 I'm just introducing things, and then I'll step back. The goal here is really just to have a conversation, so audience participation is required and requested. We have four experts on Wikipedia and we can pick their brains over the course of an hour. We'll provide a little bit of structure though, and I'll start with introductions. So Sarah Barum is Senior Analyst Web Enablement, Government Information Services at Department of Internal Fears. Sarah has been an Information Management Consultant since 2012 and worked in Government online information services since 1983. Mike Dickerson is Curator of Natural History at Whanganui Regional Museum. He taught Digital Literacy at the University of Canterbury's Learning Skills Centre and runs Whanganui Wiki Wednesday, a community Wikipedia group. Courtney Johnson is Director of the Douse Art Museum and a past board member and conference convener of the National Digital Forum. We'll be facilitating the conversation. Stuart Yates is a Wellington-based Wikipedia with more than 10 years' experience editing Wikipedia. He has a day job now looking after a baby who's also here with us. So I won't take up any more time. I'll hand it over to you, Courtney, and we'll get started. Kia ora koutou, everyone, and thank you for coming along. We might just start with a show of hands. Who is an active editor of Wikipedia for their workplace or in relationship to their job? Alright, alright. Who's doing it in their free time or based on interests? Alright, a few more. Who is thinking about a Wikipedia project for home or wanting to learn about how to do it for themselves? Who's nervous about Wikipedia? Alright, and who's here for another reason that I haven't managed to tap? What about for the professional or their institution planning a Wikipedia? Is anyone at an institution that has or is thinking of developing a Wikipedia strategy or project? Alright, we've got a bit of context. Do you want to tell them who you are? Okay, so I'm Stuart Yates. I have a technical background. And I have a day job doing technical stuff at a tertiary library. I have my Wikipedia home page, user page. And the important thing to notice is down there I have a list of conflicts of interest. So there are two important things really. A list of conflicts of interest and those collection of links there that I use as a convenience. The conflicts of interest statements are very, very important because Wikipedia is trying to be a tertiary source and as soon as you have people who have conflicts of interest, direct interests in particular subjects, you have issues. And the primary way we deal with those is conflicts of interest statements which then feed into a whole lot of other things. I've been doing editing Wikipedia for more than 10 years and mainly I edit biographical stuff and probably most Maori people who aren't sports people and who have biographies on Wikipedia, those were started by me, probably. I haven't done a formal calculation, but because I went through all of the people who were in Dictionary News on Biography and who didn't have Wikipedia articles and created articles for them just to cross that bridge. And I'm currently working on a, well, scoping a project that might do a similar thing with New Zealand legislation going back to the 1840s and all the way to today. And that's 17,000 articles, so that's quite a few. I'll hand on to the next person. Do you want to finish? I have a better way to introduce oneself for Wikipedia than to simply throw up your user page which is, you know, it's a public document which anyone can edit, actually. Please don't. I'll know if you do. That's the thing. That's the great part. And of course I can instantly revert any changes if I don't like them. So I was interested in Wikipedia at the University of Canterbury because students were being told they couldn't use it. Not just cite it, use it. And that seemed ridiculous to me. So I tried to change that attitude amongst lecturers. At the end, people were starting to assign Wikipedia articles as writing assignments for their students, expanding an essay into a stub rather than just writing an essay to hand in. It was a great piece of public writing experience for them because they got to suffer critiques from complete strangers, defend themselves and give references to back up that defence. I continued this when I went to Whanganui here. I am interested in fostering community engagement in Wikipedia because the editors are very much dominated by, you know, white techie males. And so anyone who isn't any of some of those things is really, really encouraged to consider adding your perspective to Wikipedia. We have Wiki Wednesday, which has not been an enormous success in recruiting long-term editors. It's been interesting for people to pop in, make a few edits and then drop out. And this actually is a case with many casual editors. But I'm interested in strategies that will help recruit regular volunteers like any other volunteer project to continue working on Wikipedia. We have just received funding to have a Wikipedia in residence for six weeks and Whanganui to work on Whanganui-related pages, which are dire at the moment. Founded by the City Council, who has suddenly realised that Wikipedia is actually the world's number one way of finding out about Whanganui. So we rather too much mention of Michael Laws and Gains on the page. So we need to probably, you know, add a wee bit more to balance that. And we are organising an editor-thon and all-day Wikipedia workshop in November for River Week to try and encourage people to come out of the woodwork and try their hand at anything. So that's me. Hi, everybody. I don't have two jobs. I'm a consultant. I stopped working at the Department of Internal Affairs in the early 2012. I live in Dunedin and I'd like to say that the Hawken Library is a sort of a spiritual home for me. I had my first proper holiday, school holiday job as a secondary school student, climbing up very high ladders in the old Hawken Wing at the Museum, trying to squeeze more things onto the shelves. So it's been an absolute pleasure, of course, to come back to the Hawken to help try to shape the way that the University of Otago Central Library and the Hawken Collections share the collections