 This is the first time I attend to the Wikimedia, because it is very near to where I live compared to some former, you know, former Wikimedia. And I work for Chinese Wikipedia as an editor for about five years. China has a big population, but only a few contributes to this greatest project, I think. I think it's a pity. So there's still a long way to go. I am from Syria, I live in Saudi Arabia. My age is 17 years right now, and I am coming to Kimania to share my experiences and knowledge with the others and to know more people of the movement of Wikimedia around the world. I think these two days I'll just try to learn about how you deploy education programs, how do you pitch to professors and teachers in schools about the benefits of Wikipedia, the benefits of Wikimedia projects. And I want to bring this experience and the practical practices to Taiwan. Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. We're the people who are doing that, and every year we keep cranking along and working and working. And I think Wikimedia is a great time to stop and reflect on the successes that we've had so far. And so I wanted to go through quickly just some of our milestones this year. When you've been at it as long as we all have now, over 12 years, it's easy to get a bit jaded about certain milestones, but to me they're still very, very exciting. When we look at the big numbers, 28 million articles, 286 additions, well that's a nice big number, but it's almost too big to contemplate. And certainly none of us is working in a project where the number 28 million has direct relevance to us. It's not something that we try to achieve. But what's interesting to me is the breakdown of languages that have different major milestones. So we now have 120 languages with at least 1,000 articles, and obviously those last 20 languages are all just barely over 1,000 articles. And what I would encourage people to do is to go out there and find those Wikis, go to the list of Wikipedias, and go see who's working there and meet them. Come out of your own home, Wiki, where you're used to working, and maybe at a moment when you're discouraged about some of our usual idiotic arguments that we all accidentally find ourselves in as Wikipedians. Go do something completely different. Go pick a language that you know very little about, hopefully a regional language in your area where they may speak your language. And go and try and find someone there who speaks your language. English is always a likely choice, but depending on the part of the world it might be French, it might be Russian, it might be something else entirely. And just go and chat with them and ask them how they're doing and ask them how you can help them and say, I'm sorry I don't speak your language at all, but I would love to spread the word and help you in whatever way I can. And it's an incredibly rewarding thing to do to go and meet those people who are just at the beginning of that journey. Last August, I flew to Frankfurt am Main, Germany for my first encounter with Wikimania. Here, at a local youth hostel, hundreds of people from dozens of countries gathered for a week's worth of conferences, conversation, and conviviality, all united by one goal, creating a free online encyclopedia in every language on Earth. Wikipedia.org, the website where this encyclopedia can be found, now ranks among the most visited and valuable in the world. It was created at virtually no cost by volunteers, these self-styled Wikipedians, using an innovative computer program called a wiki, which enables anyone to write and edit on a web page. Okay, so otherwise you would have seen it a lot more often. Okay, but just that one line, so we're good to go. Akadon is mainly where people who are developers or coders kind of thing who works on the software side of Wikimedia, they come and they join, sometimes they work on their own concepts, their own ideas, or sometimes they work with a guy like me who doesn't know much of the technical side but then who needs assistance. So I know what I need to be done, but I don't know how it's to be done. So the people would be here who can assist me or help me technically. My name is Linus Velukas. I'm a developer from Vilnius, Lithuania. Open source software is when you develop something and you want it to share with the world, and you want the rest of the world to use it and to improve it. If you are lucky, you release it under an open source license and from then someone takes it to use it for their own projects, for their own needs, and here she likely improves the software and gets it back to you. So you can then both use the same software. My name is Benny Lin. I'm from Solo Indonesia. One of my purpose here is to help Japanese Wikipedia to use their own script, which is a Japanese script. The script is not available to be used in a web page anywhere and MediaWiki is the first open source project that would enable people to type Japanese script as it was written 100 years ago. I'm a medical student and I'm interested in stuff that's related to promoting women into Wikipedia because there have been so few women editing Wikipedia in my country and as well as globally. So I'm talking with people who are interested in the same issues and trying to collaborate with them and I'm trying to learn from them. People from different parts of the world have different ideas. There are certain things which work in their culture which we can really assimilate into our culture. We had a very valuable conversation with people from South America, from Bolivia and Venezuela and Brazil. They have some good achievements in their Wikipedia and in Arabic Wikipedia we have a lack of awareness. People don't know how valuable their contributions are. It's very easy and we are in a level. People don't know till now that you can edit Wikipedia. My name is Tom Hogarth. I come from Perth in Western Australia. This is my first Wikipedia that I've attended and the conference hasn't even started. Yet I feel as I've got more than I could possibly have hoped for. The networking, the meeting people from other countries and putting a face to the other editors and realising how human they are compared