Capacity-building for Diversity and Inclusion in Indian Wikimedia Communities

Reflections from the Train-the-Trainer program on supporting emerging leaders to bridge the gender gap in the movement.

Train-the-Trainer (TTT) is a residential training program, previously conducted by the Access to Knowledge (A2K) team, (now the Open Knowledge Initiatives team, IIIT Hyderabad) for emerging Wikimedians from Indian language communities. Since its inception in 2013, the goal of TTT has been to support emerging community leaders by providing them training in skills that would be helpful in their growth. The latest iteration was in 2024, with more than a decade dedicated to building the capacity of the communities that sustain the Wikimedia ecosystem in Indic languages. Over these years, the Wikimedia movement has changed in terms of communities and awareness. India has seen dramatic growth in access to internet and digital devices; AI has swept over the internet over the last few years. The importance of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) is being increasingly acknowledged across the world not only in workplaces but also in community-led movements such as the Wikimedia projects. Beyond just representational parity, there is also now more awareness about various aspects of diversity including the need for safe and meaningful engagement with community platforms across languages, gender and sexual identity, age, caste, religion, ethnicity and bodily ability.  As a training program for new Wikimedians, TTT has also worked on incorporating learnings related to diversity and inclusion, especially with respect to gender, in its design and participation.

Read the executive summary and the full report on Meta-wiki. 

While there is today global awareness of the gender gap on Wikimedia projects, now with several active community interventions and research to address this gap,  diversity and inclusion still remains a challenging area of work, especially in a primarily volunteer-led ecosystem. The Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Hub(DEIH) is another global effort to actively address some of these challenges, in line with the 2030 Movement strategy recommendations.

By virtue of its very goal, to promote leaders from Indic languages, the TTT program aims to bring in emerging leaders from active language communities across India. However, participation from women Wikimedians in early interactions of the program has been low, perhaps a reflection of the larger gender gap within the movement, which is not only a disparity in terms of representation of gender identities, but also content related to gender, feminism and sexuality. A key challenge here has been the lack of women and gender-diverse individuals in leadership roles within the movement, and a number of gender gap related interventions across the movement have proactively tried to address this problem through capacity-building initiatives.  The TTT program as well, has tried to actively counter the participation gap by modifying the selection criteria itself to include at least 20% women participants in 2018, which it surpassed significantly that year itself. Since 2020 the team has maintained (and often exceeded) a benchmark of 25% participation from women across all events, along with undertaking research and other activities related to bridging the gender-gap within Indian language Wikimedia communities.  

The current reflections are from a recent evaluation of the TTT program, which comprised a mixed methods study to assess the overall impact of the training, areas for improvement and recommendations for the next phase. The evaluation included a survey taken by 57 TTT participants, with 33.3% responses by women respondents and 3.5% by non-binary respondents. Interviews were conducted with 16 participants, five of them women. The low percentage of women respondents in both the interviews and surveys, despite efforts to ensure representation during the sampling for the qualitative data collection, is still indicative of a participation gap in the early years of the program.  

It is notable that out of six interviewees who mentioned gaining confidence as a lasting skill from the program, five were women. They mentioned the platform offered by TTT for public speaking and interacting with a diverse crowd as an experience that helped shape them as leaders in their community. The appreciation of the program for instilling confidence and providing a safe space for expression demonstrates that attempts towards addressing the gender gap do have an impact. In the survey responses, four respondents mentioned applying for the She Leads project.

This project  is run by a woman OKI team member to support women Wikimeidians in organising events  and taking on leadership roles in general in their own communities. Most of the aforementioned respondents organized a workshop via support from this project, thus practicing leadership skills in real life. Another respondent mentioned Wiki Women for Women Wellbeing, a 2018 editathon, while another mentioned participating in the Feminism and Folklore contest. There have been a number of initiatives aimed at empowering women Wikimedians and at targeting content gender gap and participation gender gap. The recent training initiatives in India like Wiki Women Camp and She Leads Bootcamp have specifically targeted active women Wikimedians, to understand their needs and to support initiatives by them.  Earlier events, such as Women TTT 2019 and Wiki Women for Women Wellbeing were similar efforts to address these needs for capacity-building.  Apart from gender-focused projects, survey responses also display that awareness about grants at TTT helped marginalized languages and knowledge forms. Doteli Wikipedia anniversary celebration, North Karnataka folk arts, digitization and re-licensing program for Assamese Wikisource are some instances of participants focusing on inclusion of underrepresented languages and regional traditions. 

Based on the TTT evaluation and the wider challenges with regards to gender gap in the Wikimedia ecosystem in India, following are key reflections and learnings: 

• Content and participation gaps with respect to gender, feminism and sexuality continue to remain a challenge, and there is now a need to build specific capacities to address these from a larger, intersectional DEI perspective.  What are those capacities and how do we identify them? Involving emerging women and gender-diverse Wikimedians on a priority basis in the design of events, and emphasizing on the importance of direct involvement to counter not only participation but also content gaps on projects can be part of the training at TTT. 
• Allied areas of work such as community health and conflict management  are important areas of skill-building for most communities, and it would be important to build these components into training efforts for all new Wikimedians. Subject experts from other domains may be engaged to offer such training. As gender gap, and DEI is an active area of discussion and practice across fields, it would be effective to engage subject experts. 
• Diversity and inclusion are topics to be discussed at the level of strategy, both at a regional and global level. As part of the recommendations in the report to  build a cohort of leaders who may be able to engage at such a level, it would be useful for them to develop capacities in these areas to bring in unique contextual nuances from the region to the discourse around gender gap, and DEI within the movement. 
• Training efforts should continue to mentor and support women and gender-diverse leaders, where possible even after the event. Post-event mentorship can support participants as they take on leadership roles, conduct events etc. by offering to provide them with support and advice that is contextual. This would potentially help avoid discouragement from taking up active leadership roles. 

There is certainly an awareness about diversity and inclusion within Indian Wikimedia communities, initiatives, and programs. The TTT program can address these at the basic level by inculcating the required awareness, skills, and providing support to emerging leaders by including these at the programmatic level. The next pathway is to bring sustainability to the representation, so that new contributors have a good balance in terms of identities, languages and contexts being represented, and are able to continue building their skills and engage meaningfully to the movement.