According to the second official Wikipedia Editor Survey conducted in December of 2011, women editors comprise only 9% of contributors to Wikipedia's “sum of all human knowledge”1. This significant lack of women and women's voices in the Wikipedia community has led to systemic bias towards male histories and culturally “masculine” knowledge (Bosch, 2012; Lam et al., 2011; Haralanova, 2012; Gardner, 2011; Potter, 2013; Walker, 2012; Wikimedia Meta-Wiki, 2013), and an editing environment that is often hostile and unwelcoming to women editors (Gardner, 2011; Lam et al., 2011; Wikimedia Meta-Wiki, 2013). The Wikipedia “gender gap”, as it has come to be known in Wikimedia circles, has increasingly become a large concern for the Wikimedia community, and a fair body of scholarly and non-scholarly work investigated and addressed the gender gap has materialized over the last few years. However, as much of this research has been on the “general” Wikipedia editing community, the vast majority of the outputs and dialogue that have been generated by these endeavours revolves predominately around the experiences of Western women on the English-language Wikipedia, and there has been little to no discourse on the significantly larger gender gaps in editing communities in the developing world.
According
to the same Editor Survey of 2011, India's editing community is only
3% female, but there has been little discussion on mainstream
Wikipedian forums on why the participation of women in India is
markedly lower than that of the Wikipedian population on average.
Further, no directed research of any kind has attempted investigate
this phenomenon.
This
research thesis will attempt to investigate the gender gap in the
Wikipedia community in India through an exploration of the contextual
nature of the real and perceived barriers that both editors and
non-editors face to contributing to Wikipedia. It
is my hope that this research helps to generate a deeper
understanding of those obstacles that prevent Indian
women
from becoming editors as
well as demonstrate that context-specific
research is needed to better understand those barriers and challenges
that are faced by women from different regional, linguistic and
socio-cultural backgrounds.
This
research study has three main objectives: to generate a better
understanding of the demographic composition of the current editing
community in India; to investigate
the barriers and challenges that Indian women face to their
participation in the editing of Wikipedia through the exploration of
the experiences of women who are currently editors and the
perceptions of female non-editors; and to determine whether the
barriers and challenges identified by the research subjects are
unique to both the lived experiences and realities to there woman as
well as to the Indian context. The research has a fourth, more
long-term research objective, to produce research outputs that can be
used to increase the effectivity of initiatives aimed at developing
the Wikipedia editing community in India, but this objective will be
given less focus during the data-gathering process.
This
study hopes to work with the following three populations of research
subjects in order to gather the necessary data required to meet the
needs of the research objectives: the Indian Wikipedia editors
community, the female members of the editing community and a group of
Indian women who do not currently edit Wikipedia (the specific group
will be decided at a later date). Data will be gathered from the
Indian Wikipedia editing community through an online demographic
study and one-on-one or group interviews with female editors, and an
online qualitative and quantitive questionnaire will be circulated to
the community of non-editors. This mixed methodology will hopefully
lead to the generation of a large pool of data with significant
potential for astute and insightful analysis.
While
the research aims to generate a context-specific understanding of the
barriers and challenges experienced by Indian women, considering the
tremendous degree of culture, ethnic, linguistic and socio-economic
diversity found within the
Indian population and the time and resource limitations of the
project itself, this study cannot realistically produce a complete
account of the barriers that any one group of Indian woman face to
their participation in India, nor can it hope to generate a highly
nuanced and sophisticated exploration of the complexities and causal
mechanisms that contextualize those barriers within the Indian
society. Instead, the goal of this research is to perform an initial
exploration of the themes that characterize the gender gap in the
Indian Wikipedia editor community in hopes that it will lead to the
discovery of avenues for more focused research in the future.
As
very little regional, population or even context-specific research on
the gender gap in Wikipedia has been carried out, and no such
research has been done on the Indian editor population, any attempts
to address the gender gap in India, or indeed the gender gap in any
editing population whose cultural, socio-economic and societal
contexts differ from those of the Western, caucasian,
English-speaking world, are at risk of reproducing and even further
entrenching the patterns of exclusion that already characterize the
Wikipedia editing communities. The outputs of this research will not
only be useful in designing more effective, context-appropriate
development projects for the Indian Wikipedia editor
community—particularly initiatives that aim to bridge the gender
gap—but will also help the Wikipedia community at large to better
understand the complex nature of the gender gap, which will hopefully
stimulate similar investigations in India and elsewhere.