 Good morning everyone Okay, good morning. Welcome to the second day of wiki conference USA 2.0 I'd like to make a couple of announcements first. There are welcome bags for those of you who want them in the lobby for You can get your National Archives pens and Discounts in the shop where you can buy get 10% off the Declaration of Penance or the Constitution your very own copy Tomorrow is the unconference day That's an unscheduled day where we have different events sort of prevented presented more spur of the moment and more informal We highly encourage people who are interested. Maybe they're not presenting anything else to sign up to give a lightning talk You can come to this theater. You can give a talk for five minutes on any topic you like It could be about your project. It could be about activities in your city It could be about something that is completely different from the main topic you're presenting on something a little bit more experimental Something that you just feel you'd like to share a little bit about so you can sign up for that on Go to unconference on wiki conference USA.org or you can go in the in the the hallway And we will have whiteboards at the sign up for the lightning talks and for different unconference sessions tomorrow There's a there's a grid We will sort of negotiate and find when they when and where the different events will be happening tomorrow. Okay It's my pleasure today to introduce our keynote speakers From the effort crowd project started by Alice backer Who is the the founder of effort crowd and we're now honored to have her as a board member of wikimedia New York City as well Alice is a lawyer and legal translator with 10 years of experience in online media From 2005 to 2007. She was the francophone editor at Global Voices online covering the French speaking blogs of Africa and the Caribbean In 2006 she founded and managed Global Voices lingua in online community for volunteer translators Which is you know, obviously a very it's not a wikipedia for it's a very parallel effort in very much the same feeling And that's why it's so great that Alice has joined our community and and brought some of these different perspectives She has been aggregating Haitian online expression at Haitian bloggers calm and blogging and podcasting about her native Haiti since 2005 and she's spearheaded are a very great multilingual and multi-community outreach effort in New York and hopefully more broadly In the last few months, which has been very positive for the wiki community in New York and and people generally Sherry Antwine is is our new Afro crowd project manager We're very glad to we can expand the project and professionalize it a bit And so because Alice does not have unlimited volunteer capacity And so she wisely designed a little bit of a next stage she's a she's an MPA from the the school public fairs at American which is down the block more or less and Been experienced in civic engagement worked at a civic press at the Connecticut State Legislature and has been acted as the co-chair of the diaspora African women's network and Is interested in in history? Innovation and performing arts including as a vial inist and And she's also interested in she's explored digital trends in both Africa and Europe And she's interested in exciting about empowering people with knowledge, especially women in the the African diaspora and I'd like to introduce them both to come up now How is everyone? Okay, I guess one way to start. I don't know if I'm supposed to get myself on the presentation here All right everybody. Yes. Yes. Guess what? Yeah, we're gonna have help to get back on the presentation, but I guess one good way to start is if if we could have all of the people who have either attended an Afro crowd edit a thong or who have Helped us help others learn Wikipedia at Afro crowd edit thongs get up Please Oh All right, so that's great so So now we want to tell you a little bit about what we've been doing and what Afro crowd is You know, it's it's it's fitting that we are here today It's this this day this is historical in so many ways. Obviously, there's a million-man march outside You know, this is kind of a moment in American history where? People are asking questions about all sorts of issues You know, there's and this is reflected in social media. So we know that in social media there's been tons of press about the black Twitter phenomenon and You know as a result, I guess a lot of people were asking well, what about black Wikipedia? Why is that energy of people who want to be heard and who want to have you know To be at the table and to take part in conversations. Why is that energy not translating to black Wikipedia? And and and why don't why do we you know? Why is it that Wikipedia has? Probably by most estimates including the estimate of the the the president of the Wikimedia Foundation Sorry the executive director, you know, that there's less than 10 percent of people of color editing Wikipedia So that's what we're here to talk about today and So we're we're gonna start I guess with what it is we've been doing so So we've been organizing a series of edit-a-thons since February, you know the idea being You know Wikipedia is like the world. There's there's all this You know, there's the million-man march happening outside today There's a black lives matter movement that everybody knows started out as a hashtag on Wikipedia How do we bring that to Wikipedia? How do we get that participation and these conversations going on Wikipedia? So in February as one of our as Well, whatever great, okay, so we started out we kicked off in February I do have to give a shout out to the Wikipedians in Serbia who Helped us start out Serbia Belgrade They're not in the room today But they are probably watching on live stream. They're responsible for our website They've been helping us and they've been supporting us all along just like all of the people in the room who just stood up and You know, and so they're the ones including specifically Milo Srancik who who I had met in 2007 at a conference in Croatia about online translation Who kind of have been talking to to me about, you know Why can't we you know because they he'd been my friend on Facebook? He'd been seeing what I was doing there and asking well, why can't we bring that energy to Wikipedia? So If they're watching hello now So from February to date, we've had eight other times. We've had the monthly And this is the one that we held in February. That was a kickoff at the Brooklyn Public Library In March, we had Haiti crowd again at the Brooklyn Public Library We made sure to partner for each of these editathons with people who are engaged in culture in their communities And so here we have the head of Port Academy, which is a digital online archive of of Anything having to do with academia and Haiti and here we have Winnie Lamu who is a professor of Haitian Creole Those are the types of partners we've looked for and so every time we have these editathons We start out with having them come and talk to us and then we do our training and then we move on to editing In April again, we had Afro Latino crowd this time we brought on and By the way languages are a big part of what we've been doing so obviously for Haiti crowd We emphasize French and Haitian Creole and we made it available so the people understood that they could edit in those languages if they wanted In so in March we did sorry in April We did Afro Latino crowd and this time we brought on a wikipedia and blogger who's Cuban We patched her in through Google Hangouts. She wasn't in the room. She lives in Germany and she actually held the Training about wikipedia in Spanish and we did this in conjunction with The Afro Latino project Ammo car priestly so again, we sought out these partners specific to these subgroups to to do that one in May we had Africa crowd We did we did something similar we partnered with Afri diaspora and we partnered with the Yoruba Cultural Institute to do that In June we had training the trainers Which is where sherry comes in because sherry actually was one of the people who showed up to receive the training Which is how we we got acquainted And and maybe sherry can tell us a little bit about that experience of attending why she attended the Training of the trainers in June. All right, so basically I Came well, let me walk around I came because As he as as Richard just mentioned my history buff and I also care about the way technology can be used to change people's lives and That drew me to Alice and what she's been doing and I also mentioned He also mentioned that I was part of diaspora African women's network and we're going to be doing a partnership with them In the coming month on October 25th for those of you listening who are in New York City and When I learned about Afroproud, I was like what a neat what a neat concept, you know, everyone's heard about black Twitter But I believe in a way Wikipedia has the power to be even more influential in the way that We express ourselves with what we know about the world and I know before getting involved as an editor that That I came to Wikipedia Very often. I mean Wikipedia is where you go to learn about the world now, especially if you're millennial or post millennial and So to the concept of being on the other side and being able to be a part of the history-telling process is very very powerful and I think What Alice is doing which is introducing it to a wider? Introducing it to more women and after descendants as well as Just the general public that shows up to our events From throughout different communities is very exciting and I think it's it's going to be a new A new wave of interest in all that you all have been doing for for so long on Wikipedia And I'm excited to be a part of it in this way and I guess I'll let her tell you Yeah, so also in this picture is Linda who ever since she came to our training with trainers has been editing up a storm And is constantly reaching out to me about what to do You know when she can't you know figure you know when she doesn't know how to put in the citation when she's forgetting things that we went Over during the training and who's to this day kind of she's done three full Biographies on Wikipedia. She's probably one of the most active people who've attended so if she's watching hello as well All right, so in July we we we we held We held the the the black lunch table Edit-a-thon at MoMA and this is in in conjunction with the black lunch table, which is a black arts organization And we're we're very happy that ever since they started working with us. They've changed their mission statement It used to be that you know, they wanted to make sure that you know black artists kind of were out there We're documented Received coverage and and now they've actually added to their mission statement most recently in in the form of a Wikipedia edit So it's so it's it's you know, we know that what we're doing is is having impact At just in September. We were the Queen Queens Public Library. We partnered with the Haitian Creole Language Institute We met with people who work closely with the Haitian Creole Academy and Haiti because the Haitian Creole Wikipedia is Exists but has I think 50,000 articles whereas the English one has you know, five million So could use some development and the idea is it's there But how about having people come and kind of invest the space kind of get in the space and especially people who are Excited about Haitian Creole and want to see it survive as language So the venues we've worked with we've worked the Brooklyn Public Library the Queens Library the studio museum and Harlem MoMA And in February, Wikimedia New York City had also worked with the Schomburg That was that was also and and we're probably going to be working with the Schomburg as well So we're happy to announce that we have no gender gap whatsoever As of June I counted because we had to account to the Wikimedia Foundation 61% of more women are edit funds and that's partially because a lot of the The cultural organizations that we partner with are run by women because women are always very invested in maintaining language maintaining culture And so there's there's a lot of modeling of leadership by women. So that's not an issue And also as of June 50% of the articles created were about women. So That's one of the things that we like about our for our formula One thing that we also liked is that by May we we went viral We and we knew we went viral because on top of the editathon that we had scheduled that we actually tried to cancel because it Was so overwhelming. We weren't we all of a sudden started getting all these requests to come and assist Which is what we want to do more and more of in the future rather than Investing our own resources and keeping and organizing our own monthly editathons We want that with the invitations we get we just show up and support People who are already ready who have something to say and who want to be documented. So So, yeah, we we definitely felt this virality and And so in in May by May we actually we made four appearances We on top of Africa crowd which we had planned for May we showed up at The first black lunch table edit on at the student studio museum in Harlem Afrobeat radio Ask us to come and talk to them And we also showed up at a student-run conference at the news school called the Afrofuturism conference Now what we learned is that these conferences we can't do full-fledged editathons But we had a presence which was great, and we've been working with them since and those people keep calling us back Afro crowd in the college classroom Before starting I had done kind of informal survey of black academics many of whom are good friends of mine and Asked, you know, what is your perception of Wikipedia? Do you use it? Do you like it and you know answers ranged from Well, I didn't know I could edit it Which that's you know, that's very sad People thought a lot of people said that they thought a lot of the entries were biased some people, you know as most academics thought the entries were just not reliable and others thought that You know, I wasn't crazy about it two years ago But two years later I keep going back to entries that have to do with my field of study And I like them better and better they keep improving. So that's crowd sourcing at play. So it's not surprising Most recently in This month actually we started working with Two professors We are we have integrated two classes And So race ethnicity class in media and this is of course with Richard Nipel of the wiki education foundation race ethnicity class in media at the new school and Haitian feel in context at NYU so we're there they're using there where we've started We've we've made a presentation each to them about how to use Wikipedia for assignments and they're fully enrolled in The wiki edu process So and of course here is professor Winnie Lamu who also has partnered with us starting in March for Haiti crowd She she is the one who invited us back to actually incorporate this to her class after attending our editathon in March So what's the formula? Okay, as you can already see we believe in targeting subgroups 30 percent People of African descent the United States are born elsewhere. They're immigrants So why miss out on the opportunities there to enrich all of the different language wikipedia's? So we've been working with cultural groups. We've been labeling Editathons by the name of each group Haiti crowd after Latino crowd Africa crowd you know aside from obviously the wider black American group and So, you know, we emphasize the ability that one if they want to can work in in one's native language and We've had smaller more regular edit thons definitely about one a month except we took a break I think we took a break in June or actually no we took a break in August. Yeah and So we start with a short training with an overview of wikipedia significance and the basics of editing and then We focus on newcomers making at least one edit one edit before they leave because there is definitely the stage fright issue Where people just want to sit there and kind of listen and don't want to touch it and feel like it's too So so we say you got to make one edit