Nagarpedia: Citizens Enabling Knowledge

Cities are made up of people and places and hence have a tangible and material identity. However, a city is shaped by the lived experiences and perceived notions of the people as well. As Canadian sociologist and cultural theorist Rob Shields said, “The notion of ‘the city’, the city itself, is a representation”.  Today, when almost 55% of the world is urban and 60% of the people have access to the internet, a large part of these notions and representations are made online and are shaped by the knowledge that is available on the internet. 

However, small and mid sized cities have little online visibility as well as information available about them. To increase this visibility and information, we asked one question - where is most of the accessible and visible information about cities available on the internet? An obvious answer to that was Wikipedia. The Wikipedia page of a city is often the first result in search engines when searching for information related to a city. Wikipedia is free, easily understandable and accessible, and relatively reliable. It has over 54 million articles in various languages and covers verified and updated information about almost everything under the sun. Almost 1.5 billion unique visitors visit these pages every month - that is equivalent to the combined population of India and Russia.

We started Nagarpedia in this context, of the centrality of online sources of common knowledge (such as Wikipedia) in shaping the representation of our cities.. It is our initiative to expand information and understanding on small cities by encouraging and enabling citizens to fill the gaps of information available online on small cities, starting with Wikipedia. Through Nagarpedia, Nagrika has been creating knowledge that can enable citizens across small cities with the belief that lack of knowledge regarding small cities hampers not just policy makers and businesses but also citizens, by limiting a fuller representation of all the dimensions of a city.

About 2/3rd of India’s 4041 cities have a Wikipedia page but 90% percent of those pages have very little information

According to the Census done in 2011, there are 4041 cities or towns in India that are governed by an urban local body or city government. Wikipedia has pages for approximately 2,539 cities and towns across the country.  There is also a peer review process that grades the quality of the article according to the content on it. Article quality then ranges from Featured Article(FA), Good article (GA) and B Class articles which have relatively more and better sourced information, to C Class, Start and Stub articles, which have relatively lesser information as well as limited number of references to support the existing information.

SOurce: wikipedia

As is evident from the table above, there are only 4 articles with a “featured article” status, while a majority of the articles (89%) are start and stub class; these have very basic information about the cities on their pages.

Variability of page quality often aligns with size of city

The variability in information and citations with population size also tends to align with Wikipedia's categorisation of the quality of articles. Hence many of the larger cities had FA, GA or B class articles while the small and mid-sized cities had C, start or stub articles. For example, while the Mumbai page (population close to 12 million) had over 20,000 words and 400 citations and was a GA class article, the Ghaziabad page (population around 2 million) had only 1,450 words and 44 citations and was classified as a Start article.

You can see the comparison below of some of the cities with respect to information related to governance of cities. Start class articles do not usually have a government and politics section, as you can see for Jodhpur. We’ve added the section and content for the pages of Udupi and Ghaziabad, as depicted below:

We undertook a preliminary analysis of the sections (headings) on city pages to identify the important headers each city page must have information on. The analysis was quite revealing and it suggested that only 24% of such pages had any information related to the Governance and Politics in their cities. “Government and politics” here refers to the local government’s composition and role, the constituencies the city falls under, and civic utilities (electricity, water supply, sewerage etc. in the city) among other such information points. In our Nagarpedia Wikathons, we have been focusing on the sections related to urban governance and the information about city governments. 

India is governed through a three-tiered governance system: the union government, state governments and local or city governments. At the same time, regions in the country are divided administratively, as well as electorally. States are divided into districts, sub-districts, and cities are made up of wards and zones. States are also divided into constituencies - for parliamentary as well as state legislatures.  

From a governance perspective, these multiple bifurcations have led to multiplicity of agencies which are responsible for providing various services to the citizens. For these multiple agencies, the accountability to citizens and the functions they are supposed to perform vary according to their organisational structure and legal mandates. As a result of these complications, many city pages also host information relevant to the district and not the city. However, for citizens, it is often not easy to understand these variances as well as find the distribution of these responsibilities and demand governance.

Nagarpedia Wikathons have been expanding the overall information architecture on urban governance in Indian states and cities, which can help citizens to understand the role of various actors and demand better governance. 

If you would like to be part of our efforts and contribute to the knowledge of your city or city government, please write to us at nagarpedia@nagrika.org