User:Jordyn.seidman/sandbox

Hi! Welcome to my sandbox page. This is where I will be testing out new Wikipedia editing skills and maybe even developing ideas. I am looking forward to learning more about editing and how I can contribute more to Wikipedia and its users.

—Jordyn

Article Critiques

Article: Say Her Name

1. Is everything in the article relevant to the article topic? Is there anything that distracted you?

The greatest distractions present in this article are in its repetition of information and lack of concise prose. A large portion of the information highlighted in the opening paragraphs are reiterated in other subsections of the article. The sentences are difficult to follow and there are many grammatical errors present throughout the article.

2. Is the article neutral? Are there any claims, or frames, that appear heavily biased toward a particular position?

This article is neutral solely because it does not contain information on public reactions to this social justice movement. Adding a section on responses to the trending hashtag would greatly improve this article. While there is no bias, I am concerned about the fact that much of the information for this article comes from the website of the organization that created the movement and coined the phrase, “Say Her Name”. This is a potential source of bias and I would encourage the Wikipedia community or the original author to search for other sources to corroborate the information on the AAPF’s website.

3. Where does the information come from? Are these neutral sources? If biased, is that bias noted?

As I mentioned above, much of the information comes from the AAPF website which claims to have started the “Say Her Name” movement. This is a potential source of bias because the intention of this website is to attract followers, rather than to provide impartial information on the topic. Additionally, the author cites websites such as “ebony.com”, The Huffington Post and The Guardian, which may all be reliable sources. However, I think that Wikipedia articles should rely more heavily on peer-reviewed works and less on small commentary pieces written by online news sources.

4. Read the "talk" page of the article. What do you find there?

On the talk page of this article, I found a few suggestions from students that noted the need for more reliable sources, neutral tone and a section discussing the implications of this movement on social media. Some of these students also made edits pertaining to the grammatical errors and citation errors. However, the article is still in need of some editing for the purposes of clarity, conciseness and accuracy.   5. Take a look at the Wikipedia quality scale and compare it to your article. Where do you think it falls? If the article has a rating assigned to it, do you think it is accurate?

There was no rating assigned to this article that I could find, but in my own opinion, I would consider this article to be a “Start” article because it does not always cite reliable sources, needs improvement in terms of content and organization and is full of grammatical errors.

Article: #AmINext

1. Is everything in the article relevant to the article topic? Is there anything that distracted you?

This article contains relevant information, however, I was distracted by the tone of the writing which is not particularly neutral and has some grammatical errors. I immediately noticed that several claims written in this article have no citation and are particularly controversial. Without proper citations, these claims cannot be verified and should therefore be removed.

2. Is the article neutral? Are there any claims, or frames, that appear heavily biased toward a particular position?

The article begins in a neutral tone, but by the third or fourth sentence, claims begin to appear that are biased and do not contain a citation. For example, the article states that, “Aboriginal women in Canada are more likely to be subject to violence than non-aboriginal women.” The article also states that Aboriginal activists have been appealing to the federal government “for years”. This claim is also uncited. Additionally, there is a bulletin on the top of the page that says the neutrality of the article is disputed.

3. Where does the information come from? Are these neutral sources? If biased, is that bias noted?

The citations listed include local news websites such as CTV News, CBC Novia Scotia, and Rabble (a news cite “built on the efforts of progressive journalists, writers, artists and activists across the country”). Additionally, a blog post is cited as well as twitter.com. None of these are considered reliable sources because the news cites are not internationally recognized and blog posts as well as twitter posts are not peer reviewed and often reflect the personal opinions of the authors. In my opinion, this article should not even exist on Wikipedia because it does not meet the requirement of relevant and extensive coverage of the topic from reliable sources. Clearly this social phenomenon was localized and short lived while most Wikipedia articles attempt to target topics that are widely covered and relevant for a longer period of time.

4. Read the "talk" page of each article. What do you find there?

On the talk page of this article, I found a response that uses pretty abusive language to shame the author for the biased tone of the original article as well as blame “feminists” for “running rampant over this project.” Clearly, this editor is more interested in antagonizing other Wikipedia users than actually improving the article. However, a response was written about a month later that instructs the angry commentator to flag articles in the future if they are written by clearly unexperienced Wikipedia users rather than responding aggressively. Additionally, this responder stated that he or she would edit the article accordingly. Unfortunately, this responder appears to have only deleted particularly biased portions of the original article such as the paragraph on the intentions of the Canadian Prime Minister to ignore the killings of Aboriginal women. However, this responder left behind a scant article with unreliable sources and few appropriate citations. This responder should have questioned the integrity of the sources of information and either found corroborating sources with more credibility or deleted the article altogether.

