Research:Vital Knowledge Interviews/Punjabi
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This page summarizes the participatory interview on Vital Knowledge conducted with Nitesh Gill (Contact Person) and Kuldeep Singh (Community Coordinator) of Punjabi Wikimedians in September 2025.
Definition of Vital Knowledge
[edit]Punjabi Wikimedians see their primary purpose as growth, both in terms of content creation and community engagement. They strongly link vital knowledge with reader demand - the rationale is that if readers find relevant content, they are more likely to join the community, and creating content aligned with reader interests makes editing more engaging.
What Makes Knowledge Vital?
[edit]The concept of vital knowledge is highly contextual for the Punjabi community, influenced by:
- Reader-driven demand: Articles on religion, Punjabi history, literature, and geography are among the most read.
- Editor-driven interests: The team's outreach has engaged editors interested in politics, literature, and women's representation, though this reflects some network homophily as the group originally formed from Punjabi literature students.
- Event-driven readership: Different events (e.g., elections) significantly affect what readers are seeking.
Usefulness for Shared Goals
[edit]Prioritizing vital knowledge helps set a communal horizon of what is desirable, but the community faces key challenges in implementation:
- Quality vs. quantity: Creating contests that prioritize quality over quantity remains challenging.
- Source availability: Difficulty finding reliable references, both for locally significant topics not covered in global sources and for universal subjects like mathematics or sciences that lack Punjabi sources.
- Tool limitations: Lack of automated tools to suggest relevant references.
These challenges explain why Punjabi Wikisource has been the most engaging project - it offers lower barriers to entry (proofreading vs. writing from scratch). It directly addresses the critical gap of making texts available in Punjabi.
Tools and Missing Support
[edit]The team uses various tools to gauge readership interest, including:
However, they emphasized the need for more substantial support in finding sources to create high-quality content, as simply creating priority lists without addressing the source availability issue will not drive meaningful progress.