Edit 2023/LaGuardia & Wagner Archives Wikipedia Project Year 5: LGBTQ Archives and Student Reseach: 2024/Main Page

This submission has been accepted for WikiConference North America 2023.

Starting in 2016, the historians in the LaGuardia and Wagner Archives joined forces with LaGuardia faculty and local Wikipedians to design a Wikipedia “GLAM” (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) project that would increase online visibility of archival holdings, introduce students to the process of archival research, and most ambitiously, to involve them in establishing unwritten historical narratives that are crucial towards building a more inclusive public history of activism and our cities.This year, the Archives invites students to continue this research focusing on the LGBTQ Collection. This is the fifth nonconsecutive year of this collaborative project that has involved a close team of historian/archivists, librarians, faculty, students/alumni, as well as the continued support of the Wikimedia NYC chapter - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM/La_Guardia_and_Wagner_Archives.

In our panel presentation, representative students and faculty from our team will discuss their project experiences and provide ideas for managing similar work in other educational settings. In the 2022-2023 academic year, LaGuardia Community College still faced a greatly reduced enrollment that made project recruitment challenging. Given the significantly reduced enrollment faced by the college in the 2022-2023 academic year, project recruitment posed a challenge. Based on past project year experiences, we arranged for faculty advisors to work closely with small teams consisting of 1-3 students each. Our student researcher team contributed to the entries related to LGBTQ+ activism and politics, starting entries including: St. Pat’s For All; Children of the Rainbow-First Grade Curriculum; New York City Gay Rights Bill of 1986; and HIV/AIDS in New York City, Housing section.

We would also like to foster discussion of questions like: How can we foster connections with other archives, museums, colleges and activist groups in order to make these kinds of Wikipedia projects more visible? How do we negotiate the issues relating to usage of primary sources when facilitating GLAM projects?

In addition, we would like to foster a discussion and review about Wikipedia’s original research policy and how to navigate institutional research into complying with the original research policy. Furthermore, a question for Wikipedians to resolve is how can Wikipedia safeguard student researchers from false accusations of spamming.