 Pakalofa lahi atu, tēnā koutou. Acknowledgements to the peoples whose land we're on, the Garagal people of the Eora Nation, and thank you to Uncle Bernie before for his welcome to us. Ngā mihi kinga mana whenua, and peace to all who have passed. Ko Lisa Maul, toku ingoa. My name is Lisa Maul. I'm the initiator of the Pacifica Arts Wikipedia Project. My name is Sophia. I was on the Pacifica Arts Wiki Project with Lisa. Teaching me, Lisa is going to talk about the project background, purpose and structure. I'm going to talk about how it was being in the project. So the Wikipedia Pacifica Arts Project created articles, uploaded images, and let people in Pacifica communities know about Wikipedia. It was based in Aotearoa, New Zealand. So these are three beautiful smiling faces and images of Pacifica artists that were uploaded as part of the project. And if you can go to the next slide please. This is a list of the articles that we created as part of the project. Some I created and some by other people working in it. The project page is live, and you can join in and add some articles and improvements too. There's red links and reference material, and it's linked to the Wikipedia Project New Zealand page. So there have been some nice outcomes apart from the articles. There's also like a reporter from Radio New Zealand asked me to pass on some thanks to the editor of the Amanaki Prescott Philoto article because she enjoyed reading it before she interviewed Amanaki. So a little bit of a background on me and where the project came from. Next slide please. This photo is from near my house where I live and also where I grew up. The hilly suburb of Karori te Whanganui Atara, Wellington. My mother is English, a Londoner. My dad was born in Wellington and both his parents were born in Scotland. My parents met when they were both travelling in Europe. They got married and came to Wellington to live. My mum was an art teacher so we always saw exhibitions and talked about art and artists. I work in performing arts. In my early 20s I was studying art history and design and working as a technician and lighting operator in Fringe Theatre. This was the 1990s. It was an exciting time for theatre in Wellington. I spent a lot of time at Takirua Theatre as it was developing a bi-cultural and then a Maori co-papa and foundation. I was part of feminist and queer theatre projects. I worked with Red Mole, a poetic political cabaret. I ended up being a lighting designer which suits both my technical and creative sides. I'm currently a producer making projects happen with Te Rākauhua o Te Waotapu, a Maori theatre company. The first Wikipedia edit I made was in November 2019. This is a photograph of the Dauce Art Museum who hosted an editathon focused on Maori women artists. I wanted to know more about the artists and also to address the bias that says women and Indigenous people less represented in English Wikipedia. The rage of underrepresentation is a strong motivator for me. One artist on the editathon list was Roma Potiki, her theatre company Te Arahau performed at Takirua and I knew Roma from when her theatre company went to the Adelaide Festival with three other theatre companies in 1992. I was doing the lighting for two of the other groups. I tried to expand Roma's article and I discovered there was absolutely nothing to link to. The venues, the companies, the plays, the key creative collaborators who did not have articles in Wikipedia. So I kind of like single-handedly decided that I would change that. I had a good introduction to how to edit at the workshop that was led by Mike Dippercyd, who's here today. Alex Lump happened to be there as well in Wellington. I'm not sure why, but he was at the editathon. It seemed like a nice bunch of people. I was motivated to keep editing. I asked the nice bunch of people for help and turned up to some face-to-face meetings at a Wellington library. I got a lot of great support in those early days of me and months of me kind of learning Wikipedia. And we moved online for some meetings too and I've got a screen grab of an online meeting in 2020. Margaret and Annie who are here from Australia were also with us at that meeting. So after a year of expanding performing arts articles by myself, I realised grants existed and I had time for a project. I successfully applied to the Wikimedia Foundation for the Performing Arts Aotearoa project. This was four months and three editathons in 2021. At a debrief with Jacqueline Chen from the Wikimedia Foundation, I made a connection between the ESAP region and the many countries of the Pacifica diaspora. I knew some Pacifica theatre artists and I knew there was a strong interlinked Pacifica community between art forms, between artists and between their families living in Aotearoa and also their families living back in the islands. I wondered if there were any Pacifica Wikipedians. I wondered if there was any interest