 Thank you. We had a tremendous welcome to country here yesterday, and I'd like to start by acknowledging the traditional custodians of this land as well. I want to say thank you to everybody at this conference. The work of independent researchers like me really relies on the scholars and volunteers and people doing pioneering work on Wikipedia, and I think that that sometimes doesn't get as much attention as it should. And one of the kind of surprises to me doing this work is how long it has taken to discover some of the people here. There's kind of an apology attached to the thanks because the thanks has taken so long. Even doing dedicated work and applying myself sometimes took months or even years to find people who were working right down the road from me on similar topics. And that got me thinking about why that is. And part of the problem is specific. It used to be kind of the the joint responsibility of the media and academic institutions to promote and communicate that work. And I don't think either of those parties are doing that very well. And it's sometimes hard to blame the public for not recognising or respecting research when academic institutions themselves so often a party to defunding it and sometimes even denigrating the people conducting it. Not this institution, of course. But part of this problem is also bigger than the media or the academy. Though Wikipedia and its constellation of related projects is almost a generation old and it's attracted scholarly interest for about as long. The study of Wikipedia is really still in its infancy. When I studied English literature here at this university, there was then an old professor who had read every single book that had been written about the novelist George Elliott while she was still studying for her master's degree. Reading every book now about George Elliott would be the work of a lifetime or perhaps impossible. But it is surprisingly still possible to read every single book that has been written about Wikipedia. The Library of Congress only lists about a dozen which have Wikipedia as their subject and several of them and out of proportion number of them are written by Australians or people who did their research in Australian academic institutions. Dr Heather Ford superb writing the revolution which was launched here yesterday is already in the Library of Congress. But before we congratulate ourselves too much about punching about our weight as we love to do, we should ask why so few books about Wikipedia are written at all, not just by people locally. I think one of the constellations of a fresh field of study is excitement. It feels almost like a kind of shared secret to watch what is now the largest collaborative project in human history take shape in our own lifetime and we can reach out and touch it. It's exhilarating. We can not just see it but analyse it and document it, critique it, understand it, praise it, sometimes curse it. We can help build it and if we want to we can help build the bridges that will link it to other bodies of human knowledge some of them centuries or even millennia old. It's also something a bit unsettling about that because an achievement on this scale with these kind of history making features should be self evidently important. Its study shouldn't feel marginalised or trivial and Wikipedia scholars shouldn't have to explain themselves but they do. They do have to explain themselves and I've found and I'm sure many people here have found that Wikipedia is still not taken seriously or at least not taken seriously enough. Even the word Wikipedia sometimes carries a faintly kind of patronising tone and when I tell people that I'm interested in Wikipedia and interested enough to write a book, they sometimes just say why. That's a question which at first I found maybe not insulting but off-putting and then I just started taking it at face value. Why? Why is Wikipedia important enough to dedicate this kind of time to and I found that the origin of that attitude is kind of upstream of Wikipedia and it rests on the whole way that we talk and think about the internet which is still dictated by outmoded ideas and in exact language. Phrases like in real life or in the real world suggest that when we go online we enter a false life or an unreal world and the belief that online is an insubstantial realm does have some truth to it. Internet scholars are used to the material that they're working with crumbling in their hands. What goes out of favour on the internet often goes out of fashion as well and something can go from world changing to a relevant to ridiculous sometimes just in a few hours but it was exactly being in the real world that returned my interest to Wikipedia. I've always been curious about it and I have edited it occasionally but it was working as a political writer and foreign correspondent that got me thinking about it again in a more concerted way and I started to find it strange that so many of the kind of knowledge workers that I was interacting with especially journalists and to a lesser extent scholars and students had a whole series of instructions that painted the internet not just as something to trivialise but as something to ignore and we're familiar with these, you know, don't read the comments, don't feed the trolls, ignore Twitter, don't use Wikipedia. I don't think that ever really made sense in professions that rely on curiosity but today that kind of willed ignorance now makes it impossible to understand the