 OK, so good morning, good afternoon, and also perhaps good evening to everyone. I'm glad to be here attending the first ever and hopefully last Wikimedia virtual experience. My name is Luicina Ferrante. I'm from Wikimedia, Argentina. I am the Education and Human Rights Manager. And joining me today are Mariana Fosati, Wikimedia Coordinator of Visible Wikimedia Women Campaign at Whose Knowledge, and also Ian Ramson, a Wikimedia expert from Wikie Education and Wikimedians of the Caribbean. So today, we are going to share different experiences in these sessions developed within the Wikimedia Movement in the Latin American and the Caribbean region related to actions in order to decolonize the internet and also the role that Wikimedia projects have in this process. In the very, very first part of the panel, with Mariana, we are going to share the proposals in which we have been working this year, this first part of the year. And then Ian will also share his experiences and projects. And to close both the three of us, we are going to present some current examples that we consider are good practices developed throughout the Wikimedia projects that help to decolonize the internet. So here it is. To begin with the presentation, the main question we want to share with all of you that is part of our experiences and practices is, how can we decolonize the internet throughout Wikimedia projects? This question was the starting point for Mariana and me when we started thinking at the beginning of the year on how Wikimedia projects are helping in this process of decolonizing the internet. When we try to answer this question, this particular question, as always, other questions pop up. For example, what perspective are we approaching with the idea of decolonization? Who do we want to start thinking and opening the debate with? And also, what methodology are we going to use to generate a critical and collaborative debate process? So with all these questions on the table during March and June, we developed different instances to debate within the Wikimedia chapters and user groups and also civil society organizations in Latin America and the Caribbean about the idea of decolonizing the internet throughout the Wikimedia projects. So as you can see in the slide, in the first moment, we coordinated three round tables. They were closed and safe spaces. In the first round table, we organized the experience with the Wikimedia chapters from the region and also user groups. As you can see, they are the countries. And in the second round table, we organized the debate with the social and civil society organizations of the region related to digital rights, open knowledge, and human rights. In the first two, we presented the central question, this one, how can we decolonize the internet throughout Wikimedia projects? We worked this idea from the backgrounds and experiences of those who were participating. And we tried to define a common idea about what it means to decolonize the internet from the South and what challenges exist to contribute to this process from Wikimedia projects. The last one, the third one, we organized. We tried to work together with the Wikimedia chapters of the region and also the social and civil society organizations. And we tried to identify in this last round table key actions that can generate collaborative proposals and possible articulations between the Wikimedia movement and local civil society organizations to create a regional network that can work together on this topic. After these three round tables that were between April and May, in June, we presented all these debates and challenges at RightsCon 2021 in a community lab that we coordinated during the conference with the aim of sharing these experiences and continuing working in a collaborative way on the decolonization of the internet throughout the Wikimedia projects. We are right now trying and also writing a specific report with all these reflections and debates and challenges identified during all the different spaces that we were inhabiting. And we hope we can publish it as soon as possible after Wikimedia. So I want to highlight something before giving the floor to Mariana, that is when the main results that we achieved during these experiences was to define together and contextualize the idea of internet decolonization. And I think that in the next slide, Mariana will share with us some definitions and frameworks that can help to continue working on it. So Mariana, if you want, you can go ahead. I stay here. OK. Thanks. Thank you, Lucina. So what do we mean when we talk about the colonized internet and especially what it means from a global south perspective? These questions are the basis of our reflections right now. And our questions are related with the internet in general, but also related with Wikimedia as a good proxy of the state of the internet in terms of this colonization or decolonization process. If we think on the internet of today, we could see that actually is deeply skewed towards a monocultural view of the world. This view is primarily the view of white straight men from the global north, especially from Europe and North America. Even when 75% of the online population that is using and experiencing the internet is located in the global south, in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific Island, and Latin America, and the Caribbean. So the internet today, the internet cultures