Last summer, partners from the ASEH Grad Caucus, Environmental History Now, NiCHE New Scholars, and the Women’s Environmental History Network launched the #FlipTheList initiative. Our goal was simple: to update and enrich the “List of environmental books” on Wikipedia to reflect the diverse and multi-layered nature of environmental scholarship, highlighting works by scholars of color, scholars from the Global South, and/or scholars who identify as women, trans and non-binary people. By focusing our efforts on revolutionizing this one particular list of environment books on arguably one of the most visited websites on the internet, we hoped to make a small yet significant impact.
Through an edit-a-thon on June 23, supported by the ASEH’s Committee on Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity—more than 100 people came together and crowdsourced a list with over 800 entries, far exceeding the initial goal of 300 recommendations. Since that day, many volunteers have helped to add these entries to the Wikipedia page, and this work has been ongoing.
So many recommendations were submitted back in June that we still have hundreds of titles we hope to add. We’re going to take the upcoming Environmental History Week of the ASEH as an opportunity to continue what we started, and see how we can expand the impact of #FlipTheList over the course of the coming year.
Therefore, we hope you will join us on April 5 at 12pm EDT for a virtual discussion about the background of the project and where it can go from here. We’re interested in how to broaden the conversation about diversity, equity, and inclusion to all facets of our field. We will also spend some time talking through the basics of editing on Wikipedia for those who wish to help.
Then, on April 21, we’ll be hosting a come-and-go event from 9am to 3pm EDT to bring the community back together and further our goal of getting our recommendations onto Wikipedia. You can find meeting details below!
| Diversifying Environmental History on Wikipedia (and Everywhere Else) April 5, 12:00 – 1:30pm EDT To register, click here *** #FlipTheList Hangout April 21, 9:00am – 3:00pm EDT To register, click here |