 takes care of most of the tasks. So yeah, a lot of the work goes behind the scenes. It goes to Wayne. There was about 150 people there. I was asked, what was our number one priority? The number one priority is figuring out how we can increase the number of regulars so that there's some continuity to this. If I move away, I want to make sure. And also the number of people who are interested in potentially organizing it. If I move away to a new city, I'd like to see the Bay Area still have a regular community, ultimately growing into a chapter. And I heard a lot of people be like, well, talking about, when are you going to turn it into a chapter? You know, you're getting a fair number of people, but yeah. First things first, let's get a community first. We had some of the interesting events where there was a retrospective on the crisis at the WMF, sort of a quieter session. It was not recorded. That was interesting. I'm not sure. Some people that won't mean anything to, but to the ones who it does mean something to, I already know all about it. So I'm not going to spend much more time on that. There was a strategy session at the end where we sort of brainstormed. And I think one of the things I was hearing from that it would be nice to figure out how contributing to Wikipedia helps people in their professional careers or in their just, so that it's something more tangible for them. I heard from somebody about how, you know, he made all these edits, but he wasn't sure what his ultimate reward was. I talked to a journalist about trying to figure out a partnership between journalists and Wikipedia's because they may not realize it, but we're constantly reading their editorial policies and whether or not they have fact-checking and sometimes we're contacting them. And so she was the president of the largest journalism association in America and it seemed very gung-ho about figuring out how to, I don't know, be better at journalism. And I went on a pub crawl. And that's pretty much my update. I think we just have to be persistent about these types of things, getting the building a bigger community and not losing hope. So that was a lot longer than I expected. So here you go, Wayne. Hi there, my name is Wayne. My username is Checking Facts, F-A-X. And I knew about Wiki Conference North America from all the banner ads that were always in my way. And then one day I got an email from Richard in New York and he said that somebody from Bay Area Wiki Salon should come to San Diego and represent the Wiki Salon. So I asked around and I drew the long straw. And I drew the long straw, so I went to San Diego. They told me that they had a scholarship set aside for one of us, so I thought, cool. So I calculated the expenses. I didn't realize that the scholarship could include meals, so I only did airfare and hotel. But after they approved my scholarship, it was like one fourth of what it would take to cover that. So I regrouped and reserved a room or a bunk at the downtown hostel. And I wasn't looking forward to that completely, especially if I got stuck on an upper bunk and fell off it in the middle of the night or couldn't get up and down the little ladder or something. So anyway, the hostel turned out to be a fabulous experience because they have all kinds of amenities. It has a full gourmet kitchen, or they have 24-hour staff. They have maids to keep things clean to a certain point. And so there was a dorm with 10 beds, and out of the 10 beds, six of us ended up being at the conference. And as a matter of fact, I was supposed to meet with a fellow named Gerald, who was the official photographer, and I thought I was in room 308, and I was trying to hook up with him, and he said he was in room 208. So I was texting him back and forth through this program called Slack, or Slacks. I don't even know the name of it. And trying to hook up with him in person, and then this guy turns over from the next bunk and says, are you Wayne? So one by one, I started to realize who in the room was Wikimedia. Nobody had a name tag on or any way to know, for sure. But slowly, I met a fellow in a bunk across the way who was from Tunisia, and he lives in Montreal, and he works on Wikidata and Arabic Wikipedia. And then the head of photography was in the bunk next to me, and then Catty Corner was another photographer, and then a person who uses the pronoun she was in the upper bunk across from me, Val, and Val was representing you and women through social media. And Val turned out to be a pretty amazing person. So I met all these people. We got free breakfast at the hostel, so we'd meet upstairs and have breakfast together. And then I didn't want to burn myself out walking to the library. Actually, our first day was a bow apart, and that was really amazing because they gave us access to all 15 museums, including an upgrade to a cannibal exhibition and some backstage tours. And I volunteered to do registration, so I ended up registering people for backstage tours instead of going on backstage tours. I finally did go on the cannibal tour, and it was amazing to meet so many people and to be at Balboa Park, which was a terrific venue, and then the San Diego Public Central Library, which is three years old next to the Petco Park where the quadrées play, and the library is so tall that it's nine stories tall. It looks down into the stadium from a balcony next to one of our meeting rooms, and we took over all the meeting rooms in the whole building, including the auditorium, and I ended up being a videographer, mostly in the auditorium, so I got to see keynote speeches and main speeches all day