before you leave if nothing else And so that's helped us a lot Of course social media since that's my background. That's not been an issue. So, you know We've definitely we do everything Everything is announced and documented in Facebook Instagram Twitter And we've we've done the the Google Hangouts through Google Plus, which is also you too crowd blog. Yes And of course the website afro crowd org and the blog So we've already talked about the partnerships with smaller cultural groups And of course we we make sure to to mention look wikipedia is like the world And this is to address the perception that the entries are often biased It's like the world you have to step in just like there's black lives matter Just like there's black Twitter you have to step in and learn how to edit so that you can actually be part of Changing these entries that you think are biased And so this is just to show you the outreach partners griffin a nation Which is going to be important in a moment any cultural exchange Afro Latino project your agricultural institute black brown and digital The Haitian Creole language Institute. Those are just some examples, of course the black lunch table also And the diaspora African women's network, which is going to be our next edit on on October 25th again at the Brooklyn Public Library So so all that's fun. It's warm and fuzzy, but of course there's tons of challenges and we've already talked about some of them Notability is a is a huge issue people often ask well, you know Why is it that a? Stereo killer has more notability than a very very well known very important cultural actor in a local community in Africa, you know So so those are some of the challenges that we face distrust Based on past rejection. We're going to go in detail into one of these cases distrust based on perceived bias Which has caused some in our target group to form totally alternate Pedias world Afro pedia is one of them, which is why we couldn't call ourselves Afro pedia and went for Afro crowd Another one of them is Afro pedia. Those are all efforts of people who Explicitly or not have said well, you know, we need to create our own efforts because we just can't trust that Wikipedia is not going to be biased So those are out there and of course generally a lack of knowledge and trust in crowd sourcing Or just even an understanding that Wikipedia is crowdsourced So I just wanted to go through really quickly a notability case study that has Happened to wiki Africa, which is a private beautiful project started in Italy by a foundation called Latterra 27 and and now hand it over to the I think it's Africa Center in South Africa And so, you know, I've reached out to them We've been in talks and they've explained to me that they had a lot of issues with Maintaining articles on again about those those local cultural actors who are important and have an impact locally but don't necessarily have an You know articles written about them in the New York Times or even in Le Monde in France. So So they explained to us that, you know, they partnered with the African Festival of Cordoba in Spain to do editathons and that With the French Wikipedia, there were many issues Specifically, you know, there were they were not accepting issues They were not accepting entries for movies shorter than three minutes and that were not in French Difficulty in some cases to find sources as required by the guideline by the guidelines due to a cultural gap Or the need to lower some requirements and hopefully if the community decides to discuss these topics again It will do so while keeping this precedent in mind Apparently things went a little better for the English Wikipedia where Wikipedians just recommended to avoid massive uploads of one sourced articles and some of the contents were incorporated in more general entries So people, you know, grappling with these notability issues, but with full understanding that on the ground for the communities That these entries are about these are actual these are these are notable topics. So the question is who decides what's notable However, this story ended well because Christina Perillo of La Terra 27 told me that fortunately thanks to a huge work on community building and engagement of the volunteers active on the different Wikipedia language editions involved at the end. We were able to overcome all the difficulties So she couldn't actually come up, which is what I was looking for with an article that remained rejected after all this time. So that's good and We did it as we were able to discuss through the discussion pages of the entries with the people who pointed out the Notability issue and involve them to improve the entries and or to share the wiki Africa project aim Avoiding to frustrate new editors and cultural organizations involved, which is the key for maintenance Now this story did not end so well And this is unfortunately one of the people that we were trying to partner with when we were doing Afro-Latino crowd because he's so influential in his community. He's from the Garifana community the Garifanas are they're an ethnic group who are a mixture of African and Native They are actually the Caribbean has their name after the Garifana Because they were their first and they were eventually deported by the British to I believe Central America, which is where most of their populations are today. They they are the only speakers of They are the only remaining speakers of Teino by some accounts and the Teino being the natives who were there in the Caribbean and They have so they speak both Spanish and Garifana and Garifana is a language that everybody thinks is about to disappear well, so I reached out to him because he's by far the kind of luminary blogger in that community and He refused to participate into partner. We ended up partnering with the Afro-Latino project And we did end up we have the story does end well in some sense and I'll tell you why But it is important to go over his experience and why he wouldn't Partner with us. So he goes I have had nightmares trying to post and edit items on Wikipedia I am tired of Wikipedia. I was setting up a Wikipedia profile on the independent film Garifana and Peril There was a rejection of many of the sources I cited because they were from blogs namely my own blog Then when I tried citing sources from legitimate quote-unquote media the profile was still rejected I must have cited close to 80 sources So I just put my profile of the film Garifana and Peril on my website screw Wikipedia. I Submitted an entry like four or four or five times and was rejected each time I guess because most of the sources weren't from mainstream media like the New York Times and such Websites that had articles on the film Facebook photo albums. I Set up a section Detailing the city's towns where the movies were screened in some instances the only proof of the screenings was photos taken of the audience at these screenings Here's the profile. I put up on my own website. So he just ended up putting the article in his website. I had 93 sources Here's what I wrote about the Wikipedia tribe Wikipedia explains that my submission did not adequately demonstrate the subjects Notability It did not meet up to their standards films notability and the verifiability of the references in the submission References need to be independent of the subject after significantly improving the references in the profile Making sure to mostly site websites that are independent of the Garifana and Peril movie and I was denied again I also tried setting up Wikipedia entries on various Garifana bands who aren't very well known I was also rejected there on similar grounds notability and verifiable sources But based on my nightmarish previous tries didn't do it wholeheartedly So this story is one where this is just someone who's just not interested. I mean who knows maybe he'll show up again We don't know Maybe he'll hear from so many other people in his community that you know people are coming to Edithons having a good time Or maybe he want What is what one way that this story ends well is that we did actually get we actually started a Garifana incubator In Wikimedia New York City thanks to Richard and I pull because this is a language that's about to disappear and many of many others From that community showed up at Afro Latino crowd and actually made the first entry there So so you know all is not lost But this is a good example of someone who's pretty influential Who's pretty interested who has the excitement who wanted to be part of Wikipedia and who probably because of Having made his first entry through submitting an article versus at one of our editathons where we would have actually kind of sat through and really kind Of figured it out and given him more time And you know there's I don't know if Dave Goodman is here But he always helps out a lot with making sure that that things stay on and that they get improved and people have enough time To do it and don't get discouraged But you know in this case trying on his own just going through the interface. It just didn't work out So What's the future To end we want to work with With the gender gap people on adjustments to notability only because it looks like a lot of the gender gap people are working a lot with that There was a presentation at Wikimedia New York City of someone who's actually trying to get funding to Create more sources more notable sources about people who they feel really are Wikipedia material But just don't have those sources there and maybe that's something that we can We can look at too along with some notion of more recognition of local newspapers because for example in the Gryffina and peril a case he had definitely cited lots of kind of very old hundred years old Local newspapers in the Central American countries where Gryffina's lived Yeah, so if the film has not been reviewed by the likes of the New York Times But but by about a hundred local Latin American papers some of which are as old as their nations You know can that help fix the notability? Obviously working on better or onboarding is important So that the very first interactions don't result in rejection don't result in frustration And so that people can actually stay on and Improve the entries that they found or they thought were biased when they first came across them Of course, and this is really the only thing we can do is outreach outreach and more outreach in a way That's kind of very detailed right now. We're mostly focused in New York In fact, that's where we live But but but hopefully we can kind of export the model to other parts of the country Do you have any questions right now? Yes, John is just young Yep come right down My name is Brenda Waller some of you know me as Montana BW We just at the end of August hosted one of the first ever edited thongs in the state of Montana at the Montana Historical Society One of the issues that we were myself and my co-presenter who is user King Jeff 1970 on Wikipedia We're debating as we were going to be creating articles on women in Montana history Was basically that article articles for creation is where? Article submissions go to die Basically, and so what you are discussing about your issues We run into similar things who gives who cares you're out in a state with less than a million people more cows than human beings So obviously anybody who even lives there ever has just completely been non-notable So we did a lot of work arounds We had a couple of people that we knew wanted to create articles that we basically had them create Their username and their account and make 50 edits four days ahead of the Presentation so they could just create it straight from scratch We also seeded a couple of stubs on topics we knew but unfortunately, you know the people are going to work on them They don't get the creator credit we did Because we're auto-patrolled and so on and so forth. So what I'm curious about is You know, I hate to say that you come up with ways to just avoid ever dealing with articles for creation And I've even tried to be part of the solution by going in there and approving some articles and moving them into user space But it's a and I'm a nine-year wikipedia I find the interface of approving articles and moving them in to be a fairly steep learning curve to do it right The way you're supposed to use all of the tools So I'm just curious what you do in editathons and with other new users to help just Avoid the new pages patrol. I mean between what do you do? Well quite frankly what we do is we tell them not to go through the article submission In fact, one of the the people who's been the most prolific You know without she's been able to create two articles and then she went and did the third one through the submission And she told me it's already gotten rejected twice and I told her well, you should have not gone through that You know, which is what we tell them also the other thing we do is you know First of all at that first edit on we say make an edit to something existing because when people have created things usually Really with within the context of the edit on except training the trainers where people had to write a whole article before they left The two sentences that you're going to write or the three sentences to start an article probably won't establish notability We've had that happen. We've usually worked to keep the article there while we beefed it up ourselves But really at the first edit on we say edit something existing and then another formula that was discussed at wikimedia, Mexico was You know edit someone who's dead Right because a lot of that a lot of this tends to happen with people who you know living people which is what people want to work on It's kind of harder to you know really kind of Establish that notability right away if this is someone who's notable But really hasn't yet gotten a whole a whole bunch of very mainstream mentions Yeah, and some articles were in fact dead people but because again the historical society is not digitized All of their collections. They are pulling material out of vertical files and paper files And so indeed we are dealing with hundred year old newspaper Type of clippings or even 50 or 60 year old newspaper clippings And so I mean another thing we were using were sandboxes and so that was another another technique But just curious what some of your you know see good tricks were yeah And can I just can I just say that something that? That's come up is just how empowering it is to see your work on wikipedia I know it was for me and in our last editathon we collected feedback and Something that came up and also verbally to me was It felt so yeah feel so accomplished like it's only been a few hours, and I feel so Accomplished my stuff is going to be up there for the world to see they're going to learn about a little more in some cases about someone they may not have known a much about and To see that on their faces is very rewarding, but I know The experience of putting it on and knowing that it'll be there and stay there is Something that keeps them coming back to do more but also makes them want to come back to more editathons because for our editathons, they've been largely beginners and For those who want to come back It's that first experience that really is a launching pad for them to come more to more editathons and learn more and And keep up the process Anything else? Yeah Great point great great talk by the way It's it's really great to see so much happening in that space and actually one of the projects I've been trying to work on here in DC at American University actually Yeah, I get more African-American women journalists cataloged in Wikipedia and we're working with some of the journalism groups to do that Also not just to let other people know as well those posters that we have on the lobby I already talked to some folks here who said hey, can we get those at editathons? Can we get them to academic conferences? And that is absolutely one of the goals that we have is that we're gonna have a set of those posters here at NARA But the idea is that if they're useful for editathons and academic conferences We can have a traveling set of those we can even have custom versions for the groups that you're trying