today, what we can see as an internet culture is not the culture of the majority of us. Only is the culture of few people actually a minority in relation with the number of people participating, building, and using the internet. And almost nearly 45% of this population online are women. So there is still a gender gap. And that gender gap is bigger in those countries when there is still a huge digital divide. As I said before, Wikipedia is a good proxy of these problems because it's a good proxy of online public knowledge. And what we can see there, what we can see on Wikipedia, well, this is well known for everybody at Wikimedia, I think, but let's say that only 20% of the world, primary white male editor from North America and Europe, edit 80% of Wikipedia. And one or maybe two, it depends of what sources we use. In 10 of Wikipedia editors are self-identified female women. So the internet isn't diverse, isn't multilingual and multicultural by default. This is not a reality by default. By the contrary, hegemonic cultures and narrative, the same cultures and narrative that have been hegemonic in books, in TV shows, in cinemanias, papers, museums, in art collections, find strong mechanisms of cultural reproduction on the internet in the same way that in the past, in other spaces and media. So we must be aware of those mechanisms of silence, violence, and injustice also on Wikipedia. So as the colonizer, the internet must be for all and from all of us and not only for or from some of us. So you can read more about all of these in the Who's Knowledge publication, our stories, our knowledge. And you can go deep in on this structural problem of knowledge justice. So the next is you, Luli, it's about our challenges. Yes, you're right, you're right in here. OK, thank you, Mariana. I think that it's very important, everything that you shared and after the ideas and definitions that you shared in the last slide, I want to recover a little bit what I was talking about, the roundtables and the different debates that we generated there. And we identify in the same loop as Mariana was explaining some specific challenges that are really important to take into account if we want to contribute to the decolonization of the internet from a Southern perspective and throughout the Wikimedia projects, we can define these challenges or we define these challenges as real time and contextualized gaps. And they are very related with this idea that Mariana was sharing. The first one, the first gap that we identify in our debates was internet access gaps. According to Cepal, one in every three people in Latin America and the Caribbean cannot access a proper internet connection on their own devices due to their economic situation. This point is key for us if we want to think of strategies that are contextualized to our social, political, and economic reality. On the other hand, and Mariana already said it, is gender gaps. Here also emerged a lot of specific questions, like, for example, who are participating, how they are participating on the internet in Wikipedia, in what moment of the day they can do it. And in this last question, we want to bring something that is important that has to be, in some point, with the unequal distribution of caring tasks between men and women in our society that have a direct effect on the uses and spaces, in particular, women and diversities, can freely inhabit. Also, we identify participation gaps that it's more related with indigenous communities in their mother tongue. And the last two gaps that we identified and we debate, and we are already working on this and trying to continue analyzing this context and being part of this context is the content gaps and source and neutrality gaps. This is related with what kind of sources can we use in Wikipedia? And if those sources represent the diversity of cultures and communities that want to contribute in their languages, and also if all communities and cultures have the same understanding about what is neutrality. We think that with all these debates and also continue generating these kind of experiences as the one that we are sharing right now in Wikimedia, we can perhaps we can manage to work together throughout the Wikimedia projects generating inclusive practices. So I think that it's a lot of information in a few minutes. Perhaps there are some questions, but these were some of the main challenges we identified during these debates and the different experiences and places where we were presenting these experiences and practices with different actors from civil society, from Wikimedia, from the Wikimedia movement, and also from different countries and localizing their experiences. And we are still working on it and we want to continue working on it. So thank you very much for allowing us to be here during this. And now I will leave the floor to Ian so he can dip on these debates and the idea of decolonizing the internet throughout the Wikimedia projects in the Caribbean context. Hi. So I'd like to talk a little bit about one specific part of the Wikimedia universe and I want to focus mostly on Wikipedia which and precisely specifically the English Wikipedia which has been my home in the movement for the last 17 years. As we've talked about the internet itself is very colonial, very unequal, but Wikipedia's coverage of the world's knowledge in particular is uneven and it's uneven in specific ways that mirror a lot of the