offline world as well. The distinction between the online and the offline has always been artificial and it's now completely unworkable. There is no online and offline world. There are only the world or the worlds as we see in the title of this very conference. Even the kind of caveats that we make about accessibility have lost some of their power. When I've been in sub-Saharan Africa, I've routinely met people who have no running water in their home but also have a smartphone with the internet on it. And it's not surprising that places like Ghana are now one of the world springs of Wikipedia as well. It's now true that unless we understand digital culture, we just flat out don't understand culture. That's true in obvious areas like politics and the media but it's true in less obvious places as well. Our relationship with the past is being altered by digitisation just as rapidly as our relationship with the future. And it matters that many of the narratives and methodologies that we've inherited to understand online culture just don't work very well. Too often the digital is sidelined as an indistinct place. It's sort of written off as a business opportunity or a suite of new products or a danger to our brains, our institutions or our livelihoods. Most new things are misunderstood but among people who should have known better, these misunderstandings have also been fuelled by a sense of competition. Perhaps even a seldom spoken concern for their own relevance. And though they're not very old, the stories we've inherited about Wikipedia are especially unhelpful. The cliches around it have survived almost well as the site has itself. Ten years ago Jimmy Wales told The Guardian that asking is Wikipedia reliable or not already felt five years out of date. That question is now 20 years old and it hasn't gone anywhere. Wikipedia is still in 2022 frequently compared to Encyclopedia Britannica. Although Britannica's print edition has been defunct for a decade and Wikipedia is often listed I think incorrectly as its cause of death. The recent crops of undergraduates have not only never seen a copy of Encyclopedia Britannica in use, they only know what an Encyclopedia is at all because the form has been preserved by Wikipedia itself. It's natural to reach for comparisons when we're trying to understand something new. But that's also how we make mistakes. That piece for Wired that Bunty mentioned, which was published under the headline Wikipedia is the last best placed on the internet, had some analogies in it. I've used these analogies other people have as well. They've compared Wikipedia to things like termite mounds or barn raising. And I've since decided that these kind of comparisons are incomplete enough to be misleading. Wikipedians are not ants or the Amish and pretending that they are misunderstands something very fundamental about Wikipedia and its sister project. And that is their scale. It's true that Wikipedia is one of the largest things that humans have ever created, even though they did it in tiny increments. But it's also true that Wikipedia is tiny. Its entirety in both text and images can easily fit onto a thumb drive. If you look up Wikipedia in Jack Lynch's history of reference works, which is called you could look it up the reference shell from ancient Babylon to Wikipedia, it lists Wikipedia's page count as zero and its size and weight are marked down as none. Wikipedia exists in an uncanny state, both as one of the most singular and monumental things in the world and something that has almost no distinctive physical presence at all. That also means that it has none of the trappings that accumulate around knowledge when it's combined with prestige. Wikipedia is not bound in Moroccan leather. It has no marble colonnades or neoclassical edifices or gothic revival towers. It doesn't have reading rooms. Its racks of servers housed in anonymous or near anonymous looking facilities in Virginia and the Netherlands are invisible to everyone apart from a handful of engineers. Somewhere on the moon there is a lost copy of Wikipedia on a nickel disk that flew across the sea of tranquility like a frisbee when the spaceship carrying it crash landed. When we try and see Wikipedia in our minds eye, there is only the image of a single humble web page which looks more like something from the internet 20 years ago than almost anything else on the internet. That image has barely changed since its creation and when our habit of mind is to make reality and corporeality the same thing, there's something unsatisfying about that. It confuses us. It's all too easy to conflate size and scale and influence and importance even though those are all very different things. And it's only when we break those habits of mind which we recognise also as colonial habits of mind that we see something that is very different. Those worn out questions, is Wikipedia accurate? Is Wikipedia successful? Start to sound very different. They are suddenly more like asking if a library is accurate or if a city is successful. Neither of those are quite a rhetorical question but the answers are richer and much more nuanced and interesting than yes or no. The terms of Wikipedia's success are also out of step with its time. It's a non-profit in a world defined by commerce. It's a public good when those are in short supply. It's a product of consensus at a time of record polarisation and of volunteer labour in a moment defined by declining social capital. Even its worst self-promoters