Wikipedia’s reach is enormous, and it is ever-increasing. It appears at the top of most Google Searches, and the search engine lends Wikipedia increased credibility by featuring it in its “knowledge panel” next to the top of every search. As social media is increasingly utilized as a search tool, TikTok has taken to indexing Wikipedia pages underneath topic discussions as a fact-checking method. Chatbots like ChatGPT are trained on Wikipedia, and Wikipedia articles have even been known to influence legal decisions. Wikipedia’s influence is recognized by far-right politicians, who have paid editors, and prominent conspiracy theorists, who have threatened editors to revise their Wikipedia articles so that they are represented more favorably on the website.
Wikipedia’s increasing ubiquity and role as arbiter of truth are especially problematic for the field of Native American and Indigenous Studies. Long-term Wikipedia editors on topics like American history, climate change, and philosophy are largely hostile to Native American histories, environmentalisms, and thought. On environmental pages especially, editors refuse to add Native histories and philosophies, arguing that Native ontologies are “fringe” beliefs, Native environmental science constitutes a “minority view” made up of “dramatic political quotation[s] that [are] not relevant to climate change,” and Native legal scholarship is “not a study of facts.”
While such erasure and denial of Native beliefs and histories are not new, they do represent how settler colonialism operates in digital spaces and how it spreads. It must be resisted. This article outlines a pedagogical framework that prepares students in the Environmental Justice and Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies classroom to intervene in such erasure by training them to become Wikipedia editors outside of Wikipedia’s training systems. The methods detailed in this article work outside of Wikipedia’s on-site training for educators and students, which presents obstacles for student editors by labeling them as “students.” Long-time editors who disagree with student edits on topics related to Native American and Indigenous Studies are more easily able to remove student additions to the encyclopedia by claiming that these edits are of low-quality simply because they have been completed by students. Instead of depending on Wikipedia for training, I provide a strategy for working outside of the Wiki-Edu framework that concentrates on reciprocal feedback in the classroom and positions students as editors with varying interests outside of their coursework.
By detailing assignments and student additions to Wikipedia completed in a “Climate Change and Colonialism” class, I outline this framework to combat settler erasure and misinformation while training students in anticolonial practices. Amplifying Indigenous voices, ideas, philosophies, and practices that show worlds otherwise outside of colonial systems in digital spaces is one small step toward challenging dominant Western systems, especially those around knowledge production, land tenure, and hierarchal systems of racial domination. Showing students how that work might be done, and allowing them a space to practice that work so that they might continue to challenge colonial systems outside of the classroom, provides them the components to begin creating a more equitable and just future on repatriated land.
This article has been published in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment as an advance article. It can be read here.
If you would like to know more about this project, or if you would like a copy of this essay, please contact me here.
Kyle Keeler 