When I was doing the modules to get started with Wikepedia editing I had noticed the presence of what Kwok (2020) refers to as the “neutrality problem”. I immediately thought to myself that one of the Five Pillars of Wikepedia isn’t really possible since all writing is shaped by political context, something that a lot of different education spaces still need to work on understanding. I’m glad that there’s a growing number of scholars in different fields who are willing to take on this epistemological interrogation of how much of Western academic principles are designed to center some ways of thinking over others, often making objectivity and impartiality more of a myth than a practice. This was my first time creating a Wikepedia account and making an edit to a page. I felt similar emotions to those described by Mari (2020) in the “When Wikepedia Fought Back” article in that I was also surprised to see just how “alive” Wikipedia is. This assignment and the readings helped me learn a lot about the social and political dynamics of how Wikipedia pages operate. Though I’m disappointed (but not surprised) to see that Wikepedia still doesn’t consider “blog posts” and similar materials to be “verifiable” materials appropriate for using as citations/references since not everyone with important knowledge to share with the world can access academic publishing and sometimes social media is the best option for finding documentation of different things. 

For the assignment I ended up editing Wikipedia page of the late Chicana feminist scholar Gloria Anzaldua. She’s one of those scholars that despite having a lot of really great ideas and profound impact on her communities, also said some really problematic things in her papers along the way. I noticed that a lot of my gender/women’s studies professors often had no clue about some of the critiques that Anzaldua’s work has been receiving the last decade until I brought it up in class. I think it’s one of those things where people’s critiques were getting suppressed for a long time and now as more Black and Indigenous Latino scholars manage to successfully carve out space in Latino academic spaces designed to exclude us there’s finally more academic sources critiquing Anzaldua’s work that professors can assign in their courses if they want to continue teaching Anzaldua’s work. I added the highlighted sentence with a citation to the brief “Criticism” section on her Wikepedia page.