In his article "Can History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past," Roy Rosenzweig writes, "Like journalism, Wikipedia offers a first draft of history, but unlike journalism's draft, that history is subject to change." This week, I took a stab at changing history.
My first assignment for my Digital Humanities & the Historian course was to edit an existing Wikipedia page. I chose to focus on songwriter Stephen Foster, and, more specifically, the statue of Foster that was removed from Schenley Plaza in Pittsburgh this spring. In Dr. Jennifer Whitmer Taylor's Commemoration and Preservation course last semester, my classmates and I each drafted a replacement proposal for the Foster statue. We spent a great deal of time unpacking the cultural relevance of the memorial and the message it's been sending to Pittsburgh's African American community since it was erected in 1900. Having paid close attention to the news cycle before, during, and after the statue removal, I knew there had been some interesting developments regarding public response and possible statue replacements and was interested to see if this information was reflected on Wikipedia. Editing the Stephen Foster Wikipedia page(s) was empowering, exciting, and a tiny bit terrifying. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't nervous to share my work on such a public forum. What if I got something wrong? What if people disagreed with me? Once I started editing, though, I was hooked.
I found two Stephen Foster pages that required editing: one focusing on the songwriter's life and legacy and another dedicated specifically to the late Schenley Plaza sculpture. After updating the main Stephen Foster page with a bit more context, I made sure to link to the Stephen Foster (sculpture) page. In terms of strengths, both the general Stephen Foster page and the sculpture page contain extensive biographical information about Foster. There was much less information concerning the controversy surrounding the statue and its removal and the cultural relevance of the sculpture today.
Most of the pre-2018 edits on the sculpture page were minor and mostly concerned with cataloging. It wasn't until April 2018 (after the statue’s removal) that a user updated the "Controversy" section of the page and later that same month another user added information about the statue's removal. I focused on the “Controversy” section and added information regarding the public response to the statue. Though the page mentions that the debate concerning the statue has been ongoing, there was no context as to why the discussion had started up again in 2017. I added in an introductory sentence about the cultural climate after the Charlottesville riots and the heated debates surrounding Confederate monuments, which serves to ground the Foster conversation in a specific cultural moment. I also provided information regarding the public hearings that were held, the feedback that the Art Commission received, and the attempts made by the Task Force on Women in Public Art to install a new statue honoring an African American woman. I also removed information in the "Controversy" section that referred to the practice of rubbing the toe of the African American figure for good luck because it was not relevant to the controversy surrounding the statue.
Employing a Neutral Point of View (NPOV) when writing this article was difficult. Because we had spent so much time researching Foster and his ties to minstrelsy, it was difficult at times to represent the statue debate as two-sided, but I managed. I used local news sources, drawing from different publications including the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Pittsburgh City Paper, and WESA, Pittsburgh's NPR News Station. I think these sources represent a broad range of views.
The first edit that I posted, which was a three sentence addition to the "Memorials" section of the main Stephen Foster page, was almost immediately deleted by another user with no explanation. I was confused and upset and immediately assumed that my content was being censored because of the contentious nature of the topic. However, I ended up reposting the content on both the sculpture page and the main Foster page, and neither has been deleted yet.