The Mixed Museum was delighted to be one of Wikimedia's first Connected Heritage partners.
Our partnership aimed to help to improve public knowledge on the history of racial mixing in Britain through editing Wikimedia sites using material from The Mixed Museum’s collections. Read more about the partnership on our Connected Heritage page.
Our Wiki micro-internships with Queen Mary University London (QMUL) university students have played an important role in diversifying Wiki content as well as bringing new audiences to The Mixed Museum.
Run for four weeks in the spring of 2022 and again in 2023 with the help of Leah Emary, our Wikimedian-in-Residence and the rest of the Connected Heritage team, the internships have had a significant impact in reach and engagement.
In collaboration with Wikimedia UK and QMUL, The Mixed Museum has been been hosting university students participating in QMUL’s micro-internship scheme since 2022. These four week placements allow students to gain experience of working in professional environments over a four week period.
Our micro-internships are designed to provide students with an insight into the heritage sector, particularly the challenges of sharing marginalised histories with a wider public. We do this through our bespoke Wiki micro-internships that we developed with Wikimedia UK as part of our shared Connected Heritage partnership.
Our micro-interns learn how to edit Wikipedia and upload to Wikimedia Commons using material from The Mixed Museum’s collections. Their four week programme consists of:
The interns have weekly Zoom meetings with the Connected Heritage team, and get support via Slack and email, giving them experience with tools essential for a remote work environment.
The Mixed Museum's collaboration with the Association of Mixed Race Irish (AMRI), which produced our first digital exhibition - Mixed Race Irish Families in Britain, 1700-2000 - revealed the extent to which this history within Wikipedia was shockingly absent. In particular, material directly relating to the Black, Asian and mixed race historical presence in Ireland was almost non-existent! Below are snapshots of the sections on 'South Asians in Ireland' and 'Black people in Ireland'.
As you will see below, the historical period for the South Asians in Ireland entry began only in the 1980s! Meanwhile, though the Black people in Ireland entry reached back to the eighteenth century, the discussion was very brief and sparse.
We decided that our micro-internships could make a small but significant difference in improving these sections. The Connected Heritage team decided to ask the interns to focus on integrating the research from the eighteenth and nineteenth century sections of our AMRI exhibition into the two Wikipedia pages.
After spending time familiarising themselves with the AMRI exhibition material, Anastasia and Zaid underwent editing training with the Wiki team. Armed with their brief and their new editing skills, they then spent the following three weeks uploading relevant text and information from the AMRI exhibition into Wikipedia. Meeting weekly with Chamion to discuss progress and challenges, and using Slack to ask questions and get feedback from the Wiki team, the pair gradually began to shape the entries to give Wiki visitors a better flavour of Ireland's rich and longstanding multiracial history. Though the internship was short, Anastasia and Zaid covered many areas in both historical research, curation, writing and editing, including the complex but often fascinating area of image licensing and copyright.
The Connected Heritage team are so pleased and proud of what Anastasia and Zaid have managed to achieve in their short time with us.
Anastasia, who worked on 'Black people in Ireland', has provided important details and a contextual backdrop to the pre-existing brief mention of Tony Small who featured significantly, in our AMRI exhibition. The Wiki page now gives more information and links for Small, a formerly enslaved Black American, who became a servant to the Irish revolutionary Lord Edward Fitzgerald before moving to London with his white French wife, Julia.
Meanwhile, Zaid created an entire new section for 'South Asians in Ireland', highlighting the presence of this community in the country from the eighteenth century. He also added details of an important South Asian figure who seemed to be missing from Wikipedia entirely: Professor Mir Aulad Ali, a Muslim Indian scholar of languages at Trinity College Dublin in the nineteenth century. As we discuss in our AMRI exhibition, Aulad Ali married an Englishwoman, Rebecca, with whom he had a son, Arthur, information that Zaid also included in the Wiki page.
In the four short weeks of their internship, Anastasia and Zaid produced amazing tangible outcomes. In their 48 edits made across the pages, they added almost 5,000 new words of content and 52 references. The result of their hard work? Almost 38,000 page views and counting! It is wonderful to think that, already, tens of thousands of people will likely be better informed about Ireland's longstanding multiracial history thanks to our Wiki interns.
Anastasia and Zaid have created a wonderful foundation on these pages that we hope will continue to be built on. It's been a wonderful start to our Connected Heritage partnership - we hope you will enjoy reading about Anastasia and Zaid's experiences on the project that they have very kindly shared with us below.
