Lauren Maharaj Reflection

Wikipedia is the place we travel when we want to discover more. Usually inhabiting the northern regions of any Google search, Wikipedia prides itself as an accessible space for the curation and accumulation of ‘all human knowledge.’ Yet, many people find themselves and their oral histories excluded from its virtual pages. This is a natural consequence of Wikipedia’s editorial process – whereby new articles undergo a peer-review process to ensure that they meet the platform’s standards of notability, neutrality, and verifiability. But what if a history has never been written? What if its facts have never been fully published? Verifiability poses a challenge to recognizing the people and stories kept alive within their communities – but seldom discussed within the topography of ‘reputable’ literature.

Nora Hendrix was a woman previously excluded from Wikipedia for this reason. Hendrix was, for many generations, one of Vancouver’s most notable residents. Residing in the Strathcona region from ~1912 to 1984, she was a critical force within growing and enriching the city’s early Black community. While beloved to the community, however, Nora was widely unknown beyond the geographical stretches of the Downtown East Side – let alone within the realm of historical literature.

As an influential BIPOC woman that shaped Canadian history, I wanted to commemorate Nora’s life story where the avid internet-voyager could see – but a lack of independent and verifiable sources posed a challenge to publishing her story on Wikipedia. Few literary sources have memorialized Nora by documenting the intricacies of her life and work. Of those that have - such as internet biographies written by family members and community historians - neutrality and verifiability remained at issue.

While researching and writing my biography on Nora Hendrix, two tactics proved incredibly useful to sustaining the verifiability of my article: thoughtful source compilation and syntax selection. Each sentence I formed referenced a melange of local news coverage that, only once pieced together, painted an expansive view of Nora’s life. Having been fact-checked, properly accredited, and regularly updated, each article was verifiable in its own right; together, they supplanted unreliable biographical sources. Where these sources factually conflicted (most commonly in reference to dates, names, and places), generalizing syntax offered the most reliable means to communicate information accurately; “Hendrix… moved to Vancouver, British Columbia from the United States circa 1912.” Rather than discrediting one set of facts in selection of another, these linguistic allowances further enhanced the verifiability of my article by citing multiple sources – all while preserving the veracity of the facts presented. This is how I discovered that how you deliver a story is of equal – if not greater – importance than nailing down the details you tell.

In the case of Nora Hendrix (and other stories like hers), the challenge is not just in unearthing the facts but in presenting them in a way that is verifiable and respectful of the intricacies of community histories. Through considerate source selection and choiceful language, it is possible to ensure that marginalized stories occupy space within the internet’s collective history.