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Fixing Wikipedia's male bias

With a delayed start, Indians are now fixing the inherent bias at the go-to site, which has more pages on men than women, and far more male editors than women

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Sunayani Devi, Rabindranath Tagore's niece and sister of acclaimed painters Abanindranath and Gaganendranath, is generally agreed to be the first modern woman Indian artist. But look for her on Wikipedia and you'll find very little — she doesn't have a page of her own, and there's just one line about her in the page on Abanindranath. The only place that has a paragraph on her is a page on 'Women Artists of Bangladesh', which is an erroneous classification, because Sunayani Devi was born in, and lived all her life, in Calcutta.

It is to correct such gaps in information on important women figures in Indian art that the 'Art + Feminism Wikipedia Editathon' was organised at the National Museum in the capital on April 18, World Heritage Day. The force behind the event is Medhavi Gandhi, a cultural entrepreneur and founder of The Heritage Lab, a website that aims to make museums more accessible to general public. Two more events are scheduled for later this month in Mumbai (Piramal Museum of Art, April 29) and Varanasi (Bharat Kala Bhavan, mid-May).

Internationally, 'Art + Feminism Wikipedia Editathon' is something of a movement. It followed in the wake of a 2011 study that found that more than 90 per cent of Wikipedia editors were male, and less than 5 per cent of its super-users — editors with more than 500 edits to their name — were women. No wonder there is a gender bias in Wikipedia — more pages on men than women, an emphasis on subjects that are of interest to males, etc.

Since 2014 when the first Editathon happened, there have been more than 175 such events across the world, in which more than 2,500 people — artists, scholars, curators, etc — have participated, resulting in the creation of 2,000 new pages and improvements to 1,500 pages.

The Delhi event too led to the creation of one new Wikipedia page — on Vasantsena, the courtesan of Ujjain who figures in Mrchhakatika, the ancient Sanskrit play — and additions to 13 pages by 14 editors. A prior Chandigarh event was more fruitful with 18 editors who put up four new pages, one of them on acclaimed sculptor Mrinalini Mukherjee and another on respected art critic Jaya Appasamy.

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