Students at LaGuardia Community College who participated in a “CUNYpedia” and Wikimedian-in-Residence-led program have authored a new Wikipedia article titled “African American film score composers” that points out a century of musical accomplishments. The article will help to recognize iconic music by Black artists featured in U.S. films almost since the start of film history, which have often gone unacknowledged.
The article was created in LaGuardia Community College’s “English 103” research methods-oriented class, a course taught by Professor Ximena Gallardo and Librarian Professor Ann Matsuuchi. The instructors told the AmNews they wanted their course to lead to more than a “throwaway” research paper, so they assigned students to identify “knowledge gaps” on Wikipedia — areas where history has been overlooked due to systemic bias or a lack of digital records.
“Wikipedia is an open platform, but it has a lot of gaps and missing things,” said Richard Knipel, CUNY’s Wikimedian-in-residence. “While some composers might have had individual articles, Wikipedia was lacking on things that summarize a whole aspect of history — the struggles and the trends. We wanted to work with students to share this history not just with their professor, but with the public at large.”
“One way to make research real was for students to do work that would actually help the world and have an impact outside of the classroom,” Professor Gallardo explained. “In this particular class, we were trying to see if the students could write an entire article by themselves. It turned out to be a massive undertaking, but this particular student was brilliant. They went for it and loved it.”
Working on the article showed LaGuardia Community College students how they could be part of creating information that would be useful to others. The Wikipedia article details how African American music was portrayed in the first silent films and later in films with sound, like “The Jazz Singer” (1927). It points to the ways film helped spread racial stereotypes and the negative and sometimes positive ways it depicted African American spirituals, folk songs, blues, soul, funk, and hip hop.
The research process required the college students to work with physical archives and connect them with the digital world. For Professor Matsuuchi, an instructional technology librarian, the project was a way to show students that libraries are still valuable even at a time when quick Google searches are a quicker option.
“Academic librarians support faculty intensely, and it makes sense because Wikipedia is based on books,” Matsuuchi said. “I wanted students to realize how valuable textual information sources are, especially those that are not visible on digital platforms. We found a whole book on African Americans in film, and just flipping through it gave us the idea. There wasn’t anything on Wikipedia that provided an overview narrative of all these important people.”
Since its publication in June 2025, the “African American film scorers” article has been accessed nearly 1,000 times.
“It’s a cumulative process,” Knipel added. “People are still finding important research in the archives about composers from the 1920s and 30s. Now that the article is up, it tells other people, ‘Really, we should be working on this.’ It’s a work in progress, just like history itself.”