Subhashish Panigrahi
Subhashish Panigrahi has been a long-term Wikimedian since 2011, the co-founder of Wikimedia affiliate the Odia Wikimedians User Group, and has served the Wikimedia and open knowledge community in professional roles through past leadership roles at Wikimedia Foundation and the Centre for Internet Society's Access to Knowledge, a Wikimedia affiliate. He is a senior civil society leader, filmmaker and researcher, a current board member at the international citizen journalism nonprofit Global Voices and a global network representative for India at Creative Commons. Since 2017, he has catalysed open knowledge/source contributor communities across Asia-Pacific at the Internet Society, in Asia at Mozilla, and in South Asia at the Wikimedia Foundation and the Centre for Internet & Society. In 2023, the 72K transcripted audio recordings in Odia he published under a universal Public Domain release were arguably the largest voice data repository in any South Asian language of that kind. While initiating several open access/knowledge movement ventures, I have created over 5K Wikipedia articles.
Sessions
India’s dominant caste groups have historically governed how art and artists are documented publicly in authoritative texts. As this issue proliferates in digital praxis, information about most of the country’s artists and artisans from lowered castes is undocumented or erased. Since Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects allow only conventional citations, adding marginalised artists’ data into authority control databases is an interim solution until the caste system is entirely abolished. Collaborating with the Getty Research Institute, I created nearly 700 artists’ Union List of Artist Names (ULAN) records. Over 20,000 more new records are underway.