I applied for this micro-internship at The Mixed Museum because I saw it as a great opportunity to contribute to an important and fulfilling project outside of my degree. Shining a light on underrepresented communities is something that has always been important to me - I know how frustrating it can be to find a lack of material that focuses on the lived experiences and histories of those who may be deemed not important enough to record. I therefore shared with The Mixed Museum a belief in the importance of highlighting overlooked histories of long-standing ethnic minority presence across Britain and Ireland, histories which are often absent from mainstream narratives and education.
I attended the Wiki editing training session and began browsing the Museum's AMRI exhibition for potential entries for the project I was assigned with: South Asian presence in Ireland. The archives were full of interesting anecdotes that the Wikipedia page was missing (the Wikipedia page itself was shockingly bare - its history of South Asian presence in Ireland began in the 1990s?!)
I started out from the eighteenth century, researching and understanding the role played by Irish East India Company men who brought their wives, mistresses and their mixed-race children from India back to cities like Cork. I then started reading about some of the most notable South Asian residents of Ireland during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Take the Indian entrepreneur Sake Dean Mahomed, for example. Alongside his Irish wife Jane Daly, Sake Dean was the first person to introduce the practice of "shampooing" to Britain and Ireland. I certainly didn't know that! To my disappointment, I also found out that Sake Dean and Jane's great grandchildren were forced to change their surnames from Mahomed during the First World War so as to avoid racist attention at a time when xenophobia was rife and mixed marriages were disapproved of. This was a damning reminder of how even those whose families had been accepted by the British and Irish elite weren't exempt from the evils of racism.
I was particularly intrigued by the collaboration between the Museum and Wikipedia. I don't think it's controversial to say that, when looking for quick information, the first port of call for most of us in this day and age is generally a Google search followed by a click onto a Wikipedia article. But what if the Wikipedia page for your desired topic is skeletal and incomplete or, worse still, what if that Wikipedia page doesn't even exist?
As I mentioned, it's incredibly discouraging to discover a lack of information for a specific topic, particularly when that topic pertains to one's heritage. Knowledge that is hidden in the depths of academic journals or behind irksome paywalls isn't always accessible and, no matter its quality or utility, doesn't find its way into the public sphere. This internship explored a more creative and accessible means of knowledge sharing for topics related to social history, race, and heritage, and so I was enthusiastic to share the Museum's rich archives on Wikipedia - one of the most accessed online resources in the world.
I also came across Mir Aulad Ali, another brilliant example of the thriving South Asian community in nineteenth century Ireland.
An Indian scholar working at Trinity College, Dublin, Mir Aulad Ali was a well-regarded individual who often donned traditional Indian attire at Irish events and represented Dublin as a dignitary when foreign kings and queens visited the city. It's a shame that the story of Mir Aulad Ali isn't given due recognition (he doesn't even have a Wikipedia page.) Alongside Sake Dean and many others, he represented a South Asian community welcomed in Ireland and one that played a central role in Irish history. They also represented the growing presence of mixed-race families in Ireland, something that the Museum's AMRI exhibition so brilliantly captures.
Looking back at how I felt before I started this experience, I recall that my first thought was: "OK, I'm basically going to be copying stuff from the exhibition into Wikipedia for 4 weeks". While this wouldn't necessarily have been a bad thing, I'm grateful that the experience involved far more than this.
The freedom and flexibility that the internship offered really allowed me to do my own individual research and go down all sorts of rabbit holes while editing. I actually ended up going beyond my assigned project and started writing entries for other Wikipedia pages, all the while acquiring vast amounts of information and knowledge that I had no idea about. I even briefly ventured into the minefield that is copyright, learning about all of the different licences that'd allow me to upload (or prevent me from uploading) a particular image onto Wikimedia Commons to complement my entries.
Branching off into these different areas was incredibly enlightening and, most of all, fun! I can say with confidence that the 4 weeks I spent in this role felt more like a productive hobby than a "job".
Regarding what I've gained from this internship, I think the number one thing is lots and lots of knowledge (both historical and practical.) I was also able to refine the research skills that I've developed as an undergraduate student by applying them to a specific research brief. It was a breath of fresh air to be able to conduct a project different from the essay writing activities that I've been so used to for the past 3 years.