to target So for African-American topics and things like that We actually have banners that more directly address the types of things that you want to do at editathons So that's something that's great And unfortunately the experiences that you have are exactly what we've run into here in DC It is standard at our editathons to say don't touch AFC Turn on these things and it's really sad that we have these two different Training regimens for folks are online and in person if we have the luxury of sitting next to someone We can kind of help them edit and then if they see not they but the community sees that experienced administrator Has a footprint on an article. They'll back off Right, they will see that. Oh, this person who's been an editor for 10 years. They kind of know what they're doing So if they do the last edit on an article that a lot of these folks in AFC will just kind of back off of that Unfortunately, that's just kind of the the folk practice that we have and that I wish there was some way we could change that But unfortunately right now at these editathons. We tell them the same thing that you do Thank you. Thank you for that. I will say you're speaking to the right room Gara Funa and Peril is now an article on Wikipedia We restored his work, so you should just talk to him and say we want to work with you now Hello, thanks for your talk. Hi. My name is Abhay Nathu. I'm editor on Mara TV Kepedia and I Can understand the question or the issue of perceived bias We run into that a lot on I'm sure many of the Indic Wikipedia's gender-based class based and unfortunately something that's unique to Indic languages, caste-based How did you reinforce the principle of assume good faith? I'm curious to know because I would like to use that I run into that every other week Did you say principle of assume good faith? That's right Okay, can you explain what that is? So When I go to read Wikipedia or edit Wikipedia when I'm dealing with somebody who rejected my article I won't know I should assume good faith that it was done not as a Personal vendetta against me or as a perceived notion of Exclusionism rather there were some reasons behind it and I want to understand the reasons That's that's the message that I have been trying to reinforce when I deal with perceived bias I'm an admin on Mara TV Kepedia. So I deal with that So that how did you do that? Did you find any success in any particular way that you did that or are there any other pointers? The truth is really we haven't had any of the articles We've created and our editathons rejected because we've you know, because either people were just adding an edit to Something that existed or when it was created a couple times they were slated for deletion like the same day because really they were too short but really Usually some admin David Goodman would would then put a stamp on it and then we had the time to go beef it up So really the bad experiences are the experiences of people Navigating Wikipedia alone, which has got to be the majority of our target group because we're only in New York We're only touching I mean we've gone viral We feel in our kind of sphere, but we're only touching but so many people and most people who interface with Wikipedia interface with it online so So we actually haven't had to kind of well I've had issues I have had issues trying to edit the black lives matter article where my edits were Rejected well not rejected, but somebody deleted them and I went and kind of duped it out myself So I know of this experience, but You know, I don't know if anybody else can talk about the principle of assumed good faith People maybe who work on gender because this is you know, this is the first time I'm hearing about the concept Okay, but yes, there ought to be a way to you know be able to say I think that this is this has been this is being rejected Based, you know out of bias and we accept that we're dealing with systemic bias that it's kind of in the air Then obviously it you know that has to be kind of taken into account when someone You know makes Tries to keep an article on but the problem is as I understand it You have to duke it out on the discussion page, right? There's there's not really is there a place where you can go and say I think this rejection is biased and And can somebody answer that you were you were please use the microphone behind you Yes Yes, there is a project on Wikipedia English the wiki project systemic bias So that does exist and so and it's if you go there and you can you know Say the problem you're having and draw attention to it And then people can come and weigh in and some of the time they'll say it's a lost cause and some of the time They'll you know more or less try to help you, you know You know work your way out of it is something that you come up against somebody who just isn't understanding You're not communicating well Or if the policy, you know people are having trouble with the policy And or if someone just flat out it seems to have biases that are real against you then we can you know Have a group of people that can come in and you know not have that bias and hopefully you know outweigh that discussion So I would encourage you to join that as a project and also You know look to see what what other people are doing there like every wiki project It can be dead if no one's using it. So having more people come and work there will you know keep it live and going? And so do you have such a project which language are you working at? I work in English? It's what I'm right, but our initial Please tell us your name again. My name is a bear. Okay, which language are you working at Marathi Wikipedia? Oh, yep, and yes, we do have pages that reinforce that Principle we also have personal intervention when somebody airs out a An accusation of perceived bias That's when a couple of senior editors would engage but I was I was curious to know if anybody in the room really has a Methodical way a systemic way of doing this more resources Multimedia or anything else examples I would be very curious to know because I want to use it Because honestly, I don't think there is a systemic bias at least on Marathi Wikipedia against any group But there are perceived notion based on hundreds of years of history maybe thousands But the the thing is we are starting anew and we don't want that to be an ingrained Shortcoming or a perceived shortcoming of it Going forward from here on out and and that that that is my question or plea to the group to Help us or help anybody that needs that kind of help. Thank you. Thank you both Yeah Yeah, hi, my name is Danny. Yeah Can you tell us a bit about like what kinds of articles people are interested in writing at the editathons? Like you've given a bunch of examples I'm just wondering like is there a trend of people generally are interested in writing about these subjects. Yeah People really are interested in writing about their group I mean, you know, that's that's kind of the idea because usually there's not enough entries about their groups I can show you our Articles list And you you know, you can just get an idea I Mean, you know, it goes it, you know, it activists former US ambassador Linguists Gryffin a chief patient suffragist Puerto Rican actor historian African-American labor and consumer rights activist, you know, it tends to be biographies. We've had very few people Start articles that were You know parts, you know parts we've got you know parts of the parts of a country People people are writing about it. It just looks like all sorts of issues You know biographies of people who are notable in their communities and and shoring them up Okay, that's really interesting. Thank you. Okay We also have a lot of great volunteers that we have a lot of people from who help in the Wikimedia community in New York Richard for example, who is you know Instrumental every time and a few others who come to give a hand in the community So that's also another important part as far as We've seen so far In giving confidence to the people who are beginners and who are just getting started to know, okay Well, someone was here to kind of help me through the initial process All right, so we have 10 minutes left Yeah, it occurs to me while listening to these stories about Articles getting rejected and I've heard plenty more and I've had to go and AFC myself, you know Professor will write to me and say help. I know you know about Wikipedia So I'm wondering if maybe we need to start thinking about these as a two-way educational process instead of a one-way educational process Whereas instead of just we're taking these folks and saying we're teaching you about Wikipedia Maybe we also need to teach Wikipedians that these things out in the world that you don't know about are still notable And we need to take that approach And you know, maybe you can say if you find yourself Writing a lot of articles on a topic that keep getting rejected like Garifuna or Montana or whatever Maybe you throw together a bibliography get a librarian to throw together a bibliography Say these are the sources that we're using again and again. This is why these sources are notable Like throw it up on a wiki essay page or something and they could just point to that document or have you know Where you're working with just say if you need help with notability just show them this link and then that might help break That because if somebody who doesn't know anything about Garifuna looks at these sources, you know And they're gonna say this doesn't look notable to me. It's a blog, but they don't know anything about it So maybe we can teach them about it that way. Take that approach. Yeah, sorry. That wasn't really a question now I just ended up talking There's tons of questions up in the air. We certainly don't have all the answers. Go ahead. Oh, yes I when I lived in Nicaragua some of my Garifuna friends were bilingual in Spanish and English and If people are like me and their Spanish is not as strong as their English We could still put these articles up in Spanish first and ask wiki media Mexico to help us with our Spanish And then I think they would stay up in the Spanish wikipedia Because people will recognize local newspapers in Spanish as a legitimate source then we can pull them over from Spanish into English and And get around that problem Well, we're working on a translate-a-thon with Professor Gallardo next semester and we work on Spanish She works on Spanish in English. Obviously. She sent us people from her class She talked about it yesterday who come to our edit funds and done just that we've had two people come to our edit Thons to translate from Spanish to English So, you know and there's a lot of that going on. So that's a that's definitely a great idea. That's Yeah, absolutely, and if you have problems with people deleting articles that are perfectly notable in the Spanish wikipedia by all means Well, please leave a note on the systemic bias page Indeed Go ahead. Good idea. Thank you Thanks, wonderful work. I and I share the interest I guess there's a whole session here on articles creation process revision or something. Is that right? Can you can you repeat that? There's a whole session at this conference. I think on Revising the articles for creation process. Yes. So, you know that yesterday, unfortunately, or oh my goodness I'm sorry to have missed it. Okay. I had it on my list. I guess I let it slip through yesterday. Yeah, okay Well, maybe someone can tell us what well in that case. Yeah, I Wonder if our people creating in their own scratch boxes. Are they creating in the draft space? I've I've recently run across a draft space. I think it's great What I really wish is that because having people collaborate on an article can also of awesome I can also often Help the reviewers to say wow, this isn't you know, some individual out there There's there's people collaborating on something or sharing experience So, you know, I'd recommend the draft space and I also have a plea With the draft space when I go to when I follow a red link because I want to create an article and I see oh, this isn't here. Do you want to create it? And then I say yeah, I want to create it and then it says well You don't you want to search to see if this already exists when I do a search at that point I've already expressed interest knowing that it's not a page I'd like the draft space to come up because I'd like to know if somebody else had the same idea is trying to establish credibility Notability has put something in draft space and I can now collaborate with them So this idea of trying to I think in your process Collaboration is in my mind always evidence of more than, you know, vandalism more than Non-notability, so trying to put those ideas together wonderful work. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Go ahead So we have like five minutes left, so let's move quickly so everybody can talk go ahead I wanted to make a similar point to the one that dropped made earlier that it's a Something has to happen on both sides of the of the equation And so that's the restored the article Gryffindor in parallel as I was looking for it Because I wanted to see what the what the deletion reason was and I've only had two minutes now to look at it But I can see that some of the sourcing isn't right, you know He cited sources that don't actually say about what he's put in he's put something in from from personal knowledge and but but so he cited a URL that's related to what he is talking about but the page that comes up doesn't actually say what he said in the article So one one thing I think that you need to do is you need to explain to people why the sources that they cite Actually have to say what sure yeah, but what the text says because because if that if that is not the case The the Wikipedia article may mutate over time and come to say something completely different to what actually happened Well, one one recent example was the Amelia Bedelia article where where someone found that five years After they were stoned in college and wrote in that Amelia Bedelia was I think it was was based on a Cameroonian made They just made that up five years later. That was still there. So someone like your Your friend at Teofilo, I think he was cool I mean he would obviously be care that that the information in the article is correct and stays correct long-term So you can impress upon him yeah, but that the way to do that is to make absolutely sure that every word that's in the article is Traceable and verifiable on the source. Yeah, that they actually says we he's never actually attended one of our edit You know right in the very beginning and at the same time, you know Wikipedia's need to understand that they shouldn't just get annoyed with someone like that You know because they're coming We know with their heart on their sleeve and trying to do something sure and run and sometimes you get Wikipedia instant Just going, you know, right if I can exercise power here, you know, I can do someone down So that's how they go and throw acronyms at them at them and delete the article So I think what big opinions need to do is they need to do their own research I mean that movie to reference power is definitely notable. It's definitely notable. Yeah, exactly news that there's you know That there's New York newspapers are reporting about it. There's absolutely no question So the article shouldn't have been deleted because it should be rewritten even now You know, it needs it needs work, but but it's about a notable topic and The third element really is that sometimes you really just run into into talk pages that are dominated by people who don't like black people I remember I corresponded a few years ago with Leicester Spence who is an Africana Studies professor in Baltimore and He had trouble with the he was trying to explain to people that it's all in the talk page history That there's a difference between Afrocentrism and Afrocentricity, you know One is just a Perspective in historiography that the you know black people are the subjects of history being told rather than objects described from a from an alien perspective and He was trying to explain to editors that Afrocentricity and Afrocentrism aren't the same thing and that