long. For one thing, I wanted to see Pax's presentation, and Pax bagged the auditorium, and then when he got started, Catherine Maher made a point of coming in and watching Pax's presentation, so I thought that was a tip of the hat. And the Balboa Park staff and library staff was amazing in supporting us, and I ended up being a volunteer for all four days for every track and every presentation. We were just supposed to work like two hours for one day, and I ended up working like eight hours for four days. And by the fourth day, everybody else had left town, so I was like the senior volunteer. Okay, I'm going to open it up to questions. Anybody have a question? If you need a microphone, there's one over there, or you can just holla. What inspired me the most was downtime, going to La Jolla Cove in an Uber with five guys and having one of them be like a professional tour guide of La Jolla Cove, and the other one being an amateur paleontologist telling us what all the lines in the Cove men and stuff, and then breakfast at the hostel and going out to a big dinner here and a small dinner there, and they had a couple of lunches where we got to mix things up, and then at the end of the conference, we were able to share our takeaways. By that time, most people had left town, but there were still about maybe 45, 50 people left, so we heard a lot of stories. But my mind's kind of mush about the individual presentations because I saw so many, but I would say Pax's was the best. Anybody else? Yes, I'm Pax. Fun crunch on English Wikipedia comments, all that good stuff. So yeah, I was really happy to go to the Wiki Conference. My presentation was called the Transgender Gap, it was basically about my experience being a transgender person editing Wikipedia and some of my concerns about the coverage of trans people and issues that concern us and safety issues concerning transgender editors on Wikipedia. I had given talks before about transgender issues, but mostly to crowds that were specifically interested in social justice, animal rights issues, and things like that. So I wasn't sure exactly what to expect from this crowd and I was worried that it would be a much more conservative audience and I would get some invasive or inappropriate questions but none of that happened. People were really thankful. People came up to me throughout the three days that I was there at the conference thanking me and asking me for contact information and more information. Everybody was really respectful and I think I really made some good connections. So I'm very glad that I came and gave the presentation and hope to continue with that and do more talks of this nature. Hopefully come do something for Wikipedia in August. I'm already thinking about that. And yeah, it was just really great to meet up with people, some of whom I knew only by their online handle. And I like that it was North America-wide so we had some Mexican and Canadian people in attendance as well and I like that Indigenous People's Day was featured and that it was specifically called Indigenous People's Day and not Columbus Day which I thought was a great thing and that there was a spotlight on content related to Indigenous people and keynote speech and another talk specifically on that. So I really felt that it was very inclusive, I mean that wivity and I feel that it really did live up to that hope to have a very inclusive Wikipedia. So yeah, very positive experience. My partner came with me as well, he's made I think one edit on Wikipedia ever so I told him if you want to duck out and go on a bike ride or something during some of the sessions feel free and he did some of that but he actually attended a number of sessions too, not just my own and had some good conversations and made connections with people as well. So yeah, very positive experience. And my presentation is online. If you come up to me after I can give you my handle and it's linked from my English Wikipedia page. It's a fun crunch if you want to look it up. Anyone have any questions? See I feel like it's kind of been a learning experience this year. I mean the first time I ever came to the Wikipedia Foundation was in January for Wikipedia 15 and before that I knew nothing about the WMF or any of the politics involved or anything and once I started to learn about that I was like whoa, okay. But I feel like that's part of why I was a little nervous but I feel like a lot of my negative experiences with Wikipedia were actually coming from the editors and not from the WMF. That makes sense and it was mostly anonymous, not necessarily IP address anonymous but people who I didn't know the names of who were making the vandalizing and harassing and that kind of thing and that really colored my experience but I felt like that was not the fault of the WMF at all. I mean there are certainly things that the WMF could do to reduce harassment and that's part of what the Inspire campaign was about and I actually submitted an idea to the Inspire campaign which became an RFC which actually did get support to change the permissions for pages in the user space so I'm very excited about that happening. But yeah, as far as what could be done, I feel like I only have a narrow perspective on it. I mean I can speak as a queer person, as a trans person, as a black person but that's about it. I can't speak to the experience of women on Wikipedia specifically even though I have lived experience as a woman. I don't claim to speak for women. I can't speak for people for other ethnic identities, etc. So I don't want to say oh it's just rosy and wonderful for everybody or oh it's just