About This Wiki
What This Is[edit | edit source]
The Black History Foundation Wiki is a community-built archive for discovering, researching, and sharing Black history — especially the history that lives in family memory and community record before it ever reaches an archive, a textbook, or a museum.
Why We Built It[edit | edit source]
In 1860, the Clotilda — the last known ship to bring enslaved Africans to the United States — arrived in Mobile Bay. The community of Africatown that its survivors founded told the story of that ship for more than a century. Historians dismissed it. It wasn't until 2019, when the wreck was finally located and confirmed, that the outside world caught up to what the community had known all along.
That gap — between what a community knows and what gets counted as "verified" — is the reason this wiki exists. Community accounts, oral histories, and family records don't need institutional permission to be true. But they do need a place to be documented, discussed, corroborated, and — when the evidence comes together — recognized. This wiki is that place.
How To Use It[edit | edit source]
- Browse the homepage's discovery rail for recently added and
actively-researched articles, or browse by category (People, Places, Events, Eras).
- Research an article's Sources section to see what's backing a
claim — every source is tagged with its type (archival document, oral history, newspaper, and more) and a confidence rating (verified, single-source, or disputed), so you always know how solid the ground is.
- Contribute what you know — a new article, a citation, a correction
— and see your work reflected automatically on your contributor profile.
- Post a research lead for a story you believe but can't yet prove,
tagged with exactly what it needs to move forward: archival access, translation, fieldwork, funding, expertise, or digitization.
- Discuss any article or lead on its Talk page.
Our Ultimate Goal[edit | edit source]
Every unresolved research lead on this wiki represents a piece of history still waiting on the resources to confirm it — the same gap that kept the Clotilda a community secret for over a hundred years. Our goal is to close that gap faster, in the open, with the community doing the work.
Looking further ahead: as research on this wiki matures — corroborated, discussed, sourced — the best of it should have a path to permanence beyond this wiki. We intend for this wiki to eventually connect with Black History DAO, where the community votes on what gets permanently preserved on-chain. That connection doesn't exist yet — this wiki's job today is to be the place where the research happens and matures. The DAO's job, when the two connect, will be to make the strongest of it permanent.
Some leads need more than research time — they need money for an archive visit, a translator, a dive team, an expert consultation. Every research lead on this wiki that's tagged as needing funding is already built to carry a link to a specific fundraising campaign for that exact need. We intend for those links to eventually connect to Charity Coin, a fundraising platform we're building to support projects like this one. That connection doesn't exist yet either — but the moment it does, the path from "we know this happened, we just can't prove it yet" to "here's exactly how to help prove it" will be a single click.
How This Compares[edit | edit source]
| Site | What it does well | Where this wiki is different |
|---|---|---|
| Wikipedia | Broad, well-governed, general-purpose encyclopedia | No built-in way to track how confident a claim is, or to flag what unresolved history needs to move forward |
| Ancestry.com / FamilySearch | Deep genealogical records, family-tree tools | Built for tracing your own lineage, not for community discovery and discussion of shared history |
| Fandom-style wikis | Polished, community-editable, great discovery UX | Built for entertainment franchises — no concept of source confidence, oral-history disclaimers, or research needs |
| BlackPast.org | Respected, expert-written reference on Black history | Written and reviewed by historians, not community-editable — no place for a family's account to live while it's still being proven |
How This Serves Our Mission[edit | edit source]
The Black History Foundation's mission is to empower the African diaspora through education, cultural celebration, and the preservation of our history — believing that protecting our past is the key to a stronger, more unified future. This wiki puts that mission into practice across all four of the Foundation's pillars: education (every article is a teaching resource), technology (the citation and research-leads tooling built into this wiki), cultural preservation (a home for accounts that would otherwise stay undocumented), and community engagement (research is done together, in the open, not behind an institution's walls).