Page not found

Do you know of Charusita Chakravarty or Rohini Godbole? Chances are that you have not heard of either of them. Even though Chakravarty is the don of fluid dynamics and Godbole is a physicist who helped hunt down and decipher the Higgs-Boson particle. But you can hardly be blamed. The problem is that they barely exist on the Web; and this tells us more about society’s systemic omissions rather than an individual’s ignorance. In today’s digital world, to not exist on the Web is to exist only in half measure; it is to be unsearchable, to be unknown, to be a nobody.

The World Wide Web abducted us two decades ago. We now experience life through Twitter feeds, Facebook streams and RSS alerts. We know what our friends and followers read, and we think we know everything. But the whispers that slip through the cracks are as important as all the ambient sound and white noise. To remedy that, Wikipedia — the world’s omniscient and omnipresent encyclopaedia — started the Gender Gap project in 2011 to bridge the online gender imbalance.

Given the vast, let’s say, infinite scope of the internet, it is easy to overlook the fact that it too is a gendered space, with its own patriarchal fissures. A 2011 study showed that women comprise only 15 per cent of global contributors on Wikipedia. In India, women make up a paltry three per cent of contributors.

Recently a group of 20-odd volunteers assembled to help right this wrong. Working with Wiki, along with Women in Free Software and Culture (WFS India), they gathered at the Delhi office of Breakthrough, an NGO for the prevention of violence against women and children. They had a simple task — update “stubs” (incomplete Wiki entries) or create new pages for specific Indian women scientists and parliamentarians.

The Wikipedia edit-a-thon, which had been publicised on Facebook and Twitter, brought together a motley crew of computer geeks, researchers, a documentary filmmaker and even a civil aviation engineer. To be part of it, all one needed was a laptop and average Google skills. Mumbai-based Rohini Lakshané, chairperson of the Gender Gap project in India, explained the structure of Wiki and went through the steps to make a page. The fifth-most visited website in the world, Wiki uses reliable, independent third-party sources. The volunteers first tried to update the page of scientist Prabha Chatterjee. When a LinkedIn account was found, they were highly enthused. But Lakshané quickly disqualified that as it was a primary source. References on blogs, Twitter and YouTube had to be ignored too. The team soon realised updating a page required some serious sleuthing, and a newfound respect grew for the countless, anonymous editors who had created millions of pages.

Wiki boasts one lakh volunteers worldwide, but only 2,000 active Indian editors per month. This leads to a serious knowledge disparity. Look for Kamla Bhasin (an activist and feminist) or Khabar Lahariya (a regional newspaper) and you’ll quickly identify the deficiencies. These Wiki pages exist as stubs or ‘orphans’ (no other articles link to it). As Lakshané says, “Wiki represents the sum of human knowledge that is already put out there. But it is a very Western point of view.”

History has always been a battle between who writes it and who gets written about. With March being Women’s History Month, Breakthrough along with Wiki focused on archiving records of women online. As Shobha SV, a former journalist and manager-multimedia of Breakthrough says, “In this day and age of information overload, less information is also a form of violence. Events like this edit-a-thon and a recent hackathon aim to correct these imbalances.”

For Lakshané, who has been a Wiki editor for English and Marathi pages since 2008, the lack of women editors snakes back to multiple social and technological reasons: women don’t project themselves enough; they are afraid of antagonism; they have little access to computers; they have less free time as they spend more time on the family; the Wiki syntax is intimidating and, with fewer tech-savvy women, newcomers find it difficult to negotiate.

The Gender Gap project hopes to tap into Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Media (GLAM) as these institutions stash most of the world’s knowledge. By working with them Wiki hopes to conjure up more pages for women.

Satabdi Das, a software engineer who works in electronic design automation, is acutely aware of the absence of women in both the online and real world. A graduate in computer science from Jadavpur University, she was one of three girls in a class of nearly 60 boys. To bring women who code together (she wears a coder’s t-shirt when we meet), she has started the group WFS India, which hopes to address “the injustices we feel we have faced in our lives, some of which aren’t even tangible”. An event like the Wiki edit-a-thon is another important step in creating spaces for women. She says, “I enjoy programming because it is creating something. When I edit Wiki and write about these women, I feel like I am creating something, as well.”