At the launch of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art in 2004, the Museum created its own database to complement The Dinner Party, which is still accessible on our website. At the time, independent researchers spent months researching and writing entries for each of the 1,038 women.  Of all the issues I encountered in the early stages of this Wikipedia project, the one that most decisively determined the course of the rest of my work was that areas of this database do not provide citations.  While the database entries on the Place Setting women are longer and carefully sourced, the Heritage floor entries were created more as placeholders for information that we’d later expand upon, and are therefore typically shorter and do not list any sources.

Judy Chicago (American, b. 1939). The Dinner Party (Heritage Floor; detail), 1974–79. Porcelain with rainbow and gold luster, 48 x 48 x 48 ft. (14.6 x 14.6 x 14.6 m). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation, 2002.10. © Judy Chicago. Photograph by Jook Leung Photography

The lack of citations for each of the Heritage Floor entries eliminated the option of directly translating information from our database to Wikipedia. This also had significance for those pre-existing Wikipedia articles that listed The Dinner Party database as a source. By citing the database, which is a tertiary source that does not list any of its sources, the Wikipedia articles were perpetuating a cycle of poorly referenced material. The task became replacing the Brooklyn Museum citation with the original source material.

A more minor problem was the difficulty in finding women on Wikipedia because of multiple or misspelled names. Legendary and mythical figures often have several names, or a name can be spelled differently depending on the transliteration system being used. There were several occasions in which I created new articles only to find that articles already existed under a different spelling of that woman’s name. For example, Judy Chicago’s Flavia Julia Helena was simply “Helena (Empress)” on Wikipedia, and Fibors was found under the name “Tibors de Sarenom.” In these instances, entries were consolidated and multiple aliases were redirected to the same article.

Another issue specific to this project rested in Wikipedia’s notability policy, which states that articles and list topics must be notable, or “worthy of notice”. Determining notability does not necessarily depend on things such as fame, importance, or popularity—although those may enhance the acceptability of a subject. Chicago chose the Heritage Floor women based on many years of extensive research and a rigorous set of criteria for inclusion: “whether the woman made a worthwhile contribution to society; if she had attempted to improve conditions for other women; and whether her life or work illuminated a significant aspect of women’s history or provided a role model for a more egalitarian future.”

This issue was brought up when the article I created for Gisela of Kerzenbroeck, a medieval manuscript illuminator, was nominated for deletion on the basis that the article “lacked context” and was “very incomplete.” I immediately defended the article’s existence on the AfD (Article for Deletion) page, citing the fact that her most notable work, the Codex Gisele, is a significant medieval manuscript and her life and work have been the subject of several published studies. Several other Wikimedians came to the defense of the article and the discussion that ensued is evidence of how exciting the process of writing and editing on Wikipedia can be. Needless to say, the result of the discussion was a “speedy keep.”

I would argue that there is very limited information on many of these historical women because in their lifetimes, their accomplishments were probably deemed unworthy of recording for the sake of posterity. Their accomplishments were also often attributed incorrectly to men. Fanny Mendelssohn, a gifted pianist and prolific composer of the Romantic era, created a musical style that was falsely attributed to her brother, also a famous composer. Oliva Sabuco, a 16th Century Spanish philosopher and author of medical treatises, published a visionary philosophical text in 1587 that, decades later, was attributed to Oliva’s father based on the notion that Sabuco had plagiarized his ideas; recent feminist scholarship has produced compelling counter-evidence of Oliva’s authorship. Genevieve D’Arconville’s 18th Century anatomical drawings, which were the subject of scientific interest for many years, were attributed to a man during her lifetime. The list goes on and on, and many Wikipedia articles still credit these men rather than affording women the credit that is rightfully theirs. Now, we have the opportunity to give these women their due by recording what we know about their lives in Wikipedia, the most public, accessible source available today. It’s an exciting prospect and I look forward to seeing this project through over the next several months.

Judy Chicago (American, b. 1939). The Dinner Party, 1974–79. Mixed media: ceramic, porcelain, textile. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation, 2002.10. © Judy Chicago. (Photo: © Aislinn Weidele for Polshek Partnership Architects)

Given this context, it felt right that one of my projects would involve Judy Chicago’s large-scale installation, The Dinner Party, which has been on permanent exhibition at the museum since 2007. The Dinner Party is an icon of feminist art, which features the names of 1,038 women in history—39 women are represented by table place settings and another 999 names are inscribed in the Heritage Floor on which the table rests.

Chicago created The Dinner Party “to end the ongoing cycle of omission in which women were written out of the historical record.” As Wikipedia is often the first and last place people go to conduct research, it is increasingly coming to represent the most accessible, if not the most comprehensive or well sourced, historical record available today. This project is a direct manifestation of our effort to advance Judy Chicago’s intentions for The Dinner Party and re-write forgotten women back into history.

In light of the dearth of good quality information on topics related to historical African art on Wikipedia, I met with Kevin to brainstorm ways to approach the task of using our assets to augment existing Wikipedia articles, and write new articles, on these topics. Kevin informed me that he was in the early stages of planning the reinstallation of African Innovations, slated for 2015, which will include focused galleries on individual African cultures.

Edo. Figure of a Hornblower, ca. 1500-1550. Copper alloy, 24 1/2 x 8 1/2 x 6 in. (62.2 x 21.6 x 15.2 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Alastair B. Martin, the Guennol Collection, 55.87. Creative Commons-BY
Image: front, 55.87_front_SL1.jpg. Brooklyn Museum photograph

I suggested that we use objects from our collection as starting points in thinking about new articles for creation, an approach that runs counter to the prevalent instinct in art historical writing to place the object at the forefront of the text. With this methodology, visual analysis of objects gives way to a deeper understanding of their context and the culture or individual who created them, but the opposite approach must be taken when writing for Wikipedia. In the context of an encyclopedia article, objects must serve to illustrate the text, rather than the other way around. Moreover, Wikipedia’s core policy of “Neutral Point of View” restricts us from interpreting objects in a novel way, or even giving a particularly nuanced description of an object. For example, a Wikipedia article on ancestral altars from Benin would offer context for an object in our collection, a figure of a hornblower that probably stood on such an altar. While contrary to the way we might approach the task of writing about our collections, we recognize that this approach is necessary in order to share objective information with a wider audience.

