 Okay. So, all right, so you're driving the slide so I will verbally press forward on the slides as we do this. Welcome everyone, I am thrilled to announce that to be able to sort of introduce the Wikimedia Foundation Research Award of the Year or WMF Ray award as we're calling it and the awards themselves, the papers will be announced by Jimmy Wales. I think he's here yet or yes, I'm here. Oh, you're here. Great. So I will turn it over to you. But before I do that, Jimmy, I'm going to introduce the a little bit of background into the award itself. All right, so let's move forward. The goal of this award is to is to this is the first year. But this is this is a we've committed ourselves to an annual award to recognize research that has been done. That has the potential to really significant significantly impact Wikimedia projects and research the committee for this year was myself along with Aaron Shaw Northwestern University and they love the of course here and just introduced myself Aaron would be here but had a baby a couple weeks ago and and is has his hands full literally, I think the award. They're sort of moving forward there are sort of three eligibility criteria that we articulated. The first was is that the work should be about using data from and or important to the Wikimedia Wikidata and communities or other Wikimedia projects. The work should have been published within the sort of 2020 the previous calendar year. So in this case, sometime in the year 2020 the manuscript must have a be available in an English translation mostly as a function for the award committee to be able to ensure that we could read it. And authors should have no conflict of interest with any of the members of the award committee which I'm sure is the only reason why all of you who did not receive the awards that were disqualified there were some facts and really great research done by our collaborators. The committee, I don't know I'll speak for myself was this was more work than I was expecting. There were an enormous number of really, really great papers that and pieces of research that we that were identified and reviewed there. We they came in three different ways there was a public call for nomination and a bunch of really great work was sort of sent into us by by readers and researchers. We went through all of the research that was covered in the with your research Twitter account which you should be following and subscribe to if you are not already. And then we also did an additional sort of Google scholar search where I sort of hit next page next page until we ran out of things to make sure that there was another really great work that we had missed. One thing that we found was that there were sort of two kinds of papers that were that we ended up having to sort of consider. One type was, we found that there was this really large body of excellent research that seeks to understand wiki media projects, often using data from projects like wiki data or Wikipedia. A lot of that is work that you know, you hear about at the wiki workshop. There's this even larger in some sense body of research that may not have directly involved wiki media projects but which really had the potential to impact wiki media, and in the future, and which really contributed towards the sort of broader wiki media movements goals and missions. And we as a committee spent a lot of time trying to sort of, because we found really great examples in of both of these kinds of papers and trying to figure out which one we sort of wanted to honor. So this year that we were going to give the award to two papers, one from each of these groups, one to each of the most impressive, impressive example of each type. So, so we move forward to, I guess like a couple of things to announce to announce about the award. One is that there is a physical award. So, many of you who are community members or researchers will know that wikipedia and give each other virtual awards called barn stars which are attached to buildings and barns as decoration. We will be sending physical barn stars to each of the winning examples of research, which means that we will have to record we will have to get an address in which we can send these things. But we've, we have procured barn stars and we'll be sending those out. So if you want a physical barn star once I have it on my desk. It unfortunately was not for winning for doing such a great piece of research, but think of how much more this will be you. And with that, I'm ready to turn it over to Jimmy to announce it, I will say that I think that are the process moving forward for is going to be that I'm doing will introduce each of the awards. And once the word is announced, we should all unmute and clap visually and audibly for the person. And then we've invited the authors to speak for two or three minutes. I have no idea what they're going to say to speak to us as a group and I think that that's the plan. So with no further ado, let's move forward. It's, it's, it's up to you Jimmy. Okay, fantastic. So, thanks Mako for the introduction now I have some lovely text that they wrote for me and I am going to read that out and you'll be able to tell I'm just reading it. But I'm going to add a few remarks one and I want you to know that I did actually read both of these papers today. I have a couple of personal remarks to add as well but I thought I better read the official announcement. So our first award goes to an innovative project that shows casual evidence of the relationship between increases in content quality in English Wikipedia articles and subsequent increases in attention