As part of the ongoing work in developing a Universal Code of Conduct for the Wikimedia movement, I sat down with volunteers and staff from across the movement to learn more about their hopes and thoughts regarding the UCoC. This is the third in a limited series of interviews that will be published here on Diff.
In this interview I spoke to Ankan Ghosh Dastider. He is with the movement since December 2012 and currently a board member of Wikimedia Bangladesh chapter and editor of the Wikimedia Education newsletter. He got involved in the movement when he was only 15 years old and at that time the idea of “anybody can edit Wikipedia” motivated him. His enthusiasm increased rapidly. As he got older he got engaged with the Bangladesh chapter and found the outreach activities very interesting. He participated in several collaborative and outreach activities, conferences and was inspired by the vastness of this movement. The amiable environment, full of excitement to do something for the future in terms of knowledge equity always encourages him to contribute to this movement.
His current focus is on outreach activities to engage more volunteers in the Bengali community. He is part of the group who publish WikiBarta – an online magazine in the Bengali language by Wikimedia Bangladesh to let people know about the chapter activities and what is happening around the world. He helps to conduct edit-a-thons on numerous topics and to organize workshops to convey the Wiki-message.
He also was part of a cultural exchange program he organized with Arabic Wikipedia titled “Arab-Bengali Cultural Exchange Program”. Bengali Wikipedians wrote articles on topics that are culturally important in Jordan, and Arabic Wikipedia created articles that are culturally important in Bangladesh. In total, 60+ articles were created, and the Wikipedians from both of these languages learned about the different cultures. Ankan is rightfully proud of that event.
In the video below I spoke to Ankan about how he became aware of the UCoC, the impact he believes it will have on his community, and what changes he expects the Code of Conduct to have on editors.
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