horrible and awful for everybody. I can't speak to what I've seen. And my biggest challenge is just trying to avoid harassment, avoid vandalism of pages involving trans issues, gender queer issues because that's been a huge problem and have greater representation of people of color and that sort of thing. So that's what I'm looking at. Sorry if that didn't really answer your question specifically but yeah, sure. I take a picture of you all while I'm up here. So I've sparked a couple comments for me. I've always seen statistics on Wikipedia that I've doubted to a certain extent like there's only 0.1% of editors or women. I'm excited. But I hear numbers like 5%, 10%, 11%, 6% and I would say nobody disclosed what their sex was at the conference but just guessing it's very low. Women at the conference and people of color was very low and disabled I would say zero. Maybe one person with a cane. Maybe two. One guy had kind of a shopping cart full of stuff that he pushed around but very undiverse. Yeah, I'm disabled. So I look disabled but I am. Yeah, I'm just saying just kind of a glossed over the appearance was that it was not diverse for a lot of reasons. And then also I wanted to mention for next month the last Wednesday of November I bumped into Catherine Maher at the conference and this is boring for employees but I got her to agree to mix with us on November 30th. She's busy. She was busy tonight but she said she would come November 30th and then the next day I asked her are we really on and she showed me her iPhone and we're in there. So unless something pops up that I figure she has a handler. So we thought that would be interesting just on non-presentation months just to have somebody interesting walking around that people can have organic conversations with. We just want to have, I know the month April when we had the transgender panel and the author and the library person that was our biggest Wiki salon. Yeah the first one we had 100 RSVPs and 50 people show up approximately. A lot of that had to do with Pete Forsythe. He did a lot of promotion and he did a lot of preparation and he expanded the panel and the topic and he was a great moderator. Okay. We do want to open it up to anybody who wants to say something but I think one thing about figuring out how to draw a bigger crowd we could be more organized in that. If anybody has any ideas then we would be happy to hear from them but do you want to say something? Yeah. I'm not super discouraged in general. Do you want to say something? Yep. And that is one problem we have which is that I have a full-time job and we're also sort of scrambling to what are we going to do because we don't have a speaker sometimes. Hopefully as we get better at figuring out two or three months lead time what we're going to do that will be better. Yeah. Balancing my busy life and Wayne's. Wiki Conference North America interrupted me a little bit and then I ended up staying down there to hang out with my second cousin once removed and my second cousins who I didn't know about the second cousins and I hadn't seen the ones removed in like 53 years so that was pretty special and I ended up videotaping some family history that he told me. So anyway I came back late from that and I didn't do that whole like 8 days. I didn't even touch a laptop. So I mean we're slowly growing a listserv of people who have came. Has anybody ever like when we sent an email has anybody ever said unsubscribe me? Yeah so nobody said oh we don't want to hear from you anymore and so as that grows and we're trying to keep our communications light so that does happen you know once a month and we will send one out a lot earlier I think with this Catherine thing we may even send two because the other thing about doing it a week before is that you do it you know in the beginning of the month people forget it's deleted especially if it doesn't have like click put my calendar so if you do it a week before some people are like you know my schedule is rarely scheduled in advance for more than a week personally but yeah balancing that I'm personally like a person who just like if somebody sends me like too many emails I'm like boom unsubscribe can't handle it I'm not sure how everybody is so I'm sensitive to that I don't know if you guys have any thoughts about that I mean two a month is probably okay right three a month is too much oh yeah yeah yeah hadn't heard yeah yeah yeah yeah yep yep I think I think one thing we will try to be very careful of is if it's not going to happen we'll give a lot of lead time because we want this to be a very regular thing and that's also why it's very casual and I'm like we're not going to be doing a pretend promotion because also like if you do a lot of promotion we had one gentleman who came here and he was sort of expecting more of a presentation and you know we don't want to like promote a lot if it's just going to be just a casual get together so and those are kind of like yeah so looking ahead a little bit because last Wednesday of December falls after the beginning of Christmas Hanukkah and Kwanzaa we're going to move December back by a week to the 21st of December so we're trying to plan ahead and also this month at the last minute we almost had to move our venue and so it kind of took the wind out of my sails I'm not sure that's just a personal thing but I kind of get on the momentum and I love this month yeah this this month I think it was this month that's next month oh okay yeah communication could be slightly better in terms of like kind of just because I sent an email that you know we had a conflict yeah and then