 Hi everyone and welcome to our presentation about the ban of Wikipedia in Turkey. I'm Kutuk, I'm an editor in Turkish Wikipedia and I'm together with Bashar. We both have been active Wikipedians for over 15 years now and we are two of the founding members of Wikimedia User Group Turkey. Today we will talk about the ban of Wikipedia in Turkey, how it happened, how it started, why it started, what was the process of lifting that ban and how it ended and how we came back afterwards. Even though most Wikipedias do not have such an existential threat, we believe every different Wikipedia project can learn from our experience and what we have been through. So, access to all Wikipedia projects including Turkish Wikipedia, English Wikipedia and all other languages was banned in April of 2017. At first it was an administrative decision, administrative measure taken by the government and then it was backed up with a judicial one. The ban was technically legal under the Turkish internet law but the law was overreaching and actually the articles caused the ban of Wikipedia in Turkey were on English Wikipedia, on Turkish Wikipedia and it didn't have anything to do with the Turkish community but the Turkish community had the most negative effects from this ban and the Turkish people who couldn't access Wikipedia and actually the problems in the articles were very easy to fix. So, the articles were about state sponsored terrorism and foreign intervention and involvement in the Syrian civil war and the articles were about Turkey having links to ISIS and al-Qaeda and supporting them. These were stated as the cause of the ban, when the ban went live in 2017. But the Turkish government has a tendency to ban popular websites instead of finding solutions. So, Twitter, YouTube and a lot of more websites were banned during the last 10 years. Right now Twitter, YouTube etc are open but PayPal, Uber and Booking.com and about 300,000 more websites are still banned. So, this slide is a joke because it's a bit of a dark story about freedom of expression so I had to lighten this up somehow. So, unlike Twitter, YouTube and other for-profit sites who try to make business in Turkey and earn money in Turkey Wikimedia Foundation did not give up to the demands of the Turkish government at all at first. So, they did not agree with the censorship of the content and they decided to challenge the decision in courts for freedom of expression. So, the Wikimedia Foundation contacted us immediately, like a few hours after the ban was established in Turkey. We discussed the situation, we discussed the Turkish public's reactions, we discussed the cultural background and what to do next. So, the Foundation immediately hired the best internet lawyers in Turkey and started the appeal process and release statements. The legal process took about two and a half years. So, from the start of the ban in April of 2017 to the end of the ban in January 2020, the Wikimedia, both the Turkish one and every other language version was banned in Turkey so no one in Turkey could directly reach those websites. The final appeal was filed to European Court of Human Rights and on October 31st in 2019 they asked for a statement from Turkey and after that on December 2019 they decided that the ban should be lifted. But the problem was European Court of Human Rights does not have direct jurisdiction over Turkey so they cannot order Turkey to do something. But the Turkish government and the Turkish court system decided to lift the ban in January 15th of 2020 after two and a half years. So, the ban was not a good experience for us at all in Turkey, Wikimedia as you would imagine. Only the most active and most dedicated Wikipedians remained active on Turkey, most of almost all of the IPs were gone. Only the experienced people who were dedicated to projects were able to stay. Everyone in Turkey found ways to circumvent this ban. So, some people used mirror websites like WikiZero. So, you could just type a zero in front of Wikimedia address in URL and you could just reach the website through a mirror that had lots of advertisement. Some people more technically savvy people changed their DNS addresses and set up a VPN or use the browser like Tor. But these solutions are not also perfect because Wikimedia doesn't allow all open proxies, open VPNs. So, it wasn't very effective all the time. And here is the direct result of the ban. So, in Turkish Wikipedia and Arabic Wikipedia had similar page views before the ban. And during the ban period, the page views of Turkish Wikipedia decreased by 80%. So, in other words, 80% of our readers couldn't reach us and couldn't reach free information. After the ban was lifted, the numbers came back a bit, but we are still catching up with the Arabic Wikipedia. We are still behind of them. The new article count decreased a bit. We lost about 12,000 articles that could have been written, which is about 2.5% of our total article count right now. But after the ban was lifted, we gained a lot of new users and we gained a lot of new articles. During the ban, about 80% of our editors, most