Both academics and researchers working with the foundation agree that the online encyclopedia suffers from a dearth of information about black history, too often petering out when the topics extend past the well-known names and events of slavery and the civil rights movement. In the Internet age, this is no trivial matter: To many people, a topic does not exist if it does not have a Wikipedia page.

The foundation is hoping to fill in the blanks by hosting events like the one on Thursday throughout February, soliciting expertise and institutional knowledge from places like Howard; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, in New York; and National Public Radio.

The organizing team came up with a list of entries that needed to be expanded, like those about Myra Adele Logan, the first woman to perform open-heart surgery, and Mildred Blount, a fashion designer who dressed celebrities in the 1940s and designed the hats worn in “Gone With the Wind.” They also began creating entries for topics that were completely absent from the Wikipedia database, like Beth A. Brown, a former astrophysicist at NASA, and Farish Street, a hub for black businesses in Jackson, Miss., that thrived until the 1970s.

Meta DuEwa Jones, an English professor at Howard who participated in the editing event, often teaches the poems of the Dark Room Collective, a group of poets that scholars have called as significant to the writing world as the New York School and the Black Arts Movement. There are pages on Wikipedia for more than 50 artist collectives, including lengthy entries for the New York School and the Black Arts Movement. The Dark Room Collective is not there, “even though they specifically changed the face of African-American literature and contemporary literature in the ’80s and ’90s,” Ms. Jones said.

“It’s not just a problem that it’s not on Wikipedia — it’s also a possibility,” she added hopefully as the team set out to craft an entry.