there's another met tomorrow at this very place and you guys may be aware of that so that we could mind those two events I think it would have been a lot better chance for people to mix up and meet each other and taking some of the pressure off of us to be like okay we got to figure out how to you know make this an event but it was good to talk about this wiki conference North America all of these one strategy they had a wiki one strategy they had a wiki conference North America was to have a presentation in the middle in a big room and off in the corner people were having a little edit-a-thon or something in a giant room so there can be there can be multitasking on the same night in a room that's as big as this people can spread out yeah I mean another thing that I'm sort of aware of and think about is that we advertise on this meetup for wikipedia tech but these meetups aren't exactly technical so it makes me like poor one here showed up hoping to hack with a bunch of media wiki people you know there's not too many but we can still make it interesting so yeah ideally in the long run I have some ideas for that but I'm not sure I have the time one talk I will do at some point who knows when is talk on how to balance volunteering with a professional life and all the technical tools that may make it easier but also might just be a rabbit hole yeah so December 21st our presenter is going to be Jim Haifey who pretty much runs the wikipedia key house he was one of the first people in there and had a lot to do with the way it is and he answers a lot of questions and he also made a presentation at the wiki conference my presentation was not accepted Ben did a lightning talk at the last minute when I got drafted to do something else he put together a lightning talk with slides and all kinds of stuff in like 4 minutes yeah that's like last minute doing your paper in college so we want to open it up to anybody who wants to make any announcements are we done? Felix has an announcement I might have an announcement here so this is I'm Felix Kramer this is my second time here a month ago I came and talked about this project that I've been involved in called the climate congress wikipedia project and since the last time we launched the project a month and a day before the election and it's basically a separate wiki that contains information about candidates and incumbents for congress and what they say and do about climate change and we have all the senators 33 senators and the challengers and about 12% of the members of the House covered here and basically it's objective information not partisan and it contains in it a paragraph called a draft summary for wikipedia which is a distillation of a lot more research saying this is the kind of information we want to move over to wikipedia and we realized and part with a lot of good advice from the end that we don't know what we're doing about wikipedia and we need to get some people involved in wikipedia to help us on this whole but we did launch this thing and we've gotten some information in the last three days Bill McKibbin who is the leading climate change writer and organizer in the world I'd say and Mike Goon head of the Sierra Club and Bill Maher so we're getting some good attention and a great article in Moyers and Company about the project and what we intend to do and it's all at climatecongress.us and .info is the website anyway so we're continuing to work on this after the election we plan to continue on it with getting ready for the next congress with all the people coming in having information about all of them and we're crowdsourcing and at the same time one of the other goals is to recruit a group of what I would call climate wikimedians wikimedians who think climate is really important love what's already at wikipedia and think there can be a lot more and if I had to sort of say where we're ending up we would love for on the idea that climate change is more and more important to everyone in the world over the next period of time we all know that a person has an article in wikipedia called culture, politics, science, economics, whatever what they say and do about climate change is important and so our long term goal would be for every one of those people to have a section about what they and climate change that people can find on wikipedia that's our big goal but we're starting with politicians and so we would love help from you guys advice we know who lives eats and breathes wikipedia can give us some help and so forth so we're not even ready to approach the people who spend a lot of time on wikipedia doing climate related articles and editing and so we're really early on so we need to expand our team and that's what locally with San Francisco and virtually with people anywhere anybody just talk to me about it and I think this is something that can really take off in the next couple of months so thanks I have been very lonely for a very long time I have made many thousands of edits and contributed many thousands of dollars over the last maybe eight years or so and I have looked for opportunities to meet other people that work on wikipedia and not very successful I have come to a number of the technical meetings here at the foundation the last time I was here was about a year ago and after that experience I didn't want to come here today because I was treated so rudely down there in the lobby and one thing I can say is that that situation has been corrected but the last time I was here it just about drove me away permanently I hear that there's a lot of effort to get people together and I just sort of found out