for Wikipedia to be a place for Pacifica information. I approached Makarita Urali, the Pacific Arts Manager at New Zealand's National Funding Body Creative New Zealand with an idea for a project to expand articles relating to their annual arts Pacifica Awards. When I looked at that page, there was a lot of red links of many notable artists. Makarita knew about Wikipedia because she'd also been to an editathon at the Dauce Art Museum a few, maybe a year or so before I joined it. She also knew me back from Taki Rua. I described a Wikipedian in residence program to her that would teach three Pacifica people how to edit Wikipedia by creating new articles. In my probably awkward Pākehā, white New Zealand away, I was trying to propose a pathway for Pacifica people to be creating content on Wikipedia about Pacifica people. To work myself out of the picture is the goal. To resonate with a statement from the disability community, nothing about us without us. My performing arts Wikiproject had targets for BIPOC representation and I know there's politics of white people writing and researching about brown people including well-meaning old white women like me. I have read Linda Tuhiwaismith's decolonising methodologies. Makarita backed the project as a creative New Zealand Wikipedian in residence with investment funding from the Digital Moana Programme. We sought three people to come on board. These are the three who came on board. Sophia and Kasi with their arty profile shots and then Leilani with her computer selfie. Sophia had just finished a Tautai Oceania internship organised by Creative New Zealand and had been mentored by Makarita. The two other people were recommended through my performing arts network. Kasi Valu was a third-year acting student at Toi Whikari, the New Zealand Drama School and he's just actually graduated. He was recommended by choreographer and producer Tupe Lua Lua who I knew from a play we'd both worked on with a Fijian New Zealand theatre company, The Conch. The third person was recommended by people I knew in the company Pacific Underground. They knew I did Wikipedia because I'd asked them if they were okay as Pacifica people with being in Wikipedia because they had no article in my performing arts kind of hat. I wanted to put their article in there. So they were okay with it and I started their article. They put me in touch with Leilani Sio, a DJ and events manager who was working at Wellington Museum. So the goals of the project were to increase content about Pacifica artists in Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata and to introduce Wikipedia and editing skills to Pacifica artists, writers and researchers. So it was about the editing skills but also about what Wikipedia is. The framework of learning was a target of achievements. So for example, the editors were asked to create five new good quality c-class Wikipedia articles. I also included the metric of at least 50% women or non-binary slash gender fluid. There were also targets for fixing problems in articles, targets for uploading images to Wikimedia Commons and targets for creating new Wikidata items. I wanted the learning to be broad and introductory and also with enough repetition to embed some of the technical things that you learn. I thought about my way of learning across different areas over the past three years, two years. So this Pacifica Arts project had the new editors being paid for their time to edit and learn. I was thinking this fast track the interest and commitment to the project and remove barriers such as people needing to pay their living expenses and working. I had also learnt from the Performing Arts Wiki project that identifying and encouraging new editors did not easily occur through editathons. I knew to attract potential editors from our Māori or Pacifica background building relationships with them was really critical. So I had considered meeting and talking to key people to explain the type of person that might be interested, build relationships, encourage them to volunteer to try Wikimedia and then I thought about how time-consuming this would be as a volunteer myself. So time is also required to follow up with emerging new editors as they encounter the layers of guidelines and cyclopedic writing style and the often hostile environment that new editors face, especially when writing biographies about living people of colour. The process was bypassed by introducing the incentive of being paid to learn and then I was there to help people work through the different areas that they needed repeated coaching on. In the project there was outreach targets to speak with others in their circles about Wikimedia. Creative New Zealand also added a payment contribution for a talanua or conversation with artists as part of the project so people didn't have to go to the free league of their time. I know that contact with the subject of articles isn't a usual