Dear all,
Here is a story by this reporter who attended the Delhi meet up. Caravan folks had been contacting us for a while regarding 'Wikipedia meet ups' and finally their reporter Krishn landed up at the 7th meet up. Just a heads up, these are entirely his observations and even the quotes are not verbatim. He's paraphrased what he heard us say. Subha will agree. Anyway, it's a good piece on an outsider's perspective of Wikipedia outreach.
Also, it happens almost always that journalists are clueless about the Wiki universe and end up misquoting facts, figures, terms. Maybe a journalist outreach session or inviting them to attend an entire editing session could remedy this?
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FACT CHECK: Krishn Kaushik
BALADEVAN RANGARAJAN moved his brown beanbag to the centre of the room, closer to the round wooden table on which lay a Macbook. He wasn’t well acquainted with the laptop’s keyboard, so he used a wireless one instead. A wall-mounted flat screen TV transmitted the Macbook’s display to a gathering of 14 seated around the unadorned room.
The first step, he instructed
the attendees, was to create a Wikipedia account. It was this year’s
first summertime meeting for Wikipedia Meetup Delhi (WMD7, to be exact),
and most in attendance were newcomers. Launched in 2010, the meetups
have helped train aspiring Wikipedians in Delhi the art of editing
Wikipedia entries about India.
While registering for an
account, Rangarajan tried typing ‘baladevan’ for his username twice—but a
prompt informed him that it was already being used by someone else. He
tried ‘baladevan.rangarajan’ next, and this time the system accepted.
Asked by the website to
introduce himself to other Wikipedia users in the form of a short
description, Rangarajan, with side-parted hair and thick eyebrows that
slope inwards, typed that he was a public policy researcher who “loves
kids and freedom”. Sweet and grand.
With the formality over, Rangarajan opened his first Wikipedia page as an editor: one about Pav Bhaji. The opening sentence read: “‘Pav Bhaji’
(Marathi) is a fast food dish that originated in Marathi cuisine, and
is native to Maharashtra and is popular in most metropolitan areas in
India, particularly in Gujarat.”
Suspicious, he noted that Pav
Bhaji is not just famous in the metropolitan areas of Gujarat, but in
cities in central and western India more generally.
He confirmed his claim by citing Retail Franchising,
a Tata McGraw Hill publication he found on Google Books that talks
about the food’s popularity in central India. After all, for facts to
hold, they require reliable sources.
And so he rephrased the
sentence: “Pav Bhaji (Marathi) is a fast food dish that originated in
Marathi cuisine. It is native to Maharashtra and is popular in most
metropolitan areas in India, especially in those of central and western
Indian states such as Gujarat.”
Much better; everybody else agreed. Rangarajan had just established a fact internationally. And, now, nobody would doubt it.
The Wikipedia Foundation’s
office, where Rangarajan had established Pav Bhaji’s regional
specificity, is situated in a non-descript building in Hauz Khas. On a
door three floors above the street, a wooden nameplate—each letter
framed in a small wooden square—reads WIKIPEDIA. Inside are two rooms
each with white walls and five workstations: airy and minimalist like
the website. The foundation currently has five people on staff, two of
which were at the meetup: Subhashish and Nupur.
“We belong to diverse
backgrounds,” Subhashish had said before the meetup began when there
were only four people in the room. Of the 15 Wikipedians present by the
end of the session, at least 11 had been trained as engineers, including
Subhashish.
Noopur said that women were underrepresented in the community globally—there were just three present at WMD7.
“Thank god! We would have
articles about shades of lipsticks otherwise,” blurted Abhishek, a lanky
man with a goatee. Wikipedia was too serious to be “pink” for him. An
engineering student from Ghaziabad, he described himself as a “write[r]”
of poetry and philosophy, on his Wiki profile. “I have learnt
everything from Wikipedia. More than from anyone else,” he added.
As the group focused on the TV
screen, which displayed the procedure to establish Pav Bhaji’s
popularity in particular parts of India, a plump man with nascent
whiskers—Roboture in his Wikipedian avatar—was surfing for more items to
edit. An engineer from Jamia Millia Islamia, he surveyed the pages for
‘Poha’, ‘Dahi Bhalla’ and ‘Flattened Rice’, among others, but changed
nothing.
It had been one and a half hours
since the meeting began, and the group was still mulling over Pav
Bhaji. “The lazy bums or those unwilling to invest more time in
enhancing or creating Wiki pages can start with translating already
existing entries into one of the many Indian-language Wikipedia sites”,
Noopur admonished, with a smile.
“Can we reference magazine
articles for any edits we make?” someone asked. Two senior Wikipedians
advised the group against doing so. “Not well researched,” said
Rangrajan.
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Thanks,
Regards
Noopur