When people need some details on a subject, they often turn to Wikipedia, which gives information in English most of the time. However, many people struggle while browsing websites in their mother tongue or Wikipedia entries in their own language.
An all-woman team from Mangaluru, which has been contributing articles to the online encyclopedia in Kannada, Tulu and Konkani for a year, has now added more than 300 articles in the three languages.
Dhanalakshmi K.T., who took the lead in forming ‘Wiki Women Mangaluru’, told The Hindu that it was created as a platform for encouraging women to contribute articles to Wikipedia and edit them. The group also wants to get more women to use the tool of Information Technology.
“The all-woman 47-member team, comprising students, teachers, professionals and home-makers, added 314 articles on various subjects between December, 2015 and January 2017,” said Ms. Dhanalakshmi, who is now a final-year B. Com student at St. Agnes College.
The number of edits done during the period stood at 5,884. “We have added 3.38 MB of data,” she said.
Wiki Women Mangaluru organises meets and ‘editathons’. During the meets, the most recent being held in September last, the women deliberate on the topics of articles to be written. Editathons focus on writing and uploading articles and editing pages. “I remember when my sister Pallavi K.T., who was in SSLC a year ago, was searching for some information in Kannada and couldn’t find [it]. I made up my mind to not blame others and instead contribute to Wikipedia,” she said.
U.B. Pavanaja, formerly a programme officer at the Bengaluru-based Centre for Internet and Society and editor of Vishva Kannada , guided and mentored the group.
“While there are some persons just talking about gender gap in Wikipedia and giving presentations all over the world about it, without actually working on bridging the gap, here is one group silently bridging the gap. This group is working successfully without any noise and no talk about feminism,” he said.