active editors who has more than one or more edits, stopped editing Wikipedia. And the number of new users decreased by almost 90%, as it was very difficult to create an account and it was very difficult to reach Wikipedia through ABPM by creating an account. So, to recap, we lost most of our users during the ban. We lost a lot of articles and we lost a lot of readers due to the ban. One positive thing is the vandalism was not a big problem during that period because vandals generally use IP address in Turkish. But after the ban, we came back with new blood, with new users and new people on board. And we grew our outreach efforts exponentially so that we can rebuild Wikipedia after having such a blow. From the rest of the presentation, my dear colleague Bashar, will tell you about the story, how we came back and rebuilt our community. Thank you very much, Frat. Yes, the Internet users in Turkey have really missed Wikipedia a lot. You might be remembering the Miss Turkey campaign. If you go to the next slide, maybe you are remembering this campaign, that Wikimedia Foundation launched for the first anniversary of the ban. During the campaign, many Wikimedians in the world expressed their support for free knowledge. In Turkey, the campaign had taken the form of Wikipedia as the dick. We missed Wikipedia and was well received in Turkey. We saw how much Internet users in Turkey have missed Wikipedia with the floods of new user registrations right after the lifting of the block as Frat shared. Our small group focused on how we would keep this new interest for Wikipedia live. And in the next slide, I would like to go over our group's efforts on that. Since the lifting of the block, the main problem ahead of us has been rebuilding the trust in Wikipedia and open knowledge. Here are some examples of news about Wikipedia and mainstream media organs before the lifting of the block and right after it. Even after the ban was lifted in January 15th of January 2020, which was the 20th anniversary of Wikipedia, the counter Wikipedia propaganda and pro-government sources continued for some time. We had to change this feeling of mistrust and misunderstandings about Wikipedia. In other words, we had to reintroduce Wikipedia to Turkey. Our strategy can be summarized as next slide as being more visible and open for being able to trust about Wikipedia. And although the site is very largely known and read by the public, the number of contributions have always been very low and the community was never active. We, the activists, we didn't know each other. And another meeting is highly valued in Turkish Wikipedia community. I think practice is difficult in changing the slides. And we decided to change that. And we decided that it's time to show people our simple facts. Next slide. That Wikipedians are not rare unicorns and Wikipedia is built by ordinary good people. Still, most editors prefer remaining anonymous, but a small group of Wikipedians started out meetups and outreach activities in partnership with other organizations. What we do in the next slide, I summarized them. We started regular online meetings called Wikipedians date. Editors use Telegram channel actively, our group formed a nonprofit organization. We started to meet and collaborate with other free knowledge organizations. We represented Wikipedia at universities and organized many activities in partnership with civil society organizations. Now I want to go over them one by one. As I said, being more visible and open was our new strategy. And we thought that first we had to learn being visible and open to each other. So we started to meet with each other. Since the lifting of the block, Wikipedians meet twice every month and meetings are open to all anyone who would like to meet Wikipedia. And as their questions are welcomed, simply many activators use Telegram actively. There are almost 200 members in our Telegram channel. Again, anyone can join the channel and especially new editors like using this channel to ask their questions to experience Wikipedians and they can be part of Adopt a Wikipedian program. And in the next slides, I want to mention that another way of using our visibility and building trust was forming a nonprofit organization. So instead of continual work as an informal group of volunteers, we became a registered formal organization. Because when we started to do outreach activities and contact partners, the first question that they asked me was, who are you? Do you have a legal identity? And by forming an association, they could answer, reply them as yes. We have a official organization registered with the Minister of Eternal Affairs and it serves as a good way of building trust. And after the lifting of the block, we wanted to know other black members and organizations in Turkey. We found out that we were not alone in the University of Karinowalic. Organizations like Creative Commons 30, Open City Map Turkey, Data Literacy Association and fake checking organizations like Tator, were also there and we started to get to know each other, visited each other's meetings and even