This internship also gave me an insight into curatorial practices and the Wikipedia editing process. Acquiring a combination of research, archiving, and editing skills is certainly something that will stand me in good stead. Finally, I learnt that anyone can edit Wikipedia - our teachers were right!
This was an incredibly unique and exciting opportunity that I wouldn't have experienced elsewhere. I can't thank Dr Chamion Caballero and the Wiki team enough for the chance to intern here and their support throughout the whole process. As I mentioned at the beginning of this piece, I applied for this micro-internship because I saw it as a great chance to contribute to an important and fulfilling project. I'm so glad that we've collectively managed to convey invaluable information and knowledge from the Museum's archives to one of the world's most accessed online resources.
A big thank you to The Mixed Museum for giving me this fantastic opportunity to learn from and work side by side with such keen and ambitious individuals. I am delighted to have completed my internship in partnership with Wikimedia and supported The Mixed Museum in its journey to preserve Black and other ethnic minorities' British history.
When I originally applied for this internship, I felt the need to make a contribution that would speak louder than a simple conversation about controversial issues with family members or friends. I finally felt ready and empowered enough to start talking about such problems as racial and gender discrimination out loud. And what better way to do so than through historical research and education?
I was particularly looking forward to helping people learn more about underrepresented communities and appreciate their country's diversity. Being a part of a team currently striving to strengthen Black and South Asian representation was exceptionally thrilling, and crucial for the new generation's education.
Upon my onboarding, the Mixed Museum and The Wikimedia teams were extremely welcoming and enthusiastic, which immediately made me feel comfortable. Apart from having weekly meetings with Dr. Chamion Caballero, I was fortunate enough to have a training session with the entire Wikimedia team. This was very interesting, as they explained the process of adding, editing, proofreading, and, most importantly, keeping the articles afloat afterward.
As I started looking into my main task- editing and managing the "Black people in Ireland" Wikipedia page, I was astonished at how little valuable information it contained. The deeper I dug, the more I realised that even though some information was present, it was at times twisted. Many sections lacked sources, many had sources that seemed entirely unreliable. Half-truths, misconceptions, and inaccuracies were so common that I considered starting the page from scratch at times. Unfortunately, my time with The Mixed Museum did not permit me to do so. Therefore I stuck to amending and improving the sections that already existed.
Throughout my experience, I gathered a lot of invaluable information about the Black presence throughout Ireland as well as Britain. I came across many surprising facts, such as the life of Tony Small, who was described as merely being the saviour of Lord Edward FitzGerald in Wikipedia and many other sources. His background appeared to be so much more complex as he turned from an enslaved person to one of FitzGerald's closest friends.
Unfortunately, I had never heard of many of the historical facts, dates, and names mentioned in the 'Mixed Race Irish Families in Britain' exhibition, despite being a former history student at a British school. This worries me until the present, as I find education to be the most crucial aspect of children's upbringing, which is supposed to form their minds to create tolerant, understanding, and compassionate adults later on. How can we claim to be fighting injustice, racism, sexism, and homophobia if so little information is available to students, who will grow up not knowing a thing about these issues and not being able to adequately discuss them? Especially when Wikipedia, the most available source of information for the young, can not provide them with the details and facts that should be thoroughly studied. I wonder how many more people out there wish to change their mindset, but a lack of accessible resources prevents them from doing so.
One of the most exciting parts of this internship was learning more about the behind-the-scenes processes of Wikipedia. It was a challenge to adapt my writing style to that of Wikipedia articles since they strive to present facts supported by scholarly sources, whereas university writing usually requires thorough analysis and reflection.
However, the Wikimedia team was extremely supportive throughout the experience and helped me figure out the most complicated aspects of editing and citing. In addition, Chamion at The Mixed Museum was available at weekly meetings as well as by email every day of the week to give detailed feedback and assist me with anything I struggled with. I feel that the whole team collectively contributed to making the page look the way it does now.
I am grateful for the chance to be able to make a change through my skills and be a part of something bigger than just me. I feel that now is the time to be open-minded, creative, and detail-oriented with our heritage. Working on projects concerning Black and South Asian descent, ancestry, immigration history, and many other aspects of their lives in the UK will truly help others embrace their legacy and encourage them to find out more about their own roots. I hope that I was able to bring something valuable to the table and really helped the great cause of spreading awareness about Black Irish history.