I think it's causal evidence. We conduct a natural experience using natural experiment using edits done on the English Wikipedia via the wiki education foundation program. The paper shows that English Wikipedia articles that were improved by students in the program gain more viewers than a group of otherwise similar articles. It also found that this effect spills over into a range of articles linked to from the improved articles. The foundation's mission has two parts one disseminating knowledge and two encouraging people to engage in the production of new knowledge. This work provides new evidence that links these goals in an exciting way from the Wikipedia foundation and we can move its perspective. The paper provides strong evidence to support a range of content improvement efforts, although it might seem like there's a tension between focusing resources on improving content that is poorly developed, but also currently unpopular and putting efforts toward making more viewers and higher audience already this work suggests that content improvement efforts focused on content gaps that is areas where coverage might be less strong than it could or should be can create new audiences for that content. For all these reasons we award the WMF for a 2021 to content growth and attention attention contagion and information networks addressing information poverty on Wikipedia. Now this is going to be I'm going to make my personal remarks now when I read this I was very excited so for a very long time within the Wikipedia world the wiki media movement. We have various efforts to do targeted content creation. And oftentimes people look at these efforts and they say oh well look we got people to come and they made a bunch of content it wasn't that great. What is the point of this does it really do it is it about training new editors what is what is this all about. Is there any evidence that it actually works. And the answer is yes there is evidence that actually works and this is important not just because great we've got more knowledge about more areas that we don't have. But it's actually about encouraging those spillover effects and encouraging more editing in areas that we don't have this will help us in many ways to address some of the imbalances that we see so gender balance is actually a very good example. If we can create content that is of interest to a new category of people, then they aren't just reading the stuff that a bunch of geeky boys made, but we get a much wider range of people and this this on all levels of equity is really important. That's why this is really important research. It says that make a will call for everyone to clap. But I think I'm going to call for everyone to clap. Hey. Fantastic. Yes, that makes everybody pop up. Wonderful. Wonderful and someone's even typing clap clap clap in the chat which is absolutely perfect. So we'll just go on now to the next one and then I guess we'll do the photo. The second award goes to a paper, authors and a community that has attempted to fundamentally change how we approach the challenge of low resource languages in Africa. The research describes a novel approach for participatory research around machine translation for African languages. The authors show how this approach can overcome the challenges of these languages. The work of the authors and the community is an inspiring example of work towards knowledge equity. One of the two main pillars of the 2030 Wikimedia movement strategy as a social movement will focus our efforts on the knowledge and communities that have been left out by structures of power and privilege. We will welcome people from every background to build strong and diverse communities. We will break down the social political and technical barriers preventing people from accessing and contributing to free knowledge. We will also think of a better or more inspiring example of a project from the last year, seeking to achieve these goals. Additionally, we see the success of this project is something that will directly support a range of Wikimedia foundation and Wikimedia movement goals, including the newly announced abstract Wikipedia which will rely heavily on machine translation tools. For all these reasons we award the WMFRA 2021 to participatory research for low research machine translation, a case study in African languages, and masakane community. In my personal remarks when I read this I was very excited for many many years people say to me I'm not giving a speech or I'm talking to a journalist and they say oh yeah great but what about machine translation isn't that really great for Wikipedia and what I say to them is, you know what, and I didn't know this term, low resourced but that's a great term. What I said to them is, okay look, yeah machine translation, I use it day to day Google translator whatever, and it's gotten to be, it's not good enough but it's gotten a lot better, but it's only better really, and what you might call the economically important languages. So if you want to do translation from English to Spanish and back. It's actually not too bad but guess what we have huge communities in the English language with video we have huge communities in the Spanish language, Wikipedia we don't really need machine translation in the same way that we might in some of the new and emerging communities of Wikipedia, but those machine translation tools are very bad, they're not good they're low resourced. So this kind of research talking about the way community can help with that and improve that it's like super important because it will mean that we can get better machine