that they have with the people that may wish to know about them. And the genesis of the project has certainly come from Sharon Dell, the Hawken Librarian. And she, coming back to Courtney, she heard Courtney talking about her project, I think, later, last year, was it, Courtney? And also she attended a conference relating to the Matareke Humanities Network of about, I think, seven universities where a person from Dartmouth College was talking about going to where the people are just to reflect back what Mike has just said. Wikipedia is a place where people go. They start there very often, as we all know. The other, so measuring one of the aims was to see if, of the project, was to see if, by improving and strengthening the information in Wikipedia articles with connections into the collections online at Otago, was to see if there was any measurable impact on use, so that was certainly also part of the genesis of the project. Another key thing was the launch of the Marsden Online Archive. And I don't know how many people have looked at that online, Marsden.atago.ac.nz. Not off my heart. Just the most extraordinary digitised collection of archived material, Church Mission Society material was fetched back from London by Dr Hawken. And do you want to say tiny bit about that, or you're the person that might know about that? Just how the Church Mission Society material came back to Hawken. Sorry, I missed the first of that. It's all right. It's all right. I'll carry on with that. So I've started editing. I suppose to finish the introductory remarks, because I'll talk about the direct experience that we've had. I think the word might be misunderestimate, and I was quite glad that George W. Bush coined that word, because I came into the project as a Wikipedia novice in effect, and so have very, very much learned on the job, and have been able to, you know, hopefully learn those lessons on behalf of, let's say, other people in this room, because we'll certainly, I'm sure, be sharing the results. Just for example, I talked to Stuart and Mike earlier on and Courtney, and Stuart said to me, that thing he just said about wikipedia is a tertiary source, and so, you know, the use of primary sources is, let's say, forbidden, and Stuart, you won't, I haven't said this to you directly, but I think in the back of my head, I thought, yes, but that can't possibly mean these online, digitised online resources for various reasons that will be really great to talk about, and so that was one of the lessons that we've learned how to address this question of primary sources of archival material, and I think that's, you know, a thing that you'll be interested to hear about. Sorry, that was a little bit long. All right, hi everyone. So so, so, so, so. My wikipedia history goes back a year, exactly. I made my, I think I made a user page sometime last year, but then I actually learnt how to edit wikipedia at a session run by Mike and Stuart as a workshop last year at wikipedia, which I came to with Mackenzie Patton, one of our interns at the DALS, to learn how to do that for a project that we were setting up. My, oh, my user page is a disaster, actually, because I'm really bad at the back end of wikipedia. That is one of my personal failings and the failing of the project that we ran, but that's all right. Look, it's got badges. They have these badge things. I added some badges. Yep. All right, so at the DALS we ran a wikipedia project over summer. Who's already familiar with it and doesn't want to be deluged in lots and lots of details? You're all new to it. That's great. Who knows where the DALS is or what the DALS is? All right, that's better. Okay, I'm not good to sense check that. So we were founded in 1971 and we sit in the really productive space between fine art and fine whatever it's called at any particular moment. Applied art, craft, decorative arts, contemporary object making. When I give a speech I try to use all of these terms so that I don't upset anyone by using the ones that they don't like. The DALS has kind of over the period of its lifetime moved somewhat between those two different poles. So it's had periods where it's been very, very craft identified and it's had periods where it's been very, very fine art identified and when that happens it tends to lose some of its stature and relevance and relationships in the area where it's not currently being seen as being very active and you all work in cultural institutions and you all know that a huge part of what we do is relationship maintenance and management and keeping the fires of those relationships warm and that's what this project was actually all about. Oh hey baby, you're okay. So our Wikipedia project we set out to write 100 biographies of New Zealand craft artists on Wikipedia. There were about four things that I was trying to do with this project. One was to partner with a trust who funded the project. They gave us $13,000 to do it and I've spent about nearly $9,000 of that so far. I'm happy to share all the budget and information like that and at some point I will get back up to publishing all of that. So they were set up many, many decades ago to support craft artists. They were winding up the trust and $13,000 was what they had left in their bank account. They wanted someone to pick up their existing website that was made in 2005 and hadn't been updated since that point and run that and I in our proposal said no, we're not going to do that I'm not going to take on another website and then try to maintain it. What we will do is we will use that money to hire two interns one of the real problems in the field of New Zealand's craft history is you can't go to a tertiary institution and study that history and no one is not being actively taught with a tertiary institution so when you're trying to staff an institution like mine and bring in younger professionals who know the history of this part of our art history they're not able to access that history because it's locked up in books and old journals inside of dusty libraries and it's not being kept alive so bringing through to new young researchers was kind of one of my second level aims of the project was just as important to me to actually writing those biographies writing the biographies was about