expected or needed thing in Wikimedia but it was part of this project as an option and ended up being quite central to the experiences. How the project went versus how I thought the project would go. My expectations of what people could achieve was too high. I hadn't really factored in time to encounter the concepts of Wikimedia. I observed a great deal of care and respect for the people that they wrote about, the subjects of the articles. The lack of reference material between what they knew to be the story and what they could cite was really hard. It was hard for them to create content but it was also really hard to encounter. It wasn't for everyone. I knew creating a community of learners would be a positive outcome but COVID and the three schedules of the different people didn't really happen in the way that I envisaged. I sort of thought that our first meeting would be like we would have lunch together and get to know each other a little bit but it almost exclusively went online and we didn't have much connection with Creative New Zealand and the Pacifica Arts team are quite a lot to do with COVID. I think we only had one Zoom meeting that everyone attended and even then one person left early and one person had joined late. So the community between us four and the project wasn't built much and the teaching coaching was mostly one-on-one. After the project finished, Cassie, Leilani and Sophia haven't really continued editing Wikimedia. I was very curious about whether people would or not when the payment stopped. However, they all want to. They all like it. They're not too put off by Wikimedia but really they don't want to edit isolated by themselves. So more events are needed. Yeah, that's me. Thank you, Lisa. Round of applause for Lisa. I don't know if you've realised but in front of you there are handouts that are going to talk a little bit more in-depth about the concepts that I've used as my research methodologies to navigate Wikimedia. So Crab 1 and have a good read. Te Punafifini haako mai tahiti nui e. Mo Amore, he mai he matoa te Punafifini mai Italian-Hangarian. Whakaoe ke he atua he langi. Si whakaoe foki ke he motu ke he nei ko Nuselani. Whakaoe foki ke he motu nei ko Australia. Mau motu ako ito pofuna tula o si nei. Warm Moana greetings to you all. Thank you for this privilege to be stood before you here all today and to those who are joining us online. It is an honour and a delight. Just as Lisa said, I too give thanks to the land that I am a visitor to and that I now stand on and the ancestors treating this land with the respect that I have for my own fenua back home in New Zealand. My name is Sophia Amore. It is long but strong. Name built from both sides of the Mangafoa, which means family. I am a New Zealand born Nguyen. My mother is Nguyen and Tahitian. My father is Maori, Italian and Hungarian, weird. A little bit about myself. I am from Wellington, a small but large community populated mainly by Pacifica. Despite the smallness, there are seven different churches, three schools and one college. I must say the best time to visit us was on a Sunday. Because of the many churches, the sound of our ancestors filled the air as the choirs sing. The sounds are so profound. You would usually see those in their best dress. You would even get taken back by the piracy of white. I am an artist from humble beginnings brought up on the practice on Anga Whaka Nuiwe. Anga Whaka Nuiwe, the new way of life as a third generation. As you can see, I come from a large family. This means Sunday roasts were hectic. I grew up with my grandfather that taught us grandkids practical life skills, where grandpa would sit by the piano in the sitting room watching us kids get out bedding ready, arguing, pushing, shoving, laughing, telling us all specifically, go to bed. Then proceeding to wake us up three hours later at the crack of dawn to go fishing. Those were the days. By the age of six, all grandkids could catch a fish or a rod in line, an old stick and string, with mussels and with they all chop sui, potatoes and pasta. Grandma would keep me by her side making whaikai te kihi pitako along with many other customary dishes, where attending church every day was never challenged as I saw it a part of Anga Whaka Nuiwe. After my grandfather passed away in 2010, I made the decision to move in with my grandmother to support her while continuing my education. It was a no-brainer. I stayed here through four years of study for fine arts at Massey University in Wellington. Because of this, Anga Whaka Nuiwe no longer became a practice of life, no longer became a practice by a way of life, a way of living. Grandma and her way of being became the inspiration for the work and the projects I took on. Doing things of Anga Whaka Nuiwe became my research methodology during study. 