are often anonymous and in a cultural environment in which images are supreme it remains almost stubbornly an exercise in text. It's one of the few places on the internet that still sort of matches those hopes held by early tech utopians including Tim Berners-Lee himself. Christopher Kielty recently called himself an anthropologist of the internet we could have had. A place where he and others imagined rebuilding society without injustice, racism, rape or authoritarian government. And Wikipedia is sometimes still described as one of the last vestiges of these kinds of places. I don't think it is a utopia though it has been called one. And back in that old interview with The Guardian Jimmy Wales said that his preferred question about Wikipedia, the contemporary question is, gee, this is actually fairly amazing. It's pretty good. How can we improve it? Where does it break down? Where is Wikipedia fairly amazing and where does it break down? These questions which at first sound innocuous especially when they're phrased in Jimmy speak are what this conference is about. They turn out to be intimately linked to the most urgent issues of agency, humanity and freedom and how those relate to technology. It is also and this is easy to forget a very beautiful place. Wikipedia is a vast literary work and a landmark in the history of editing. It's also an incredible collection of outsider art occasionally. It's not a coincidence that artists and musicians in particular have engaged with it very intimately perhaps better so than people like journalists. Something bittersweet in that beauty when the online world increasingly feels like an ugly place and one of the mysteries and frustrations of Wikipedia is that it's lessons are so difficult to translate. Its early advocates thought it would usher in a new open spirit in politics, a belief that was shared everywhere from Washington to WikiLeaks. Many people including Jimmy Wales himself thought Wikipedia's ability to deter trolling could revolutionize other social media. In both cases the world has failed to turn. WT social has not overcome its own problems let alone anyone else's. These lessons are complicated by the fact that we talk about Wikipedia. We're really talking about very different things sometimes radically so. A feature about biology that has been carefully tended for years and a bot-composed stub machine translated into a minority language both result in things called Wikipedia pages or Wikipedia articles though those things have less and less in common with each other. The best descriptions or some of the best descriptions of Wikipedia emphasised that it's a collection of sources. But in reality or this new reality we often encounter Wikipedia without its sources. Unfortunately one of the things that every Wikipedia page has in common is how it's read and treated by machines or algorithms and other passive intermediaries. Almost every day we use Wikipedia whether we know it or not and sometimes whether we like it or not. The datafication of Wikipedia through wiki data and other potentially even more groundbreaking prototypes like abstract Wikipedia is exhilarating because it has so much latent transformative power. But that power is ominous as well as dynamic. It has the power to make knowledge unmoored and ultimately unaccountable. In the humanities the question whose knowledge has turned out to be the most important of the 21st century so far. It's transformed institutions like this one and on Wikipedia it remains a live question especially with regards to what has been called the frame. Some of the people who were involved in Wikipedia from the earliest moment feel disappointed in it despite the scale of its achievement because of how quickly it reconstituted frames of Western knowledge in a place where they thought that didn't have to happen. Part of Wikipedia's success has come from a culture of spontaneity and a willingness almost an eagerness to make mistakes. But an area like Indigenous culture and language is a place where speed is only possible without consent and where mistakes can be most damaging. We heard yesterday about the difficulties of getting oral traditions and oral citations into Wikipedia and it's sometimes when we look at a project like Nungarpedia that's described as a failure because it hasn't yet got off the ground. I'm not sure that that is a failure. If something takes longer to be done the right way when so much of that kind of interface has been done the wrong way I don't see what the hurry is and it may be that Nungar and Wikipedia are not ready for each other and perhaps never will be and that kind of outcome can be a success as well. If we look at something like Scott's Wikipedia another example people are very familiar with where the entirety of a Wikipedia language was produced by an American teenager with a bung online translator. It's now possible that the majority of Scott's language on the internet is not in fact Scott's at all. It's an eye dialect preserving something which has nothing to do with Scott's and the community that this entity was created in lieu of. That kind of event seems like an outlier but it's also a warning about what could happen to other bodies of knowledge and other institutional bodies of knowledge as well. I think one of the things which has been most encouraging about this conference and the people who have spoken here is the humility and the understanding of the limitations of the tools that people have here and