She came for the books and became a Wikimedian

Jyoti Chiring began editing Assamese Wikisource after retiring from a career in nursing. She is now an active Wikimedian. This blog post stems from the conversation I had with her, while we were roommates at WikiConference India 2026. I was meeting her for the first time there, and she was kind enough to share her story with me, which I promised her will I share with the world. 

Jyoti Chiring did not join the Wikimedia movement because of free knowledge, or the encyclopedia, or anything so abstract. She joined because of books.

She had known a neighbour sitting with a laptop, and they spoke often enough in person for her to take the freedom to ask her what she was doing with it.

“She said, ‘I am working in Wikimedia as a volunteer.”

Jyoti immediately decided that she wants to do this thing like her neighbour. She had just transitioned from a very busy nursing superintendent to a retired mother, and the stillness of her retired life was making her wanting to do more in life.

The neighbour was Rumi Borah, a long-standing Assamese Wikimedian. The books were on Assamese Wikisource. Three years on, Wikisource is still where most of Jyoti’s work lives. She jokingly says that she came to Wikimedia for the library, and she never really left it.

A second start

Jyoti spent her working life in nursing in Lakhimpur, Assam. She began as a tutor at a G.N.M. training centre, served as Matron at the Civil Hospital, and retired in January 2022 as Nursing Superintendent of the Medical College and Hospital. Every edit she has made on Wikimedia projects, she has made since.

She had never owned a computer before retirement. She never even explored the possibilities of the internet on a desktop computer. She learned to type in Assamese on a computer only after her retirement, for to make herself able to write on Wikimedia. After discovering Wikimedia, she asked her husband to buy her a computer, and told Rumi she was coming, to learn more about how to edit. Eventually, she picked up, not only computers, but also editing. Now, she is comfortable with editing, and works on Wikimedia projects like a breeze.

“First we have to appreciate her”

She reminisces her first days on Wikimedia. “One page, one day, I did. Then that lady (Rumi Borah) — she appreciated like anything. Then two pages I did. Then she said, ‘Oh, you are doing so nicely. Come, come.’”

And then, without being asked, Jyoti offered me the lesson she had drawn from it:

“If we attract someone to Wikipedia or Wikimedia, we have to first appreciate her. Then they will be motivated.”

During the course of our conversation, it became clear to me that what kept her stick to Wikipedia was encouragement as a beginner: it was somebody noticing that she had made two edits, and saying so out loud.

Three articles on a good day

Jyoti also translates from English into Assamese, at a rate that would embarrass many volunteers with more free time than she has. Asked whether she managed an article a day, she revised the figure upward without hesitation: “Three. Sometimes four, sometimes one, sometimes two.”

She reads the English article and writes the Assamese counterpart from a scratch and has built 480 articles that way.

Her subjects are, overwhelmingly, women. Recipients of the Nari Shakti Puraskar, India’s national award for women. Articles for Feminism and Folklore. Mountaineers, racers, diplomats. Arriving on the projects, she was struck by how many were already there:

“I was really surprised to read that so many women are there, they are doing so many things, really, one after another.”

She has worked outward through the projects since, treating each as its own craft to be learned challenging herself to expand her Wikimedia skills: quotations for Assamese Wikiquote, photographs and now video for Wikimedia Commons, and most recently subtitles. Much of it happens within a few steps of the stove. “I am doing cooking and all, I write and then only go and cook. I have, near that kitchen, computer.”

An invitation worth repeating

Jyoti worked mostly alone.

“In the beginning I feel so hesitant to approach other people. This young youth, younger people, they know so many things, and they will think, ‘This old lady, why is she disturbing us?’”

Contrary to her expectations, nobody in the Assamese community turned her away. She always found help when she needed it, in the form of links, tutorials and helpful comments.

A community holding its ground

Jyoti’s steadiness is easy to read as a personal quirk. But I see that it could be better read as a community pattern.

At WikiConference India 2026, the conference where this conversation took place, there was a keynote presentation about the State of Indic Language Wikis by Santhosh Thottingal. The headline was not comfortable reading. Active editors across all Indic Wikipedias grew for sixteen years, peaked around 2020 and have fallen 27% since. Measured against their own best years, most communities now sit well below them: Kannada at 26%, Sanskrit at 28%, Odia at 35%, Malayalam at 37%, Hindi at 42%.

Assamese sits at the top of that table, at 100%. Its best year is not somewhere in the past. Assamese Wikipedia, although a small community,  set an edit record in 2025, and has held around fifty active editors a month, every month, since 2020 while the Indic average slid beneath it.

The project where Jyoti does most of her work is holding too. While the Wikipedias lose editors, the sister projects have held or grown: Wikisource has grown every year since 2023.

The notebooks

There is one more thing, which Jyoti mentioned almost in passing.

Jyoti writes poetry. She has notebooks of it. Years ago some of it appeared in the newspaper under her daughter’s name, because she was scared to put her name on her work in public and wanted her daughter to take up writing. Her daughter, as it turned out, was not interested, and Jyoti let the matter rest.

The notebooks stayed. She still reads the poems aloud to her daughter. And she has a plan for them: “When it will be more, I will publish one book.”

What stayed with me even after I bade goodbye to her was her last sentence.

 “I’m a lady with 60 years,” she said. “And I’m a learner.”

Jyoti Chiring contributes to Assamese Wikisource, Assamese Wikipedia, Assamese Wikiquote, and Wikimedia Commons. She was introduced to the projects by Wikimedians Rumi Borah and Pranamika Adhikari. 

The author is Netha Hussain, a participant at WikiConference India 2026, who was deeply inspired by Jyoti’s life story and work.