world's broader systemic inequalities which are which reflect from the things that Luzana and Mariana talked about things like access to sources and what contributes to source. The gender gap, of course, is a huge problem on Wikipedia, the English Wikipedia is we've now gotten close to 19% of biographies being about women. It's not a problem across all languages. The Welsh Wikipedia has done a great job but there's an awful lot still to do. Less perhaps obvious is especially to people outside the movement is the issue of uneven geographic coverage. So, you know, every, if you look at Wikipedia, if you look at North America every train station, every town has a decent article. You get further into the world and that's not going to be the case. It's especially bad in large areas of Africa and Asia. And beyond the uneven coverage, there's this interesting or not interesting but sort of pulling fact and that is if you look at European countries they are best covered in the Wikipedia that's in their own language. Switch to the global south and that's not true. They're best covered in the languages of other countries very often the language of their former colonial masters. When you think about the content on Wikipedia it's colonized in its very bones. So in the early days of Wikipedia, we needed content. The project needed content, content through traffic, traffic through contributors. So the content of Wikipedia contributors was supplemented with a lot of other free content that was available online. Notably the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia and the CIA World Factbook. And while a lot of this content has been rewritten, there's still an awful lot of that content underlying a lot of articles. Until earlier this year, the geography of Trinidad and Tobago article, for example, described it as slightly smaller than Delaware, which is very useful to people from Delaware and maybe Americans, but not to the world, not to, it's not a meaningful comparison. It's a very colonized comparison. And a lot of other articles, you look at them and you read language that's 19th century, you read attitudes that are totally out of date and totally the product of a white male Northern worldview. The last time I checked, there's still 11,843 articles tagged as incorporating texts from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica and 4,870 articles with texts from the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia. So underlying Wikipedia is a lot of, things are perhaps worse than you might imagine. Now, as a contributor, it's fairly easy to contribute to Wikipedia as long as you sort of keep your head down and participate in your digital labor. But when you enter the world of debates that things get a little more difficult sometimes. As an outsider, as somebody who's not a white man, you do run into the issue of being seen as a special interest when you declare your identity. So if this topic is about something that you are familiar with and the rest of the community is not, you say, I'm from here. I know suddenly you're a special interest and you're no longer the white man from the global North which is implicitly assumed to be our arbiters of neutrality and distance. As we mentioned before, there's the issue of sourcing and I think sourcing and the inequities in sourcing, the differences in what constitutes a reliable source. All of these things are probably a discussion that needs to be had entirely on its own. So unfortunately, I don't think we have time to give that the coverage it deserves. Images are another place where colonial stereotypes are perpetrated. I've often been asked, I've often had people ask, why does Wikipedia prefer historical images? Now, of course, that's not actually the case. The case is that Wikipedia prefers free images and very often that's things that are out of copyright. So it's historical images. But even when we have free images contributed by community members, it's very often through the eye of, through a touristy sort of colonial eye. When we continue to present the world in this old fashioned way, we continue to perpetuate these stereotypes and perpetuate the vision of the global South as backward. So it's important and there's really important work that's done by groups like Wikileaks Earth and WPWP to use images that are there to add relevant images, to diversify and decolonize the presentation. But there's a huge amount that needs to be done. The last part of this is when we talk about decolonization, I'm often reminded of what happened in the 20th century. By, at the end of World War II, the colonial countries, Britain, France, Portugal, still thought that in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, they could, that they would gradually turn local control over to the local people. And maybe over a couple of generations, we would come to the point where we could be self-reliant and self-governing. In reality, the whole process of decolonization was largely over by 1975. And if there's a lesson in history for the Wikimedia movement, I think it is the fact that we need to be careful, we need to pay attention to this potential transition. They can happen much more quickly than we imagine. And while the community has done a great job of, with the movement charter, with all these changes that they want to do, we still have a very much a case where those of us who are in the global north, those of us who are