At the Fall 2012 NCBS National Board meeting the members unanimously approved a new digital initiative to enhance the infomatic presence of Black Studies on the worldwide web through a broad-based Wikipedia Project that all NCBS members and member institutions are asked to support.

Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia that is collaboratively written by the people who use it. It has more than four million articles covering all sorts of topics, but still there are thousands of subjects that are of fundamental importance to Africana Studies that are not to be found in Wikipedia. As students in the many Black Studies classes that are offered every semester, as faculty members who teach those classes, as lifelong learners who know and can share knowledge what are we waiting on? “We are the change we seek,” to quote President Barack Obama. Become a Wikipedian and begin adding articles about Africana Studies today. Does the African American Studies Department or Program on your campus have a wiki entry? How about the founders, important faculty, major events, and community sites? Get the sources, write the entry, and post it to Wiki. Get your class to work on doing their entries as a collaborative assignment. Together we can do this!

Africanapedia is the proposed Wikipedia Project that will bring together editors that want to work together as a team to improve Wikipedia. Through a focus on Africana Studies it will create new articles in a coordinated way and check existing and newly created entries. The work of Abdul Alkalimat is an inspirational force for the Project. Of particular importance is his short manifesto “Black Studies and Wikipedia: Our next frontier is in cyberspace.”

My name is Amilcar Shabazz and I was elected Secretary of the National Council for Black Studies (NCBS) in May of 2012. One of my goals is to get the NCBS to use “more effectively emerging digital and cyber-technologies.” Africanapedia is our first step toward realizing that goal. There are three easy steps to become an Africanapedian:

1. Stake out a topic for your Wikipedia scholarship.

2. Keep a record of the new entries and edits you make.

3. Share that record and help us build an Africanapedia community of editors.

It is a simple as 1-2-3. I could blow your mind by mentioning some persons, places, ideas, etc., that are not in Wikipedia. Let’s do something about it. Take any Africana Studies subject, and see if an article exists. If one does, read it and see how complete or accurate it is, and edit it if you see changes that are needed. If an article does not exist, then write one.

Start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Your_first_article and write to me with questions and to share your experience:
Amilcar Shabazz, amilcarshabazz@gmail.com