he would fail people in this In the studies course if they didn't understand the difference and Editors white editors just wouldn't have it You know, they shouted him down and after I think today after centricity redirects to Afrocentrism Yes, and and so that they're arguing with an Africana Studies professor about and That you know that that is a harder problem I don't know whether you need arbitration for that arbitration is a two-edged sword because you know opponents whenever you get into a Dispute they will almost be able to find something that you did wrong as well And arbitration tends to sort of punish both sides these days So it's very very very difficult I think you need to get people together and sort of watch out for each other and then people will shout It's canvassing, but you need something like that next year. Yeah, or actually Next week immediate conference. Yeah, let's go really quickly. Oh, are we are we done? Okay. We're done Okay, very very briefly I attended that that some of the workshop yesterday was called reimagining the article submission process and They talked about how difficult it was to get through AFC Articles tended to get to reject her for no ability fairly quickly And without touching on all the issues one of the major things that came out of it was a Suggestion that we start off with a short Abstract with at least one high quality Reliable source preferably to So we sort of nip this whole it's not notable thing in the bud Then once you've established some kind of no ability then you can beef it up and work on it as separate phases in that Pro and that process. Yeah, and that's what we've done when our articles came up for for rejection the same day Yeah, that's that's really quickly to real quick things there's been a lot of talk about notability and One of the talks that's going on today is a talk about notability. So I've got a lot to say about that But that's going to be during that talk The other thing is the triangle wikipedia's user group we just started that up because back in 2013 we had our first edit-a-thon over in the triangle area at UNC Chapel Hill this year we had eight edit-a-thons between Chapel Hill Duke and throughout the triangle area and one of the things that came up this year is the Lumbee tribe in that area kept trying to get articles into wikipedia and They continuously were being rejected and we actually had someone from DC come down and Help us out from the user group up here And soon as they put it in it stuck because they had say a little bit more weight behind their user account, right? Which is what inspired me to? Create the wikipedia's user group. So other groups that are having that problem Maybe creating a user group to be able to bring people together when you're running into an issue like that You can reach out to someone that you've met at a previous edit-a-thon This is our first year doing that so we don't have a long history to say it really works well But one example so far it's worked. Well, that might be a good way to find support. Thank you last Oh, I actually just had it was a note the other gentleman had mentioned about telling them about sources to make sure it Explicitly states what it was Something I've realized in the past year is that we have a lot of people coming to wikipedia and editing with a Knowledge of writing student papers and with student papers you can take a source that doesn't explicitly state it I found that when I explain it to the people that you can't do it that way you have to have it actually say it There's like this. Oh, I get it moment where they realize it's not like writing a student paper because they're just mistaking academic papers with You know, right? Yeah, so that's that was all. Thank you. Thank you so much Oh So if we could stop the side conversations and sit down and get ready for our next speaker that'd be great Oh Okay, we're ready to get started. So if everyone could take their seats our next speaker is a Long-time wikipedia named Rosie Stevenson good night. She has been editing under the name Rosie step and so you all some of you know may know her better by that name She heard she's going to do a presentation called women. It takes a village. Thank you everybody So, let's get started. All right, so social media wiki content gender gap and Andrew Here's my commons picture figured we needed to include a village since we're talking about Women takes it takes a village and so a scene a lario shout out to you Agenda so you have a little idea of what we're going to be talking about Let's get started right now with the introduction to the material. We're going to frame gender gap Some of us have heard about an editor gender gap and the editor gender gap being a disparity in the percentage of female and male editors While this is an issue. It is not what we're going to be talking about today in our presentation What we are talking about is something called The content gender gap and briefly what that means is all of those missing articles about women women's works broadly construed their things that they wrote the The paintings they painted the sculptures they sculpted and then also the women related articles like women's health it is considered a systemic bias issue on Wikipedia and Some of us deal with that Here we go. Sorry about framing content gender gap I want to talk about a encyclopedia that was published in 1957. That's in my backpack right there It was written by a Ramon Armando Rodriguez. It was called a dictionary biographical geographical a historico de Venezuela and in it 3.6% of the biographies are about women So let's talk about present day 2014 Wikipedia There was a article published in 2015 that addressed the content gender gap and and just we could have some shout outs from the audience what percentage of the biographies on the English language Wikipedia in 2014 Were about women. I've given you some choices any other 15.5% and All I got to say about that is this are you impressed there are other bias points in content gender gap Metadata metadata, which the results show that women's biographies contain more marriage related events than the men's do Men's biographies contain more cognition related content than the women's do and That there's a strong bias in linking patterns with men's biographies quote-unquote Disproportionately more central than articles about women What did Simone de Beauvoir have to say about that in 1942? It is not women's inferiority that has determined their historical insignificance It is their historical insignificance that has doomed them to inferiority Well, we've been doing something about that and I want to talk about the things we've been doing and I'm going to connect with what Meta says some of the initiatives are since 2012 Some of the initiatives on meta are local and some of them are global And I want to specifically talk about the initiatives listed on meta regarding Content and not other areas such as culture and campaigning and whatnot What I saw by studying these was that they were stove piped and by that I mean There's no umbrella movement That addresses content gender gap Nothing that coordinates them from 60,000 feet Here's the list Straight out of meta again. I remove things relate that were not content gender gap related But were maybe related to gender gap in other ways eight items One of these wiki women prize is in Arabic. I apologize. I did not review that one, but I reviewed the others Let's talk about them The first one on that list was wiki women's history month. How many of you are familiar with that? Good good large show of hands. So wiki women's history month began in 2012 and You can see the events new images new lists new articles It coincides with international women's day, which is March 8th There were a lot more activities more articles new lists created in 2015 then in 2012 we're really on a pretty good Projectory, and I'm really excited to think about what we're gonna have in 2016 so another Couple of things that were mentioned on that meta page were the gender gap task force and Women in red, but these two projects or task forces are not It aren't aren't all of it. You can see that we have a whole bunch of Task forces and projects and affiliated projects that have to do with content gender gap And I've listed those pretty much. I think that's it On the side of the page Also mentioned on meta is something about women scientists and specifically the systemic bias workshop kit We have someone in our audience who? Develop that We're pleased that she's here with us Emily temple would Also mentioned on the meta page were editathons and meet-ups specifically art and feminism and what the what our folks are doing out at Week Media Mexico, so I want to talk a little bit more about that globally We've run lots of editathons focused on content gender gap Sorry for that BTP at the end of capacity building there don't know how that happened But let's talk about with the edit on us in wicka wick media, Mexico They have named their editathons specific to those regarding content gender gap as edit on us I really like that and I'm thinking about taking the phrase they coined and incorporated Incorporating it in the work that we do I Want to have a shout out to those Folks who work at wicka media Sweden who did a whole series of editathons on women in fiction And then the art and feminism crew who are going to be speaking later today had 1500 participants at their 2015 events and then last on that list women in red So thank you We're going to use women in red as a case study and I'm going to start by Coding a sentence out of a wicka media blog by sico buttress Alex Wang and Maria Cruz Earlier this year where they start off their blog post complex issues require collective action wiki project women in red and To make it easy on you. It's that wiki project regarding content gender gap Began the planning stages in February 2015 it was launched six months later July 11th 2015 this year Mexico City at wicka mania scope content gender gap and Like I've mentioned earlier. It covers women's biographies women's works Women's issues broadly construed We didn't do it all by ourselves the layout design of the project was done by wiki project X James here in the Sarah We didn't do the metrics by ourselves Max Klein with the Wikipedia gender gap index wiki use wiki data to kind of help us along with that in the last 91 days there have been 760 talk page posts regarding content gender gap I have to stop and think about if we didn't have this wiki project about content gender gap Where where would we have been talking about it? probably on other pages Maybe article pages maybe on some of the individual occupation based wiki projects like wiki project women writers 760 talk page posts in about 90 91 days in my mind. That's a lot Again complex issues require collective action so in just Two and a half months. I've got the data from July 11th through the end of July the month of August the month of September But we haven't crunched the numbers for October look at the articles. We've created a lot I'm not saying these articles wouldn't have been created if it wasn't for women in red. I'm sure Some of them many of them would have still been created under Somebody just wanted to do that But I am saying that I think that that's a large amount of new articles because we focused our attention on it We've held to editathons and these are virtual editathons because we're dispersed all over the globe All the people working on women in red. They're everywhere The first one was a three-day event in conjunction with the Smithsonian. It was Asian Pacific American women We had 10 people sign up as participants for our Virtual editathon over three days. We created 38 articles The next one we ran ran for two weeks women in leadership No one sponsored us. We did this on our own There were 26 people who signed up. There were more people who contributed We created a hundred seventy five articles about women in leadership Now if we hadn't done this with those articles still have been created, maybe eventually 2015 and those articles still hadn't appeared Our next event women in architecture Being sponsored by the Guggenheim and we've had conversations with them They're doing events all in person editathon events all over the world But for about 11 days women in red is going to do do it our way Virtual editathons so far 17 people have signed up and when I say so far that's probably as of Monday or Tuesday because I've been traveling since then and can't put in the number of Articles yet because we don't know that but I can say some people are so excited They've already started writing articles and putting them in the outcome section Bravo We have some opportunities. We have some struggles and they are things that have been talked about with by other People who have stood on this podium before me and it is on notability on reliable sources on using foreign language sources and You know what it crosses across new editors and seasoned editors alike. We all share the same problems So I want to give you a couple of examples Judith gesh was part of our Latest editathon women in leadership chair of the international runic advisory group president of the English place name society and She wrote the first book length work devoted entirely to women in the Viking Age and She got herself over to AFD articles for deletion And we were able to establish notability and so promptly the AFD tag was removed her page was created by someone who had 86,000 edits and And I point that out because you've got to think about that if someone with 86,000 edits had determined that this person was notable and began working on that article And they didn't have all the references, but you know what it took me about the second page on Google Yeah, a Google search to find that she wrote the first book length work devoted entirely to women in Viking Age And when I added that to the AFD discussion, it kind of it closed the discussion Because someone decided yes, we've established notability on this person But 86,000 edits and so the takeaway is we invite people to edit a thongs and if they are newer edit editors They've got zero edits. They have a hundred. They have a thousand They're gonna encounter the same thing that you do if you've got 86,000 edits so let's talk about the next one again through our Editathon women in leadership Kirsten Gunther chair of Majar telecom Her page was created by someone with 59,000 edits someone who had started up this whole idea of a women in leadership group to to be run by women in red and That article made its way over to Articles for deletion to and the interesting thing about this one was that many of those Citations were in foreign language and the person who a seasoned editor someone I highly respect who Put this over at AFD Wanted to understand were those considered reliable sources because they were in a foreign language He wasn't able to exactly read them even though he probably used a translator And he really wanted to understand were those reliable sources and once convinced that they were reliable sources and That the one English language one was gonna be okay He decided that he would withdraw the you know the the AFD and this article got to stand Categories I really want to talk about categories. So women in red has found that if we Do a really good job on creating categories Regarding women and women's related things that we can see more easily where some of the gaps are Wiki project women writers as an example that falls under women in red has 659 categories We have 23,000 plus articles under our scope. We average 168 new articles a month about women writers And I think a lot of that is due to having those categories where we can see we do not have women Novelists in gone gone in women novelists and such. So let's go search for those articles Let's go ahead and create them. I've got a roadmap for what we do next. All right I think what we need is a movement and We need the entire wiki village you to join us Now I've talked about things on Wikipedia a lot over the last few years and usually about this time I'd say see this I wear an invisible bracelet and it says WWHSD on it and it refers to what would Harry Seldon do