India
Noopur Raval | Technology. Education. Wikipedia. Cinema. Woman. Noopur Raval crawls the interwebs to produce accounts of techno-cultures. She currently works at Commons Machinery and is pursuing her M.Phil in Cinema Studies at JNU, New Delhi.
Authored Comments
Dear Chris,
Disservice would be a harsh word. And, I request you to not make this into my problem with editors in question. I repeat, this is systemic. To help understand, I request you to look at this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavarpur. This is one of the many articles created in bulk from census data. However, if you check the 'Festival' section, it has unreferenced and possibly inappropriate information. My point is, there are thousands of such articles that sometimes stay for years with rubbish on them or get deleted because there is no way to get more textual references for Lavarpur and others. Bama has it better but the problem stays: it's not a completely automated system and hence there will be victims of speedy deletions on one side and rubbish piling up on the other. This is partly because there is little patience and a smaller community that can provide local expertise/help to judge content.
Dear Bob,
Without getting into *general* problems of *any* community, I personally wanted to focus on a hunch that I had. As is implicit in my article, my problem is not with the content that exists but the way in which information production is encouraged. In that sense, the obsession with accuracy, neutrality and objectivity becomes problematic because nothing is white or black.
I appreciate your response. I hope you understand that my experiments are only symbolic of larger representation issues on Wikipedia.
Thanks!