[Air-l] Wikipedia, Rosa Parks, and "The work of race in an age of digital reproduction"?

[Mary K. Bryson]

This week I am teaching Radhika Gajjala's wonderful Cyber Selves, and Lisa
Nakamura's CyberTypes (who writes about "The work of race in an age of
digital reproduction") in a course on new media and the possibilities for
democratic public pedagogies.
When I heard that Rosa Parks had died yesterday, I went online to look at
the digital "rendering" of this life, and this death.
On wikipedia, the entry for Rosa Parks contained what I first reacted to
with disbelief as an extraordinary and somehow, incredible and
incomprehensible racist paragraph under the entry - Death and Funeral. It
was late. I looked at the page again today, and then the history of the
page. It would appear that this particular version of the entry on October
24 has been permanently deleted from the public history of this page. This
prompted me to look at more of the history of the revisions - just those
made on October 25/05. Not so extraordinary at all, it turns out. I have
compiled a short list of some of the contributions to this wikipedia entry
for my class tomorrow. I don't know enough about Wikipedia to know how the
revision made on October 24 could summarily be deleted from history.

At any rate, with a sense of caution in putting this "out there" - I am
sending what I have found, and I have just started to look...

http://educ.ubc.ca/faculty/bryson/565/wikipediarp.html

Mary