Aneil Sidhu Reflection

I never expected to participate in an event like the 2024 Rungh Wikipedia Scholar event, but when I was offered the opportunity, I quickly accepted. I was extremely excited to contribute to increasing representation of women and non-binary artists on Wikipedia by creating an article as a Wiki Scholar. I am a firm believer in social equity, so creating and seeing my work positively contribute to social change made me feel fantastic. Myself and the other event participants were asked to write Wikipedia articles for artists who did not have an entry on Wikipedia. I selected Mandeep Wirk to be the focus of my Wikipedia article because I connected with the themes behind some of her artwork, and she is a longstanding writer and artist in British Columbia, Canada without one.

I scoured the internet for a few days looking for information about Mandeep Wirk. I searched for her family history, education history, artwork, written work, and events she had participated in. I started writing the rough draft of my entry when I felt that I had enough information. I made sure the information I used was from reputable sources because I did not want the article to be removed from Wikipedia by the moderators for having unreliable information.

I wrote my article about Mandeep Wirk in Microsoft Word, and when I felt it was ready to be put onto Wikipedia, I made my first ever Wikipedia account to get it published. I learned a lot about the process on how to get an article published on Wikipedia and navigating the website trying to get my article about Mandeep Wirk published. I learned that Wikipedia has a section on the website called the Sandbox where users can write drafts of their article, and practice with the websites editing tools. The sandbox section is different from the main space of the website that users will interact with when looking up information.

I figured out how to move a draft from the sandbox space to the main website, but doing so was apparently shortcutting the article publication process on Wikipedia. I did not know it was shortcutting the article publication process when I did it. My problems on Wikipedia began after initially publishing the article about Mandeep Wirk. The article was moved from the main site back to the sandbox space by Wikipedia user “GSS”. He felt the article did not meet the notability criteria of Wikipedia and should be submitted for publication review after changes were made.

I did not want to cause any conflicts with the Wikipedia moderators because I really wanted the article of Mandeep Wirk to be posted and accessible to the world. I would not shortcut the process again and would resubmit my article for review after trying to address the notability issues that caused it to be taken down initially. I read the help page about new pages and there was a section about notability. Wikipedia requires articles to have two or three reliable sources that mention the subject in multiple paragraphs and not to be written by the subjects themselves. Most of the sources I had were written by Mandeep Wirk so those would not fulfill the Wikipedia requirement, but I had two sources from the municipal government of the City of Surrey, British Columbia that I felt fulfilled the requirement.

The first source was Re: Source: A Living Archive a book published by the Surrey Art Gallery to celebrate their 40^th Anniversary. The second source was the art exhibition brochure for “From the Land of Five Rivers” held at the Surrey Art Gallery in 2011. These sources were not good enough apparently, so I went back to scouring the internet for sources of information about Mandeep Wirk that I could add to my article to prevent it from being declined again. I found her Master Thesis from Queen’s University and added information about it to the article. I thought the addition of her Master Thesis would be enough to get the article published, because Wirk had contributed to the collective knowledge of humanity with an original idea, so I resubmitted it for publication review. My article was rejected again for notability. I decided to redo the citation list on Wikipedia because I thought maybe I had classified a source wrong and resubmitted it for publication review. My article was rejected again for notability.

I reached out to the Surrey Art Gallery because Mandeep Wirk has frequently worked with them, so they might have a source that I had not used yet. I contacted the Surrey Art Gallery hoping to find a source that would meet the Wikipedia requirements. A member of the curator team from the Surrey Art Gallery responded to me but was unable to provide any new sources for me. Without any new sources my article on Mandeep Wirk sits in the draft sandbox space waiting to be edited and resubmitted for review.

I have learned a lot about Mandeep Wirk through the Wikipedia article I wrote. The notability criteria on Wikipedia was the biggest challenge for my article. It was the obstacle I could not get past even though I tried very hard. It is a real shame that the article on Mandeep Wirk was not published because she is known locally as a significant artist with a long career, who I feel definitely deserves to be on the website.

Works Cited

1. “Help:Unreviewed New Page.” Wikipedia, 21 August 2023, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Help:Unreviewed_new_page&oldid=1171561617. Accessed 25 May 2024.

2. Adams, Jim, et al. Re: Source: A Living Archive, 1975-2015. Canada, Surrey Art Gallery, 2015.

3. “From the Land of Five Rivers.” Canada, Surrey Art Gallery, 2011.

4. Wirk Mandeep. “An Investigation of Intercultural Friendships among Female University Students in a Multicultural Canadian City.” Queen’s University, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque Nationale Du Canada, 1993.