LINC to tell the deep and influential history of Kansas City Black women and men.
Now it’s time that Wikipedia got up to speed.
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That’s why the library and the archives have recruited volunteers to help get a lot of the information compiled in the recent book Kansas City Black History into the files of Wikipedia’s giant, international online encyclopedia, said Carmaletta Williams, executive director of the Black Archives.
“We want to make sure that people feel themselves represented here," Williams told KCUR. "Same thing with Wikipedia, you want to make sure that as many people as possible feel that they're represented there."
Kansas City Black History, published in 2020, accumulated 77 biographies into one book that the project had been publishing annually in posters, pamphlets, booklets and education materials for schools and communities.
KCUR reported that of those 77 individuals, 54% already had their own Wikipedia articles and 45% did not, Williams said. But even the ones who did have articles were lacking information.
One of Williams’ favorite Kansas City-area historical figures who had been slighted in the past is Junius G. Groves. He was featured in the Black History project for his rise from slavery to wealthy landowner and businessman and was recently enshrined in the Kansas Business Hall of Fame.
Groves became known as “The Potato King of the World” and one of the wealthiest African-Americans of the early 20th Century.
It was an auspicious achievement, having been born into slavery in Kentucky in 1859 and then working as a farmhand as one of the freedmen who made the “Great Exodus” to Kansas in 1879, according to the record in his entry to the Kansas City Black History Project in 2016.
Williams also highlighted the story of Sarah Rector, who was known at one point as the richest Black woman in the country before settling in Kansas City. United Inner-City Services, a local nonprofit, is now trying to restore her home on 12th Street.
People like Groves and Rector not only need to be represented in Wikipedia, Williams told KCUR, but they need “great, big, thick entries.”
The library will be inviting volunteers to Wikipedia Meetups, with the first one Nov. 23 at noon. Click here to learn more.