Mind The Gap

Feminists attempt to correct the gender imbalance on Wikipedia’s art pages / Gender

- Aathira Konikkara

On a Saturday morning in September, around 20 people assembled in a room at Khoj International Artists’ Association—a not-for-profit organisation that promotes alternative arts—in a narrow alley in south Delhi’s Khirki Extension. As sunlight streamed in through the large windows, the group, which consisted mostly of women, sat in rows and typed hurriedly on their laptops. A woman, who was walking around and supervising the writers, paused to address the room. “No copy-pasting— every piece of information has to be rephrased,” she said.

Everyone present was part of a Wikipedia edit-a-thon, an editing session where anyone can be invited to create pages or revise existing ones on the voluntarily edited online encyclopaedia. The theme, women in Indian contemporary art, was chosen by Khoj and Feminism in India, or FII—a digital feminist platform working on gender, media and technology—whose founding editor, Japleen Pasricha, was supervising the session. Participants had been asked to create pages on any Indian female artist from a list of 30, including Pilloo Pochkhanawala, a sculptor, and Gayatri Sinha, an art critic and curator. Most of those women did not have Wikipedia pages, and of the few that already did, many were “stubs”—Wikipedia’s term for pages with insufficient content.