The Centre for Innovation, Intellectual Property, and Competition (CIIPC), as part of its Open Science Project, organised WikiEdit2016. The purpose of this workshop was to introduce students to diverse aspects of open knowledge resources and to motivate them to move beyond passive consumption of knowledge and become active producers of knowledge.
The workshop was held on 11th and 12th of November, 2016. It started with a keynote address on ‘Peer Production and Sharing’ from Mr Zakir Thomas (Former Director, Open Source Drug Discovery Project). He spoke about how sharing of information has evolved over the years and highlighted how Wikipedia has unchained knowledge from the clutches of a few. This was followed by a discussion on how the Wikipedia universe works wherein the content is created by thousands of users spread across the world. Ms Kuhuk Jain (Student, NLU Delhi) made a presentation on ‘Representation of Women in Wikipedia‘, highlighting the issue of gender bias and gender gap in Wikipedia. This led to a discussion on the possible reasons, one of the major being lack of adequate female representation in Wikipedia. Participants discussed how sexism on Wikipedia could be a reflection of the society we live in. This workshop also tried to address this by ensuring equal participation by men and women.
This was followed with discussions on editing guidelines and wiki page creation/ editing, led by Ms Rohini Lakshané (Wikipedia volunteer/ Program Officer, Centre for Internet and Society, Bengaluru) and Mr Tanveer Hasan (Wikipedia volunteer/ Program Officer, Centre for Internet and Society, Bengaluru). Participants tried their hands at editing pages and created new pages. The workshop ended on 12th of November with an open discussion on the learnings from the workshop and the future contributions to Wikipedia by the participants.