Projekt:Podcast/Avsnitt 343
Avsnitt 343
Inspelningsdatum: 31 januari 2026
Publiceringsdatum: 4 februari 2026
Lyssna:
Extern länk: https://wikipediapodden.se/wikimedia-futures-lab-netha-hussain-343/
Programanteckningar
Programledare är Jan Ainali.
Special episode
This is the third episode in a series of ten short interviews recorded at the Wikimedia Futures Lab in Frankfurt. In this episode, recorded on day two, we meet Netha Hussain from Wikimedians of Kerala.
Transcript
Welcome to Wikipediapodden and this series of interviews from the Wikimedia Futures Lab in Frankfurt, the last weekend of January 2026. My name is Jan Ainali. Here we will meet participants, panelists and organizers to give you an idea of what happened at the lab. The interviews took place over three days with the first one just before it started and the last just after the closing ceremony. So you will get to gauge where the attendees were at each point in time. This is the third episode of tem recorded day two.
My name is Netha Hussain. I live in Sweden and I'm originally from India. On Wikipedia, I mostly work on articles related to women and women's health. I also engaged in a project related to finding knowledge gaps related to women's health on English Wikipedia. On a community level, I engage with a South Asian user group called Kerala Wikimedians user group where people speaking the Malayalam language come together to improve the Malayalam language projects in Wikipedia.
It's an honor to have you on the podcast.
Very happy to meet you also. Yes, thank you for inviting.
My pleasure. And we're here at the Wikimedia Futures Lab in Frankfurt. What made you want to come here? Because we had to apply. So why did you want to come here?
I wanted to come here because I'm very concerned about the future of Wikimedia. I always think about what would change in the world, which would make us change along with it. And traditionally, we have been resistant to change. We have been a slow growing project. We are doing well in terms of giving knowledge to people. But given the scenario now with the generative AI, with attrition of contributors, with people not discovering us, not as frequent as before on the internet, it is very important that we come together and talk about these things and try to find solutions for these problems. I'm not sure if I have the solutions, but it's important that we talk about it and think about the future collectively. Doing it alone would maybe result in a couple of blog posts from me or some discussions in some smaller meetups. But when we do it collectively, we have collective intelligence and it will help us get a better understanding of where the world is heading and what solutions we can make in the future.
We have had some help getting some talks and inspiration around the themes, content around consumers and around contributors. Of what we have heard, what have you felt resonate from your own experience in the Wikimedia movement?
When it comes to content, I think knowledge gaps and misinformation has always been the pain points that Wikipedia had. We undermine our trust when we have knowledge gaps and misinformation. We give space for bad actors to enter in when we have knowledge gaps and misinformation. Our readers won't become contributors if they see that we have misinformation on our platforms. So this was what I was thinking about content. When it comes to contributors, I learned that it's not enough that they should be invited into the movement, but we should sustainably follow them up, give them the encouragement, not pushing them to do more, but helping them in subtle ways, personally so that they feel belonging to the community, but also by using technology and technological tools to make their work easier and helping them to grow to their full potential within Wikimedia. And if people could see that they could meaningfully grow in the Wikimedia movement, they will continue to stay, bring more people, help each other and make that a welcoming space. And this part I heard from many, many, many people around me. And when it comes to readers, readers now have a perception that the technology is growing very fast and AI will do everything. AI will take over the world. AI will take over Wikipedia. So this kind of, you know, fears or false beliefs affect how they see our platforms. They might choose to not contribute because they think that, oh, Wikipedia is old. There will be AI, which will take over Wikipedia in the future, which is absolutely false. So we'll also have to work on changing the perceptions of our readers about who we are, what we do, what our mission is, what our values are, and how they can engage with us as readers and as contributors.
And we're only halfway through, so maybe it's a little bit early to ask this question, but do you already feel something that you will bring home with some new knowledge or new inspiration that you can put into practice or keep you inspired in your work?
Absolutely. I think the format of the Futures Lab is in a way that you talk about all the issues, problems, trends, and things that you see, and then you formulate a hypothesis, one or many hypotheses around the problem, and maybe design a little experiment to try and solve that problem in your own ways, right? So this approach was not right in any of the conferences, even Wikimedia or outside conferences before. I've not seen that before, so I think the approach is something that I will take away from here, and I will try to see all my problems in this perspective. So I'm a scientist by background. I do research, but I would limit the set of questions to neuroscience or medicine. But now that I see that you could formulate this kind of questions, even in the Wikimedia space, and try and test your small assumptions, it doesn't have to be rigorously scientific. You can have a little bit of flexibility in terms of methodology, but try in this perspective. So the methodology is something that I will take home and will keep with me forever, and I think this will also lead to a series of blog posts from me. I'm already working on a series of posts on the Diff blog about knowledge gaps, and how we should view knowledge gaps, and what are some of the strategies that we can employ to understand the urgency and relevancy of knowledge gaps. So this would probably help me to, you know, expand my perspective on this topic, and also write a little bit more about some of the hypotheses that we can test in this domain.
I'm looking forward to these blog posts and to see your experiments. Thank you for joining me on the podcast.
Thank you very much for inviting. Yes, that was cool.
This was the third interview out of ten. When all are published, you will find them on Wikimedia Commons, both in the Wikimedia Futures Lab and Wikipediapodden categories. And of course, on Wikipediapodden.se under the Wikimedia Futures Lab tag. There you can also find other episodes in English.