trying to improve the visibility and the relevance of those artists we focused on post World War II artists New Zealand artists who may have worked overseas is a bookbinder for example called Edgar Mansfield who was a very influential 20th century bookbinder of New Zealand birth who also returned here at the end of his career so he was one of the people and our thing we went from Levi Bergstrom who made wooden spoons through to a bookbinder through to potters and jewellers so people who you might more naturally associate with New Zealand's craft history it was about just making those people available again and online there's a lot of written material written print material but it hasn't been put online the second part of the project which we're undertaking now publication, digitisation very much inspired by Tim and the work that he's done at Christchurch Art Gallery to put that I get my primaries and my secondaries confused occasionally so I think it's primary material primary secondary ish I know the distinction but I sometimes get confused when it comes to art stuff so putting that stuff online and the other thing that I wanted to achieve was two things maybe two things I wanted to achieve with the project was renewing some of our relationships in the craft sector and making sure that the craft sector felt cared about by the DOS by us putting our energy and attention into them that's kind of the truest thing you can do to show that you care about a community is devote your energy to them and also to try to move along some conversations about what it means to be on the internet as an artist and particularly around releasing images of your work in such a way that we can put them into Wikipedia and that is another part the second half of the project that we're doing which is going to be about going out to artists and asking them if we can upload images of their work into Wikimedia Commons so that we can put them onto Wikipedia pages of course in order to put them in the Commons they have to be public demand public demanded they have to relinquish all of their copyright claims over those images all of them and that is quite a new conversation so we're embarking on a really big conversation at the moment with artists about copyright and reproducing their images online and I've got a whole other talk about that that I might say about for next year once I've got some more thinking around it so the project was really really successful Bridget and Mackenzie were awesome they did awesome work I the eight and a half, nine thousand dollars that we've spent doesn't account for any of my time and I put in a vast amount of time more than I should have I should have been spending more time probably being a director rather than satisfying my geeky love of it was just so nice to use my art history degree for once you know to actually get to use this body of knowledge and put it somewhere where people might actually look at it was incredibly satisfying and I have continued even though we're kind of we're now just adding information as it pops up to those pages rather than creating lots of new pages but I found that I went off over my Christmas break and wrote about another 30 pages of my own that I felt needed to be made particularly around women artists from the 70s and 80s who have disappeared from the conversation and that's just my personal kind of commitment to that area we also have run two editathons we took part in the art and feminism editathon that was fascinating that's all up on our blog, our findings from that they are completely unpredictable but really wonderful events and then we ran one during Matariki last this year focused on Māori and Pacific artists Bridget Riawesie who's one of the two interns who worked on the project has become sort of a bit of a Wikipedia editathon go-to girl so she went and worked with Playmarket on one that was around New Zealand Theatre to work on, she's helping Rape Crisis I think out actually Wellington Rape Crisis has approached her to help run a editathon around she was telling me last night it's completely gone out of my head but I just they're going to get a whole lot of old newspaper articles and use them to inform articles about something or rather that was really interesting at the time and it's completely slipped my mind but I thought that was fascinating that someone who's come through doing this in an art gallery is now being approached by a social justice social service institution to do this work so the things that we didn't do particularly well and I'm just talking for ages because I'm handing this over to these guys to critique so I'm basically doing this set up and then I'm going to try to be quiet for a while is and Stuart can talk about this particularly we were very bad at the back end of Wikipedia do you want something Mike? It would be great if we could see some of the articles or a link to the project maybe start with the project page and then click through to show a typical entry so here you go here is a project page that Stuart made for us because I'm useless and I don't know how to do these things so this was so helpful I had no idea there's the easy peasy bit of Wikipedia which I felt really comfortable in and it's the immediately satisfying part of Wikipedia and then there's like there's more of them and there really are cane and there's all this back end and I just get it wrong so I focus on the easy peasy stuff so here's our list of artists here's Stuart did this amazing table I'm pointing at the screen with the artists who were identified and sources of material on them because he can do things like that and I can't or I could if I tried harder but I don't have enough time so I settle for the easy wins here are some of the pages that we created Arita Wilkinson is a contemporary jeweler she's got an exhibition on at the Douse at the moment Malcolm Harrison was a very well known textile artist he was quite remarked upon for being a leading male textile artist when we still gentified all of these things Kobe Bossard is my bae I love Kobe so much he's one of my heroes he is a contemporary New Zealand jeweler who now lives in Middlemarch he played a really large hand in shaping what is contemporary jewelry so that was one of the other lovely