organized joint events. We believe having such collaboration and network is important to fight back against censorship and block in the future. When it comes to our partnerships, after the lifting of the block, we found out that people and all kinds of organizations are more eager to collaborate with Wikipedians than even before the block. So we started some activities and our partners were first of all universities. Since the band was lifted, we had activities like 18 university departments in five different cities and we reached, directly reached over 1,000 students, university students since the band was lifted. And in order to reintroduce Wikipedia to people other than university students, we made partnerships with civil society organizations. Some first simply ask us to make a presentation or give a talk for their members or volunteers to introduce Wikipedia. We made presentations for organizations like Library & Associations, Public Health Association, Teachers Network. We give trainings to volunteers of city councils to improve Wikicon fans about their cities. And after each event, we received an invitation to talk at another place. We do accept every invitation, whether it's for three person or a hundred person. What matters for us is not the number of people participating, but sharing, finding someone to share our enthusiasm. And if an organization feels ready to start editing, we organize a telemedicine tone with them. The concept of the tone was welcomed very positively by organizations because it was a very good online activity to make during the pandemic. It gave the opportunity to introduce something new to their members or volunteers and produce a meaningful work about their field. The tones are a little bit different than the tones we make with experienced Wikipedians. In most of them, the goal is not producing as many articles as possible, but participants create one article or two articles for those work. And after the man, during the 2022, another member volunteered to organize regular at the tones for writing women biocopies. In the next slide, we see their pictures. Those at the tones really took attention of the media. And in the next slide, we made Wikicontest more visible to the public. We used the side notes, the spanners, and sometimes sent out press buttons to announce contests. And they are very proud that we made the first Wikilabs contest in Turkey. We organized Wikilabs Earth and more than 3,000 photos were uploaded. We saw there's a big welcome back Wikipedia to response from Internet users of Turkey. And in the next slide, we see some media coverage. We started to be seen on the media, especially on the first anniversary of the lifting of the block. We had made some interviews. We often answered questions about the lifting of the block, but we more focused on our outreach activities and our efforts to create better content for Turkish-speaking people. And lastly, I want to wrap up like saying this, you know, the experience are ordinary good people. And the experience in Turkey had been through difficult times. We are so thankful to everyone in the Wikimedia Foundation and in the moment for their efforts for lifting of the block and for their support during the block. Now we are much more active and stronger than before the block. Normalizing the public perception about Wikipedia and Wikipedia was our main problem after the lifting of the block. We see openness as a key for that. All our efforts after the lifting of the block is based on this understanding. We all know that contributing to Wikiprojects and being a part of our movement is as easy as clicking the edit button, but not every internet user could recognize this and Wikipedians remain as mysterious and even suspicious people for many. Our group is now working for changing their perception, and for this purpose, some of us are more visible and accessible, although most Wikipedians remain anonymous. I am one of those more visible active Turkish Wikipedians. At university courses, webinars, seminars, it defines we keep telling how they could be a good contributor as well. People are afraid of things they don't understand and also governments are afraid of things they don't understand. We have to make better understood by everyone. So we believe we would trust by openly communicating with anyone interested and Wikipedia will be richer and less vulnerable to any censorship efforts in this way. I'm glad that I could finish my verse and thank you very much for listening. I would like to see questions. If I have time, you can reach us all the time offline as well for your questions. I'm checking the effort for the questions. Okay, we have our user names, Basha and Kütük on the etherpad and on the talk notes. You can check the Wikimanias site about our presentation, found our user names and you can always reach us for any questions on how the blog was lifted and what was the process during that. Thank you everyone for joining our call and listening to our presentation. For any questions, you can reach the Wikimanias staff or us. Thank you for joining us.