comfortable with the global north are still telling people, this is the way it's going to be. We understand what to do in your best interest. And perhaps we need to do more listening and we need to do more preparation for the changes that are going to come. Could I have the next slide, please? So, work I've been involved with, I've been involved with work that Wikimedians of the Caribbean have been doing over the last three years. And we are a fairly new user group. And our goal really is to change the participation and perception of people in the Caribbean. So the Caribbean is more than just, sans-sans tourism beaches, but the world doesn't see us that way. And it's, so there's that and that sort of perception is very much the case on Wikipedia. There's also the Caribbean is seen through a colonial lens. There's tons of information on country X's colonization of the Americas. But we are segregated by our colonial histories and divided by our, divided or the things that bring us together, the commonalities that brings together tend to be ignored. So despite the fact that we are a multilingual area, continent divided by water, some people say there's a lot to do there. And we're working with, for example, we've worked with cultural activists in the region, we've worked with environmental scientists and things like that to bring people from the Caribbean into the movement. And now I'll return to Luzana, I think. No, I can't give you the floor, obviously. Okay, well, from our perspective here in Latin America and to have Ian sharing about Caribbean was great because sometimes when we talk about Latin America, we forgot too often the Caribbean region. So thank you, Ian, for that. And I will share some of the experiences in which Lucina, Mia, and our fellows from the region are involved in relation with develop a decolonized view of Latin America. And first of all, I think that this decolonized vision or view comes from the idea that human rights and social struggles must be in the center because colonization and decolonization, of course, are social processes and very conflictive and very related with the fights and the struggles of the people in the territories. So that's why we are focusing in some experiences related with that fights and struggles in the ground. So one of the experiences are collaborative campaigns organized on Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia in collaboration with independent media and media activists in Latin America, which is a strong movement and also with social collectives working together to cover knowledge gaps, developing strategies, such a collaborative coverage of relevant events, social events like protests, political shifts, diverse cultural events. And for instance, every 8th March, feminist Wikimedians in Argentina and Uruguay and I think that also in Chile, Mexico, support the media coverage of the HMAR mobilizations and they upload photograph and other materials to Commons. This kind of collaboration between not only Wikimedians taking photos and uploading, but also in articulation with social movements is key in this kind of experience of collaborative campaigns in the ground. Another experience is related with resistance and memory building. And maybe Lulika can add more about this, but one very relevant example is Wikiderechos Humanos, Wikihuman Rights, and also Wikiderechos Humanos, LGBT Plus, and other initiatives to make visible human rights, memory, social justice and gender issues on Wikimedia projects from a rational perspective, and especially in partnership with journalists, historical memory sites, social movements related with memory and human rights, digital rights, civic society, organizations, also. And another experience is related with memory and visual knowledge to make women and LGBTQ Plus folks visible on the internet One specific experience is the Visible Wikibemian Campaign an annual campaign of whose knowledge that in the last three years has been campaigning with partners and friends from around the world, but with a special presence from Latin America making available on the internet more than 50,000 images of women to illustrate Wikipedia articles. And especially paying attention on the image, gaps on Wikimedia Commons, which is not only a gender gap, but also a gap that needs to make more visible Black women, brown women, indigenous women, trans women from the global South. So all of these experiences are interconnected initiatives. For instance, sometimes from a collaborative campaign covering protests and mobilizations, create materials to share on Visible Wikibemian, for instance. So all of these initiatives are interconnected and initiatives that seeks to create partnerships with organizations and groups that make a part of the, as I said before, of the social struggles and resistance in Latin America. And interwoven with their practices, their practices created with these social resistance movements, these communities are creating knowledge from the margins and from the cultural peripheries where people are still resisting epistemic colonial violence. And so if we seek for the colonization strategies, we need to listen and to create spaces for this kind of embodied knowledge and in another structure this way. So, and I will pass the word to, Luizina, do you want to say something to close the panel and then we can go for the questions? No, yes, thank you, Mariana. I think that it's very