Who Gets to Tell the Story?

 

Who Gets to Tell the Story?

In Search of the Stories We Almost Lost

While reading James Baldwin's Princes and Powers, I found myself thinking about something that happened seventy years after the 1956 Conference of Negro-African Writers and Artists.

In September 1956, Black writers, artists, and intellectuals gathered at the Sorbonne in Paris to discuss culture, history, colonialism, assimilation, and the political circumstances that shaped the lives of African and Black peoples.

Today, I find myself asking a related question:

Who gets to create the record of human knowledge?

The technology has changed.

The problem has not disappeared.

From Paris in 1956 to Wikipedia today

Baldwin described a gathering of people from many different cultures.

They did not all have the same histories.

They did not speak with one voice.

They did not necessarily agree about the future.

But they recognized that something had happened to their histories through colonialism. Their cultures had often been described through someone else's eyes.

Baldwin made an observation that has stayed with me: what was called History, with a capital H, was largely a Western interpretation of the life of the world.

That sentence makes me think about Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is now one of the largest places in the world where people encounter historical knowledge.

Millions of people may never open an encyclopedia in a library, but they will search a name, a place, an event, a movement, a scientist, an artist, a community, or an African country and encounter a Wikipedia article.

That makes the question of who creates those articles much more important than it might first appear.

The missing story

One of the things I have learned from being a Wikipedian is that sometimes the problem isn't that information does not exist.

The problem is that the information has not yet entered the encyclopedia.

There may be books.

There may be newspapers.

There may be photographs.

There may be oral histories.

There may be people who have carried the knowledge for generations.

There may be archives sitting in somebody's basement, university library, community organization, church, museum, or family collection.

But if nobody has brought that knowledge into the process of documenting it, it can remain invisible to the larger information system.

This is where I see a connection with Baldwin.

A culture does not disappear simply because someone outside of it fails to see it.

But something happens when the people who carry that culture are not participating in the creation of the historical record.

A living culture has to recreate itself

Baldwin wrote about the necessity for a people to continually recreate itself in the image of its past.

I love that idea because recreation does not mean simply going backward.

It means taking what has been inherited and asking what it means now.

That is very different from putting culture behind glass.

I think about this when I work on Wikipedia.

I am not interested in simply filling empty spaces with information.

I want to understand why the information is missing.

Who documented it?

Who didn't?

Whose photographs survived?

Whose letters survived?

Whose books were published?

Whose oral history was recorded?

Who had access to universities, newspapers, archives, publishing houses, museums, and other institutions that preserve knowledge?

And perhaps most importantly:

Who was expected to be the historian, and who was expected to be the subject of history?

Then came artificial intelligence

Now we have another layer to this question.

Artificial intelligence systems can produce an answer in seconds.

You can ask ChatGPT, Gemini, or another AI system about an African community, a Black historical figure, an Indigenous tradition, or an obscure event, and receive a beautifully written answer.

But where did that knowledge come from?

Alkebulan Wiki Edit and Study 

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The machine did not live the history.

It did not sit with someone's grandmother.

It did not walk through the neighborhood.

It did not attend the funeral.

It did not photograph the building before it was demolished.

It did not listen to an elder tell a story that had never been written down.

AI works from information that has been documented, digitized, collected, and made available to its systems.

That makes the creation of human knowledge more important—not less important—in the age of AI.

This is why I keep coming back to slow Wikipedia

I have become increasingly interested in what I call slow Wikipedia.

We live in a culture that wants everything immediately.

Ask a question.

Get an answer.

Generate an article.

Create an image.

Move on.

But knowledge does not always work that way.

Sometimes you have to sit with a book.

Sometimes you have to compare several sources.

Sometimes you have to discover that the first source was wrong.

Sometimes you have to find an old newspaper.

Sometimes you have to talk to somebody who remembers.

Sometimes you have to look at a photograph and ask what it does not show.

Sometimes you have to go into the community.

And sometimes you simply have to wonder.

That is why I like the idea of slow learning.

The slowness gives us time to notice what speed causes us to overlook.

Oral history matters

I think this is also why oral history matters so much.

There are people walking around carrying knowledge that may never appear in a database.

They remember places that have disappeared.

They remember businesses that closed.

They remember farms that became housing developments.

They remember community organizations.

They remember migrations.

They remember what happened before the cameras arrived.

They remember what happened when the newspapers left.

A person can carry an entire archive inside of them.

But memory alone is vulnerable.

When that person dies, some of the archive may disappear with them.

This is why documenting people's experiences matters.

An interview can become a transcript.

A transcript can become research.

A photograph can become a Commons image.

A documented event can become a Wikidata entry.

A collection of reliable sources can help improve a Wikipedia article.

And suddenly something that existed primarily in someone's memory becomes part of a larger public record.

