[Wikimediaindia-l] Cultural differences with Indian newcomers

[Srikanth Lakshmanan]

Hi all,

While we are all working on reaching out to more and more people to join
wiki community in India, I see an area we need to focus before it becomes a
problem.Few days back there was a thread posting a link to article[1] in
which a user claimed "Foreigners deleting Wikipedias India content". In the
Chennai meetup that happened last week too, there was a person claimed new
users are being BITE <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BITE>N by
admins among other things which indicated his lack of understanding in wiki
policies / guidelines. I just came across another ANI incident[2] involving
an Indian editor and 3 admins. Without going to details / commenting on it,
am quoting part of this comment about[3] "cultural gap that exists from
being an Indian editor editing from India in an English Wikipedia dominated
by Anglophone people. He needs to know when to persist, when to back off and
needs to learn the general etiquette of the Western world"

There are few common patterns / misconceptions among a set of new Indian
editors most of whom never come back to wikipedia.
  1. Admins have superpowers, remove content and BITE.
  2. Lack of understanding of wiki policies. Neutrality and Copyrights seem
to be problem areas.POV Pushing happens quite a lot and there is general
lack of awareness about copyright.
  3. Then this "cultural" differences.

While the examples are from English wikipedia, these issues might be common
to Indic as well as they grow.

If we could address these, we could avoid newcomers leaving wikipedia.

[1]
http://www.ciol.com/News/News/News-Reports/Are-foreigners-deleting-Wikipedias-India-content/142555/0/
[2]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Incidents#Yogesh_Khandke_and_Three_Admins
[3]
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Incidents&action=historysubmit&diff=397820910&oldid=397820751

Regards
Srikanth.L
Google Profile <http://j.mp/SrikanthL>
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