to some of them compared to how they are online. A lot of people who are older who have computer skills probably don't understand that it will be very easy for them to edit and help and assist. In some cases some people have a sense of their proofreading or their wanting to check facts is something that perhaps a younger editor may not be so patient with. There are some maintenance project issues which can be time consuming but it's very satisfying. When you get to a point you've just finished working out a category or you've finished working out an article and getting it up and it's accepted by others and they actually look at it and they appreciate it. You get a sense of self-satisfaction that you've contributed to a really larger project. I'm Vera de Kock, I'm from the Netherlands. I've been a developer with the Wikilev Monuments Project in the Netherlands and I'm also an administrator at Comments. Wikilev Monuments is a photo competition that started in the Netherlands about five years ago. It started out as a national contact test around our national monuments. The next year following that it was a number of European countries. Since then it has been an international contest involving countries around the world and this year China actually will be participating for the first time. This is the usual explanation for what is free software or free knowledge or open content. I didn't understand about it. I'm German, I asked an American who speaks German and I said Chuck can you explain me what does this mean? And he said Siko just forget it. In the English language you have a problem. The word free, many people think free that means you don't have to pay money for it. Yes and in German you don't have the problem. In German people would think anything of free but you don't use it in German. It's not necessary and it's just confusing because you talk to people about don't think of free beer. Well what will people do when you say that? When you're in Germany and you talk to people about free beer what will be the consequence? You will make them bark like a dog. Yes it's just distracting, it doesn't help you to explain. Free speech, what is free speech? It's Benjamin Franklin, it is a printing press, newspapers, it's a speakers corner in London Hyde Park. But no one will understand what you mean in this context. It is folklore, it's an insider joke just for Wikipedia and other crazy people. No one will ever have something of this. I use this, a suitable picture, I got it via Facebook, all audiences, I use it for the elderly, for young people and everyone between them. You may have heard of this, maybe some of you know that, any one of you are a Facebook friend of mine and you too. So this is an ape, I forgot the species but this ape is anywhere in the jungle in Asia. And there was a famous photographer who had a lunch break. And then the ape came and he saw this camera and it's interesting and he played with it. And finally the ape made this picture by himself. And then I asked my audience, well I am showing you this picture. Am I allowed to do so? Is this legal? Do I have the rights? And people will say anything, they will say the rights. Well the ape took the picture so he has the rights, you must ask the ape. Yes? Or the photographer, yes the owner of the camera. No? It's the owner of the jungle or the piece of land where the ape lives or the government, they have the rights. And the only correct answer is no one has the rights because copyright is for humans and apes cannot, they have not the creativity you need by law to be a copyright holder. So this is public domain, you can use it. Something I hadn't expected before I started working on Wikipedia is how much ideology is involved in making it really open source and accessible to everybody. If you're copying something you have to make sure that it's clearly classified as being in the creative commons area. If there's any sign of any form of copyright by anybody you just don't touch it unless you have a special permission. Especially when you're working on illustrating the Wikipedia articles it's very tempting to skip the free part and just include pictures that have been published elsewhere on the internet and take a less absolute stand on copyright law but taking that absolute stand makes it possible to redistribute the entire work we've been doing to people that don't have access to the internet. So Wikipedia can be provided offline on computer, on a stick or on DVD like it was done in Kenya or on a new stick like Afripedia and Kiwis are doing currently in Western Africa. So there is an increased access of Wikipedia. But the question is how is Wikipedia used and how could it be used in better ways? One of the answers comes from one of the projects that have been implemented in Kenya and students that receive access to Wikipedia offline were extremely happy about it but what they noticed is that unfortunately Wikipedia didn't provide what they needed for their curricula. We are a big team and delegation from Kazakhstan. We came from 11 cities in Kazakhstan. So we came here for one common goal to develop Wikipedia. In our schools we have little Wikipedia clubs so there was our first meeting in Kazakhstan Wikipedia and since this meeting we helped to make Kazakhstan Wikipedia better and bigger. I would like to underline the importance of Wikipedia in our educational process because many international teachers who are teaching our students educate us with the help of Wikipedia and they also suggest us to use sites such as Wikipedia or Wikimedia in order to increase our knowledge. So the Wikimedia movement has been giving out grants for a number of years now. Probably the first grant givers out were the Wikimedia Foundation maybe the German chapter possibly also the French chapter. Last year we took a massive leap forward in our ability to give out grants and in the amount of money that we gave out as a movement together. And it looks like this. So last year the Wikimedia Foundation gave out just over 5.5 million US dollars to about 35 organizations around the world and to many, many hundreds of individual volunteers. So what you see on the right here is a