things for me I felt like I got to shine a light on people who I really care about and people whose careers I really care about which leads me really nicely into the other major problem with the project as we ran it which is conflict of interest so conflict of interest is a core tenant of Wikipedia and and there's an official statement on it somewhere do you want to drive? I'll try alright you find that I'll move over here a little bit so there's an official statement on that and I feel like our project run by three people employed by a museum that specialises in producing exhibitions of these artists' work who collects these artists' work who is publicly funded to work with these artists probably played very very close to the line when it comes to the conflict of interest statement because we are inextricably funded in the careers of these artists on the flip side of that no one else was doing it and no one else has the knowledge well not that no one else has the knowledge but we had the motivation and the knowledge so I kind of discounted the importance of the conflict of interest stuff which true Wikipedians hold very very dear and I emphasised the value of just getting stuff done and knew that the community would come in and correct us if we were doing anything that was really flagrantly wrong but what but what we did do was we tried not to write it from the point of view of the Dauce so the Dauce was an incidental part of these artists' careers so of course if they had exhibitions at the Dauce or they were in our collection then that was mentioned and it's been very I will admit to shaping the list of artists that we picked a little in order to align well with our collection because we're just about to start a collection online project and what I want to do is suck these biographies through from Wikipedia and present them inside our online collection so that I don't have to maintain that information ourselves because we can't afford to I have a staff of 18, I have two curators two collection managers two 18 to 24 temporary exhibitions a year and manage a collection of 4,000 objects and I'm in charge of community art and another museum, I have two museums and I have a theatre as well so I don't be having time to manage all of that stuff so we tried to act with integrity and we tried to be even and open-handed but I think if you closely examined the work that we did and we hadn't had Mike and Stuart there kind of shepherding us through the project and contributing their Wikipedia mana to us a lot of our early articles would have probably been deleted by people who saw this as being too closely tied and Stuart himself has a history of going through and deleting things that he considers to be conflict of interest and he is doing his Wikipedia and duty in doing so I for example endorse the deletion of a couple of months ago a page about a staff member here at Tapa on the basis that I agreed with the argument that they were not what's the word what's the fancy word for not important enough not notable someone has been doing a lot of work on a particular high school and writing page after page after page about people who attended that high school this particular staff member came up because I really like him as a person but you don't actually warrant a page sorry sorry there's a whole world of people who don't warrant a page until their bits are published and you'll notice that lots of dictionaries of biography don't actually just living people because the power of the obituary is enormous a lot of stuff a lot of stuff the people are awesome for Wikipedia they're great alright so that was our project those are two things but in general I'm really happy it was really successful we expected more when we started the project we were you did a little picture of it I was terrified of the Wikipedia community I just had a mental picture of them being those trolls in the world and that this was going to be painful embarrassing discouraging and potentially somewhat damaging for these two younger professionals who I was working with and that wasn't true at all and that might just be because no one cares that much about New Zealand craft artists compared to Star Wars or Israel like frankly they are low risk areas to be dabbling in so I would really encourage people to not overrate the risk to their personal well-being by getting involved in Wikipedia but there are definitely ways that you'll do it and it will be good and ways that you can do it and it won't be good and that's where I'm going to hand over Stuart and Mike because I think they can continue on that point and then we will stop talking very shortly and give you guys a chance to ask questions or offer your own observations any questions on the conflict of interest listing there I'm interested in where the line is between a conflict between I'm interested in where the line is between a conflict in a person and a conflict in a concept that you adhere to or support so something that you're invested in in a research capacity or whatever there's no conflict there, it's only when it's about people there's a conflict anywhere conflicts of interest go from unpleasantness in the Middle East or Korean Peninsula through to I declare conflicts of interest with my grandfather whose article I contributed to and my father's article which I wrote by Wave Awake so it ranges from the whole from the international scale to the personal scale I would disagree to some extent and that if you look at the and because it's really important for panel discussions of people to actually disagree about things rather than just say you're wonderful, no you are and Stuart is wonderful but I interpret it more narrowly and saying that the biggest problem in conflict of interest is people trying to make their own Wikipedia page or edit their own Wikipedia page or edit the page of their institution which affects all of us we can't go and create a Wikipedia page for our institution if it's not there because we, even though we are of course morally pure and scrupulous human beings the appearance of conflict of interest is just as important as any actual bias we have to be hands off and we're writing about the public face of our institution or because people will simply interpret us as