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In a world riven by stereotypes and discrimination, the internet should be challenging the biases of our physical world, not deepening them. In fact, the internet could well serve as a digital space that reflects and produces the richness of our world’s multiple forms of knowledge, through a combination of text, voice and visuals. As Google projected a few years ago, the world has nearly 130 million books in at least 480 languages. Yet in a world of nearly 7,000 languages and dialects, that means only about 7% of our languages are in published material. We need to do much more to capture the oral knowledge of our past and present.

So how do we make the internet look more like the world we live in? Those of us who make up most of the world need to bring our information and knowledge online, and all of us – wherever we are from – need to help make it happen.

A number of individuals, groups and campaigns have been working to make the internet more diverse and plural. Wikimujeres​ (and similar initiatives in different languages) work on increasing the number of women’s biographies from Latin America on the Spanish Wikipedia. W​iki Loves Africa expands the number of high-quality images from African countries, and Afrocrowd works to create and improve information on black culture and history on Wikipedia. Organisations such as the Association of Progressive Communications focus on women’s rights and knowledge in internet and telecommunications policies.

Whose Knowledge? is a global, multilingual campaign that works with these groups and beyond, to centre the histories and knowledge of the majority of the world that is underrepresented on the internet. For instance, in 2016 when we began, we worked with scholars from the Kumeyaay Native American community of southern California, on the Wikipedia article about the ​California gold rush, to reflect its deeply negative impact on Native American communities. In April, with our partners in Equality Labs, we held a Wikipedia editing session to include information about the 350 million people of India’s Dalit community, and wrote about inspirations like Grace Banu – the first transgender Dalit person to be admitted to an engineering college in Tamil Nadu. At the same time, we are working with communities such as the Dalit and the Kumeyaay to archive their oral knowledge and histories.

Google and other key mediators of information should have a responsibility to ensure that communities around the world are not flooded with foreign content, and that the internet begins to resemble the network for billions that it is meant to be. But we – as users – also have a responsibility to question the perspectives presented to us by the Googles and the Wikipedias of the world, and perhaps also to change them: to edit, to create, and to build the internet we want to see.

• Mark Graham is professor of internet geography at the Oxford Internet Institute in the University of Oxford and a faculty fellow at the Alan Turing Institute. His research focuses on digital labour, digital geographies and inequalities in our digital world

• Anasuya Sengupta ​is the co-founder and coordinator of ​Whose Knowledge? – a global, multilingual campaign to reimagine the internet to be for and from us all. She is supported by a fellowship from the Shuttleworth Foundation for this work