All members of the Karnataka Assembly will soon have individual Wikipedia pages.
“Wikipedia has become a popular online reference portal. But there isn’t enough data on Assembly members, especially Ministers,” said Tinu Cherian, Wikipedia Administrator and Former Board Member of Wikimedia India Chapter.
“So, Active Wikipedians — who edit and contribute to Wikipedia — in Karnataka have come together to create profiles of the State ministers and MLAs,” he said. Mr. Cherian is one of the top 10 editors and has done over 54,023 edits and created more than 2,000 articles on English Wikipedia. Of the 224 MLAs in the Assembly, less than 20 per cent of MLAs have a Wikipedia article on them. The profile page that is being planned will have information on birthplace, education, political career, family etc.
ChallengesOne of the challenges the community faces is the guidelines on the notability of the topic.
As per the notability policy, the person should be “worthy of notice” “significant enough” to have a Wikipedia article on them.
A person is presumed to be notable if he or she has received significant coverage in multiple published sources which are reliable.
“It’s difficult to find enough online references, especially in mainstream media of all MLAs for proving the notability,” added Mr Cherian.
Apart from the notability issue, the community is also facing hurdles like non-availability of data about each MLA in the public domain and availability of free licensed images.
They plan to overcome this hurdle by approaching the information department. The community will also ask the government to facilitate interactions with MLAs so that they can collect more data for the research and creation of the articles.
“It is very difficult to say by when we can create profiles of all 224 MLAs. Once this is done, we may also create Wiki profile for MLCs in the State,” he added.
