Wikipedian Indians on Bishakha Datta's Appointment, an outsider with involvement in wiki editing Options

[Cock-up-over-conspiracy]

Wikipedian Indians on Bishakha Datta's Appointment, from: The Hindu.com

Indian feminist journalist and filmmaker Bishakha Datta was recent invited to join the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees. She runs the Mumbai-based non-profit Point of View, which is "dedicated to disseminating women's perspectives through media, art and culture."

Noble gender balancing on behalf of Wikipedia San Francisco or a non-democratic cultural imperialist of Whites over Indian Wikipedian community?

Why, of course, the Wikimedia Foundation want trustees who know nothing about daily life on the Wikipedia!!! Let's see Bishakha Datta wiki-format a table or propose some hard core degradation pornography for deletion.

EXPLAINING HER PRIORITIES:

The virtual close-knit community of Wikipedians in India was bemused last week when the Wikimedia Foundation appointed its first ever Indian board member.

The predominantly male community was further astounded that the appointee was a woman, an “outsider” at that, with no background or involvement in wiki editing.

Even at the Bangalore Wikipedia meet, Ms. Dutta is conspicuous, being the only woman.

(IMG:http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4117/4869696251_87ec768ceb_z.jpg)

This post has been edited by Cock-up-over-conspiracy:

[Cock-up-over-conspiracy]

I toned it down but cannot remove the copy and pasted version. Strange, there must be some caching going on or Flickr keeps deleted images.

Glassbead, whilst I am grateful for your detached moderation, I do remember you being defensive of this new trustee before ... rightly so from one point of view, e.g. she has not a clue what is going on.

On the other hand, she needs brought into the discussion. She has taken the bit, or bait, and is part of the PR machine now.

If you want to try a responsible approach, which I encourage and would appreciate, The Point of View website is here:

http://www.pointofview.org/contact.html

Point of View aims to promote the points of view of women through a sustained and creative use of media.

[Somey]

On the other hand, she needs brought into the discussion. She has taken the bit, or bait, and is part of the PR machine now.

In the previous thread, I'm pretty sure someone linked to this article, which is illustrative of what GBG is referring to above. Most Western radical feminists will tell you that all pornography is exploitative and that prostitution is little more than males attempting to commoditize women, no better than slavery, and not the least bit "empowering" or anything else that might be deemed positive by a civilized society.

Bishakha Datta, however, is no "Western radical feminist." India is a completely different culture, and their attitudes towards everything related to these issues tends to be quite different from those in the US and Europe. Indian couples routinely use abortion as a means of child gender selection; bride-burning still occurs frighteningly often; women are almost automatically blamed for conception failure, with men often abandoning their wives rather than submit to a simple sperm-count test (though this may finally be changing, as Ms. Datta herself reports); prostitution is rampant while condom use is considered "unmanly" by many Indian men, leading to high rates of STDs, and so on.

Meanwhile, on Wikipedia you've got people like Goethean (T-C-L-K-R-D) lamenting that Indian scholars are attempting to de-emphasize the heavy emphasis on sex promoted by certain Indian religious leaders of the past several hundred years.

It just strikes me that pornography is practically the least of India's sex- and gender-related problems, and that someone like Bishakha Datta isn't likely to treat it as a serious issue. If anything, she's likely to agree with studies suggesting that exposing adult males to porn reduces their tendencies towards sexual violence, which from her perspective would make it a good thing. That doesn't necessarily mean she's Part Of The Problem™, but if you're thinking she might take the lead on this issue, that just seems very unlikely to me.