2020-2021, I applied and was selected for the Tultai Oceanic Internship Programme through the Tultai Pacific Arts Trust located in Auckland, New Zealand, funded by the Creative New Zealand for aspiring young professional artists, helping them with the development of the inner logistics of gallery-operated spaces, and I was able to transfer that to my community to provide more dialogue and mainstream spaces. From this programme, I was able to be introduced to Makarita Urali, Senior Manager of Pacific Arts Creative New Zealand. Through the Tultai Programme, Makarita became another mentor, an example to myself along with Iwana Gordon-Smith, Harris, Vanessa Kroski, Etna Talapa, Claire Harris and Sonya Withers, strong, independent wahine Makarita and I conversed one day mentioning Lisa in the Wikipedia pilot programme. She went on to explain briefly about a gap within Wikipedia that gap was with Pacifica and Mana Moana artists. It made me feel a range of emotion. I knew this pilot programme was for me. My grandmother would say, ua talanoa, which means don't speak stupid words. I used to giggle at this, worth the deeper context and analysis and asking my grandmother what this actually meant. She said, it's a lesson, a lesson in knowing how words can be wielded, how texts can change in an instance and can be misconstrued. Each word we use is weighted. To remember that in our words we wield are the weapons that can save or sell us out. The importance of finding where I stood as a Pacifica editor on Wikipedia was just as important to me as my own identity. Knowing where I stand, knowing the place, my positionality and then my responsibilities. I'm unsure if Kasivalu or Leilani had previous knowledge of Wikipedia before this pilot programme, but I knew nothing. Read links, citations, notability, wikidata, complete jargon. It took me a solid week to nail down citations, but I was quick to realise how they would soon turn into my worst enemy. I do recall asking Lisa a lot of hard questions once on Zoom. Sorry, Lisa. Before Lisa and I had our weekly catch-ups, I had just finished a discussion with my grandmother about the concept of notability on Wikipedia. Something at the time, I had just learnt myself. Grandma had given me a list of newware artists that I suspect in her time of the 1940s. She proceeded to tell me the narratives of these artists. I got excited until I clicked. Notability. Are they notable? Surely. My follow-up questions were, what did they do, Grandma? What awards did they win? What were they a part of? Give me something. I could feel her tense up. She quickly said, yes, they're notable. Do you have family families? We are talking of our people from newware. My people, the people I grew up with, is that not notable enough? I agreed. I created drafts in honour of them on my Word documents. If I had it my way, I'd write it up in a jiffy. In this instance, my grandmother had so much information to offer. It was unfortunate that there were a lack of web pages to support her and her knowledge. leo'i paasifika bety'i ka tuna sy'i i ddata geni. Maenai piafoda'i, tumblesasia a bety'i ka taba. Apa Changwai te Waratia tata te Arwis, litela adonai kainia, menai i taludau aʻwa, maenai piafoda'i jaia. Apo i tata. Paikianawai te Waratia, piafoda'i 퍽. Tata paikianawai. me seeking to find similarities and differences between Wikipedia and the Pacifica way of doing things. Recognising the differences of how, and how Pacifica artists present themselves became apparent. It is not just them that you might, sorry, it's not just them they will make reference to. It's their whānau, family, it's their references to their tīpuna, their community, their whakapapa, their genealogy. They are bringing their whole positionality into the space. So making sure that Wikipedia catered to this was important for myself to capture, because that there was my reason to why and my motivation. I knew I could find articles if I worked harder to use. I want to use Wikipedia as an international platform that can help the artists themselves and their communities. Kasi Leilani and myself noticed a certain repetitive waves. Either there's not enough different information on our artists, so the articles become rather monotone, robotic. Cut and paste, no matter how many times we try to rewrite it, it did not cater to their whakapapa, to their whenua or to their whānau. The positionality they brought was then gone. The information that is sourced is repetitive. Both of these things do not equal an article that we were happy with. It equaled an article that did not recognise the Pacifica artist and their positionality as a whole. This was challenging. This slowed us down and meant that in order to keep going forward, we had to take two steps back. This also meant that we had to forget about the set goals in the pilot program and focus on the artist and work with them. For us, fostering the relationship was more important. This is where the concept of tala noa comes into play. But we all did express and feel that through