Tune into the latest Whose Voices? podcast episode from Whose Knowledge?, where we delve into the critical topic of decolonizing structured data through a global majority feminist lens. This episode, recorded at Wikimania Singapore 2023, explores how the very foundations of the internet, built on structured data, reflect and perpetuate existing power imbalances.

In this episode, Maari Zwick-Maitreyi, Language Justice program Co-Lead at Whose Knowledge?, sits down with Dumisani Ndubane, a pioneering Wikipedian and founder of Wiki Indaba for African Wikipedians. Dumi, with over a decade of experience in building African Wikipedian communities, shares his invaluable insights on the Eurocentric nature of platforms like Wikidata and the urgent need for African voices in shaping these digital infrastructures.

Dumi highlights a crucial concern:

He discusses how large language models, trained on Wikidata, absorb its biases, emphasizing the implications of issues like the conflation of gender and sex in data identifiers. The conversation also touches on the lack of transparency and community consent regarding the use of Wikimedia data by external technologies.

Discover why decolonizing structured data is vital for a truly inclusive internet that values diverse epistemologies. Listen now to hear Dumi’s powerful call for African participation and accountability in building the future of online knowledge.