Bangalore-based Wikipedians are spearheading an experimental initiative, the Oral Citations Project to overcome the lack of published material in emerging languages on the online encyclopedia initiative, the Oral Citations Project to overcome the lack of published material in emerging languages on the online encyclopedia
There is more Wikipedia in India but it would be interesting if there could be more India in Wikipedia...or more South Africa for that matter” — this view put forth by researcher and Wikipedian Achal Prabhala in the film People are Knowledge, probably sums up the need for capturing simple things that we know and do in forms other than the published material.
And taking this thought forward is the Oral Citations Project, a pilot project which explores alternative methods of citation that could be employed on Wikipedia. Funded through a grant by the Wikimedia Foundation, the essence of how this project was undertaken is captured quite lyrically in the short 40-minute film.
“For most of our learning, a majority of us are trained to look at something that comes in the published form because the written word is considered sacrosanct. That way, we become prisoners of a system of hierarchy of knowledge. But there are so many things that we know and do in our everyday lives that are not documented in the written form or any other form for that matter. Recording these things in some form would add to the vast knowledge base,” says Bangalore-based Achal Prabhala who is also member of the Wikimedia Foundation Advisory Board and makes South Africa his home for three months in a year.
Achal adds that the nature of the project is experimental as nothing like this has ever been done in Wikipedia before and if it finally gets implemented, it would be a path-breaking venture.
The idea behind this project was this — Wikipedia privileges printed knowledge (books, journals, magazines, newspapers and more) as authentic sources of citable material. Restricting citation sources makes the enterprise workable. But books and printed words generally are closely correlated to rich economies: Europe, North America, and a small section of Asia.
“Just to give an example — in 2005, 161,000 books were produced for a population of 60 million people, while in South Africa there were 6,100 books for 48 million people and in India for a population of 1100 million people, only 97,000 books were published. What this means for indigenous language Wikipedias from India and South Africa is that there is very little citable, printed material to rely on in those languages; in turn, it means that it is very difficult for any of those languages to grow on Wikipedia,” adds Achal.
The project was done with three Wikipedia languages — Malayalam, Hindi and Sepedi (a South African language) and the subjects chosen to be documented through audio interviews were two games Sur and Gillidanda in Hindi, Naaliyar Bhagavathi Theyyam, a temple ritual and Dappa Kali, a folk game, both from Kerala in Malayalam and in Sepedi, Mokgope, a country liquor made from the marula fruit, and two games played in Limpopo in South Africa, Kgati and Tsere Tsere. Collaborators for the project are Bangalore-based IT professional Shiju Alex and Mayur, Mohau Monaledi of South Africa and Achal Prabhala, with additional help from Vijayakumar Blathur.
“We wanted to take up languages that were varied in terms of number of people who spoke them and the kind of media market they reperesent. Sepedi is a South African language spoken by just 5 million people with hardly any media market or any published material in that language. The fact that these language Wikipedias had active editors also helped. The common thread for picking these topics was that there is hardly any written material on them and whatever exists cannot be accessed,” says Shiju, a Malayalam Wikipedia editor, who travelled along with Achal to witness and document Dappa Kali and Naaliyar Bhagavathi. Achal also travelled to Johannesberg and Limpopo to collaborate with Mohau, who recorded audio interviews with women who made the liquor and played the age-old games.
In the long run, Shiju feels that this project will help in capturing for posterity traditional symbols of Indian society that may get lost to the coming generations. “Nobody plays Dappa Kali these days. Kids in Kerala are more interested in cricket,” he rues. The project will be presented at the forthcoming Wikimania to be held in Israel.
RECORDING THE PROCESS
The film People are Knowledge was shot and directed by Priya Sen with additional assistance from Zen Marie and Achal Prabhala and was completed this month. It includes interviews with noted experts in the field of language, anthropology and women studies such as Jon Soske, a scholar of Indo-African history, Urvashi Butalia, a pioneering feminist publisher and writer, Isabel Hofmeyr from the University of the Witwatersrand and also various people who were directly involved in the project. It records the process of audio interviews done through internet telephony and documents discussions held with a priest in a remote village in Kannur district, women making liquor from marula and playing their native games and children playing folk games in remote Kerala villages.