So those of you who are Asimov fans out there and know about the foundation series and you know about the Encyclopedists, you know what I'm talking about except it's not invisible anymore. It's purple Thanks to a friend Harry Seldon established a group of encyclopedists on another planet Who were going to write the sum of all human knowledge? Yeah, I think about that. I think about what would Harry Seldon do You know, he was a psycho historian and what he used is mega data in order to project out thousand years what would happen to the to humanity human race and Thinking about that in the perspective of Wikipedia You know, it kind of gives me a balance I think of things from 60,000 feet and not just the one article and not just the one edit So if it takes a wiki village to move content gender gap forward Here are the thoughts I have a call for action to convene wiki conference content gender gap in 2016 the goal being establishing our movement is Ensuring that we have international representation. This is not an English language Wikipedia Problem alone Bring together the thought leaders from a lot of different places Can you see how we could incorporate 100 wiki days and the chapters and the user groups and commons? wiki project biography wiki cup We definitely need wiki data. We need wiki edu. We need program design man and management We need technical expertise people who know how to deal with grant writing and strategic planning and project management and branding and promotion and research and testing and community interaction because we can't do it all by ourselves So the movement we need a name Are we going to be women pedia? What are we going to be our? Logo our unified look and feel what's that going to look like jump in we need you global local advocacy promotion marketing advertising social media experts to promote it across all the language wikipedia's and wiki data and commons We need glam and education to join us. We need those partnerships But glam and education they need to benefit too We need to be able to support their goals while they support ours. I believe we can meet We need to build on worldwide sponsored meetups We've talked about the Smithsonian and the Guggen we're going to be collaborating with the Guggenheim later this month We need to emphasize remote participation While gathering like this is awesome. I love it. I wish everybody could experience it Most wikipedia's don't get to experience this. So how do we bring them all in under our umbrella? We need to bring in subject matter experts to help us develop best practices We need a wikipedia in residence Technical support so those who know me and love me know me that I am not the biggest Technical guru here and those who are more technically inclined. We need your help with our project Women in red has a wish list this long of technical issues and our requirements have exceeded what wiki project X Who established our project look and page? Look look and feel for our pages. They were not able to assist us with some of the Harder things that we need to get done and we need to have a conversation about bots wiki data and wiki so Max Klein who does the wikipedia gender gap index says that the beta version is coming Out soon. Sorry. He's not with us here today How do we incorporate the wiki data though into the work that we are doing and how do we assure that all the wikipedia? articles End up in wika data. They're getting there people are doing that. I'm checking that out I'm keeping a close eye on it. Some of them get in there faster than others, but it's not automatic For those of you who think that you create that article wikipedia and just boom magic a bot comes along and creates the wikipedia And wika data entry you're wrong. It doesn't someone has to do that chapters and user groups I think you're gonna be our best friends because you have your own unique communities And we would like to partner with those and learn from your experience and engage in Bidirectional learning because I think you can learn a finger to from us All I'm gonna say about grants is this program design will determine grant needs. I Wish I knew more about that about being able to say I think we need a grant and it's gonna be for this much money And it's gonna be to do this But I don't have my arms around it and we need your input to figure that out to sort that out Questions and answers time and I've put some up there for you, but do we have any others? Yep, walk to the speakers, please Hello, I organized an art and feminism edit-a-thon satellite in Kansas City Such a great experience to feel the community It also got covered in our local media, which was fantastic, but of course the articles that went up online Received some comments from trolls who said things like oh, so you're making Wikipedia More unequal you're purposely making it by is that kind of nonsense and of course I just ignored it But I'm wondering if anybody can offer some advice for dealing with Trolls and is it best to ignore them or is it is there is there a good way to respond? Yes? Thanks Yeah, and I haven't had any problems with our edit-a-thons having our changes reverted or Targeted so it's been a great experience. So thank you for the advice and thank you for your question I want to make a comment about that too. So on the talk pages for women in red. There's been some talk about incorporating a Template that says this article was created at an edit-a-thon Please allow the user a little time to improve the article before you do Before you do anything rash And so there's two trains of thought on that one of them is that this is a good idea to use that kind of a template because those people who are out there acting in good faith will back away and will give that article some time and then the second train of thought is don't use that because the Folks who are jerks are going to then hone in on everything that that user has done and will go around and plaster all sorts of different kinds of Templates on the articles they've created. So I'm on the fence. I've never I have never personally used that template But if anyone has good experiences or bad experiences, you know, that would be helpful to hear from you either here or offline Hi, I'm Lorraine Harriton and I'm working with New York Chapter to do a women in science Edit-a-thon we're going to do on November 22nd But I really appreciate all your thoughts that maybe we should make it virtual Maybe we should make it multi-day and think about how we can expand this I just want to let people know we are going to do this women in science at the New York Academy of Science Which is at Seven World Trade If people are interested and also I appreciate your ideas on how to expand it and make it more powerful We would love to partner with you and if you can reach out to me if they're here or On my talk page We'll go ahead and do a virtual edit-on in conjunction with you great terrific we can talk after this Sage this is more a comment than a question. Your bracelet is fabulous Stylen I'm wondering if you have any thoughts yet about an Institutional home or a cultural organization partner for Wikipedia and in residence is there any sort of organization you think would be pretty would be especially inclined to support female biography That's a great question. I think we have come on Kevin So it will be a glam Institution that the you asked a question in the first Institution that came to mind was the Simón de Beauvoir Institute in Mexico City and so there are Others here in the US that I think are going to be you know Equally suitable and our partners in Canada and all over the world Probably have some other ideas and I would like to hear from you about that Okay, I've minutes I hear do we have any other questions or comments Thank You Monica run up to the speakers so everyone can hear you please So as I said, thank you so much for this work and for your presentation the Editing statistics that you posted were just wonderful and I wondered if you could comment a little bit on Interventions made into existing articles versus Articles created because you had posted the articles created was their focus on editing existing articles Or was the focus on actually creating new articles because of this dearth of Entries on women in the biography section So the focus is entirely on the ladder on creating the new articles Wiki project women concentrates on both half half of that group concentrate on creating new articles and others work on Taking articles to GA or to FA or just improving them in general but What women in red does and what I'm trying to address with content gender gap is Let's get those articles written. I don't care who's writing those articles Let's write those articles and then let's improve them because it starts with that first You know it starts with hitting save that first edit and after that everything else is an improvement Right, so whether you improve it in that same hour or someone improves it a day later a month later Ten years later. I take the long view create the article Someone else will come along and someone else will improve it. I know someone like who's that someone? It's all of you and me and everybody else out there Thanks. Hi everyone My name is Monica shangle Jones, and I'm just wanted to say I'm so pleased to be here today And to be presenting to you this this work here And I wanted to take a minute to thank the scholarship committee for making helping make my my travel here possible and Thank you so much This is a project that I'm so pleased to share especially after Rosie's presentation on content gaps because it is also thinking about content gaps and it's it's as I'll explain it's organized with Seydras and wiki Ed so sage. I'll ask you to stand up or wave really quick And so his name is of course here, but he did not prepare this presentation So this is this is my doing and this is this is really like a slice of work in progress I'm going to present to you what where we're at right now kind of take take scope and and share where we're going next So the gap-finding project is about working as you can see working with academic experts in a feminism focused and feminist distributed editing project and The the aims there's a few different aims, but it actually I want to give you a little back story This project came out of an editathon that I co-organized with Amanda Men King University of Washington back in February and that editathon was called I love to you critical wikipedia editathon and it was organized as a panel discussion in the beginning around issues of oral history representation feminist hacking Wikipedia and a media ecosystem these were kind of topics that Four panelists presented on and then in the afternoon we did conversations about editing edits and so on and so forth and It was a fantastic event The Cascadia Wikimedia user group was there it was organized at the University of Washington research commons Which is part of the library there was I think seven departments on campus that helped to offset the costs of hosting the event and The night the evening before we had the event We had James Hare come out who was curious about the critical wikipedia editathon And he came and he participated as well And it was just a really like lively Set of happenings around feminism around content gaps around what kinds of issues shape participation in wikipedia editing And during over those two days Sage and I got into a conversation about How it is that editathons sometimes seem to put the burden of responsibility of solving content issues on Women or minorities and and isn't there a way to better distribute this to kind of Ask for help from content experts or from women for minorities from and but then not necessarily Say now you're charged with solving this problem Can we come up with a different way of thinking about wikipedia editing and from that we developed an inspire campaign project Proposal that would address gaps in a distributed way, but also would think critically about participation and what participation means to begin with and So there was more or less three goals, which is identifying to begin with these unknown unknowns on wikipedia. What are content gaps? How do we develop a feminist editing process that's distributed and can we do this practically? Over say a six-month period by partnering with wiki ed and the resources that wiki ed has developed working with University classes wiki ed also recently partnered with the national women's studies Association Which was bringing in women's studies and feminist studies scholars to do wikipedia editing in their classrooms To kind of think through the this this question So our six-month project began We'll begin with began with a brainstorming event where we in advance invited five content experts from different Disciplines, but who are focused on issues around feminism and technology was our is our focus To develop some sort of list that then we can pass off to a course or a number of courses That are also devoted to in some way feminism and technology And then we can reflect on how this process goes and Invite these experts to reflect not only on the content on wikipedia But also on the process that we're going through over this time and then develop The insights that we gain from doing this pilot project into a protocol that we can share with others who are interested in distributed editing and both content gaps and issues around what shapes participation on wikipedia and Our proposal we then kind of laid out more clearly what would met what would be a measurement of success of our of our pilot And there's quite a few different things that are our measures of success And I won't read them all to you here, but I will say you can find more about the project on the Inspire campaign page and also gap finding protocol wordpress.com which I'll share with you later again and Right now we're really in the middle of it. We just had the brainstorming session and courses just started For the fall quarter courses that will be potentially using our lists So we're really kind of this is this is as I said, this is like a snapshot of where we're at right now But I wanted to take a minute just to say to focus again on a distinction, which is it's a project that's feminism focused in that it's focused on content gaps in wikipedia that are related to content around feminism and feminism and technology But it's also a feminist project in that it aims to be reflective of process and reflective of the ways that participation is shaped by issues that are larger than wikipedia by social issues by By kind of the gender-based and systemic biases that we see in our society at large And to in some way attend to these by developing a sensitive protocol and to develop a sensitive process So here we have our measures of success again. Oops. I'm going backwards. Sorry about that as I said now we're kind of reflecting so far and We have three ticks that we can we can share with you We have we've recruited subject matter experts and the recruitment was very personalized One of the women recruited for the project was a panel presenter at I love to you She focuses on oral histories of Chicano women who have been involved in radio production and had already noted at our I love to you event the dearth of entries around the very women that she'd been chronicling So she and she was very enthusiastic about wikipedia. So she seemed like a great person to be involved A number of other there was five other scholars We've invited from University of Washington to participate and all of them I either met in person with sage And I met in person with them We talked about, you know, why they were interested or not and what they could bring to this I did phone calls with people So it was very much like a nurturing process of getting people enlisted and interested in Participating and not just identifying content gaps, but also in being part of part of the whole bigger pilot project Then we hosted a five-hour brainstorming session. It was actually four hours because we took an hour break for lunch At a technical bookstore in Seattle in the Capitol Hill district where And I'll explain to you a little bit about that in a minute and then we worked we worked on