In March 2023, two QMUL student interns, Leyi and Shannon, joined The Mixed Museum for four weeks in March 2023 to improve Wikimedia content on the ‘Brown Babies of WW2’.
Though much more of this history was uploaded to Wikimedia sites, a great deal appeared to refer to older sources. In particular, reference to the first-hand accounts collected by Professor Lucy Bland and displayed at The Mixed Museum, were noticeably absent.
We decided that our micro-internships could make a small but significant difference in improving reference to the ‘Brown Babies’ history.
Working from our Wiki Volunteer Trello board of tasks, Shannon focused on adding personal accounts to articles which read like lists of dates, while Leyi was interested in adding social history to articles on military bases in England. Leyi experienced some pushback from other editors which she describes in her blogpost reflection below. We were deeply impressed with her resilience in the face of the initial shut down.
Both Leyi and Shannon had incredibly interesting conversations with Chamion around who feels ownership over different parts of history and how our work editing Wikipedia can have an impact on what is generally accepted as ‘important’.
Yet again, even though the work is carried out over such a short period of time, it has a very immediate impact.
As you can see, as of May 2023 Leyi and Shannon's combined work has had 52.6k views on Wikimedia pages, and continues to drive visitors to The Mixed Museum website.
In particular, Leyi’s persistence in adding the BB history to airbase pages, really paid off. We also feel that as these pages are so heavily framed around military history, they very likely share the BB history with a quite different audience than our usual ones.
When I initially applied for this internship, I was deeply intrigued by The Mixed Museum’s focus on mixed-race people in the UK, giving and spreading the voice of a marginalised group in society. It was also very astonishing to see how much work has been done by the interns from last year. Looking at their edit histories and how many people have viewed the improved wiki pages convinced me that this opportunity to work as an intern at The Mixed Museum will be meaningful and fulfilling.
During the four-week internship, I focused on the ‘Brown Babies’ and their parents, usually British mothers and African-American GI fathers’ experiences in the UK from the 1940s to 1960s. Brown Babies who grew up during the mid-twentieth century, experienced different degrees of racial discrimination.
What is more special for this group is that they were sometimes not accepted by either the White or Black communities in Britain. With a difficulty finding their self-identities, the Brown Babies is a group that can be quite easily neglected on the wider scale of history. But reading through the materials, especially the one on Tostock Park, I found that Brown Babies were crucial parts of local and national society and history.
They are a microcosm of the changes in British society from the post-war period to the Cold War, reflected through and accompanied by the forced separation of Brown Babies' parents and their stories of reunions with their American families in the 1990s. The experiences of the Brown Babies are living history that is invaluable.
It is also worth mentioning that the perspective of the Brown Babies provides a unique lens for us to discover the stories about their fathers, those enlisted men not only as part of the US military but also part of the social history of the locality where they were based.
Some unexpected incidents came up during the internship which actually reflected the significance of the work of The Mixed Museum and the Connected Heritage project. As I was trying to add the information about Black GIs to a wiki page of the airbase where they were located, I found that some other editors’ expectations for the page were more about technological and military concepts. As these editors might not be familiar with such concepts related to the airbase as part of the wider social history, adding information about Black GIs and their descendants’ experiences triggered questions and disputes on the reliability of the information on Black GIs. And I need to be honest that communicating with people on Wiki sometimes requires us to be very skilful. I want to raise a big thank you here to the Wikimedia team. They’ve provided useful suggestions and support throughout the entire internship including the editing process of this specific wiki page.
Even though this kind of problem might occur, utilising the platform about military units and bases is a very efficient way to make Brown Babies' information more accessible to viewers who might have little knowledge and expectation on this topic. As I skimmed through the wiki pages about military units that were deployed in the UK from WWII to the Cold War, I also found a lack of organisation that could connect the dispersed information of African American soldiers who were once based in the UK. I then created a category with a relevant name and added it under the relevant wiki pages that I edited previously. Sadly, I did not have enough time to further improve this category. As it was more like a preliminary attempt to organise the relevant information in the vast universe of Wikimedia, there are still many things that can be added to this category.
This project offered me insight into not only the editing process of Wikimedia pages but also the depth of social history: an order to deploy a military unit will trigger a series of subsequent events and affect an unexcepted range of people. Archiving and editing the information about 'Brown Babies' allowed me to sift through the type of resources that I was not familiar with. The ‘Brown Babies’ exhibition and this internship broadened the scale of my view on a very specific period in history by probing into the information about military deployments and exploring their connections with individual stories.