about this thing by accident going through my email maybe there's a problem with signal to noise ratio I don't know what it is I did not really understand what wiki salon was nor do I understand quite what's going on tomorrow I plan to be here tomorrow I'm really glad that some people are working on this I really wanted to go to San Diego it just didn't work out I had too many other obligations at the time but I think we need to have a way of getting together face to face you know eight or nine years of dealing with this over the internet and not knowing the people that I'm working with and not being able to walk down and ask somebody a question and know and get a feeling like you know in my job I have a feeling for who knows what and I can go and have a conversation with them and with Wikipedia I feel very very lonely I think I can speak for Ben and say that everything that you said is the reason that he wanted to start a wiki salon and I still don't understand completely what it is because he's never completely told me but we're slowly figuring it out and you can help us do that you can help to find it sorry I didn't remember to mention this when I was talking earlier FEA on English Wikipedia has gotten a grant for an LGBT featured photo drive basically we're trying to improve coverage of LGBT people and related topics on Commons so there's going to be cash prizes for the first two submissions once the contest starts which is tentatively November 1st but it's been pushed back a couple times so there will be an announcement there will be a banner and everything once it is actually open but just so people are thinking about it now there will be cash prizes for the first two LGBT themed photos to reach featured picture status on Commons so we'll get us some more good content on there and I'm not officially in charge of the contest I'm just spreading the word about it my name is Clayton I went to WikiCon that was my first experience with Wikipedia or Wikimedia a very positive experience I learned a lot and first night here at a salon and I look forward to future ones learning more about how I can help edit and spread knowledge particularly about art and what not, thank you Hi everyone, I just wanted to introduce myself my name is Juan Lada I'm a documentation engineer and I'm mainly interested in contributing to MediaWiki through documentation but if you're interested in anything about technical writing in general come talk to me I'm Juliette on the communications team at the Wikimedia foundation and I've been involved in this just a little bit as a host providing a little bit of logistical support making sure the doors are open but I would like to I really hear the interest and the motivation to have more people at events like this so I'm interested in working with Ben and Wayne and anyone else who's interested to spread the word and we are headquartered here in San Francisco we've got a nice space and we should welcome people in so I'm setting up a call with you and me I just want to like give me a mic my name is Margarita, last name is Nath Pactitis, my handle is Nath Pactitis and I'm I just moved to the Bay Area from Los Angeles, I was a librarian actually for Slavic and East European studies at the UCLA library I was also the instruction coordinator there and in that position I actually ran several different kinds of editathons, Wikipedia editathons and I have to say that Pete Forsythe was the one who kind of like sucked me into the whole Wikipedia world I took his school of open class which is fantastic really early on because in a previous life I was also a professor of Russian literature and just realized how many times I was doing last minute prep for my lectures the first hit was Wikipedia and it was often really helpful and I throw something from Wikipedia in there so this notion of you know but then you always tell your students you know you can't site Wikipedia so I just had a real problem with that and thought there would be a better way to engage and it turned out to be true so I've thought a lot about what it means to teach with Wikipedia as a librarian at UCLA once I transitioned to being a librarian I worked with especially one faculty member quite a bit, Tobias Higbee who actually teaches a class on labor and social justice where he assigns Wikipedia research and articles in his class that was super interesting but I also had organized editathons with librarians to get them to put in external links to like really cool actual digital content that related to articles that were going that already existed also our plus feminism editathons that happened around LA and a really fantastic series of editathons that basically women named Stacey Allen organized called Unforgetting LA which always happened in spectacular locations like amazing libraries and galleries and art spaces where we were encouraged to get people of color, women other underrepresented groups into Wikipedia by starting articles she had a really neat approach to doing that so I've actually created my fair share of articles and edited a bunch of other ones and now that I'm in the area the first thing I did was try to figure out if there's anything going on at Stanford because I'm at Stanford now still the librarian for Slavic and East European studies so I've actually done edits in Polish and Russian Wikipedia and Greek actually I know thank you but I've been asking around but I'm still new and I'd like to continue to help coordinate editathons looks like there's a new Facebook group that just started two days ago called Libraries in Wikipedia which I'm excited about I think