Friday at Auction Finds is readers’ questions day. I try to guide readers to resources to help them determine the value of their items. I’m not able to appraise their treasures, but I can do some preliminary research to get them started. So, these are market values based on prices I find on the web, not appraisal for insurance purposes that I suggest for items that have been determined to be of great value.
Today’s conversation focuses on how to get more African American artists – and history – in Wikipedia.
Question:
Thanks for the info on Walter Ellison. I was saddened to discover there is no Wikipedia entry for him. He is most certainly worthy of at least that! As an art teacher in Chicago I try to focus on artists associated with the area and who have work in the Art Institute of Chicago. Walter Ellison is one of my favorites.
Answer:
The reader had read a blog post I wrote a few years ago about a lovely painting by Walter Ellison that sold at auction in New York. Ellison is one of my favorite artists, too, especially so because of his 1935 painting of African Americans at a train station likely in my hometown of Macon, GA, on their way North for jobs and a better life as part of the Great Migration.
I saw that painting for the first time at the Art Institute of Chicago.
I suggested that the reader write a Wikipedia entry about Ellison, whose name is included in a list of African American artists on the site; however, a link from his name takes you to a page noting his absence. Ellison is a listed artist and he should be in Wikipedia. But he’s not the only missing one.
A few months ago, I attended a Wikipedia session sponsored by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in conjunction with its “Represent: 200 Years of African American Art” exhibit. The aim of the session was to teach folks how to create pages in Wikipedia for African American artists, and about a dozen of us showed up.
The session was conducted by Mary Mark Ockerbloom, the Wikipedian in residence at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia. Her job is to share the foundation’s images, archives and other information through Wikipedia.
Having someone on staff to represent an organization on Wikipedia is smart. The site has become the go-to place for information pertaining to just about any significant thing in the world. Search Google and if there’s a Wikipedia page for your subject, it will top the list of results.
While Wikipedia has thousands of pages, it doesn’t include everything. It is not an egalitarian or diverse entity: 90 percent of its volunteer contributors are male, as Ockerbloom noted, and I suspect that few are African American. So what you get is primarily what interests those volunteers.
The site’s page on Pokemon, for example, is quite extensive, noted an article in the MIT Technology Review, but “its pages on female novelists or places in sub-Saharan Africa are sketchy. Authoritative entries remain elusive.”
Even the co-founder of the organization acknowledged that there are holes. “‘The biggest issue is editor diversity,’ co-founder Jimmy Wales said in the same article. He hopes to ‘grow the number of editors in topics that need work.'”
Writers with an interest in African American artists would be a group primed for growth. The volunteers, though, will have to step up and start writing and editing, as I suggested to the Chicago teacher.
I decided to check out the Philadelphia museum session after reading an article about students at Howard University who were getting together in February to edit information on Wikipedia about the history and culture of people in the African Diaspora. Also in February, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York hosted a sold out event titled “Black Life Matters Wikipedia Edit-a-thon.” These were among several that were held that month and are still being held.
At the museum session, a board with yellow Post-it notes held the names of artists who either had incomplete pages on Wikipedia or no pages at all. Here’s a sampling:
Barkley Hendricks. A short bio. Most recently, a Hendricks painting titled “Steve” sold for $365,000 at Swann Auction Galleries in New York.
Charles White: A short bio.
John Biggers: A short bio. Some of his works are included in an upcoming auction from the collection of Maya Angelou to be held at Swann in September.
Eldzer Cortier: More complete bio.
Sam Doyle: A short bio on this South Carolina folk artist, but includes no published references, a requirement of Wikipedia and noted at the top of the page. His painting on roofing tin titled “St. Helena’s First Blak Midwife” sold for $204,000 at auction last year.
Moses Williams: A short bio of Williams, whose silhouettes of the Peale family of Philadelphia are in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and a silhouette of Williams by Raphaelle Peale can be found at the Library Company of Philadelphia. Williams lived from 1777 to around 1825.
Roy DeCarava: Scant biography of this famous photographer.
Although their entries in Wikipedia are limited, biographies of these artists can be found on many museum and gallery websites, and in publications.
Wikipedia makes it very easy for anyone to sign up, log in, create a page, edit a page or add images. It’s a collaborative process, allowing contributors to write about notable subjects or edit someone else’s work by correcting spelling mistakes, including published references and even challenging information. It has thousands of volunteer writers and a few hundred “administrators” who manage the site.
Its contributors are from different cultures all over the world, and all are not academicians who know what they’re talking – or writing about. They sometimes unintentionally get it wrong, or deliberately do so. That’s why it’s important to double-check information you find on Wikipedia.
The site has policies, guidelines for writing and editing, and style and formatting rules. You can’t break Wikipedia, according to a Wikipedia tutorial, which noted that because editing is done in a collaborative environment, pages that need work have the potential to get better. Other contributors are reading what you’re writing or editing, and they can participate in the process.
Ockerbloom offered the following:
Anyone can create (and edit) a page, including adding images, sound and video.
Pages are normally about notable subjects whose history can be verified through independent sources. The first sentence should tell why the person or subject is significant.
Everything written must have verifiable published sources, no original research. (That can be a detriment to some African-American related subjects, because for years very few books were truthfully written about them.)
Articles should be written in a neutral and unbiased manner. No opinion – just the facts, according to Wikipedia.
You can’t write or edit pages about yourself or your organization.