translation tools that are actually useful to those emerging communities where you know they don't really want to use some machine translation tool that doesn't really work. So, fantastic. Another round of clapping please. Yay. Very good. And this is, this is actually one of my favorite parts of my role in the community I always joke that I'm like the queen of the UK. I don't try to take credit for anything I don't do anything but I get to be the person who comes and congratulates people and hands out awards so thank you for allowing me the privilege of just meeting and doing the real work. It's really wonderful to be here. Thank you and I think that I wanted to give the authors of the paper who we have representatives from both groups that are here so wanted to give the office of the papers. I don't know to say anything that they would like. I see that maybe let's start with the first one so you're here. I'm here. So, thanks. It's really an honor to receive this recognition for our work. So I'll study look at the knowledge gap on Wikipedia. As I'm sure we can all agree, Wikipedia has fundamentally changed the way knowledge has been produced disseminated and consumed by it's amazing, but at the same time, it's not perfect. So, while the community governance and the open collaboration model of Wikipedia can perform many benefits, but decentralized nature can leave a question of knowledge gap and information skill to the system of nature dynamic. So we study how a policy that focus editorial effort to be complementary and they can never just be over of attention and ultimately act to alleviate knowledge gap on Wikipedia in the Wikipedia article network. So, so finally, I just want to say that like reaching the knowledge gap and addressing equity issue on Wikipedia. I guess that more broadly on Internet, right, it's such an important topic. So, so my cause and I will continue work in this area. And I know it has been like a strategic focus of the Wikimedia Foundation, and I hope just more and more people will find it interesting and important and decide to contribute to solve this problem. Thanks. Congratulations again. Thank you so much. I'm not sure who's, I think there's a number of people here from the second paper so I'll turn it over whoever'd like to however you guys want to coordinate this. Bonaventure I think this is here. Okay. So, on the behalf of all my second members. I want to venture to some truly honored to be standing here with Chris, a misery to receive this wiki foundation research award of the year. So, my second is a very big family where I can say that we get each other's back like we have a huge focus on personal development, but on a community level. We don't really care about who is the senior or whatever we work together as one to make sure that everybody learns and everybody's moving together. We're like through activities like mentoring section group weekly and up the studies. So I believe that this award is dedicated to each of us. I believe that this award is dedicated to our daily effort that we do to make sure that AI is decentralized and is used for the benefit of everybody. I also believe that this award is a huge win and step forward in our daily goal of putting Africa on the world's NLP map. So, thank you again for this prestigious award. We are truly honored. And before handing over to Chris, then I would just like to say something a little bit motivational that you guys always should get ready because we are only getting started and yeah, we are coming for more. Thank you and I leave the floor to Chris. Thank you very much, Bonaventure. I also want to add, on behalf of the Masakane community, I want to add that Masakane is built on love and creating an encyclopedia that's more inclusive of African languages. I was listening to the Wikimedia talk and they were talking about Wikimedia is built on love and that was really, really wonderful to hear that because Masakane is also built on this love and working to include African languages on the NLP map. We have over 400 participants from about 30 African countries and abroad with diverse fields. Our core values are based on participatory research. We work on the philosophy of I am because you are. And that's why in Masakane, you are part of this large, but coordinated family of super awesome experts with different fields working together. For example, me and Bonner, we joined as undergraduate students and they're like experts in linguistics, computational linguistics, computer science, machine learning and really treat you as, you know, as a course. And that's one awesome thing about Masakane. So I want to end if you're inspired to work on African languages, you can always come to Masakane. If you have a project you want to do and you want to involve African languages because in the world right now there is talk about algorithmic fairness and AI fairness and ethics, which means including more low resource languages in machine learning and NLP. If you need help with authentic experts, annotators or translators of African languages or native speakers because in the panel discussion there was a talk about the importance of having native speakers of these African languages. So native speakers to, you know, work on the language with you. So if you need help with that, you can always come to Masakane. And lastly, if you want to be part of a super motivated, humble and forward thinking community, you're free to come to Masakane. Once again, on behalf of the Masakane community, we express our profound gratitude to the Wikimedia Foundation for this prestigious award. Thank you.