Decentering Design: Wikipedia and Indigenous Knowledge

Abstract

This article is a reflection on the case of Wikipedia, the largest online reference site with 23 million articles, with 365 million readers, and without a page called Indigenous knowledge. A Postcolonial Computing lens, extended with the notion of decentering, is used to find out what happened with Indigenous knowledge in Wikipedia. Wikipedia's ordering technologies, such as policies and templates, play a central role in producing knowledge. Two designs, developed with and for Indigenous communities, are introduced to explore if another Wikipedia's design is possible.

Notes

¹The earliest example of Wikipedia I could find is from July 27, 2001 (“HomePage,” 2001). The earliest discussion on its categorization scheme is found at “Wikipedia Talk:Category Schemes” (2002).

²The page was in fact not merged: Only the term Indigenous knowledge was merged into the Traditional knowledge article; the rest of the text was deleted.