5. Take a look at the Wikipedia quality scale and compare it to your article. Where do you think it falls? If the article has a rating assigned to it, do you think it is accurate?

This article is unrated, but after looking at Wikipedia’s quality scale, I would consider this article a “stub” because lacks reliable sources, proper grammar and tone as well as legitimacy as an article that should be included in Wikipedia’s online encyclopedia. A Google search revealed that “#AmINext” was only covered by one international news source, Al Jazeera, and has no other apparent reliable sources to draw from. This article should be deleted from Wikipedia’s site.

Final Project Ideas

Contributions to the "AmINext" Article

Some of the contributions I intend to make to this article are to reword some of the sentences for neutrality purposes. I also intend to corroborate the information that is already cited using more reputable sources. I think there is much more that can be said about the development of this social media campaign and I want to dig deeper into the issue itself to discover the social media presence of this sentiment that existed before the hashtag, if possible. I also think adding a section about the disappearances of the aboriginal women will give readers a better idea of what the hashtag represents and provide a basis for the claims of this social movement. This issue has persisted within Canadian society for at least ten years, according to news reports and I think that fact should also be made clear in the article.

In the above column in which I critiqued this article, I initially stated that there was not enough information on the topic to warrant a Wikipedia article. However, after looking closer at the academic literature that exists on the topic, as well as several news sources that operate primarily in print, I am confident that this article is notable enough to deserve a Wikipedia article and I hope to improve it by modifying the tone, and adding relevant background information.

Notes for Improvement of #AmINext

Based on my research so far, I have discovered a few key additions that should be made to the #AmINext article:

1. More information should be written about Holly Jarret, the woman who created the hashtag and what her intentions were in doing so.

2. More information should be included about the immediate events that led Jarret to start the social media campaign.

3. More information should be included about Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his administration's role in refusing to investigate the high prevalence of violence among indigenous women (this is important because some women participating in the Am I Next Twitter campaign directed this question at the then Prime Minister).

4. More information should be included about the public response to the hashtag campaign.

5. A list should be compiled of hashtags that were used in combination with #AmINext that pertain to other activist campaigns such as "#stolensisters" or "#idlenomore".

Current Bibliography

Burman, Jenny. “Multicultural Feeling, Feminist Rage, Indigenous Refusal.” Cultural Studies, Critical Methodologies, vol. 16, no. 4, 2016, pp. 361–372., doi:10.1177/1532708616638693.

“Canada: Growing Outrage but Business as Usual.” Targeted News Service, 29 Jan. 2015, login.proxy.library.emory.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/1652216919?accountid=10747.

Cogan, Marin. “The Sisterhood.” Foreign Policy, no. 219, 2016, pp. 68–75. Proquest, search.proquest.com.proxy.library.emory.edu/docview/1795688283/FD4539DF4A8041D3PQ/1?accountid=10747.

CTV News Staff. “#ImNotNext Campaign Says No to Victimhood.” CTVNews, CTV News, 16 Sept. 2014, www.ctvnews.ca/canada/imnotnext-campaign-says-no-to-victimhood-1.2009556.

Thomson, Aly. “#AmINext Aims to Raise Awareness about Murdered Aboriginal Women.” CBCnews, CBC/Radio Canada, 13 Sept. 2014, www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/aminext-aims-to-raise-awareness-about-murdered-aboriginal-women-1.2765405.

Peer-Review Response

I am so grateful for the peer-reviews I received on my article. Most of the suggestions were small grammatical changes that were easy to fix (which I have already done), but I also think that Siboyle's suggestion to add a sentence explaining Jarrett's personal goals in creating the hashtag campaign would really improve the clarity of my article. I have also added a sentence following her suggestion. The last aspect of this project that I need to complete is to link other articles to mine. Some articles I have thought about linking include:

1. Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women in the "See Also" heading
2. Murder of Tina Fontaine in the "Aftermath" heading
3. Hashtag Activism (this will be a small paragraph) in the "Notable Examples" heading

