Failure and Wikipedia: How encyclopedias work

On technical mediation

Bruno Latour: On detours and missing masses

In order to accomplish a primary task, one has to undergo a series of smaller tasks that may lead one to perform actions (technological and political) that may actually be in conflict with or detrimental to the primary task

Inserting the political, social and cultural back into the technological

Also, looking at the cultural produced in conversation with technological – flat worlds (of Friedmann)

Doing Wikipedia in India

Of tech communities

GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) Working through gender gap, literacy, internet access, awareness barriers (licensing, open source), scalability Imagining the internet: outside the U.S Badges don't work, the schwag does worse Do you build communities around platforms or pull from existing communities? How do you explain open and free?

Wikipedia fails

Goal: to increase number of editors Result: People yet to be “Wikipedia-worthy” Encyclopedias and imagined users/consumers Why WP needs to fail: to reimagine and reconfigure users (subsequently editors) The women, the brown, black, queer won't just come if you make more space and put welcome banners Tech/social – locating human interests, incentive mechanisms and reshaping products

Personal (mis)adventures in knowledge activism

Case 1: Putting local businesses on WP (and mapping them Case 2: Writing about sexual assault on WP (and translating to languages) Case 3: Courting controversies (and writing about religion on WP)

Case 1: Local business experiment

Case 2: Writing about sexual assault

Case 2

Case 3: Courting controversies (religion)

Fin