My first step was to assess the presence and quality of existing Wikipedia articles. An initial search revealed that there are huge gaps in information and the articles that do exist are often of poor quality and riddled with inaccuracies and language that perpetuates misleading stereotypes.  Given the current state of affairs, my two main goals in editing existing articles on topics related to historical African art are 1) to add content from important and highly regarded source material and 2) to replace incorrect information and terminology.

As an example of this type of terminology, let’s consider the word “tribe” or “tribal.” Most scholars who study African states and societies agree that the term “tribe” has no consistent meaning: “It carries misleading historical and cultural assumptions. It blocks accurate views of African realities. At best, any interpretation of African events that relies on the idea of tribe contributes no understanding of specific issues in specific countries. It generalizes a continent’s worth of different social organizations―empires, kingdoms, city-states, autonomous villages, etc―into an overly broad and pejorative term. Indeed, it perpetuates the idea that African identities and conflicts are in some way more ‘primitive’ than those in other parts of the world.” And yet the word is used pervasively in Wikipedia articles on historical African art. If you do a Google search for “Wikipedia African Art,” the second thing to come up is the Wikipedia article on “Tribal Art”; the words “tribe” and “tribal” are used seven times (!) in the general article on African Art.

Three weeks later, I’ve written and edited nearly 20 articles related to the Benin and Yoruba culture groups. It is immensely satisfying to contribute this particular content to Wikipedia, particularly since it is both so rich and so poorly represented on the site.

Throughout the writing and editing process, I am always looking for places to seed our images, which were uploaded en masse to Wikimedia Commons. I did this either to pre-existing articles, to which I would add further research and relevant source material, or to new articles I created. It is exciting to finally make these incredible objects more widely available by inserting their images in a deserving context.

What makes this particular initiative unique is that it came from outside of the institution. When WikiAfrica approached us, it catalyzed an ongoing collaboration that falls directly in line with the Museum’s institutional mission to make our amazing collections available to the widest possible audience, including both visitors who walk through our doors and members of the worldwide community of people interested in art.  We are grateful to WikiAfrica for having brought this fantastic project to our attention.

WikiAfrica’s desire to reach out to us is not surprising given our history as one of the first institutions in the United States to collect and exhibit African material culture as art. Today our collections, numbering more than six thousand pieces, are noted not only for their quality and size but also for the historic role they have played in exposing African art to Americans. The Museum came to assume a leading role in collecting and exhibiting African art primarily through the efforts of its first Curator of Ethnology, Stewart Culin (1858-1929). In 1923, Culin organized the largest exhibition of African art ever assembled. Today, select objects from our collection are displayed in the long-term installation African Innovations.

Our collaboration began with images. We shared our API key  with Wikimedia’s “Share Your Knowledge” project so they could upload our digital image assets to WikiCommons. In six months, they uploaded 3,758 files. Unfortunately, many of these images have not yet been used in articles, which turns out to have a direct correlation to number of views.

Bushoong Kuba. Bwoom Mask, late 19th or early 20th century. Wood, cowrie shells, glass beads, fur, leather, cloth, seed pods, 13 3/4 x 8 1/4 x 12 in. (35 x 21 x 30.5 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the Anne Eisner Putnam Collection, 73.178. Creative Commons-BY

Whether or not an image has been “seeded” (or placed in a corresponding article) has a significant effect on how many people view that image. An image of our Bwoom Mask serves as a striking example of this effect. Standing alone in its uploaded state on Wikimedia Commons, the image received 334 page views within a three month period. Once a Wikipedia user seeded the image in an article about the Kuba Kingdom, the article was viewed 4,942 times within the same period. In other words, the Kuba Kingdom article received 15 times the number of views than the Bwoom Mask image. While some of the 3,758 images uploaded by WikiAfrica have been seeded, the vast majority have not. To be precise, as of this month, 97 of the uploaded  images have been used on French Wikipedia, and 70 on English Wikipedia.

However, I realized that there was often no place (or no good place, I should say) to seed these images―there were very few articles of adequate quality that addressed topics related to these objects, and those that did exist were either incomplete or full of false information, or both. The Kuba Kingdom article is a good example. The article offers only 750 words about one of the most powerful and culturally productive kingdoms in African history, and yet over 10,000 people have looked at that article since December. That signifies 10,000 opportunities to expand someone’s understanding of the incredibly rich history and cultural heritage of pre-colonial Africa. That fact alone is a call to action if I’ve ever seen one.

This leads us to my current project augmenting Wikipedia articles on topics related to historical African art, which I will cover in next week’s post.

As I write, I am nearly five months into my nine month tenure as part of a project funded by Kress to make scholarly and curatorial information about the Museum’s collections available to the public on Wikipedia. Bridging these two very different worlds, each with its own priorities and languages, presented a challenge. As we embarked on our current initiative, we looked to past projects as a starting point for moving forward.

Throughout these nine months, I will be working on a number of projects that fall under the umbrella of this initiative. Each of these is concerned with augmenting areas of Wikipedia that are weak (in terms of both the number of articles and the quality of those articles) with knowledge and images from specific areas of our collections that are strong. In a series of blog posts to follow, I will describe some of the hurdles and especially gratifying moments in each of these different projects. Stay tuned!