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Diversity and WP:MILHIST |
The current prominence of anti-racism movements should encourage Wikipedia editors who focus on military history to reflect on our work: do our articles reflect diverse experiences and viewpoints?
At the outset of this short op-ed I'll put my cards on the table. I'm a white middle-aged Australian man who has never been the victim of racial or gender-based discrimination. As such, I can't speak here from personal experiences of discrimination or seeing my community under-represented, and I am certain that I have massive blind spots. I am sure that this op-ed will reflect some of my biases.
We've seen lots of good work in Wikipedia's coverage of military history over recent years to address systematic bias. In the topic areas I'm most familiar with, broader ranges of sources have been used in articles, the coverage of the Australian frontier wars has been considerably expanded, the quality of articles on the military history of the Balkans has been improved and a lot of work has gone into rebalancing our coverage of World War II to reflect modern scholarship. I'm sure that there have been similar, and stronger, improvements in many other areas.
Yet I often see material in articles which makes me wince. As some examples:
I think that most, if not all, of this is entirely inadvertent. To a large degree it also reflects limitations in our sources. Until recently, for instance, the literature on World War II in the Pacific generally paid almost no attention to the experiences of Pacific islanders or civilians in the Netherlands East Indies, Philippines and pre-war Japanese colonial possessions. The literature on this topic also continues to largely ignore the racial segregation of many military forces during the Pacific War.
However, there's scope for us to try to do better (and I firmly include myself in this). This could include:
Addressing these problems will result in stronger and more interesting articles.
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Diversity and WP:MILHIST |
The current prominence of anti-racism movements should encourage Wikipedia editors who focus on military history to reflect on our work: do our articles reflect diverse experiences and viewpoints?
At the outset of this short op-ed I'll put my cards on the table. I'm a white middle-aged Australian man who has never been the victim of racial or gender-based discrimination. As such, I can't speak here from personal experiences of discrimination or seeing my community under-represented, and I am certain that I have massive blind spots. I am sure that this op-ed will reflect some of my biases.
We've seen lots of good work in Wikipedia's coverage of military history over recent years to address systematic bias. In the topic areas I'm most familiar with, broader ranges of sources have been used in articles, the coverage of the Australian frontier wars has been considerably expanded, the quality of articles on the military history of the Balkans has been improved and a lot of work has gone into rebalancing our coverage of World War II to reflect modern scholarship. I'm sure that there have been similar, and stronger, improvements in many other areas.
Yet I often see material in articles which makes me wince. As some examples:
I think that most, if not all, of this is entirely inadvertent. To a large degree it also reflects limitations in our sources. Until recently, for instance, the literature on World War II in the Pacific generally paid almost no attention to the experiences of Pacific islanders or civilians in the Netherlands East Indies, Philippines and pre-war Japanese colonial possessions. The literature on this topic also continues to largely ignore the racial segregation of many military forces during the Pacific War.
However, there's scope for us to try to do better (and I firmly include myself in this). This could include:
Addressing these problems will result in stronger and more interesting articles.
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