recruiting University course to use the materials that came out of that. So the the next kind of to-do steps are yet to unfold But what I'd like to reflect so far today in this presentation is just on two components of Our successes so far, which is how the brainstorming session actually went what we did at it and then the the relationship between the brainstorming session to identify content gaps and think about a feminist protocol and Recruiting a course to work with the lists and the outcomes of that So the we had two goals for the brainstorming session The first was as I said to kind of talk to the group about what does it mean to develop this process for engaging non? Wikipedia ins In to identify content gaps. How do we do that? And then how can we? Actually go about practically and technically identifying content gaps with non Wikipedia ins which I didn't emphasize before but these the participants none of them had edited Wikipedia at any Maybe a couple had usernames prior but none none were Wikipedia editors are identified as such so but they were interested But being non Wikipedia ins how do we technically identify content gaps in a meaningful way that can then be picked up by a Class or potentially by an you know another wikipedia How do we kind of translate that? So this is what I'll talk about now Here's the kind of agenda of our brainstorming session We we devoted the beginning of the session to talking about Process more holistically and then the afternoon was actually to go through and do content analysis of Wikipedia So here's how it went we have as I said our two goals the first goal what What came out of this was? We had We had a very eager and enthusiastic discussion about what gap means and Beyond content gap what are the many different kinds of gaps that May impede participation or may impede Ways of attending to wikipedia as a knowledge production site of knowledge production online and These are I think things that many wikipedians being here at this conference I realized this over again are very aware of and that wikimedia foundation has been very aware of but for the Participants in this brainstorming session. These were new things to think about so these were things that they And we wanted to foreground as being important when thinking about a gap a project. That's called You know gap finding which is you know issues around access The internet who has electricity in the world? Digital divides in literacy even if you have access. Do you know how to use certain things? What are your technical skills? Social constraints even if you are using wikipedia. What are the affective constraints that may? Facilitate your participation in a project and then only then do we get to issues about What's actually on wikipedia knowledge legitimacy, so here you can see on our fabulous whiteboard Think you know issues around what it considered a reliable or notable entry Which has been discussed already at our at our conference today and yesterday And then what are the what are the missing pages the missing entries the missing citations? It from what's already been established is sort of like the canon of academic work So for the participants it actually took kind of a bigger conversation about this bestiary of gaps as we called it to finally get to the issue of What's missing in on wikipedia as as kind of like a very particular site? And in our goal to develop a protocol for engaging Experts and content experts it also came up That the to be attentive to the ways in which subject matter experts are themselves Part of bigger power structures and so for academics. This is very obvious in the kind of tenure system tenure track The kinds of responsibilities that feminist academics women are often asked to engage in more kind of community service work So asking them to volunteer their time to be a part of a project Is also kind of a political issue or question as well Also academics have varying levels of access to different resources have varying levels of autonomy and the kinds of courses that they can teach and So in thinking through this It we should think about how volunteering Although I should mention that the participants in this project would receive a Monet a small monetary stipend for their participation in the in the greater Protocol development, but in general when working with with experts It's worth thinking about ways in which their participation can be meaningful to them in the career tracks in which they are in And so in some ways the kind the presentations that were made at the I love to you event Which were panel presentations were actually quite nice for participants to kind of put on their CV as a As a way that they've presented their research whereas participating in a brainstorming session doesn't quite have the same kind of I Don't know CV worthiness you could say and Then thinking about the second goal, which is identifying a pilot process for identifying content gaps related to feminism and technology Working with non-wikipedia does have considerable challenges Which is many of them simply didn't know where to start and in when when sage and I created the The I'll come back to this page But when when we were thinking about how are we going to go about saving the gaps that we come up with at the event We wanted to invite the participants to think through this together with us But we also wanted to provide some something to work with at the event and so sage came up with a very simple Kind of like gap topic Entry point that we could put in where we put in the gap topic and then from there you can edit it a little bit further But this requires some toggling back and forth between Wikipedia and the page the gap finding project page But this was the one place where we kind of sort of started to develop a rough set of Rails or or framing for how we would identify these but we also thought about you could use an excel list You could you know just write it down. You could orally narrate the kinds of things You could work on it individually or work at it in a brainstorming session So all these things were like on the table for how are we going to do this gap identifying and then once we identify the gaps Can we do translation work to translate the? The things that people come up with that our participants come up with to pass off to the university class But it was very interesting because non-wikipedia's often didn't really know like what was up for grabs What can we even talk about on? As needing as being a gap Not necessarily knowing that there's a history page or a talk page There's kind of the assumption that wikipedia has an authority structure That's hard to change and in many ways. This is true, but in ways. This is not So not necessarily having that facility with the norms of wikipedia or of a wiki itself And then it also came up that they had difficulty knowing that you could participate in wikipedia Visually because wikipedia visually is so different from other social media sites There's no like bright green like edit here Button or kind of like become a member of this community and sign up kind of thing So visually like the visual culture of the wikipedia page is very different. Which is which is worth mentioning so and then In terms of developing our our pilot process for this we kind of realized that in in debriefing after a sage and I talked about how the invitation to to develop together at the brainstorming session The ways like the technical ways of identifying and transferring gaps was Harder to do without more scaffolding Potentially from us or from wikipedia's who had more knowledge of how wikipedia as a culture a technical culture works And so we ended up having a lot of really ad hoc Conversations that were here and there that takes some kind of synthesizing to do So this is something to keep in mind if others were to do as a similar Session and then it also ended up that we didn't spend a lot of time working through adding or suggesting references for for the classes to use in the future But there's ways that we've kind of thought through and I've thought through these and sage can add as well Of how we can address the challenges that emerged from the brainstorming session Which is kind of naming the gaps that will and won't be solved by the event in the first place So going in and not necessarily saying that this is an event that's designed to solve all of the problems of Knowledge production in our society today But that we can name that these exist and point to them But then say we're going to be focusing on like one small part of this by doing one small thing and kind of being realistic And it's kind of scaffolding that process a little bit more either technically or in a by having presentation panel presentations type of thing to illicit out further Suggestions of content and then synchronizing the gap finding with a more with a concrete course So as I said the second thing that I'll talk about today is the the course recruitment in the course fit Initially, we thought that we would work with one of the participants of the session in a course that she's teaching and The participants were all teaching courses Four of the five participants were teaching courses that were quite relevant to the subject matter We were dealing with But for a few different reasons didn't end up finding that the lists and teaching Wikipedia would be useful for their courses With the exception of one of our participants who's teaching critical media literacy With undergraduates with a small group of undergraduates is most interested and we'll be using our our list for her course but topically her course is Not as relevant to the topic of feminism and technology as some of the other courses But the challenge of some of those Courses as being relevant to our project was enrollment numbers, you know teaching a class of a hundred and fifty a hundred and twenty students is very difficult to do this kind of editing project in What the goals of the department are if they have already designed kind of a syllabus or assessment model that the instructors are compelled to use or already not One of our participants teaching on feminism and technology found that she Just didn't have enough facility with Wikipedia on her own to feel comfortable taking on this kind of teaching project in the first time that she teaches the course so these were kind of some things to think about in terms of Inviting a professor who's not a wikipedia and to teach with wikipedia And there would it be there is a benefit for working with someone in our brainstorming session to participate as the instructor who uses the list in her course just for the Continuity of the pilot project, but there are a number of courses that wiki ed is working with That would be relevant as well. So That's still kind of in the works for developing how this could work with Completely separate brainstorming sessions and then passing off lists to other courses or events But as I said, yeah, there's kind of in thinking about the challenges that this Opens up. There's there's ways around it Which is to work backwards and choose a course to To work within the first place and then do a brainstorming session. That's devoted to That course and the syllabus that's already in place for that course and making it very relevant So that the students who are in that course have something to to start with From there and it's it's already very relevant Another way to think about this is to have a Class an undergraduate class do a gap finding project themselves I mean sage did this last spring and can talk a little bit a bit more about how well this worked But the extent to which those gaps are then transferred and attended to is is yet to be discovered Or working with a non-class setting which would be to do to work with an edit a phone Or make a series of editing events Focused on first let's find gaps related to our subject matter expertise and then let's attend to them And just kind of spreading out the process of editing over over time So but where we're at in the protocol is we as I said classes have just started and the The course that will be using critical media literacy will be using the 18 gap items that Our brainstorming session came up with and we'll be seeing how how the students are using those or not and What what kinds of further suggestions for improvement or sharing we can develop with this? but I think a next step would be to develop kind of like a gap aid or a Suggested way of providing commentary for non wikipedia editors who can make commentary on wikipedia content And for us that will be I think we'll be developing this and then inviting our Participants to comment on it and to try it out to kind of flesh out the gaps We've already identified a little further than to continue to reflect on what we've accomplished and what challenges arise in the process And then sharing these gap lists further on Then where where we have now and also sharing them with the with the larger wikipedia Community and non wiki at editing events with the cascadia wikipedia user group. I've been involved in Weekly series of wikipedia labs that are being hosted at University of Washington's Research Commons, which is part of the library and the first event was last week around women in economics And so such these lists could be very useful in this weekly series of events as well And just writing up our notes and kind of developing more of Sensitive thoughtful Reflection on how this is working and and what others can can take from it So here's my contact information, and I'm happy to take questions from here, and I also can invite sage up To take questions as well or to make any further comments or fill in any gaps that I have In the in the project. Thanks, Monica Nice job So like what my my interest in this just to sort of step back and give it a little more framing is is that like we've you know in the moment we've done a lot of edited funds and and Like the the sort of things the main challenge that is Gradually emerged that we're coming to realize is that it's really hard to Get people who are not already well-versed in Wikipedia to be very productive like during an edited fun And like with experts in particular, right? There's a lot who have a lot of enthusiasm for Wikipedia They're very interested in sort of getting their knowledge and their sort of understanding of their area of expertise into Wikipedia But if you Bring them to an editathon and and sort of teach them the basics of Wikipedia It's very unlikely that anything will happen outside of that event and and so the pro so so like The the challenge then is like how can we take we know that that we can find people that are interested in spending two hours and Like doing what they can for Wikipedia like using their expertise So how can we find a way that actually that two hours can be really productive and we don't have to sort of spend the time of Like as as much as possible. We can avoid Having to train them on the nitty-gritty details of Wikipedia and instead like take advantage of the the special knowledge that they do have which is like they have a deep understanding of their field they can read Wikipedia and Recognize where there are problems and gaps and they have an understanding of the literature of their field for how to fill them And so like making that into an efficient process where it would be really easy to sort of get a group of people together And just within that two hours Come up with something that the rest of the Wikipedia could actually use even though It's not directly Wikipedia articles that come out of it, but it's something that could be like Easily translated into Wikipedia articles by people who do have the the Wikipedia expertise or in the case of students the time and grade motivation to carry that through So I think like we we We didn't get there yet with this first pilot Like in some ways it got sidetracked by many of the same things that often happen when you get a bunch of experts together To like talk about the problems with Wikipedia, which is that there's so many of them It's really fun to talk about the problem And so they do that the whole time and it's great like it's but but like we we know about these problems and like it's So hi