Wikipedia as a place of participation

This is one reason I don't see myself simply as someone who "writes Wikipedia."

I think of myself more as a facilitator.

I like helping people discover that they can participate in the creation of knowledge.

That is particularly important for communities that have historically been documented by other people.

There is a difference between being the subject of an article and participating in the process of documenting your history.

The goal isn't to control history.

No one person can do that.

The goal is to make the circle of people participating in the creation of knowledge larger.

That is one of the things that attracted me to the Wikimedia movement in the first place.

From the Sorbonne to the screen

I sometimes imagine those people sitting around the table at the Sorbonne in 1956.

Alioune Diop.

Léopold Sédar Senghor.

Aimé Césaire.

Richard Wright.

Jean Price-Mars.

Others whose names may be less familiar today.

They were confronting a world in which political power and cultural authority were deeply connected.

They were asking how Black peoples could understand themselves, preserve their cultures, and participate in a larger conversation without simply disappearing into someone else's definition of them.

Today our meeting place may be different.

It may be a Wikipedia edit screen.

A Wikimedia Commons upload.

A Wikidata entry.

A Zoom meeting.

A community archive.

A recorded interview.

A photograph taken with a telephone.

A conversation between a young person and an elder.

The tools have changed.

But the fundamental question remains remarkably familiar:

Who gets to tell the story?

I don't think the answer is "us instead of them"

This is another place where Baldwin's thinking interests me.

The answer to a history dominated by one perspective isn't necessarily to create another closed system.

We don't need to replace one authority with another authority.

We need more people participating.

More perspectives.

More documentation.

More sources.

More conversations.

More questioning.

More people learning how to investigate rather than simply accepting the first answer presented to them.

That is particularly important now because AI can make an incomplete history sound complete.

A confident paragraph can give the impression that everything worth knowing has already been found.

It hasn't.

There are enormous amounts of human knowledge that have never been digitized.

There are languages that remain underrepresented.

There are communities whose histories have barely been documented.

There are women whose work was absorbed into the accomplishments of men.

There are farmers whose ecological knowledge never entered a university textbook.

There are Black neighborhoods whose histories disappeared when the buildings disappeared.

There are Indigenous knowledge systems that cannot be understood simply by extracting a few facts from them.

There are family stories waiting for someone to ask the question.

The field still needs cultivating

This brings me back to Booker T. Washington's words:

"Our pathway must be up through the soil,

up through swamps,

up through forests,

up through streams and rocks..."

I hear something in those words that goes beyond his particular historical moment.

You cannot build a living knowledge system entirely from the top down.

You have to work from the ground.

From people.

From communities.

From books.

From photographs.

From archives.

From memory.

From observation.

From careful research.

From the people who are actually there.

And this is where the anonymous saying comes back to me:

"You cannot plow a field by turning it over in your mind."

Exactly.

At some point, you have to put your hands in the soil.

Knowledge is something we do

Perhaps that is what I have been learning through my years as a Wikipedian.

Knowledge is not simply something we consume.

Knowledge is something we participate in creating.

Every time someone adds a reliable reference to an article, photographs a historic building, records an oral history, documents a community event, uploads an image, identifies a person in an archive, or teaches another person how to edit, they are helping cultivate the historical record.

And that matters even more now that artificial intelligence is increasingly becoming an intermediary between people and information.

I don't want AI to replace human curiosity.

I want it to help awaken it.

I can ask AI a question.

But then I want to go looking.

I want to find the book.

I want to see the photograph.

I want to find the original document.

I want to talk to the person who remembers.

I want to compare sources.

I want to wonder.

That, to me, is the difference between simply receiving an answer and participating in knowledge.

From princes and powers to people and knowledge

When James Baldwin wrote Princes and Powers, he was observing a gathering of people who were trying to understand how culture could survive and recreate itself after generations of colonial domination.

Seventy years later, I find myself asking a somewhat different version of the same question.

In an age of Wikipedia, Google, and artificial intelligence:

Who is creating the knowledge that machines will learn from?

That question brings the responsibility back to us.

Not just scholars.

Not just universities.

Not just governments.

Not just technology companies.

Us.

People.

Communities.

Families.

Teachers.

Students.

Writers.

Photographers.

Archivists.

Wikipedians.

Elders.

Young people.

Anyone willing to look closely enough at the world to say:

This happened.

This person mattered.

This place existed.

This knowledge belongs in the record.

And perhaps that is what I mean when I think about the idea of a knowledge movement.

We don't have to wait for somebody else to tell our stories.

We can learn how to document them ourselves.

We can ask better questions.

We can preserve what is disappearing.

We can correct what is wrong.

We can add what is missing.

And we can teach the next generation to do the same.

The field is still there.

The soil is still there.

There is still work to do.

Let's cultivate the knowledge.