probably writing biased marketing rubbish and so we actually so we have this ridiculous situation sometimes where I go to the sergeant and say hey your Wikipedia page needs work you know, the museum page needs work too you want to help that? I'll do yours if you do mine and it's a bit ridiculous really isn't it but the biggest problem in conflict of interest is where you have a personal stake in something, a serious personal stake where you're writing about your employer and you don't have complete freedom to say anything you like or even all the truth about that subject if you are restricted in some way if you would get in trouble or lose your job if you said everything that's true about an institution or a place or a person then you have a conflict of interest that's probably the most serious and important areas where it occurs and it affects all of us in that way but so what then is there a commercial interest in a product or a concept or something surely that's a much more dangerous conflict but it's not covered by this the commercial ones are actually much less dangerous because they're really really really obvious but yeah it's still heavily prevalent that's two seconds work for me to delete your last six weeks work sure but that's resultant on you coming across it so my point here is I'm unclear why the Conflict of Estatement simply says it's about people when concepts are much more problematic than people in that regard I would argue I don't know I think the external relationship and the financial relationship it's really well covered the biggest problems in Wikipedia are people trying to make pages to promo their own stuff or B, folks who are working commercially as Wikipedia editors and PR people to beef up the Wikipedia pages of someone who pays them to do it and that's been the subject of a huge amount of scandal and soul searching in Wikipedia recently which Stuart probably knows more about than me anyway I'll sit down so there's another question there right okay I guess this kind of speaks to the inherent instability of Wikipedia because you know I have this philosophy that there's three types of truth there's his truth, there's her truth and then there's somewhere in the middle also because I am a librarian and I build and curate collections particularly around non-fiction I think it's really important to present to almost 360 degree perspective on a subject when you're going in and deleting material you're actually removing part of that 360 degree perception what do you think about that so we should keep libel in there pardon so we should keep libel in there I'm asking you that question we struggle to be a tertiary source and anything that doesn't look like a tertiary source will get removed it may not be removed for six months or six years but it will get removed eventually and we have gone through and deleted the entire contributions of editors with years of work because they were found to have conflicts of interest or systematic copyright abuse so one of the things that Stuart is saying here is that you don't put anything new on Wikipedia everything that you put on Wikipedia I thought of it as sentence by sentence referencing every sentence I wrote on Wikipedia had a reference to something that was published elsewhere and that can be very frustrating when you know better or you know that there's more but that was the approach that I took I never make a statement that can't be linked directly to a source that explicitly supports that so never where ever possible I got into some trouble but earlier on I can be a little florid and I wrote some slightly florid because I was talking about art and it has aesthetic qualities and when you talk about aesthetic qualities you use into scribing words but not on Wikipedia so I got a couple of weasel word accusations and remedyed my way so now I use other people's description words and quotes and a lot of direct quotes in my articles so that I'm not trying to describe what John Parker's pots look like or what Carl Fritch's rings look like I let someone else carry that weight for me it's not my result it's not my job I'm trying as hard as I can not to make assertions whilst being very conscious that my act of writing this page is an assertion in itself so there you go that's cognitive dissonance in Wikipedia in one sentence and some of the examples I recently wrote I recently spent some time trying to balance New Zealand academic biographies for gender and race and I was trying to find examples of gay, lesbian or transsexual academics and I found a lot of people who were to my eyes clearly gay or lesbian or bisexual or what are different not heteronormative you know that'd be my editor of the Journal of Lesbian Studies but unless they had somewhere that they were lesbian I couldn't make that inference and it is insanely frustrating because you have it's clear from their persona you've met them they're campers at a row of tents but unless you have a reliable source that says they have the gender identification and you can cite that source you can't use it maybe if we just hold your questions for two seconds and you make your point what I was going to do was illustrate some of this with some examples of what we've done with the Otago University project if I may so we came up against this issue around the use of primary sources which not a good thing for Wikipedia we came up against this and we were a little bit I suppose we were taken aback to be honest so we sort of regrouped and very much Stuart and the rest of the panel certainly allowed us to think of some different ways that we could in effect achieve some of the purposes of the project so what I'm going to show you how I do that is that working we so I'm going to start with Samuel Marston because we have you may want to make the screens for me control minus that's alright hopefully I can remember these all off my heart now while Sarah's typing I'll explain a little bit about the presentation of Samuel Marston's original letters and diary she used a couple as references to make a statement in Wikipedia about where Marston was and what he was doing on a particular day and then gave the reference to that page in the Diary of Archives but that's using a primary source like Marston's diary which