time pressure, it made us look at the development of an article as data. It was just about getting something out there, forgetting that they are human. Time took their narrative away if we weren't careful. As soon as we felt this coming on, it was natural to choose the artist first. Luckily, at least I understood. Tala noa recognises that there is a life form of the people that we engage with. It honours their narrative, their positionality and how important that is for the outcome of these Pacifica Wikipedia pages. I had the privilege of being able to tala noa with Korra Alan Whitcliff, who is now Korra Alan Laufiki Twisk. Congratulations. Connecting over the customary art of Te Vaivai, an art form we both practice. This practice derived from the colonisation machinery set Little Wives, who would teach the craft of sewing and other needle-in-thread techniques as a way to keep women at home, doing all the house chores and not out at sea. The Pacifica woman then took this custom and made this our own, creating Te Vaivai a hands-on quilt as our narrative and our reclamation. Tala noa means to hold conversation. It means to foster relationships by creating safe spaces. Where we honour differences and accept changes with an outcome. It means to cut down hierarchy, where when we talk, it is us, not you and me. It means face to face. This was then another challenge as because this pilot programme fell on hard times, such as COVID, sometimes the face-to-face tala noa was not there. Kasile Lani and I both expressed how this challenged our time management, our way to balance our life obligations and obligations we promised to this pilot programme. We would like to acknowledge the Va. What is Va? The Va is our past, present and future. As much as we might want to define the Va, it certainly defines us. It does not appear as a physical form. It is never vacant. The Va connects us all through our relationships as a space that always already exists whether we think about it or not. And even when we feel disconnected, it appears most strongly when we meet and practice our customs. The Va within Wikipedia was brought out through this pilot programme, through the practice of tala noa, through the relationships built, through the narratives told. It uncovered how much this was needed and magnified a starting point to where we can now progress. It defined our positionality. This pilot programme was successful to me where Lisa Kasivalu, Le Lani and I have cut ways for now the future Pacifica pilot programmes and the new possibilities. I just had a few things to say about the next steps. So, there are quite a few future potential projects. Le Lani and I are talking about using a Wikipedia event to promote the Pacifica presence in Wellington, tying in with the museum that she works at. Sofia and I both independently are trying to figure out how to get some more images up. So I'm working with Creative New Zealand and their collection. And Sofia's been approaching artists about images, just their faces is what we're after in the first instance. Because we've both recognised that the visibility makes so much difference. Kasia and Sofia are quite motivated to get galleries in other places to create some of the missing information so that it can be cited. So I think that's kind of a research project in its own. And Kasia and Sofia have also talked about from this pilot project experience that they want to guide and teach others in the Pacifica community about Wikipedia and to do Wikipedia. And maybe the image thing will be a good start. But also first having a really good conversation and discussion about the purpose and the difficulties to have Talanoa and talk about the bar. Thank you. Amazing and so relevant to so many here working with different cultures, oral cultures, how to use the platform differently to extend it instead of this way that we have focused on it. Absolutely fascinating. Any questions? Mike. Give Mike the mic. Kura Korowa, that was just wonderful. And I was sitting there thinking, every thing you were saying, particularly Sofia, how different this is from our traditional way of tackling Wikipedia and made me realise how many assumptions we have about who edits, how we edit, what we focus on, the importance of face-to-face, the importance of social events, the importance of stating one's own background when approaching Wikipedia, because many of us, Wikipedians, seem to be like robots who don't exist outside of our edits. And that's so not true. I do think, yes, it was very ambitious and brave to tackle such a subject like biographies of living, people of colour, artists, all these red flags for people who want to challenge or take down articles. It was going in at the deep end, but I was just looking at the article. I quickly looked up to Vai Vai and found out it's a very short and not very good article in English and in only three languages as well, one of them