From the Rock Wall to Wikipedia

In 2022, Dr. Courtney Rivard launched From the Rock Wall to Wikipedia, a collaboration among undergraduate students in ENGL 114: Rhetoric of Data, the DLC lab, and the Marion Cheek Jackson Center, which documents the history of Chapel Hill’s African American communities through its From the Rock Wall oral history project.

This collaborative Wikipedia project demonstrates how oral histories produced by community groups can address silences in information systems that shape contemporary knowledge production. Centered on community needs and data literacy, the project expands the reach of these histories by developing Wikipedia and Wikidata pages for sites selected by the Jackson Center—leveraging Wikipedia’s influence in search engines and large language models (Minhaj & Urs, 2021; McDowell, 2024).

For more information about the project, contact the DLC’s email.

Citations

McDowell, Zachary (2024). Wikipedia and AI: Access, representation, and advocacy in the age of large language models. University of Illinois Chicago. Journal contribution. https://doi.org/10.25417/uic.25702581.v1

Urs, Shalini and Minhaj, Mohamed, Wikipedia Infoboxes: The Big Data Source for Knowledge Bases behind Alexa and Siri Virtual Assistants (November 23, 2021). Information Matters, Vol. 1, No. 11, 2021, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4187145 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4187145

Funding

This project has received funding through the Humanities for the Public Good, UNC-Chapel Hill grant.