Black Lunch Table:Black History Month in Wikimedia Nigeria Community

Beyond the Canvas: Highlighting Black Artists on Wikipedia

11th May – 18th June 2024

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Black Lunch Table

With an over sixteen-year ongoing artist collaboration, Black Lunch Table (BLT) focuses on celebrating the lives and documenting/recognizing the works of black artists. Equipped with the goal of addressing the racial and gender bias on Wikipedia, there is a deliberate effort channeled towards empowering African Wikimedians to write their own history. Dedicating the month of March annually in the celebration of the Black History, Black History month is set aside to implement black-people-centered projects that would bring community of black people together, for the common goal of celebrating the Africanness of the black race.

Highlights of this celebration are broken down to sessions and events that include BLT Photobooth and edit-a-thons, training of new editors with the skills and resources to create, update, and improve Wikipedia articles and encourages existing editors to focus on Wikipedia knowledge gaps by creating/improving Wikipedia articles about African American artists. Through BLT, people are brought together to dialogues about the writing, recording, and promoting of inclusive art history. The production of discursive sites, where cultural producers engage in dialogue on a variety of critical issues is the primary aim of BLT.

Black Lunch Table and Wikimedians

Through their collaboration, the Black Lunch Table in partnership with Wikimedians jointly mobilize the creation and improvement of a specific set of Wikipedia articles that pertain to the lives and works of Black artists, translating them into different African languages so as to improve accessibility while increasing the visibility of their rich contents on the wiki space. In the field of mainstream contemporary art, there is a call for dedicated and passionate effort to document and improve the Black artists contents.

In its second iteration in the Nigeria Wikimedia community, different Wikimedia language communities in Nigeria will be involved to ensure the capturing and documentation of the Black people's contents in as many Nigerian languages as possible. Teaming up with the contributions of African Americans, in celebration of the Black History Month, these communities will join in recognising all Black people of United States in history and contemporary, from the enslaved people first brought over from Africa in the early 17th century to African Americans living in the United States today.

Among the notable figures often spotlighted during Black History Month are Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who fought for equal rights for Blacks during the 1950s and ’60s; Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American justice appointed to the United States Supreme Court in 1967; Mae Jemison, who became the first female African-American astronaut to travel to space in 1992; and Barrack Obama, who was elected the first-ever African-American president of the United States in 2008.

Activities & Timeline

Online launch: 21st May 2024

Owerri Physical Launch (Edithaton) 1: 11th May 2024

Awka Physical Launch (Edithaton) 2: 13th May 2024

Online Contest: 22nd May – 7th June 2024

Gallery

Physical event, Owerri