ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Wikipedia provides a way to curate the city as text, which is synchronous with how marginal citizens usually experience the city through verbal directions and landmarks, rather than a 2-dimensional Google map and geolocated pins connected to the network in real-time. It shows how Wikipedia platform is not necessarily neutral but it enables a form of local nuance that is often lost in a visualisation of 2-dimensional relations in a map. Despite being constructed as an open knowledge platform, Wikipedia’s curatorial requirement of “authentic” knowledge as citational excludes oral and embodied knowledge and experience of those living in the urban margins. In a context where Google has begun to dominate much of the public life of Indian cities, Wikipedia offers ways to reimagine the relations of some of its most marginalised citizens with the city.
