Workshop: indigenous knowledge for Wikipedia

Abstract

Wikipedia has made tremendous progress towards its mission to provide free access to the sum of human knowledge, but indigenous knowledge is largely excluded because a majority of it is not available in writing. We propose a workshop where narratives are directly converted into Wikipedia content with oral citations. After expanding or creating existing articles on the English Wikipedia using the respository of currently admissible sources we will travel to the rural settlement of Otjinene, interview knowledge bearers, and use the results to further expand these articles. We will thus be able to present two scenarios for a set of Wikipedia articles: One restricted to ordinary, written sources, and one that utilises narratives emanating from Indigenous Knowledge. We expect to be able to dismiss the suspicion by Wikipedia's editor community that the online encyclopedia has nothing to gain from the inclusion of indigenous knowledge.