librarians are kind of in a unique position to help make more information open access through Wikipedia by helping out with the resources that we have available to me so I'm trying to get connected to what's going on in the Bay Area now that I'm here so one of the favorite people that I met at Wiki Conference was a librarian from Georgia also also one of the keynote speakers was Mary Lee Prophet and she was a presenter at the same time PAX was more different it was the next one where we had a presentation but at Wiki Conference I was registering people and I got thirsty and she was giving this giant keynote keynote speech and as I walked by the auditorium that she was in to get some water I heard her say and at the Bay Area Wiki salon I was like yeah my name is Leila I'm a research scientist here at Wikimedia Foundation what I do mostly during the day job is basically working on research projects related to recommendation systems for what to be created on Wikipedia so these are articles to be created links to be added topics to be added sections to be added anything recommendation for editors I'm also interested in kind of understanding readers who are the readers of Wikipedia why do they come to the site what are they trying to achieve how much we are satisfying their need or should be satisfying their need so these are kind of the two main topics that I'm interested in but then during volunteer time I work with the international team as an organizer and I also organized Wikilev's Monument for Iran I'm originally from Iran so that's about me this was fun one of the benefits of having a small group is that you can talk to each other one of the things we get to talk one on one when you have a mic it's like wow I have a mic I can like expound so yeah in some ways a small group is more fun nothing wrong with it so we have about another 45 minutes or so and we can just hang out eat food, have fun talk one on one, one on three edit whatever you want to do pull up your own private corner pull up the booth you don't have to be here for 45 minutes we had one person last month who came for like 5 minutes and then bolted but we said in our invitation just come by even to say hi and then when they left we were like what do we do wrong Wayne was worried I wasn't worried our talk page list is 154 then we have a San Francisco email list that's moderated by somebody and I've never asked how many subscribers there are and then we also have an internal email list from people that have expressed interest in coming here or who have attended and that's about 150 one thing is in this space the lights can be turned down and these Christmas lights can come on and it becomes kind of disco-y and around the poles and music I also wanted to mention that basically right now is the fourth anniversary or fourth birthday of WikiData and they're celebrating birthdays all over the world for the next week and I just found out about the San Francisco celebration which happened today at noon and I showed up and it was me and another guy in a cake and the rest of the cake's in the back I mean I think it's a good reminder Felix to just try new things you know not be afraid of the consequences so if you throw a party at least when I try to throw a party nobody shows up and I feel really sad yeah I think we could find something that would be like we'd do several draws yeah yeah but what I was going to say is just like it's not that big of a deal you set yourself up with a stoic philosophy and you're like okay nobody might show up but at least there's Wayne so you know I'm not too worried about it but yeah we'll see what happens we've explored draws I think like if we had Guy Kawasaki come we'd probably draw a ton of people not that we really want to do that but it might just be too many people but yeah we'll draw a lot of people I think it was the number but that is a good idea so we need to find an excuse to have a party like that I mean one of the interesting keys about I was like oh we should just be persistent about growing this community yeah yeah yeah I mean one of the interesting things about growing this community is that parties are fun let's talk about Wikipedia but at the end of the day it's like oh if we're going to contribute we're going to be editing we're going to be able to control because you get into editing as Felix found it turns pretty serious and kind of stressful pretty quickly but yeah I think in general just like getting people who are interested together in the same room is cool too yeah yeah very different and I think you can throw a great party party and there's plenty of booze flowing at the end of the day nobody there actually learns anything about Wikipedia in a real way or they may not even stick pretty much at all so and I guess that's sort of one of my goals is to get people to actually be sort of more integrated into the online editing but that's yeah maybe they can do both I mean I'm not saying it's a bad idea that's not like my only goal but yeah I mean I like to party as you can tell with my 22 ounce anyway like Christmas Eve New Year's Day or something yeah at our first event Pete Forsythe predicted we would have 50 people and a couple days before we had like 10 and I was I was gonna be happy if we got 12 and then we got 50 we're not like Ben says we're not going for numbers and it's not a competition it's just that the more people that come to something like this the more it can web its way out into the community I had one more thing to say but I forgot yeah every story triggers another story I'd like to give a big shout out to Brandon for doing our AV