there's a long and unhappy history of trying to create world peace through mutual understanding. It's part of the Enlightenment tradition it still informs things like Wikidata to an extent today and what I've enjoyed hearing about here is the concepts of difference that might be untranslatable that remain unique and preserved and sometimes even silent. So when I've spoken to people who were part of the Wikimedia Foundation when it arrived in San Francisco they expected to be at a vanguard they thought that they were only the first that there would be whole swathes of the internet that would look like Wikipedia that Wikipedia might not even be the biggest or most important one and standing here today 20 years later it's the only one. It's the only thing that it's like it's what we thought was going to be a monument has kind of turned into a monolith and sometimes working on a place like that can feel isolated it can even feel thankless but I wanted to take this opportunity to thank you so thank you very much. I just knew that he was working away on something fabulous I cannot wait to read the book and it is so clear that you have done your research and you understand so much of the subtleties and nuances that perhaps the wider world don't. Fantastic. So please questions up the back. Thank you so much Richard the question I've been grappling with is we've sometimes been slow to take on change we were kind of slow to adapt mobile and even though I use the mobile app all the time we still it doesn't have that much uptake and just even now we're thinking of audio devices and the sound logo for example do you think do we run risk of going obsolete or is this a case of slow and steady wins the race is there something we're not doing because we know how people access information is changing whether it's through video kind of quick fixes or are we are we future proof or are we missing something? I think that this is a question that every organization that has an internet presence related to knowledge struggles with and there is a tendency to jump at changes as they happen you know the notorious pivot to video in the media world is a great example of that and there are lots of examples of even just minor algorithmic changes to things like dig destroying what seem like you know immutable parts of the internet almost overnight so there's on the one hand you can't stand still and on the other if you run too fast you run off a cliff what's fascinating about Wikipedia is and it's sister projects is how it kind of has a as a degree of natural innovation just through its users and a degree of kind of natural resistance sometimes people say too much resistance to that innovation if you look up the list of suggested Wikipedia projects for example or the list of suggested Wikipedia enterprises there are huge arrays of stuff which is just being rejected all the time in some ways the answer is in its survival you know that Wikipedia has maintained itself for this period of time and there's probably always going to be people who think it should have been something else but if it had been something else then it wouldn't be Wikipedia anymore. Thank you so much for this talk. Your work has just done so much to shift the narrative about Wikipedia and to clarify a lot of misunderstandings and to really re-center the amazing movement that makes this project possible. I'm wondering from your perspective what the Wikimedia Foundation could be doing and what communities could be doing to tell a more compelling story or to really bring people along on what we're doing a little bit better. That's a fantastic question and I'm sort of you know there's a lot of emphasis in modern journalism and modern PR about the power of stories. You know there's this great belief that if you can just come up with the right story about something and that often means a story expressed in 240 characters then it will kind of break down the resistance to that. I'm not sure that Wikipedia actually needs to do that. All it has to do is let people use it and right from the very beginning you have seen the loudest complainers about Wikipedia are still people who use it every day. That process is unsustainable over long periods of time and a lot of the kind of it's funny it's sort of people were worried about the wrong things in Wikipedia to a large extent and sometimes when they're worried about the right ones they also don't have people listening to them. The stuff we heard yesterday about social media presence I think is an integral part of it. People aren't encountering Wikipedia in the way that they used to necessarily. They're sort of picking it up through links and elsewhere and understanding that audience is a real challenge. You know if you can understand that audience you're a billionaire right so a non-profit understanding it is always going to be challenging. In some ways Wikipedia is its own best advertisement and a lot of topics like this you know you start off writing a book about it and you regret it. You get six months in and you think I've got this burden and every day I'm you know I'm busting to do more research about it because it's so fascinating and the moment that you do into that world and more people are entering that world every day they will realise as well. We will thank you for this fantastic presentation Richard and please for those of us who are in the room we can at least chat to further over morning tea. So thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you.