Reflecting on Representation: Amplifying Marginalized Voices on Wikipedia
For this assignment, I decided to use concepts from Module 4: Identity, Representation, & Selfies to guide my research. From the word go, I noticed that the process of editing Wikipedia was challenging but also enlightening. Challenging because finding an article to edit was a difficult undertaking. Enlightening because of the importance of this exercise in ensuring marginalized voices are not erased. After a lot of searching, I decided to incorporate underrepresented perspectives on Clearview AI's facial recognition technologyWikipedia page. I choose this page because I did not feel that it captured all the details for a fair assessment of its role. Especially after taking this course, I have become someone deeply committed to digital advocacy. And what better way to start my advocacy than on one of the internet's most widely accessed information platforms. The link below shows what the website now looks like with updated information that represents diverse voices. I added the section titled, “Racial Bias and the Disparate Impact of Clearview AI on Marginalized Communities.” Here is the link to the edited page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearview_AI
Another major obstacle was making sure that minority groups' stories were fairly represented. As part of this, feminist theories helped examine how disadvantaged communities, have been affected by technology such as Clearview's. In addition, I had to be careful not to interrupt these important narratives because. This could only occur through getting credible information from the impacted people thorough research. Also, it was important to maintain a neutral voice in accordance withWikipedia's neutrality criteria. This took careful preparation to balance fair language with conveying diverse voices on the topic.
Thus, editing the ClearView AI’s Wikipedia page was aprocess that made me see just how important it is to support efforts that diversify online information. As I discovered, the dominant stories on sites like Wikipedia have been skewed. As Field and others (2022) noted, this information has often reproduced repeated prejudices existing in the society. This process showed how such stories may harm marginalizedcommunities since they repeat the biases while also failing to represent all viewpoints. Thus, digital advocacy efforts are crucial counterweights to these sites that gatekeep throughrepressive structures. This can then help in reshaping the knowledge resources that are in the mainstream. Therefore, this exercise was deeply impacting as I got to realize how important advocacy is both offline and online. As digital landscapes change, incorporating the voices of the marginalized groupsshould be a priority.
Reference
Field, A., Park, C. Y., Lin, K. Z., & Tsvetkov, Y. (2022, April). Controlled analyses of social biases in Wikipedia bios. In Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2022 (pp. 2624-2635). https://arxiv.org/pdf/2101.00078.pdf
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