Wiki Human Rights in Kansas City

Miranda Pratt and Spencer Graves discuss Wikipedia and other Wikimedia Foundation projects. Miranda is the Wikipedian in Residence for the Kansas City, Missouri, Public Library. Spencer has made over 21,000 edits to Wikimedia Foundation projects since 2010-03-27, including Wikipedia, Wikiversity, Wikiquote, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata, mostly in English but some in Spanish, French, and German.

Spencer also made a presentation on “Managing conflict on Wikipedia and internationally” at WikiConference North America 2021-10-10 in joint with Luisina Ferrante and Patricia Díaz Rubio. Luisina is the Education and Human Rights manager for Wikimedia Argentina. Patricia is Executive Director for Wikimedia Chile. Over the past six years Luisina has organized dozens of “edit-a-thons” throughout Latin America and the Caribbean that have trained hundreds of volunteers, who have uploaded thousands of images to Wikimedia Commons that have been used in thousands of Wikipedia articles that have attracted tens of thousands of views. Much of this work has documented abuses of power by security forces. Patricia said that Wiki Human Rights work in Chile made a major contribution to breaking the conspiracy of silence in the mainstream media in Chile and made a major contribution the 79 percent voter approval in 2020 for a constitutional convention to rewrite the constitution of Chile, written under the Pinochet dictatorship. And in December 2021 a 35-year old former student activist got 56 percent of the vote for President of Chile against a conservative leader, who promised to prevent the implementation of the new constitution.

Miranda Pratt is organizing similar edit-a-thons in Kansas City to improve the quality of documentation on Wikipedia of issues of concern to local residents and thereby improve the quality of local democracy.  To get a schedule of their events or to ask other questions, you can write them at [email protected].


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