sage and team Monica yes, I haven't met you yet, so we'll make that happen I Alex Tonson I've been working on this kind of expert engagement thing for a long time now I was one of the early education program people and the enthusiasm behind it was I wanted to get the experts filling the gaps Because I had barely any training in I saw gaps and so of course there's We have these kind of expert problems but like every time I've both worked with a professor to support an education class or prepped for an edit-a-thon and create this list of gaps these lists of Potential art topics live in these back pages that no one will find ever ever ever again And our community has been really really good at creating these back pages with lists That have gaps over and over again And we've seen kind of a decline in red links on actual article pages And we have this kind of advent of the draft space to do things So I'm wondering if there's there's ways we could seed the article space On Wikipedia or the draft space on Wikipedia during these events with minimal Wikipedia expertise so it could be like The Wikipedia and who's facilitating or one or two people who knows how to Could take a draft like start drafts of articles and just plop in URLs for good references as it's happening or or Like see the list of with the red links on Wikipedia So I think that is right that that's the problem right like yeah and and like I'm gonna talk about this in the sort of Engagement outside of edit-a-thon Session a little later but like I'm starting to think that Maybe the approach that we need to take is to like really try to separate actually the Establishment of notability part of things from the writing the article part of things And so like this this sort of emerged from like listening to the afro cred presentation as well as Rosie's presentation and that like the if we can sort of make discrete steps for like Documenting a gap in a way that clearly establishes notability without doing the time consuming writing and composing part of it Instead of what we do now right which is we're good at creating these lists, but they're just huge lists of red links They they don't do any more than that. They don't have structure They don't let you they don't give you Enough of a head start to actually dive in and write the article unless you actually already recognize that topic And so like finding a structured way that is easy to translate into a real Wikipedia article and yet Like doesn't take a lot of Wikipedia knowledge to get that far. Maybe is is like the The nut to crack And I say that that sounds right and our conversations with librarians as part of the Wikipedia library program when we show up at conferences What they want to do is kind of share that the Academy has established knowledge on topics They don't really want to write the articles And so this is something we we need to be building tools around and I think your project is emphasizing that yet again If I can piggyback on what Alex was saying some we have we have mounds of red lists And we actually we love the red lists because at least it identifies those red links And what some of us do is we find those References and we just add them after that red link and sometimes someone even stops and bothers to put a Data birth or date date of death But I think just adding those citations and if there were experts out in the field who gave us the red link Lists and just added those citations. There are lots of people who would love to write those articles We would find it very helpful Yeah, that's great. You can see here and I don't have internet access But you can see the URL for the gaps that we found in our session And they're listed by their title and then underneath them. It's at its Messy and this will this will be a next step is coming up with a bit more scaffolding around this but like references were added Some commentary on why a particular thing was missing or what was needed to augment it a little bit more So this is giving it a little more meat You could say then what a red link does and for for the purposes of this kind of pilot project This is helpful for students because it gives them a springboard, but it doesn't just give them the answer But it gives them something to go to to look a little bit further and it also could be very useful for Folks at a an edit-a-thon or other wikipedia for a week for women in red type of project where you go Okay, this is something there's three. There's three references here around, you know Something very specific. I don't think any of these we had a couple of biographies biographical entries Alison Adam was is not listed as though that that was one but that is it's a little more Then than a red link or then just like a list of things that if you don't know anything about it It's hard to attend to oh Okay, thank you so much for your attention Okay, I'm gonna go ahead and get started. Hey everybody my name is Matthew Vetter The title of my talk is addressing the gender gap, so you haven't heard that the last of it Wiki Ed projects for the digital humanities and I'm so excited to be here and to speak after Rosie and Monica because We are really kind of traveling from from a broader perspective with Rosie to kind of a middle ground perspective With Monica and I'm gonna be looking more locally as an instructor. I'm working on this kind of so this is really gonna be great I'm a visiting assistant professor of English at Ohio University Zanesville. I've worked with Wiki Ed For a couple of years now, so I'm not a newcomer But I am kind of working as an instructor and I kind of come from that perspective, okay? So let's talk a little bit about the gender gap I'm talking about the gender gap as it is kind of caused by that editor gap Okay, so the gender gap is caused by the fact that only one in ten One in ten editors are actually women this translates into all kinds of problems most significantly Uneven representation of articles and topics that might matter more to women readers And I think it gets a little tricky to talk about what it is that that means because we can fall into all kinds of stereotypes about What do women readers want to read what a male readers want to read? But I think it's still important to talk about obviously so it means that women's perspectives are missing So we're not really building the truly multicultural encyclopedia that that we're trying to build if our if our editorship is so homogenous So just a little bit of background I'm also coming from the digital humanities, which is a field that is really interested in these questions Okay, so what are these biases? What are these gaps on Wikipedia? So I brought up this little just a definition from from Kathleen Fitzpatrick and she writes that Digital humanities has to do with the work that gets done at the crossroads of digital media and traditional humanistic study And that happens in two different ways So on the one hand, it's bringing the tools and techniques of digital media to bear in traditional humanistic questions And I felt like in my experience getting to teach with wiki ed I've been I've really been able to do that and bring Wikipedia into the classroom And it really has it as a inspired my teaching a lot of different ways But the second part of the definition Bringing humanistic modes of inquiry to bear on digital media. I think is really the question It's really the way that we're working with the the gender gap in the content gap Okay, because we're thinking about how are these disparities? How are these kinds of social hierarchies? showing up in in Wikipedia And I've just been so Impressed and amazed with how how well some of my own goals as a digital humanist as an academic Have lined up with wiki ed's goals Here in the last couple of years, so I've got a quote here from Eric Eric contributed to a to a kind of a blog project that I was working on last year as part of our Collaboration and I'm gonna talk a little bit about that more later, but I've got this great quote from him To meet the goal of representing the sum of all human knowledge Wikipedia needs to grow Wikipedia writing assignments can help While we've seen great contributions to Wikipedia content tackling gaps in gender race in class There's still a lot of work to do to to to diversify Wikipedia Wiki Ed is dedicated to improving and expanding Wikipedia through quality contributions that bridge content gaps We believe student editors are a natural ally So I really love this quote as it as it kind of speaks to the things that I'm trying to do in my own classes Okay, so what I want to argue today is just that This is such a great partnership I think that collaborating with collaborations between academics, especially in the humanities with wiki wiki ed Are in a perfect position to kind of work to address some of these content gaps that have emerged But I'll think I also think it's important for us to spread awareness of some of the systemic problems of representation And how those kind of manifest systemically and To do that we can initiate and participate in these more public conversations about the importance of intervention Okay, so I'm gonna talk a little bit about that and how we did that last semester So I'm gonna kind of go a little bit more local here We're gonna talk about a specific case study and a specific course that I was teaching last last spring and How wiki ed kind of helped us to work on that that Wikipedia project So I'm gonna talk about three things The context of the course so how we engaged with wikipedia and digital culture in general in this course The particulars of the assignment how it was framed and what we accomplished and then I kind of at the end I want to zoom out a little bit and think about How wikipedia is epistemological practices so their knowledge-making practices make it susceptible to these Existing social hierarchies so how does marginalization of women happen in wikipedia as a result of these already Existing social hierarchies that are out in our culture Okay, so about the course The course itself was was actually titled women in writing and it was on the it's on the on the institutional books I know how university is a kind of a a gender studies and Writing hybrid type of course So there was already that kind of theme in place which I think is important Especially if you're you're asking students to kind of work on this content gaps. I Was teaching it with a colleague of mine Sarah Einstein and she was teaching two sections and I was teaching one So in total we were teaching three courses and she's still Even though it was it was really themed around women in writing She still experienced some pushback from from from us doing this kind of a project from male students Who were hesitant to get on board with this kind of project? So it's really important to be able to kind of work with the course that's going to be friendly to your goals And that was kind of disappointing actually, but But we took the theme a little bit further and and we we turned it into a course that kind of focused on women writing in digital spaces So we were dealing with issues of digital identity issues of gender We had a whole unit on Gamergate where we talked about Gamergate, which was kind of more recently happening last year And then our culminating project was the Wikipedia project So here I have a little quote from the from the course description This course will explore the ways in which new media and digital geographies both open up new possibilities and Create new challenges for women in digital spaces. So it really became a course about Women writing in digital spaces and how they're represented and what kinds of problems that they problems and challenges and then opportunities They say that they face so you can see how the Wikipedia project would fit right in with that So this was the culminating project. I kind of thought of it as the research project of the course I Have a little quote here from the assignment sheet and this project You're going to contribute to Wikipedia by performing research on a topic related to gender women's studies women's represent representation or an LGBTQ issue Identifying a need for a new article or edits to an existing article and then contributing content to the encyclopedia Based on your research. It's simple, right? Yeah, and we're really kind of motivated by a couple of things I think as a as a class just as a kind of an intellectual exercise We're kind of motivated by some of these theoretical questions. Why does the gender gap manifests? What causes it? How does it specifically influence content and representation and where do we start seeing those things because? Really those you know the gap is absence, right? So how do you see absence and where do you find it was always a really kind of interesting question that propelled us in that class and propelled our discussions and Then the more practical work of let's actually try to bridge the gap Let's improve representation by working on content and Let's diversify the editor base At least for a semester, you know by having these these students become editors Definitely ways to get those student editors to come back after the class is over is a challenge as it is a challenge That we'll need to talk about but let's diversify the editor base at least for that academic term is a real goal that we can accomplish So here's a little bit of what we did actually in terms of the components and the process We we we heavily I heavily use a lot of the wiki ed resources. So we do training modules In order to we didn't have Monica's great resources at this point So in order to find those content gaps We really relied heavily on wiki projects and wiki projects were really important to that process So going into wiki project women's studies or wiki project LGBT LGBT was a great way for students to say Here's some to find these lists of articles to work on and say here's some work that we can actually do Okay, so before they create their proposal Right, they can explore the wiki project looking for some of those content gaps In their proposals, which they kind of write and turn into the instructor They they detail those gaps and they say here's what I want to work on And How's it how it's gonna work? At the same time, they're also doing they're setting up their sandboxes. They're practicing editing skills things like that We have a workshop where we workshop the proposals so we kind of say is this gonna work Is this something that you know, you're not gonna get a whole lot of pushback on? How are you able to kind of contribute in this way in this at this particular article? After they get their topics approved or their the articles that they're working on They spend some time doing research and they compile an annotated bibliography for the class Okay, and I really try to make this Because an annotated bibliography can be can become kind of a an academic exercise and not really kind of targeted I really try to target it to the particular sources that are going to be useful to them working on that specific article and the and even more so the particular Quotes and pieces of information that they know that they'll be able to summarize and use in that article So I really try to target it pretty locally So they do the research they do their annotated bibliography They start drafting their articles in the sandbox. We use the sandboxes as a way to say You know, we know that we're gonna get we're gonna run into some trouble We try to just start doing editing or if we try to start just creating pages automatically We're gonna run into some trouble So the sandboxes act as a safe place for them to gather their research and for them to Build the article so that it's ready when it's ready to move to main space At that point we do two peer reviews we do a kind of an in-class peer review so this the students Share their article drafts or their edits with other students And they try to catch red flags in terms of their their research and how they're using sources but we also work with this is where wiki ed comes in and The content experts come in and kind of will do a peer review for us for some of the Wikipedia specific things So that's tremendously helpful Once we can do once we do