Article by Jamie Lee Morin
Indigenous Digital Collections Project Assistant (Young Canada Works)
York University Libraries
On Thursday, March 22, 2018 a group of like-minded individuals gathered together with one common idea in mind: to Indigenize Wikipedia.
We decided to focus on Indigenous musicians, as last week Stacy and I noticed that on the Wikipedia page for the Juno Award for Indigenous Album of the Year that a lot of names were either redlinked or black, indicating that articles about those individuals did not exist. When we ran a SPARQL query, we also noticed that only two musicians were linked to our query for “Winner of the Juno Award for Indigenous Album of the Year.” We then looked up another musician and noticed that the information about which Juno was won was not linked to their Wikidata page (which we took care of straightaway to confirm our theory). Additionally, a lot of the names that did have articles needed an update or clean up to bring it up with Wikipedian standards (for instance, a band may have won other awards, disbanded, or began their solo careers).
As receiving a nomination for a Juno award is considered notable enough to warrant a Wikipedia page, we began to plan a quick meet up before the Juno Awards Ceremony on Sunday, March 25, 2018, to help speed up the process of updating and creating pages.
We gathered at the Toronto Reference Library from 6-8pm and encouraged everyone to either join us physically at the library or to join us virtually. In total, we had 6 participants, only one of which was virtual. Over two hours, we updated 5 articles and worked on creating 2 articles. Some of us also worked on the Wikidata items associated with the articles to help strengthen linked data for SPARQL queries.
Several are still listed on our Wiki Meetup page and we welcome anyone who wishes to join us remotely to help update and create the information even after the Junos!
Check it out here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Meetup/Indigenous_Musicians