may or may not be accurate and so that's why Wikipedians get antsy about using primary sources to back up statements in Wikipedia to review articles after they've been filtered through a fair few layers of historicism and criticism in academic writing because those things are probably more reliable than just relying on primary sources however there is a role for primary sources I think and Wikipedia I so don't agree with that totally let's do this first so just one example so we sort of went round in a couple of small circles can't get it to work I'll just have to page down and sorry and we did add as you'll see right at the bottom we added a link to the Marston online archive as an external link so that was one of the one of the more important things that we did sort of following on the other thing we did was this was particularly a recommendation of mikes to think about the use of images and adding images that the Hocken owned to Wikimedia Commons in a way that can be used as sources for articles and Anna Blackman who you may know of curator of archives at the Hocken we've actually got this image in the archives that shows Samuel Marston that is an not well known image it looks like a man that could be sort of dashing from backwards and forwards between Australia and New Zealand and planting grape vines and being everywhere at once compared to this image potentially so we added that image into the Wikimedia Commons and then have used it in the article so that was just one example of that changed use just if I may just say a little bit more about the Commons question what we are working on doing at the moment as we're building up there's a William Fox sketchbook in the Hocken collections and we're going to add a representative sample of those images into Wikimedia Commons we're going to try and do it geographically spread as we possibly can for New Zealand and those images will then be free use for anybody and so those are the sorts of slightly different tax that one of the examples of the slightly different tax that we've taken with the project so I'll stop for the moment I just wanted to ask a question about if Wikimedia wants to be a tertiary resource and you've written about artists if someone who works in a cultural interest institution has written about an artist for whom they hold an object in their institution I would have thought that would be one of the best people to write about that artist and given that you've had this input are you satisfied that you guys have stayed out of trouble and what you've come up with as a workable model? Yeah I think we're clean and what we did is the difference between us and the Otago project and why our path was very smooth and yours has been rockier is that our project purposefully started out to not be about us it's not about the douse the douse benefits but my central tenant is to create more value create more value for your community than you try to capture directly to yourself and that way value will accrue around you so our project was not about trying to drive traffic to the douse's website we didn't even have our collection online so pointless it was about trying to raise the profile of those artists and so I wrote several pages about I created pages for other galleries and important dealer galleries and stuff that we didn't have that we needed in order to create those kind of wikipedia link circles and in that way I think we kept up we kept down noses clean and I do stuff like I have quite a big crush on Chris Salisby the typographer like quite a big crush and he was on the radio in the weekend talking to Kim Hill you should totally listen to that if you haven't already thank you so I went and updated his page on wikipedia and I think that's the conflictier of interest because I know Chris a little bit and I think he's amazing and I wanted to make his page better who knows a friend of mine, Rowan Simpson wrote the blog post that started off the whole red peak thing and we were talking about wikipedia and he was like my name's not even on the page and I was like I can fix that for you so I'm writing pages about my friends but I trust myself actually I trust my intentions, I trust my education and I trust my knowledge of the situation I think trusting your professional in-states we're all trained here in some cultural institution some cultural whether they're librarians or archivists or museum people you know if you stay true to those core principles you can't go wrong and as a I've got a postgrad in history and I got very interested in oral history and what that showed and a lot of people were very upset about it because as you probably know in oral histories you get lots of contradictions and actually you get changed stories if you change the environment you actually get a whole different story and so which one was true and I had various colleagues arguing that their version of the notes that they took when they had interviewed these people and yet I had these oral histories which pointed to other truths about this person and so I thought so I got very interested in how you write about these people because I thought you know I had the truth on them but I didn't I had all these contradictions that were coming up throughout the oral histories and so I realised that there are many truths to people and that the ones I pick on reflect me and the ones other people pick on reflect them and so the only thing I could really do in publishing these biographies on these women there were a group of women mountaineers in New Zealand in the early 1900s was to reflect my own bias and who I am and why I'm interested in them and that would justify me writing about the way I wrote about them I completely agree two things first if you write about them and be clear about the manner in which you're writing about them don't do it under false pretenses don't say this is their entire life when you're only writing about the mountaineering and the other thing is as Wikipedia goes international huge problems with oral cultures where the entire history is oral can anyone tell me what are secondary sources in oral culture so basically the entire primary secondary tertiary concept is based on the print technology so Wikipedia is looking at ways that one can cite oral