Wiki Women Mangaluru for Gender and Linguistic Inclusiveness
It
has been a year for me in Wikipedia journey. I remember when my
sister was searching for some information in our native language in
Kannada and couldn’t find whatever she wanted, so I thought and
made up my mind instead of blaming others for not having that or
this, I involved myself to contribute towards Wikipedia. As the time
passes, I was happy to contribute to Wikipedia and I enjoyed doing
that. My beginning of the journey is already written in earlier blog
post in Kannada.
After
some days or so I understood there are many other things which I can
learn from Wikipedia. I can say Wikipedia work is my most favorite
work, where I find two ways of happiness - first one is that I learn
many things which otherwise I did not know and secondly the
happiness to know that someone somewhere makes use of the information
that I contributed to Wikipedia. I write to Wikipedia is mainly for
the love for the language and to enhance my knowledge.
I
get to know there are things beyond writing articles. Once I was
going through my Twitter timeline, one of the posts led me to the
blog written by Sue Gardner, the Former Chief Executive Director of
Wikimedia Foundation. There I found something called “Gender Gap in
Wikipedia”. I went through it and discussed with Dr. Pavanaja U. B.
and tried to collect more information regarding the same.
Going
little backwards chronologically, I started my journey of Wikipedia
by participating in Editathons at St. Agnes College (Autonomous),
Mangaluru, the college is known as first Women college for higher
studies in South India, where I am a student. Later, I participated
and presented a paper on “current status and plans for Kannada
Wikipedia” in Train the Trainer (TTT) event in the month of June
2016 at CIS, Bengaluru. I was also fortunate enough to participate
and present a paper in Wiki Conference India 2016 titled “Efforts
to bridge Gender Gap at Mangaluru”(https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Efforts_to_bridge_Gender_gap_in_Kannada_Wikipedia-_our_work_at_Mangaluru.pdf). There I got an idea of
starting the user group Wiki Women Mangaluru. I put this idea in
front of senior Wikipedians and got lot of encouragements.
Wiki
Women Mangaluru(https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiWomen/Mangaluru) is an user group of mainly Women Wikimedians in and
around Mangaluru, who contribute towards Wikimedia projects. We
started with a meetup at St. Agnes College (Autonomous), Mangaluru. I
would like to thank Ms. Harriet Vidyasagar, she was the one who
guided me and supported me to organize the first meetup successfully.
The aim of the meetup was to bring Women Wikimedians in and around
Mangaluru and provide platform for discussing Wikipedia matters. We
discussed the issues, problems, challenges etc and thought of
organising Editathons.
After
few months we organised Wiki Women Editathon at Shree Ramakrishna
College, Mangaluru, in collaboration with Karavali Wikimedians. Here
I take an immense pleasure to thank all those who were behind the
success of this event, mainly Dr. Pavanaja U. B., Kishore Kumar Rai,
Dr. Vishwanath Badikana, Dr. Shailaja and Kavitha G. Thanks are also
due to all my dear friends who participated and made the event a
success. We were quite successful in motivating the first timers.
I
thought of projecting this idea to like minded people who are really
interested. So, I planned to participate and present my experiences
as a paper titled “About Wiki Women Mangaluru- Bridging Gender Gap
in Kannada and Tulu Wikipedias” (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wiki_Women_Mangaluru_Bridging_Gender_Gap_in_Kannada_and_Tulu_Wikipedias.pdf) during the 4CCon at B. S. Abdur
Rehman College, Chennai, January 27-28, 2017. The event was organised
by Free Software Movements of India. Here I would like to thank WMF for sponsoring the trip and for their support.
I
had to travel 15 hours from Mangaluru to Chennai. I met new people,
When my turn came to present I was not afraid or hesitate to address
the gathering rather I was very happy to project our efforts and
real work which has created the great change. I still remember the
reaction of participants to my talk. They were curious to know about
how the idea was germinated, incubated and nurtured. As a
side-benefit of these presentations that I did, it helped me to
overcome stage-fear.
During
my presentation at 4CCon, I announced about our Facebook Group titled
“Karavali Wiki Women”(https://www.facebook.com/groups/1099334530176871/) and asked like-minded people join the group
and support. It was a great privilege to meet new people and get new
ideas. I also shared my contact details so that it may be effective
to interact with them. In addition to this we also have a Whatsapp
group to provide platform for women to discuss Wiki related matters.
So that they feel comfortable to share their ideas and views.
Some
of them in the audience came to me who were interested in knowing
more about my experiences. I was happy that there were some who are
really interested and wanted to join with us. I put efforts to
collect their thought on what made women to lag behind. I contacted
people personally and collected their views regarding the same. I
felt so good that people are eager to do something and ready to take
up the initiative and also asked for ideas. This gave me positive
energy to work even more. I was glad to hear from them. I collected
the opinions of some people I met. I discussed issues personally with
Ms. Harsha Priya, Ms. Sindhuja, and some others who are interested in
contributing to Opensource and Openknowledge.
As
a follow up, I contacted them through phone calls. I came to know
that Ms. Sindhuja, who is a teacher from Puducherry, has planned to
organise a Wikipedia workshop at her place. I shared my experience
with her and asked her how she was going about. Since National
Science Day is on 28th February, they will be creating
articles on science topics. The event will be extended to teachers in
and around Puducherry. These kind of initiatives gives me some
positive interest to work even more. People mainly need motivation to
take initiatives. This is how the chain goes on to support women to
contribute towards Technology.
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| Discussion with Ms. HarshaPriya and Amoghavarsha |
