Achal, this is great! Congratulations! Frank

Very interesting and nicely made: a welcome contribution to thinking about the democratization of knowledge.

I admire the effort gone into this and appreciate the rationale behind this video and what it proposes. It rings a lot of bells with Jay Griffiths' books (which I admire and enjoy) in which she also mentions the cultures of indigenous American peoples and how much knowledge was lost because it wasn't written down and wasn't considered "worthy" by us westerners.

However, I see a fundamental fallacy with what this video is asking: Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and as such it offers mainly written information, highlighted by multimedia (videos, images, maps, audio etc). In trying to add those traditional oral pieces of knowledge to wikipedia, one would have to convert them to written form in the first place, therefore defeating the purpose of somehow preserving the non-written tradition. You're not escaping the imperialist "written knowledge matters" premise that encyclopedias are based on, but merely submitting to it. You are asking "how can we implement non-written knowledge in a written medium," whereas you should ask "how can we change wikipedia as a multimedia medium to contain non-written knowledge." Merely converting non-written knowledge into written knowledge and getting stuck at how to reference/cite it is a step in the wrong direction, I feel, because you enter further into the trap you are trying to avoid. (It seems that all you are asking is for an acknowledged anthropologist to come around and record all of your folk songs, dances and games, write a book about them, so you can cite him - whereas the true problem is that you don't need an anthropologist to confirm the validity of what you are doing, because you are the one doing so)

Priya, Achal and Wikimedia,

Thank you for this contribution. The content of this video is useful well beyond Wikipedia. As a social scientist who studies violence against women and children, the content of this video speaks to many of the barriers we face in communicating the lived experiences of survivors.

Congratulations. I plan to assign this to my PhD students!

Sincerely,
Prof. Jeffrey Edleson
University of Minnesota
and HagueDV.org

This is a really good and valuable film that should be shared widely. I love it.