Another 5 Years: What Have We Learned about the Wikipedia Gender Gap and What Has Been Done?
—Ting-Yi Chang (September 18, 2016)
Five years after Wikimedia Foundation’s 2011 editor survey was conducted and revealed the gender gap issue, scholars, practitioners, and communities around the globe have come a long way to address the gender imbalance of the online encyclopedia. This blog post series (of three parts) serve as a summary of movements and discoveries about Wikipedia gender gap on both local (India) and global scales.
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Our editing community continues to suffer from a lack of women editors…. only 8.5% of editors are women.
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Probably the most cited statement for Wikipedia gender gap studies, the editor survey conducted by Wikimedia Foundation in April 2011 revealed the alarming imbalance within the online encyclopedia community(s). In the same survey, the percentage of female Wikipedians in India is reported as only 3%. When we have repeatedly emphasized on the development and changes the internet can bring to our societies, how do we ensure that behind our computer screen it is not just another mirror reflecting what has been silenced and forgotten?
. . . Read more on Blogs (Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3)
Program reports Outreach, education programme and community engagement programme reports:
Karnataka is known for its diverse linguistic cultures. Aside from Kannada, many are native speakers of Konkani, Tulu, and other languages. A small Wikiwomen's meetup was held on Saturday, August 27th at St. Agnes College, Mangalore, to invite female Wikipedians from the region. Many of them were new to the online encyclopedia but demonstrated strong interest in learning and contributing more Indic language content online.
Many articles about Nobel laureates are missing in the Telugu Wikipedia. Recently undergraduate students from four different disciplines of the Andhra Loyola College (ALC), Vijayawada gathered to create and improve articles related to Nobel laureates.
A campaign has been started to relicense Telugu-language books of several noted authors from "all rights reserved" to Creative Commons Share-Alike (CC-BY-SA) license..
Software Freedom Day (SFD), which celebrates the use of free and open software, was celebrated in many cities today. The piece sheds light on the philosophy of software freedom, and how free and open source software is making a significant social change. I have also shared how anyone can contribute to the FOSS movement in different ways and celebrate SFD. .
Team updates
Dr. Tejaswini Niranjana, our Programme Advisor, and Abhinav Garule, Programme Associate for Marathi have left the team recently to continue with their other personal/professional commitments. We thank both of them for their association and support both to the team and to the community. We wish them success in their forthcoming endeavors, and hope that they will keep contributing to the Wikimedia movement in their volunteer capacity.
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