User talk:Dalithistorymonth

Dalit history month hackathon
I assume you have seen, or been informed of, the discussion at Administrator Noticeboard that the hackathon sparked. I also noticed your post to Teahouse and wish that it had been posted a few days earlier and at the India project noticeboard, where you were more likely to have received a prompt and positive response. In any case, I hope you'll post any follow-up questions there, since we would love to have you all editing wikipedia especially after becoming better-acquainted with the best practices and common pitfalls.

By the way, is there a central list of participants at the hackathon (just their wikipedia usernames; not their real-life identities)? Such a list would help us to both review their recent edits (so that any which don't meet wikipedia policies can be fixed or reverted) and also to inform them of any future discussions in the area. Regards. Abecedare (talk) 21:35, 5 April 2015 (UTC)

Dalit history month hackathon followup
Abecedare thank you for your encouragement. To give you some background. The Dalit History Month project hosted this event with scholars who were seeing glaring problems with many of the Dalit articles we identified on Wikipedia. If we were not simply omitted, then the articles had misspellings, grammatical mistakes, or used sources that were inaccurate and condescending. This is heartbreaking to us. We are over 200 million people in India alone, and wikipedia in english and in our local languages is one of the only free sources of knowledge we all jointly access to learn about our culture and history as this knowledge is not readily taught or shared as part of our educational training.

You have rightly assessed that we are newbies. We are not ashamed of this. We are proud of this fact for we represent generations of a community that have been prevented from being seen as producers of knowledge and intellectual property in India and throughout South Asia. In fact our ancestors were barred from accessing knowledge shared in Brahmin circles with threats of having our tongues cut or lead poured into our ears for even daring to listen to Sanskrit: the language of scholarship in Hindu India.

By joining Wikipedia we are taking back our power as knowledge producers and curators and excited about being able to address the gaps of the Dalit experience.

In this journey we welcome mentors and collaborators. However we must have mentors outside of just the India page as many of these articles have erased Dalit participation and some editors are in fact actively representing Savarna or upper caste interests and are not practicing NPOV. However without the representation of Dalits on wikipedia this would not be challenged with content from verifiable sources.

This is our ongoing task that we will take on. We are not interested in creating rhetoric. Instead we want only to balance and present the facts which relates to this omission of Dalits from wikipedia. This is very critical to being able to jointly create the best Dalit entries on wikipedia, but it can be hard for general editors to be more aware of what are the specific issues of particularly contentious sources as one would have to have knowledge of caste politics and Dalit exclusion of civil society and other public, media, and government spheres in South Asia to assess what is in fact appropriate. Our team does have that expertise and we will work carefully to start addressing this issue and would love help to be the best contributors to this process.

This is an ongoing initiative for our growing group of editors, however for us it is clear that some of the issues coming up around our edits are not our inexperienced choices but instead the vital debate of who can name and decide what is in fact Dalit history. For example, when one of our participants categorized the Indian Constitution as Dalit History. This was significant as the writer of the Indian constitution is B.R. Ambedkar. In analagous categorizations for Black, Asian, and Latino historical achievement in North America, leaders who have accomplished similar tasks are also similarly named. So why then can we not acknowledge the origin of the constitution as also part of this significant Dalit contribution to Indian history? The fact that this is debated is the problem. The fact that the participant who added this edit learned the constitution was written by a Dalit from a participant in the workshop and not from the entry itself is also the problem.

We are afraid that what is passing for NPOV in wikipeida is in fact more erasure of Dalits from the historical cannon. The commitment to create a truly NPOV in countries like India where significant systemic caste oppression does not allow for a balanced perspective of our histories is I believe one immediate process that we must work together to rectify. We are happy to help address this and we welcome collaboration, and mentorship, but do not apologize from our self-determined process as Dalit Women and our allies to be able to engage in a global community of wisdom. We too have a rich intellectual tradition and we will continue to become a more engaged community within Wikipedia. We appreciate your thoughfulness and thank you so much for your support! I will look to see what we can do on that list but would also like to work closely with you on the category questions this process has brought up. Dalithistorymonth (talk) 12:18, 6 April 2015 (UTC)


 * I think you need to read about righting great wrongs. I understand the concerns but your attempt was far from the first by Dalits to make a mess of things and arguably to do it for the wrong reason. For what it is worth, plenty of non-Dalit communities of India (including Brahmins) do exactly the same thing. It is not helpful: we exist to impart knowledge, yes, but we are not a soapbox.


 * The core problem for Dalits is probably that of subaltern history but, of course, that is being addressed both in the real world and in Wikipedia's reflection of it. The obsession that many Dalit contributors here have with Ambedkar actually works against them: they end up getting blocked for disruption simply because they target one high-profile subject and make a mess of it, time and again. There is much more to Dalit history than that one man, as I am sure you know, and no way is it true that Wikipedia ignores Dalits or attempts to "erase" them - that would be a preposterous allegation.


 * More or less every contribution that was made during your event has had to be reverted simply because of basic policy issues. You and your colleagues are welcome to edit here but you can't just trample over everything and expect to get your own way. One of our core policies is that of consensus and no amount of screaming, shouting of "injustice" etc will overturn that requirement. I suggest that you take note of people such as those of if you wish to continue your efforts. In particular, I think you should steer well away from categories: they are complex things even for very experienced contributors and you must surely have far better things that you could contribute that just trying to pigeon-hole articles. Categories make almost no difference at all to coverage, which is apparently your primary concern. - Sitush (talk) 11:24, 12 April 2015 (UTC)


 * Dalithistorymonth, glad to see that you haven't simply walked away after the rough on-wiki experience during the hackathon. Hope more of the participants decide to stick around, gain greater familiarity with wikipedia norms, and help improve the encyclopedia's coverage in the area of their interest.
 * A quick note: Categorization is, I believe, a particularly poor choice for you and your group of editors to undertake because:
 * As Sitush mentions, it is a famously complicated field with non-intuitive category-tree structure, and often unwritten rules that only editors specializing in that area of wikipedia know. Try to figure out, for example, why American Civil War article doesn't list Category:African-American history (and no, it is not due to oversight, or anti-black bias).
 * Furthermore, the rewards for the effort, to be frank, are miniscule. Just a link at the bottom of the page, which almost no reader ends up looking at, and a listing of the page at a category page, which again, is hardly seen by anyone. You can confirm this for yourself; easy to guess what the spike corresponds to. Note how quickly the view stats reverted to <10 views per day, as was the norm for previous months. And this indifference is not restricted to Dalit categories.
 * So I sincerely hope that your group chooses a more ambitious and substantive project to undertake, where your education, language skills, and access to sources can be put to best use. If we can be of any help, feel free to ask. Cheers. Abecedare (talk) 17:00, 12 April 2015 (UTC)