#activisim has a Wikipedia page

 I often think in today’s society Wikipedia is a pretty good measure of relevance. If “pictures or it didn’t happen” is a thing, then certainly it is also true that “Wikipedia or it doesn’t exist” is also a thing. If someone asks a question about a place, topic, event, or often even a person, and google doesn’t return a Wikipedia page in the first few results you start to wonder: if that pace or event is real, wouldn’t it be on Wikipedia? But I digress, the point is while this is often how we think, that does not mean it is always a valid thought, especially when it comes to emerging trends or ideas. But I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Hashtag Activism does in fact have its own Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashtag_activism, and it is pretty informative.

It includes information on the history, stating “the oldest known mention of the term is from The Guardian in 2011,” noteable examples, including #BlackLivesMatter, #IdleNOMore, #NODAPL and #YesAllWomen, and criticism and support for hashtag activism. Interestingly, the list does not include more recent hashtags like the #MeToo movement and #HowIwillchange. Seems like Wikipedia needs some updating! Perhaps in a future post we will take a stab at crowd sourcing an entry for #MeToo!
For now I want to make just one more note about how impressed I am with the length of this article as well as the plethora of citations to sources. There are 96 footnotes on the article, more articles than I could address with my blog posts this semester!

So this a topic people have been buzzing about for a while. On this blog I intend to spend a couple of weeks posts analyzing the history of hashtag activism and the buzz surrounding it, analyzing articles about different movements etc… Then I want to delve into some studies on the effectiveness of hashtag activism as well as some ways that we might be able to do our own research into the effectiveness of a particular hashtag. Finally, I’m going to introduce those of you who are not familiar to the concept of “public interest litigation.” Then I am going to collect some organizations who engage in public interest litigation try to see if they are using hashtags as a form of activism. If so I want to try to see how effective it is. If not, I want to try to determine if it could be an effective tool.

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