traditions and oral accounts as legitimate sources and pages for this very reason and it's even worse in cultures where you have one language for a small facet of the culture i.e. church culture if it's a western church and all the rest of the culture is oral all your written sources are only about one aspect of the culture and there are only about yeah history already has to be visible to be put into Wikipedia so i mean that's the other role that we play is writing those next level accounts so that they can go in and i am so grateful to Teata NZ History the Long Biographies on Tapa's website in my case any art collecting institution that took the time to write two paragraphs about anything or anyone who has encouraged a bit so what i found was when i published these articles on these women was that there was a huge argument about who should be in and who shouldn't be and so it was interesting it was controversial i suppose it always is going to be but it would be nice if Wikipedia could be structured in a way that could support the differing stories or the different truths that make us up because it makes it interesting right we can then all find something to identify with i just don't know if Wikipedia is exactly like i'm just thinking on the fly here and i don't know if it's the place for thrashing out differing truths or at least that's where the history page on any page on Wikipedia is for and again i've had to jump in the talk page i've had to jump in and defend my creation of pages occasionally and sometimes that's about you haven't written enough yet and someone's just come in an immediate delete and you're like no wait i'm getting to the good stuff can i talk about another example of where the project is possibly going one of the suggestions again that Mike made in the June or so was to try to work on the Samuel Marnston article and bring it up to what was known in Wikipedia terminology as a featured article standard so those are the articles how many would you say they're asked to do it they're not that many are they it's less than 1% of the articles and traditionally it was the same level as Britannica it's evolved since then as Britannica's evolved but is that kind of this is a comprehensive traditional Wikipedia article so we as it was scavenged about and have found two history experts Marnston experts who may be able to help us with that article one is Professor Tony Valentine who's just become a PVC Humanities in Targo who did a lot of work on the Marnston article himself and another who's an admin sharp who's currently writing a biography now so that's it's the doom of an idea because there time to do those sort of things is let's say limited but Tony is particularly interested and we may be talking about this next week what it's sort of potentially moving towards even further is and again we're really exploring this as an idea is a collaborative effort between Targo University Library Hoblin Connections and potentially faculty about strengthening and improving the quality of articles now there's all manner of potential let's say pit bulls but but I really think that's something that we're pursuing a little bit, not leastable because it probably will tease out a lot of issues about what we're at university this university in particular these family members are thinking about what does the Wikipedia or provide now so that's going to be quite interesting to test. We've got 10 more minutes so I want to make sure that if people have got questions they get a chance to get them out. Mine's more of a I was really interested yet no I've been terrible aren't I but I was actually just concerned to hear all you lovely people who I respect greatly saying I trust myself as a curator and as a researcher to make the right decisions I come from a place where I spend every six weeks training PhD students in implicit bias so that we can try and break down the particularly bad gender problems in physics in the beginning and then get to some other places next and I'm just wondering what conversations Wikipedians have around implicit bias and we all here in this room have them it's a fact yeah so that's just that's my question it is a question we have comprehensive conversations and what you will find is that no matter what article you create you will not be the only editor I've created 1700 articles no it must be I'm missing a decimal place there a lot of articles, thousands of articles and none of them are only my creation they all have third-party input and it's a question of getting a greater diversity of editors editing and that is the core challenge is the total lack of diversity in Wikipedia editors and that was one of the tiny little things that our project it's not like it's hard to hire women in the humanities but at the same time it was good to bring two young women into Wikipedia because and that's just the beginning of the diversity mountain bringing more women and that's the whole point of the art and feminism thing but I completely agree with you on the understanding or even knowing where the boundaries of your privilege end but I will probably stick to it's if you're doing it in good heart it's better to do something than be so concerned that you do nothing because I'm concerned now with the project that I'm working on around women scientists in New Zealand that I have to now make sure they've all got massive amounts of secondary sources which nobody else seems to care if anyone wants to write about women scientists in the 19th and 20th century please do because then I can create Wikipedia articles I would actually rather write about that than about giant flightless birds in which whenever I look at an article I go oh my god there's so much here that is still debatable and being argued and I find it so much more refreshing and easy to move to an area slightly outside my own heartfelt discipline where I can more objectively read the literature and write about stuff I decided to pick up on that comment about the relationship between primary and secondary sources not having that much experience with creating Wikipedia entries the comment related to one being preferred over the other secondary over primary but surely the concept of it is all about just acknowledging your sources and surfacing