Objectives and Research Questions

1. Generate a better understanding of the demographic composition of the editing community in India

   Research questions: What are the gender, linguistic/ethic, age, frequency of editing, educational variation, employment status, marital and familial distributions in the editing community in India? Is this population characterized by predominately one group of people, or is there an equally diverse range of groups involved in editing? Whose contributions/voices are being included in the editing community? Whose contributions/voices are missing? Why?

2. Investigate the barriers and challenges that Indian women face to their participation in the editing of Wikipedia

   i) Explore how women that are currently editors experience obstacles and challenges to their participation in contributing to Wikipedia

      Research questions: What does this population perceive as barriers and challenges to their participation? What are the causes of these barriers and challenges? How do these barriers and challenges change over time? Which challenges and barriers do they perceive to be the most hindering to women's participation in editing? What do they feel would be the obstacles that an average Indian women would face to her participation in contributing to Wikipedia, and how do these barriers differ from the ones currently faced by women already participating in the editing of Wikipedia?

   ii) Explore how women that are currently non-editors perceive and experience barriers to their participation in editing Wikipedia

      Research questions: Do editors and non-editors experience or perceive different barriers and challenges? How has any prior experience with Wikipedia shaped these women's perception of the barriers and challenges that they face to their participation in Wikipedia? How do perceived but unexperienced barriers to their participation affect women's choice or ability to contribute to Wikipedia? What do they feel would be the obstacles that an average Indian women would face to her participation in contributing to Wikipedia?

3. Investigate the contextual nature of the barriers and challenges that Indian women face to their participation

   Research questions: Do women from different geographic, linguistic, ethnic and class groups experience or perceive different barriers and challenges to their participation, or do they experience or perceive similar barriers and challenges? If so, do they experience these same barriers and challenges differently? How are these barriers and challenges defined/created by their contexts? How do these barriers and challenges compare to those faced by women in other societies (for example, the Western World)?

4. Generate research outputs that can be used to render current and future projects aimed at developing the Indian Wikipedia Editor community more effective, particularly those initiatives designed to address the gender gap and attract and retain female editors