important for us to have this moment and share different experiences that we are developing and also projects that we are developing together in the region in Latin American and in the Caribbean. And also I know that we have 10 minutes for questions. So something that I want to read is the question of Kristoff that somebody shared with us in our chat. A minute, please, that I'm here. Is there a statistical number of indigenous communities within the global south, especially America? I don't know, Ian, if you have a specific answer for this. Meanwhile, I can share at the Etherpad a specific research from international human rights organisms that is working on this issue. I have specifically the numbers for Latin America and the Caribbean indigenous community, perhaps not for the global south, but I think that will help to this question and also to access to more information about this because there are too many indigenous communities in our lands. So I think that it's an important question. I will share this in the Etherpad. Yeah, I don't know if, I mean, the question of how many indigenous communities around the Americas is beyond my scope, but the definitions of indigeneity in the Caribbean in particular are interesting when you have a lot of community, when you have the colonization almost erased the indigenous communities, and now there's a question of, you know, trying, groups trying to reassert themselves as Puerto Rican or Jamaican Tainos and a dominant narrative that says, no, these people are extinct. So it's pretty tough in that regard. Yes, yes, I know it. So I was looking for something that can answer in a specific way because I don't, I don't like to give numbers that are not really numbers. So I think that I will put, I am putting now in the Etherpad. I don't know if there is any question or here. Well, yes, there are a lot of questions that you're sharing with us. Do you want to take it? I do have a thought on Galdor Gonzalez's question about oral traditions. And in the chat somewhere else, Ziko made a really interesting bit of information that I didn't know that the Haitian Quail Wikipedia uses oral sources, but more widely in the community I believe that there are, I think, I believe that the Wikisport is a great resource to build oral histories. And I would love to see that project develop into a source where we can collect these and link them and create metadata around them. We aren't at this stage where, I mean, the community isn't going to accept oral sources yet, but I think there is, it's something we badly need to move towards. Yes, and to, I would like to add something about reliable sources. And recently I participated as advisor on a study conducted by Art Plus Feminism, a user group, and the study is called Unreliable Sources, and you can find it on Art Plus Feminism website around Wikimedia sources and reliable sources on English, Spanish and French Wikipedia's, and I think that we also need to revisit the, and this is related also with the question of Andy, Mavik, we need to really reflect and discuss the idea of reliable sources. First of all, each Wikipedia has their own policy of reliable sources, own definition, and some Wikipedia, there are even a clear definition about reliable sources, and in one hand, I think that, and many people think that to have a super specific detailed definition of reliable sources can be very restrictive, but at the same time, it's important to discuss that because for some editors, at the end, what is a reliable source? It's solved through power relationships, and what is a reliable source is solved not specifically in the Wikipedia policies, but in every article, especially in articles related with people from the global south, places, artists, and et cetera. So we need to go and read carefully the policies, and for instance, if we think on how to add oral traditions on reliable sources, well, maybe we can pay attention on how we can document and how we can share that knowledge in an explicit way, like not only on text, but also video, audio formats, different formats in all, obviously in a respectful way to those groups and cultures that own that traditions and traditional knowledge, but I recommend you to look at that very recent research, and I think that Aluseminis will run a session about that, I think I have to check, but you can check also, and I highly recommend that discussion. I have a quick answer also to Andy's question, particular about a Catholic hymn writer. The issue that matters is that these things exist in a context of a colonial world. So the attitudes of the 19th century are very much centered on Europe. So for example, there's an article about Sonon LeMond, who was a very important figure in Trinidadian agricultural history. His article takes language from, I think from a contemporary source, which talks about he went out to Trinidad where his family owned a plantation. That tone is very othering, it centers him in Scotland rather than the place where he lived most of his life, and so when you take language, the information isn't bad, but the language has biases that can be very othering to the rest of us, despite the fact that you're talking about a Scott. Okay, well, we know that we have one minute left, and we want to thank you everyone, and see you in Wikimania. It's a very, very rich program, and we are going to be there. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Bye, thank you.