sources and letting the user use it aside right so then my question is secondary sources which have all the biases inherent in humans preferred as citation over primary sources which are the core root of the secondary of the secondary source let me pose you a hypothetical question if you were writing about New Zealand history would you use any secondary source before 1917 yes of course you would you would use combinations of sources primary and secondary we know almost well studies since the Murray Renaissance have shown that pretty much all of the sources basically it's only biased before about then and if someone would add sources from that period about New Zealand history I would certainly raise that as an issue because the government basically lied about so many things so many of the interested parties have undercleared conflicts of interest of time that have remained basically I think what's coming out here are the biases inherent in that let the sources speak for themselves and let the users just decide and use their critical faculties let's make a new Wikipedia so you want secondary school students to have critical faculties when they read the encyclopedia and that's who we're aiming at we're not aiming at us we're aiming at 10-year-old, 12-year-old, 13-year-old kids and journalists sorry 5-year-olds no that's me on that point too though I think it's an interesting point where historiography is relevant about how something has been represented over time is still legit in terms of referencing that kind of stuff and I think you couch it in those terms and there's certainly been bits that I've written where it was like, at this point, this was said at that point, this was said but it is this interesting, challenging thing because you can imagine a sentence that says from his perspective he thought he was doing this that it would make a lot of sense to reference the actual source where that person had said that yes if you're editing in medicine the standard is 5 years so you need a review article in the last 5 years before you say anything and that's fairly strongly enforced and I think it's important to bring a little bit of nuance because I see both points if I was restricted to material published in the last 5 years I wouldn't have been able to do my project because the material does not exist just because it's old doesn't mean it's been doesn't mean it's wrong and also doesn't mean it's been outdated by following on stuff because it's not always following on stuff Interested in what you were saying, Steve about the audience Thank you Thank you Interested in the comment about who the audience is I mean, is it genuinely genuinely writing articles for 12, 13, 14, 15 year olds? Because I use Wikipedia all the time and if I hit articles that were pitched at that level it would be dead to me it doesn't exist So the idea is that we lead the reader through the subject and so the lead, the first paragraph should be comprehensible to every high school student that's 12 year old, 13 year old that kind of age But there's simple Wikipedia which is the kind of dumbed-down version of Wikipedia or what's the relationship though You'd have to ask them I've never read this That's a goal and obviously in some areas particularly technical areas the articles are written to a much higher level and whether you want them to have a comprehensible first paragraph or not it's debatable but that is a goal to make the articles understandable by surely students, why not I think it's like when you talk about writing more labels for a 12 year old there's a difference between writing for a reading age of 12 and writing for a 12 year old's perspective on the world and I am writing for an adult perspective on the world but I am trying to keep it as simply couched as possible We've probably got time for one or two more questions I don't want people to not get stuff out If your questions, we don't have time for your questions you saw our user pages before Google us on Wikipedia or whatever find us, ask us questions We're all around, happy to ask questions I've got maybe a final question The nature of encyclopedia This discussion about primary secondary sources really folds back to what is an encyclopedia and Stuart you've mentioned that it's a tertiary source Does that sort of cut to the crux of this panel of what Wikipedia Editing is about because the nature of an encyclopedia goes back to the Enlightenment it's got a rich definition attached to it No one's sure that it's going to last either There are different arguments out there that Wikipedia is dying on the vine No, I disagree Wikipedia is 15 years old now and they were arguing about how long it's going to last from the year after it was created It's certainly outlasted Britannica The information Wikipedia can be pulled down saved and reused by anyone for any purpose Even if Wikipedia pulled the plug tomorrow on all servers, everything in it is archived and could then be simply relaunched by someone else Regardless of what happens to Wikipedia which isn't a very happy stable state the corpus that it's created is now by default the summary of the world's knowledge or the number one resolved on Google or whatever you want to call it and it's just simply going to continue to be built on because no one else has come up with anything approaching it So do you think that regardless of the various issues associated with Wikipedia that Wikipedia now defines what an encyclopedia is? There's a school of thought that says we should essentially buy out Britannica and maintain it No, as a mirror because when there's only one thing it's hard to get a perspective Well, you look at what Tiara and the 1965 encyclopedia and so you can go back and see what New Zealand thought of New Zealand in 1965 and that's actually really valuable to be able to see our changing perspectives on ourselves No, they're not There's a very interesting discussion which we don't have time for and we would love to talk about the differences between something like Tiara supported encyclopedia and an encyclopedia like Wikipedia the strengths and the minuses of each but that's another day We should have thought of that at the start of the hour Thank you so much everyone it was really nice to have so many questions