chart of how that breaks down. So it's Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Switzerland and the Netherlands, India, Argentina and 27 other countries. The Global North gets the sort of lion's share of the dollars that we give out about 95 cents of every dollar goes to the Global North and about 5 cents of every dollar goes to the Global South. What we did in 2012-13 was we established the Funds Dissemination Committee which is a volunteer led group of people who make recommendations to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees for where the money should go. This past year I would say that what we focused on mainly was the infrastructure of grant making. We were doing a lot more grant making, a much bigger scale than we had ever done before. And so we had to focus on process and systems and structures and just how the mechanics of the work were done. Visual editor. So the purpose of the visual editor is to allow people to edit without their having to learn wiki syntax. The visual editor should enable more readers to become editors. But I actually don't want people to think of the visual editor purely as something for new people. It is designed for new people and the reason we're building it is because new people are too deterred by wiki syntax. But my hope and I think the hope of the people building it is that in the fullness of time it's going to be so efficient and so effective and so user friendly for lots of different kinds of tasks that most editors will use it for most purposes. It's not there now, but that's what we're hoping will happen. Nah. What's making you say nah here? I don't know how to do that. Okay. Tool box, ready? Template. Oh, look at all that. I want to know about it. I can't do it. I cannot add a section. I have no idea how to add a section. Okay, overall how'd you feel about it? Kind of stupid. I don't know. I don't know how to call a title, author, work, date, access date, reference reference. It's formatting so the computer can read it, I guess. Whatever reads it, whatever. I don't know that much about it. Sure, sure. This is going to make people more confusing than now. I feel like somebody's scary to me. Well like there's like all this, I don't know, it just looks like hard to read. I don't like to look at it. You have no idea what this is. So that's why we're building the visual editor, right? We're building the visual editor because we purport to contain and we want to contain the sum total of all human knowledge. And if there are huge swas of the population who click edit and just back away, slowly frightened, we're not going to achieve our goals, right? So we need to make it easier for new people to edit Wikipedia. Mobile matters because mobile is the future, right? Most of us went on the internet for the first time 10 or maybe even 20 years ago and we did it from desktops and we did it from laptops. And that was sort of the frame for our experience. That was how we understood the internet. The mobile experience is a new and additional experience for us. But we know that all around the world, in India and many other countries, people are coming online for the first time using their mobile devices and they may never experience the internet in any way other than through a mobile device. And so mobile matters. It matters that people be able to read the projects on their mobile devices and it matters that they be able to edit the projects on their mobile devices. We used to have a saying around Wikimedia which I think probably people still say sometimes which was, you know, Wikipedia does not want to be written by people in rich countries for people in poor countries, right? We want everybody to continue to contribute. We want everybody to share the knowledge that they've got. Earlier this year a very surprising thing happened. We did not expect this. We did not plant the seed for this. We did not know this was going to happen. And when we heard at the Wikimedia Foundation about the story, we sent Victor out to document it for us to kind of find out what was going on and tell us the story. So I'm going to ask Chip backstage now to play us that short video. Hi, this is the letter which me and my classmates wrote to access to Wikipedia for free. It goes as follows. Open letter to Sulci, MTN, Fordacom and ATOM. We are learners in grade 12 at Sininjong High School. Joslovo Park, Wilnatin, Cape Town. We recently heard that in some other African countries like Kenya and Uganda, cell phone providers are offering their customers free access to Wikipedia. We think this is a wonderful idea and would really like to encourage you also to make the same offer here in South Africa. Our school does not have a library. 90% of us have cell phones, but it is expensive for us to buy ATOM. So if we could get free access to Wikipedia, it would make a huge difference to us. Normally, when we do research, Wikipedia is one of the best sites. And there is information on just about every topic. Think of the boost that it will give us as students and to the whole education system of South Africa. Our education system needs help. And having access to Wikipedia would make a very positive difference. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. If you're interested in registering for Next Year's Hackathon or you have an idea, go to Next Year's Wikimanias site and there's a link up here. You should be able to figure it out. It's not Wikimedia or Wikimanias 2013. It's Wikimanias2014.wikimedia.org slash wiki slash hackathon. Right up there, you can sign up as a participant or you can click on the brainstorming link and add your ideas. There's also now a brainstorming page for the main conference. So if you have an idea for Next Year's Wikimanias, we highly encourage you to go to this URL. It's just wiki slash brainstorming and add your idea there. So again, the hackathon page for Next Year's Up. If you've got some ideas, please submit them. This room is going to be open over the rest of Wikimanias. If you'd like to come back here and lounge, please clean up your belongings. We'll be closing the room at 5.30. You are all wonderful human beings. We appreciate you being here. Thank you.