Telugu Wikipedia Mahilavaranam

Welcome to Telugu Wikipedia Mahilavaranam, whose aim is to bridge gender gap in participation on Telugu Wikipedia Community. This project is also thankful to earlier efforts of Telugu Wikipedia community in bridging gender gap in content and we take inspiration from the attempt.

Like many other Wikipedias around the globe, Telugu Wikipedia is also having a serious gender imbalance in participation. Only one contributor among 10 Very active Wikipedians with the highest number of edits is women. Also, 2 in 25 and 3 in 40 editors with the highest number of edits in Telugu Wikipedia are women. Participation Gender gap in Wikipedia is a systemic bias wherein only 8-16 percent of Total editors are women, according to many studies and Telugu Wikipedia Mahilavaranam addresses it by improving participation of women in Telugu Wikipedia and also attempts to share its learnings with projects and people who are sharing common interests.

Telugu Wikipedia Mahilavaranam is trying to bridge this gap in various ways by Training sessions to potential women editors, Individual training & follow-up, Conducting Wiki-Kitty parties, Improving awareness about the cause by stories in Media, Creating resources to help people who wanted to hold a training session, etc.,

Events

Upcoming events:

Past Events:

• 24, 25 February 2018: Mahilavaranam Workshop at Hyderabad
• 10 March 2018: Mahilavaranam Workshop at Visakhapatnam

Current Events:

Ask them to Edit

Learning & Sharing patterns about editing pattern of women, what are the major issues they face in contributing to Wikipedia and especially about identifying the potential women Wikipedians can go hand in hand with Mahilavaranam Events. Currently, we are sharing our limited understanding on identifying potential editors and patterns that can help retaining those new editors. Anyone who is working in similar lines are welcome to improve this section.

• Women who are already writing something in social media in Telugu and passively participating in constructive contribution in online spaces. With very limited exceptions, many people who are contributing very actively to and building passionately some other project which has very less chances to collaborate with Wikipedia, seldom retain their interest in Wikipedia. So, find someone who is already aware and passively participating in projects online, but are not so busy.
• People who are contributing to cause of women activism by writing and people who are in women studies & willing to write can also be potential editors in Telugu Wikipedia, because of shared understanding about Content generation.
• Find out women from Communities of interest who are already grouped to pursue some hobby or interest seriously, especially working on creating or collating content. People who has this orientation can be potential wikipedians.
• And anyone who are interested to edit Wikipedia.

Let the world know

Letting the media know in advance of events is a good way to preview the events, have media coverage of the event, and potentially, have media interested in Wikimedia work in the long term. On top of that, media coverage can possibly increase interest and attract more people to Wikimedia projects and also give you materials to document and support your evaluation efforts. We can learn more about how to do it here. We will share about press coverage related to this initiative in Coverage Events subpage. Social Media pages and tags of events can be found in respective event pages.