Lithuanian. So it seems like there might be a middle ground where there are things, important concepts in Pacific culture that are so badly treated in Wikipedia, but which there are many, many published independent sources that might be a good way to coax people in to editing in something that won't be challenged and that everyone can relate to. Is that an approach you'd consider taking as part of the next step, is to pick more neutral topics, at least for beginners? Thank you very much for that. At least when I was struggling to get our speeches done down to 10 minutes each, and obviously that wasn't the case. And even then we were missing out a lot. One of that being the subject that you brought up, the red links, such as Te Vai Vai. The whirlwinds that we would go in, majority of our time spent would be on clicking on these red links and magnifying what was missing, and that just added to our, how do you say? Added to our depression. Added to our anxiety. There's so much to do and there's so much missing in our Pacifica. Our biographies are the most important and our traditions and our customs. Our studying of our biographies is a starting point and we can now look into maybe focusing on talanoa, focusing on Va. The concept of talanoa on Wikipedia doesn't really captivate what it's about. There's things that are missing and that's another way that we can look into that can hopefully draw people in. So thank you. Yes? Talking about oral traditions, it seems a pity perhaps that, well, I don't know, we've got the Australian Sound Archive and I don't know whether they have an active program capturing Auntie, whoever, and Uncle, whoever, Uncle Brendan, for example, to tell their individual stories because we can reference in Wikipedia stuff that is recorded and stored in an archive and so on. And given that it's an oral tradition, I'm hoping that you recorded your grandma talking about all these gorgeous people. Because that could go somewhere and be useful because we can use, I mean people use ABC videos as references for articles. So we can use oral stuff, but we're just not capturing it as effectively perhaps as we need to. That's the thing, thank you for bringing that up. I have asked my grandmother, why don't we record to you she'll be putting on her fake white voice, I like to say, and it's not real, it's fake. So that's their problem there. But also the fact that how many years have our Pacifica been mis-shown in institutionalised spaces? It really tarnishes, when it tarnishes our Pacifica when it's not used correctly. Even though we want to use it correctly, our ancestors and my family still have that that kind of space where they don't want to share. There are some things that stay within New Year, there's some things that stay within the Pacific and then there's some things that we can share. But yeah, thank you. Hopefully one day they'll feel a lot comfortable sharing these stories. It'll be very nice to record. Thank you for that. That was an amazing presentation. You really brought life to the projects, to the way knowledge is shared. You captured how much it is and how difficult it is for Indigenous cultures who rely on those oral stories to actually get that information across and what I've seen and experienced working with those on the Nungar Pedia project, which was mentioned earlier, is that what is notable, the things that we write down in books, awards, dates, whatever someone's done at school and learnings and stuff like that is not what's really notable about a person. It is the person that's notable. It's the things that they talk about, the remarks they've left behind, their influences. And capturing those is the most difficult thing to do. So I really want to thank you for the way you brought life to this presentation. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, congratulations. Thank you, Paul. I myself have a keen interest in Indigenous cultures and oral traditions. And I have met a few Wikimediants from Africa who have had their articles taken down because there were no citations. Because most of the references that they used are from oral traditions. I believe that we should be able to find a way to circumvent this problem, perhaps in WikiSource, because we have reached the age of electronic publications. Perhaps we can author electronic original works, not merely electronic versions of written works, but actually new publications published in WikiSource. And we can use those from WikiSource as citations in the encyclopedia. Exactly. I believe this is one way. I don't know. I could be limited in my imagination. But I believe that we should be able to find out how to get about this problem. Yeah, absolutely. I guess this project was about finding the positionality on where we stand first. And now that we have, that's definitely something that we can take into account to thank you. Thank you for your words of expression. It's very kind.