Article Draft of #AmINext

Introduction

Link to original article: AmINext

#AmINext is a social media campaign that was launched on September 5, 2014 by a Canadian Inuit woman named Holly Jarrett in order to call attention to the high rate of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada. Jarrett's hashtag campaign was launched following the release of her Change.org petition in August of 2014 calling for a government inquiry into the high rate of missing and murdered Indigenous women. Social media users participate in the hashtag campaign by posting photographs of themselves holding up signs displaying the hashtag and by including a short message about why they are participating. The campaign was created in response to the deaths of Loretta Saunders, Jarrett’s cousin, and Tina Fontaine, a 15-year-old Aboriginal girl, among others. For over a decade, Indigenous activists have called for a government inquiry into the disproportionate rate of violence perpetuated against Indigenous women. Demand for this investigation was reignited following the death of Fontaine. The #AmINext campaign calls on the conservative government, then headed by Stephen Harper, to acknowledge the pattern of violence. The campaign received widespread coverage across Canada following its launch due to simultaneous news reports releasing details of the Fontaine case. On September 11, 2014, the BBC aired a segment on the campaign which resulted in international coverage. As of March 2016, the petition on Change.org has received over 300,000 signatures.

Background

In February of 2014, Loretta Saunders, an Inuit woman and the cousin of Holly Jarrett, was murdered by her tenants over rent money. Saunders was preparing to graduate from Saint Mary’s University in Halifax and was working on a thesis regarding the missing and murdered Indigenous women of Canada. Following the September 2014 death of another young Indigenous woman, Tina Fontaine, Jarrett founded the #AmINext campaign to carry on her cousin’s efforts to increase awareness about violence against Indigenous women. The goal of the campaign is to ask the public to consider that if one demographic can be ignored, so can any demographic. Jarrett stated that her intention in creating the campaign was to encourage a national dialogue about an issue that she, and other Indigenous activists, feel is often invisible to non-Indigenous Canadians. Following the founding of the campaign, Jarrett reported that she was in the process of producing a documentary about Saunders and the underlying sociopolitical factors contributing to the high proportion of violence against Indigenous women like her cousin. In June of 2016, Jarrett reported that she sat down with both the Minister of Indigenous and Northern Affairs, Carolyn Bennett, and the Minister of Status of Women, Patty Hadju, both of whom served under the newly elected Trudeau Government. During this meeting Jarrett delivered personal responses to the crisis from petition signers and #AmINext participants.

Ties to the Harper Administration

The Harper Administration had previously been accused of delegitimizing cultural rights and refusing to investigate the high rates of violence against indigenous women. Just prior to the launch of the #AmINext campaign, then Prime Minister Harper came under fire for stating that the pattern of violence was caused by individual perpetrators rather than an underlying “sociological phenomenon” and asserting that no investigation would take place. However, following the #AmINext campaign, the Harper Government issued an action plan which consisted of an internal Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) investigation into the missing and murdered Indigenous women that was published in 2015. The RCMP found that between 1980 and 2015, 1,049 indigenous women had been murdered, 175 had disappeared and over 100 were still missing.  Additionally, it found that Aboriginal women are “over-represented” among Canada’s missing and murdered women.

Political Aftermath

Although the #AmINext campaign was most active during the fall of 2014, its social media presence was revitalized during the federal election campaign in 2015.  Justin Trudeau made violence against Indigenous women a large part of his electoral campaign, promising an inquiry into the deaths and disappearances to be one of his first acts of duty.  On December 8, 2015, Trudeau announced that a national inquiry into the missing and murdered Indigenous women would take place.  Since then, Patty Hadju, the Canadian Minister for the Status of Women, has stated that the number of missing and murdered Indigenous women may be as high as 4,000, contrary to the RCMP’s estimate of 1,224.

Criticisms of #AmINext

Critics of the campaign point out that #AmINext focuses on potential victims of Indigenous violence but does not commemorate or acknowledge those who had already become victims of the phenomenon.  Additionally, social media users noticed that asking “Am I Next?” suggests that victimhood is inevitable and revokes power from those vulnerable to violence. Sarah Raineville was the first social media user to use #ImNotNext in order to avoid encouraging a culture of victimhood and since then, other social media users have attempted to focus on the empowerment of Indigenous women.  However, Jarrett, the #AmINext founder, is not upset by the criticism, stating that she is happy that there is public dialogue about the issue, which was not the case a year prior to the campaign launch.

Associated Campaigns

• The REDress Project
• Walking with Our Sisters
• Idle No More

Associated Hashtags

•  #TinaFontaine
• #StephenHarper
• #MMIW
• #StolenSisters
• #IdleNoMore
• #Cndpoli
• #Not1More

See Also

• Finding Dawn

References