 Hello, my name is Daria Sibulska, the director of programs at Wikimedia UK and I'll be presenting research that I did last year with my colleague Agniesz Prusik. The aim of this short session is to present a broad narrative that could be used for advocacy for our work and it connects Wikimedia activities with digital skills and civil society. I hope it can also be an inspiration for other groups, affiliates of how to pick ideas for research based on your strategic framework. So let's start the slides. So this is just a 15 minute session. I'm not sure I'll have time for questions but do feel free to drop them in the etherpad or on the chat or contact me. The details are on the slide. If you follow the QR code it will send you to my slides as well so you can copy content from there if you like. I'm very mindful this is almost the end of the conference so many thanks for joining and thank you for your attention. Next slide. So let me start with the conclusion of the research, the sort of top line that we arrived at. A research showed that Wikimedia programs teach participants information literacy and that higher information literacy can significantly increase citizen engagement in democratic processes meaning if you have higher information literacy it makes you a more active engaged citizen. In the full research we've done a lot of analysis and kind of explaining terms such as information literacy, various literacy frameworks, democracy. I won't get into all of that but just for this presentation I want to explain one key term. For me civil society means all the activities of citizens in which they take collective action for social good independently of government or business. Next slide. For a little bit of background of how I arrived at working on this so I work at Wikimedia UK and my inspiration is our strategic framework which is a vision of a more informed democratic and equitable society through open knowledge. The mission is to enable people to engage with open knowledge and access reliable information to be more to have more understanding of the world and make good decisions and we also have a number of long-term outcomes of which the important ones are that Wikimedia reflects our diverse society that our work has increased free ethical access to knowledge and that our work has supported the development of high levels of information literacy. And for me as a program director I think about designing activities programs that speak to this strategy and so I was thinking how can I show that our work is supporting information literacy and that in turn it creates a more equitable democratic society. So that was my sort of impetus to look at this and next slide. And the other thing is the global context really of the shrinking civil society space meaning that it seems that there's fewer and fewer spaces where citizens can develop and practice key civic skills such as collaboration, self-representation, work within diversity and difference of opinion and I think our work provides that sort of a space which means that it's quite important we can continue talking about it and continue protecting and offering that space. So on to the research itself next slide and just to say when I say research we did a lot of desk analysis, analyzing materials, papers that have been done so far and a lot of interviews with participants of Wikimedia case programs and through all of this we concluded that we can evidence that participating in Wikimedia programs increases information literacy and when I say Wikimedia programs is any sort of typical activities that we do like editing training, editathons, explaining Wikimedia ecosystem to others essentially getting them to participate. So the key, the key elements of information literacy that we've focused on and I'll talk you through those four elements. The first one is understanding content meaning content, meaning ideas, opinions, facts and where that content comes from so evaluating the trustworthiness of information, verifying the information so finding the original source, fact checking, checking against other information so that's the first area. Second is applying critical thinking skills, analyzing detecting bias, evaluating, synthesizing and reflecting on the impact of false information on society. Then there is using collaborative and group learning skills like communication, problem solving, teamwork and lastly encouraging civic disposition which is a big a big phrase but it means things like respecting diversity of opinion or taking personal responsibility for your behavior online and I'm sure you can see as I talk for those areas that participating in wiki editing or learning those skills hit all four of those areas like anybody who is participating in a wiki editing training would develop information literacy skills based on how our project is structured. So that's the first area like our work builds information literacy skills and then on to the second area next slide we can also evidence that our work helps strengthen civil society and democratic processes and again we've identified four areas in which this happens. The first is that wiki media overall provides open and free access to information. We facilitate capturing and sharing of historical and cultural memory and this is particularly important when we capture knowledge that has been under represented which means that we can redress the imbalance of representation of marginalized groups. Second like we said already our work improves information literacy skills. This can help fight myths and disinformation and through that work against systemic bias which then means we can build more tolerance and cultural understanding across diverse groups then we encourage we can encourage volunteering and working on wiki media provides opportunity for anybody to self-organize self-represent learn useful skills become active members of democratic society and then lastly we provide accessible collaborative infrastructure. This points a little meta but what I mean is that our programs are delivered within the wiki media ecosystem which uses collaborative tools and draws on consensus-based community decision-making process and so when participants learners editors kind of participate and use that system they gain direct experience of navigating that sort of community decision-making process participation online which means that they build civic engagement skills for wiki but also skills that can be used elsewhere. I think those four areas are useful for for anybody for any groups but I think they're particularly important for marginalized groups. When we did interviews for this for this research we talked to some refugee groups and they said that participating on wiki media and sharing their content gives them opportunity to maintain cultural identity and share something self-represent in a way that wouldn't be possible otherwise which I think is very powerful. Now this is in an ideal wiki media world I guess where we've reached knowledge equity and our community is particularly inviting to those groups but the hope is there and so last next slide and so this is the core of the argument and at wiki media UK we've been thinking about how to use that for our advocacy work essentially and we came up with a number of recommendations that we're going to be using and so those recommendations are that we recommend that definitions of information literacy at a national level promote the importance of information literacy for democratic participation that the culture of that democratic participation is embedded in formal education curricula because we found that it's not always included and we think it's important and wiki media could be used as a way of demonstrating that process of civic engagement and we recommend that information literacy resources from wiki media are harnessed in education programs because we on our projects not only have a lot of educational content as such but also a lot of information and knowledge about information literacy itself like referencing you know citations versatility reliability and and so on and we also came up with a number of recommendations for our partner organizations because a lot of our work is done in partnership with cultural or educational organizations and those are that organizations should organize wiki volunteering activities as a way of promoting civic engagement and that can be prompting civic engagement both online and offline as well actually we also recommend that the organization support marginalized groups to harness the skills gained through any wiki training so they can learn how to share their cultural heritage self organize self represent and develop any other skills that can help them become members of a democratic society and then lastly that the organizations support citizens to tackle systemic biases on wiki pedia so that the project more accurately reflects our society so and to put the the research and the conclusion of it in another way participating in wiki media projects can facilitate the spirit of working together towards a common good of the goal of free knowledge for all and it can facilitate collaboration with others activism which in the long run encourages and empowered civil society and this can go some way I hope to realize the wiki media UK vision of a more informed democratic and equitable civil society and so on to the last slide and so that's all I have the QR code on this slide sends you to a PDF with a summary of the research and so does this this short link but in a few weeks time I'll have a full publication that that will be nicely designed that can be shared with with people so if this is of interest please get in touch with me or watch this space I'll I'll be sure to promote the research when the project is when the publication is ready so I think we're at time I'm having a quick look at the etherpad but I'm not seeing anything there I will have a look at the chart as well which is busy but I think I'll have a look at that in a second and respond the best I can once we've concluded the session thank you