I am very grateful for this amazing opportunity that helped me acquire multiple sets of skills in editing, communication, and research valuable for my future studies. All of these works cannot be done without the help of Dr Chamion Caballero and the Wiki team. It is indeed a great pleasure and honour to work with them.
I applied for this micro-internship at The Mixed Museum because it looked like an extremely exciting opportunity and a great way to put the research and writing skills I have learnt at university into practice. I wanted to contribute to something meaningful and learn something that I hadn’t covered before. Prior to the micro-internship, I had never heard of the term “Brown Babies”, or knew it related to babies born from mixed-raced relationships between white women and African American GIs that had been based in Britain during World War Two.
I thoroughly enjoyed the exhibition curated by Professor Lucy Bland and was excited to create edits on Wikipedia that would encourage more people to engage with the exhibition and explore the Museum’s rich archives, allowing people to gain a deeper understanding of our mixed heritage in the U.K. and how aspects of our society have changed over time.
Upon completing the internship, I feel proud of my contributions and the valuable skillset the teams at The Mixed Museum and Wikimedia have taught me, which I believe has put me in good stead for my future studies and career.
The collaboration between Wikipedia and The Mixed Museum was particularly interesting to me, as after reading the Mixed Museum’s ‘Brown Babies’ exhibition, I noticed the different ways that Wikipedia and the Museum present information and which ways are perhaps more engaging for readers. In my experience, the information on Wikipedia is often largely fact-based, sometimes making searching for information tedious rather than exciting or interesting. However, the exhibition’s focus on the personal stories of African American G.I.s and their experiences in Britain during the Second World War, and the 'Brown Babies’ search for their mothers and fathers later in life, added a human element which interested me and inspired me to conduct further research and share what I discovered with a wider audience.
Alongside my weekly meetings with Dr Chamion Caballero, the Wikimedia provided an extensive training session that made me feel inspired and confident enough to begin editing, despite having no experience editing Wikipedia before. At first, it was difficult to adapt my writing style from being usually argumentative in tone to purely factual and unbiased. However, The Mixed Museum and Wikimedia teams provided useful guidance and suggestions for how to improve certain Wiki pages, and as the process went on, I began to branch out and find areas independently that I thought could do with improvement.
I'm grateful to have been given an insight into the behind-the-scenes of Wikipedia and to have seen the enormous amount of effort and research that goes into making edits on Wikipedia. It was great to be part of a network of editors, working anonymously but collaboratively to improve sources of information and share personal research with a wider community to make it more accessible, and this becomes especially important when writing about underrepresented communities and sharing stories that might have otherwise gone untold or unnoticed.
This is what is so unique about Wikipedia. As there is no authority over specific pages or strict templates of how the pages should be structured or what information they should include, it was interesting to see what other editors deemed as important or relevant information to add.
Sometimes it was intimidating to add sections to more developed pages that already had a clear structure. For example, the page for ‘Evercreech’, a small town in Somerset, was largely centred around historical facts about the governance and industries in the town, and I was initially hesitant to add personal stories from the ‘Brown Babies’ exhibition in case it didn’t fit in or other contributors to the page didn’t think it was relevant. However, I realised adding personal stories to historical pages is a great way to remind people of the lives of real people behind the facts and figures which are usually foregrounded on Wikipedia.
Usually, people don’t tend to get as excited by the facts they accept as true when they see them on Wikipedia, they rather become intrigued and want to read more when they become fascinated by somebody’s life story, or in this instance, the rare cases of tolerance and acceptance from the British public towards black G.I.s in rural England. As Wikipedia is often used as a starting point for research, I wanted to capture the public’s attention with stories of people like Cynthia Pine, and encourage people to follow the links and references that take them back to the ‘Brown Babies’ exhibition.
I am extremely grateful to have got the chance to work alongside such a passionate and encouraging team and to have extended my knowledge about racial mixing in Britain. This internship has given me an insight into editorial and curatorial processes and helped me to refine my research and writing skills. I thoroughly enjoyed the independence and flexibility that the internship provided and the valuable connections I was able to make with the director, Dr Chamion Caballero, and the Wikimedia team, who consistently made me feel part of the team and supported me, even though the internship was completed remotely.
We are hoping to run the internships again in the future. Sign up to our newsletter to keep in the loop!
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