Opinion The Wiki way of the world

Every year,a bunch of Wikipedians gather from all around the globe in the hope of building better strategies and capacities for open online collaboration. This year’s conference was organised in Buenos Aires by the Wikimedia Foundation.  The recurring themes in this year’s Wikimania were growth in non-English wikis,improving usability,arresting a possible slowdown in growth,and addressing demographic issues such as inadequate representation of women among editors,for example. A fact from the statistics presented was that only 13 per cent of contributors to Wikipedia,across all languages,are women. This was an outcome of a detailed self-selected survey conducted by the Wikimedia Foundation and UN-MERIT. Some other interesting findings were that 69 per cent of respondents were motivated to contribute to Wikipedia to fix an error,nearly 73 per cent contribute because they ‘like the idea of sharing knowledge’ and 19 per cent of Wikipedia contributors hold Masters degrees. By one rough estimate,less than two per cent of Tamil Wikipedia editors are female,far below the global average.

This year,while assessing the future of Wikipedia,what emerged was a definite need to focus on the growth of non-English language versions of Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales,the founder,went so far as to state that he would like to see Wikipedia,in some ways,as the saviour of some languages that might otherwise be lost to history. Other talks and panels covered aspects of the software used to run Wikipedia,the usability (with a focus on ease of editing),matters of strategy,and the challenges in smaller Wiki projects. In particular,there were presentations on the ongoing and proposed usability improvements to make the site less intimidating for new users,the quality control process being followed in German Wikipedia and strategies to attract and retain new users. Some highlighted insights from Wikipedia usage statistics and the editorial process for publishing CD/DVD and print versions of Wikipedia. Many warned of the oncoming slowdown and plateau in the growth of Wikipedia,its demographic decline and the growing complexity of the community. There were also interesting inputs from the experiences of organisations like the Red Cross,generating a debate on whether Wikipedia editors should have multiple career paths and experiences from other crowd-sourced platforms some of which could be applied in the case of Wikimedia projects. There was also much thought on how to tap other structured data sets for inclusion in Wikipedia projects.

One of the great successes of the Wikipedia movement has been to build a platform and a philosophy around which other projects have been able to coalesce. In particular,the education space has seen much success in creating and sharing free,open and editable textbooks of such high quality that they have passed California textbooks standards and become a platform for Dutch teachers to create and share teaching and learning materials.

Looking at the need for growth in non-English language Wikipedias and at the need to support the growing number of users and community in India,plans are in motion to form the Indian chapter of Wikimedia. The Indian chapter has a number of challenges waiting to be addressed including increasing the awareness of Wikipedia in general and Indian language Wikipedias in particular,lobbying with governments and other bodies for the release of more public domain content,fixing India-specific technology issues like input methods,fundraising,bringing out offline versions of Indian Wikipedias,and so on.

The writers attended the Wikimania conference in Buenos Aires,and are part of the effort to set up the Indian chapter of Wikimedia