The Wikipedia Red Link

 

The Wikipedia Red Link


I did not plan to stumble into the history of the Colored Children’s Orphanage. I wasn’t doing research on 19th-century New York, the Draft Riots, or forgotten Black institutions. I was simply writing my very first Wikipedia article—about an elder born in 1919, Florence M. Rice—during a community edit-a-thon with AfroCrowd. 

As I typed, I mentioned that she had spent part of her childhood in the Colored Children’s Orphanage. The Wikipedian helping me at the edit-thon put brackets around the words Colored Children’s Orphanage. Which indicated that a Wikipedia article needed to be written. When I saved the page, the phrase appeared in red.


A red link.


At the time I didn’t know what that meant. It meant that there was no Wikipedia article about the Colored Children’s Orphanage.

That history, that institution, those lives — were missing from the world’s largest knowledge encyclopedia.

My article about Florence M. Rice had exposed that gap. A reminder that written history is full of gaps, and that ordinary people and events oftentimes get left out. Someone else wrote the orphanage article, following that red link. But when the red link disappeared, I realized that Wikipedia's links are linked data. 

Learning this changed how I approach history: not as something finished, but as something constantly repaired, expanded, and corrected.

It also taught me to pay attention—because even a small edit can bring visibility to forgotten stories.

When I saw misinformation spreading on TikTok about the Colored Children’s orphanage being burned with children trapped inside, I responded to the misinformation. I knew not just from reading history, but from having been part of adding content to Wikipedia.


No children died that night. They were rescued.





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