Telling Our Stories In Our Voices – Dalit History Month Wikipedia Edit-a-thon - Velivada

April is celebrated as a Dalit History Month. Here is a note from our Dalit History Month Collective.

Our history is the resistance of peoples oppressed by Caste. Dalit History is of the Subcontinent. Too long told by Savarna voice, we now use Dalit, Adivasi and Bahujan people’s knowledge to tell our stories on Wikipedia.

A couple of years ago we tried representing more Dalit History content (accurately and with backup from a scholarship from our own people) during another editathon at MIT in Boston. At that time, we ran into a lot of problems – everything from Sanghi trolls to technical Wikipedia details needed to be sorted out. This year we have been working with a group of politically activated self-taught women wikimedians called “Whose Knowledge?”. Their aim is to help increase the content representation of the history of marginalised folks and the work with several groups including, Native Americans, Afro-indigenous, Aboriginal and other communities, in Wikipedia, using the community’s own knowledge. In working with them, we identified several protocols and allies who will allow us to do a better job around keeping the data in Wikipedia as well-sourced, well-researched and undeletable scholarship material.

As a follow up to the research we have been doing, and in honour of Dalit History Month, we are conducting 3 editathons: one in the Bay April 15th, one in India and one in Boston on May 6th. If you are in the Bay at the time, we would love to see you there. You would bring your computer, we will give a quick mini training on how the editing is done on Wikipedia and help provide you with all the source and reference material you would need. It’ll be a fun few hours of learning and establish information about our history and culture.

If you know people in the Bay area, California please pass the flyer and info on to them and ask them to attend. Thank you so much! Jai Bhim! Jai Savitri!

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