WikiConference Day2: Talks on getting marginalised communites to join in

To encourage a more diverse coverage of topics and points-of-view in Wikipedia in English and Indian languages, several discussions at WikiConference India on Saturday centered on finding ways to enable different communities in India to start editing and create content for the online encyclopaedia.

Wikipedians feel such an engagement will not only help the Wikipedia movement in India grow but empower those who contribute as well.

Bishakha Datta, member of the Wikimedia Foundation’s board of trustees led a discussion on the current gender gap; only 13% of Wikipedia’s contributors are women. Ideas on how to encourage more women to contribute ranged from solutions at the personal level to those on a larger scale.

Dipali Acharya, a Wikipedian from Gujarat, suggested a strategy based on the ‘seven day challenge’ concept used by beauty products that are popular with women. “Simply take seven women you know in your family or neighbourhood and get them to start editing,” said Acharya.

 “The reason why you will find more women on Facebook and Twitter as opposed to Wikipedia is because they use these websites to stay connected with their children and relatives. Most women are busy with the important job of rearing their families.

They are not willing to do another job for free,” said Debashree Dattaray, assistant professor from Jadavpur University, Kolkata.

However the idea of renumeration as incentive was quickly dismissed since a founding tenet of the encyclopaedia is that contributions be 100% voluntary.

Later in the day, a discussion on finding ways to document the Indian LGBT space kicked off by filmmaker Sridhar Rangayan of The Humsafar Trust followed a similar vein. “There is a lack of documentation on the LGBT movement and its prominent figures in India. While we have tried to address this gap with projects such as Project Bolo, increasing visibility in Wikipedia is always favourable since it turns up on top in search engines,” said Rangayan.

Since Wikipedia articles are verified by way of citations, as marginalised communities and uncommon topics enter the scene, methods of citation too must change. That is the opinion of a few Wikipedians who are working on finding alternative means of citation such as oral citations. Shiju Alex, consultant with the Wikimedia Foundation and an active contributor, said, “In regional language Wikipedias, unlike Wikipedias in the western world, a lot of knowledge is not documented in books or available online. So audio recordings are a great way to address the gap.” Presently, the Wikimedia Foundation is working on a way to include content from social media (select tweets and status updates) as a valid citation method on Wikipedia.