Encouraging indigenous knowledge production for Wikipedia

ABSTRACT

Digital technology has transformed the way knowledge is produced, mediated and accessed. Wikipedia, as by far the most visited and significant source of information on the Internet, plays a crucial role in shaping the information people read. Even though its vision is to record the “sum of all human knowledge”, there are still significant imbalances in representation between Western knowledge traditions and indigenous knowledges in the global South on Wikipedia. Drawing upon experiences from indigenous knowledge documentation projects in Indonesia as case studies, this paper explores the challenges of incorporating indigenous knowledge to Wikipedia and proposes some suggestions to achieve knowledge equity.

KEYWORDS:

• Indigenous knowledge
• marginalised knowledge
• knowledge equity
• Wikipedia

Disclosure statement

Ivonne Kristiani was employed as Project Manager for Cipta Media Ekspresi grant funded by Ford Foundation for Wikimedia Indonesia.

Notes

1 http://www.artandfeminism.org

2 http://whoseknowledge.org/initiatives/visiblewikiwomen-2019/

3 https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiGap

4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Women_in_Red

5 https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projet:Les_sans_pagEs

6 https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimujeres

7 https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Loves_Africa

8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AfroCrowd

9 https://whoseknowledge.org

10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars

11 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Core_content_policies

12 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Policies_and_guidelines

13 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability

14 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources

15 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability#Reliable_sources

16 https://id.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Meira_Anastasia&oldid=17167314

17 https://www.jawapos.com/entertainment/music-movie/10/02/2020/lewat-film-imperfect-ernest-prakasa-meira-anastasia-dapat-penghargaan/

18 From Kompas.com: https://www.kompas.com/hype/read/2020/03/03/151721766/sederhana-ini-alasan-ernest-prakasa-mantap-menikahi-meira-anastasia?page=all and from Tribun: https://batam.tribunnews.com/2019/12/20/istrinya-dinilai-tak-cantik-dan-sering-dibully-ernest-prakasa-bongkar-alasan-nikahi-meira-anastasia

19 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korowai_people

20 https://id.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suku_Korowai

21 Examples of media portraying negative Korowais: https://www.smh.com.au/national/cannibals-may-be-feeding-the-lies-20060918-gdoeu6.html

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Ford Foundation: [Grant Number 0170-0359].