that the students revise and they can move their their article edits over to main space And we try because we're drafting in the sandbox I try to really encourage students when they're moving those edits over to the main space To leave to leave a history leave a edit trail there. So I'm not just kind of copying and pasting them over Some processes Okay, so I wanted to show you guys some of the examples of some of the articles that the students worked on This is kind of the best part, right? Yeah I had a I had a student a native Norwegian student my class worked in I mean they worked on just all kinds of stuff a lot of Biographical stuff There's obviously a lot of biographical stuff that is missing. So here we have feminism in Norway and item a park Kate Bornstein tender theorist some of the students were Taking the class specifically because it was a gender studies course and we're actually interested in that other students We're just taking it to fulfill a writing requirement for some context that you some context for you So that obviously affected their their article choices It's women's sports teams became something that the students felt like they could work on LGBT organizations another one Regina Spector more biographical obviously more notable Biographical article here women in Syria Women in nursing this student did particularly well. I thought They were able to find these these images in the public domain Women's sport inside so just really a diversity of topics and I think that students were able to kind of Latch on the things that really were interesting and engaging for them and that was really important in this class Some numbers and some of what we accomplished in numbers. I thought it was pretty great Until I heard the other presentations and then that kind of ruined it for me But it was it felt really ambitious and amazing at the time Okay, so we did have these three sections Which felt pretty big at least for me because I'd always only worked kind of solo like as on my own as an instructor Working with my own class so to have this colleague working with me was really meaningful and I felt like we were getting a lot done so we had 54 students in all working on 61 articles and Creating 12 new ones on just all kinds of topics as you've seen students in these three courses made a total of 1361 edits Oh big it felt it felt really wonderful It felt like and I think the students were really engaged in the work because they felt like they were doing some public work But I think what we also got out of this was we were able to kind of talk about the project in these more public spaces So we invited Eric to blog on the digital rhetoric collaborative Which is a kind of a an academic blog that I'm involved in that deals with Digital humanities and rhetoric type works and teaching and education type work So we invited Eric to kind of blog on there and share some of those goals of wiki ed So we could really see those commonalities that I talked about at the beginning of the presentation Where we're really trying to do some of the same things And I just think this is so important for for bringing in those Bringing these issues out into the public and talking about them in this third space Because you obviously you have the classroom and you have Wikipedia But bringing these issues out into that third public space is really important to kind of build public awareness So I do want to zoom out a little bit and think about how we might talk about some of these issues From a larger kind of epistemological point of view I think some of the ways that Do it working on this kind of project in the class some of the conversations that it sparked Really had to do with with the knowledge making practices of Wikipedia and we were thinking a lot about Notability the two speakers before me had talked a lot about notability But we were also thinking a lot about verifiability So we we we really had some rich discussions about how verifiability works in the encyclopedia to kind of Uphold what are already dominant ideas and dominant ways of thinking about and treating women in our culture So if we if we if we see verifiability is something that ensures that Wikipedia will typically represent the dominant texts sources and authorities in our culture Those that are mainstream and published and most readily available that in itself creates a kind of systemic bias, right? If we accept that we live in a culture that already marginalizes women and LGBTQ identities We can also expect Wikipedia to reflect those social hierarchies inadvertently, right Wikipedia acts as a sort of mirror in that way here are the sources that are readily available Here are the sources that be are being published over and over if those biases are present in those sources Wikipedia inadvertently reflects that So this was a really kind of important realization for us as a class to make I think it was a really important realization to bring out into those more public spaces Which is why and obviously we've heard this you guys if you stuck around for the first two presentations We've heard this this is why these interventions are so important Okay, by working to enlarge representation and diversifying editorial populations beginning these conversations among academics Out in more more public communities and by giving students the opportunities to engage in public writing projects We have to make a concerted effort Obviously to overcome these systemic biases because they're not going away on their own And I think that that really brings me back to Why why I've always kind of really loved working with wiki ed in some of my classrooms because the students are doing this Really important public work, and I feel like it's motivating for them So I've got this quote from Melanie kill About this kind of how it is that public culture public knowledge projects motivate learning And she writes students immersed in the culture and production of knowledge in wikipedia can become quote Generative producers and critical consumers of cultural products and can learn to make meaningful Interventions in the world and lasting connections between their humanist training and public engagement And that to me is really why I continue doing this work with wiki ed because it's become so meaningful in the classroom All right, that's what I've got. I've got my email here too if you guys want to follow up in terms of With the discussion with me in email as well I think we have some time for questions Yeah, hi. Um, I am also an academic I'm not a wikipedia, but I would like to be so I have a couple questions are just about the logistics of Doing this kind of work. Um, so first So I noticed that you had peer editing How much do you also require the students to make changes based on your own comments? And here's why I'm asking for this kind of work. Um, so I teach an introduction to feminist philosophy class I think I would be hesitant to do this and just sort of let my students loose on editing stuff about that Because they're still working through their own biases And so I would be worried about the kinds of articles that would come out by students who are just starting to learn about Feminist philosophy that they might be biased themselves. Um, so that's my first question. The second question is Um, given the issues that monica raised about workload I think often faculty members who are interested in these kinds of issues are doing so much additional service work That one of my concerns is how much work was it for you to prepare this class I might like to do this But I'm dealing with so much other services and stuff that I don't know how much effort it is up front Thanks And I think those questions are related too because you're you're kind of saying your first question is you're asking about How much are how much responsibility can the instructor take for the quality of the articles? If you're teaching a so this is like a junior level feminist intro to feminism type course I think that I think that working on those articles are Going to be tougher for students those types of articles that deal specifically with feminist theory or feminist figures are are are Definitely going to be harder to work on than articles that kind of take on a more kind of Generalist type subject. Do you see what I mean? So a lot of the articles that I was working on We did have the the the gender theorist Kate Bornstein The the student working on that article was more well versed in gender studies So I trusted her more to kind of work on that Some of the other articles that students were working on were more kind of generalist type articles That I think that they needed less support on But I do rely on peer review and I do rely on wiki ed helping out And sometimes you do have Article edits that just do not turn out well And I think that's a risk that you have to be willing to take and that you have to kind of warn students about Um Was that answering one part of the second question was just how much work was it for you to prep the class? Um, I think it's it's become less over time I've you know, I've done three or four of these So it's become less over time and some of the new tools that wiki ed is putting out like the course dashboard Have really been helpful If you can get your students, I didn't talk about the visual editor But the visual editor has has been a really important tool for my students to get them on board with this type of project So if you can get your students using the visual editor, then it is also much it is also less work But I think it's something that You build over time so the first prep is going to take a lot But you if you have a good support if you have Somebody at your school that kind of does a little bit of this and that can meet with you and walk you through it That's going to be that's going to be helpful Thanks Hi, um, so I was relieved when you addressed the the question of verifiability and sourcing I find that young female academics have a general mistrust or a growing disinterest in a lot of large publications that are taken uh as You know biblical truth in a lot of wikipedia uh discussions I'm just wondering how do you address that in your class if certain subjects aren't covered in depth In places like the new york times or bloomberg or most of the sourcing I use I think specifically of the example one of the things I think of in the gender gap is The article for menstrual cup the talk page is very interesting there Most of the sources cited right now are medical journals, but Because of that there's a huge gap on real life implementation and social Responses to that subject. So do you encourage your students to look for sourcing in Unusual places or I am open to doing that I'm I'm open to having those conversations with students because I think the conversations can be so rich But I think it's really important to remind students that they are Are going into kind of risky territory in terms of how their edits are going to be treated, you know And thinking but that's what to me. That's what made the course so Interesting and exciting was thinking about how these larger policies and larger epistemologies are working out in wikipedia I would encourage students To kind of make that push because it's almost like here. I'm going to challenge I'm going to challenge the dominant knowledge making practices that are happening by saying this source should be counted Right by saying this source should be counted. So I would encourage students to do that to kind of make that Make that move But also with the knowledge that it might end up it might kind of end in failure Thank you. Yeah Other questions. Is it time for lunch? Well, thank you so much Thank you Oh shoot. I almost had it ejected Hi everybody I think we're going to get started It's kind of uh, I think people are probably still trickling in from lunch, but I'm okay with that um I have planned to have a little time for questions after since it's a small crew Maybe I'll let myself ramble a little more. I don't know Uh, but if you have questions, I will take them and I am Available in a bunch of ways including probably easiest uh on with my twitter handle on the bottom there in case you have Questions and you don't ask in front of everyone Um, my name is parker higgins. I work for the electronic frontier foundation Which some of you may know it's a nonprofit that's dedicated to defending your rights in digital world And that means that a lot of the times that I get up in front of a room to give a talk it's Scary and it's depressing. Um, I often talk about you know threats to your security that you didn't know about Or people who are invading your privacy and you didn't know about it Or copyright bullies who are going to be able to to take your speech offline um Fortunately today that's not at all what I'm doing. I'm going to tell you a very nice story Uh, this is the story of a collection of beautiful watercolor paintings of fruits and nuts Um, probably not like much else here at wiki con Uh, and for me the story starts in february of this year When I first found the collection So this is the pomological watercolor collection Pomological is a word that is like my third most common used word in my vocabulary these days But many people don't know it. It's pertaining to the study of fruit and its cultivation Um, and I will go more into it. Uh in a minute. So For me the story starts in february of 2015 Um when I was doing a project just for myself Uh called public domain thing of the day I was trying to challenge myself to look uh to find on the internet a thing that I didn't know existed that was in the public domain Uh, because I think the public domain is really important and I think that if you don't use it Uh, then You lose it then the next time we're arguing about whether we should have a public domain. Basically, uh People won't be able to point to the valuable stories. So so this is my personal challenge I was doing it through the month of february And uh, I found these images. Um I love the public domain because it presents an alternative not just to The heavily controlled works, but also to the idea of a permission culture I like that uh images that are in the public domain and works that are in the public domain you can use for whatever So, you know, I do like that west side story can exist Uh without getting the the permission of of the uh, shakespeare state But I also like that bad adaptations of shakespeare can exist. I like that. No, you don't have to ask You know, it's not you know, not just the good ones. Um So I really like that Uh, when you think of the public domain or when I think of the public domain a lot of people just think of really old stuff Um stuff that is just so old that it either came before copyright or Uh, or the term has lapsed um We don't get new works in the public domain through Expiration anymore. Um, that hasn't happened in almost 20 years. Have people seen this chart? This is one of the it's it's very confusing at first, but once you get it, it's really remarkable Um, this is it shows how as we've extended the the term of copyright on older things uh it the time from From when it's created to when we actually get something Uh, you know, obviously it goes up and up and so since we lasted that in 1998 for 20 years We just don't get anything now. So like this I for half of my life You know, I'm a public domain advocate who hasn't gotten any new public domain So that's a very it's a weird thing and it's a it's a strange set of circumstances Uh, but it's not all uh, it's not all like that because there's another source of things in the public domain And that's government works Uh Works by government employees in the us are in the public domain There are some really cool government employees. So like these works Um are in the public domain and that's a cool thing that like every almost every picture that's been taken by a person in space Is is free for all of humanity to use and I think that's a beautiful thing And it's kind of just an accident of of the way that you know, the copyright law was drafted But that's really cool So I was in part of the the public domain thing of the day project I was uh sort of spelunking through dot gov domains looking for sets of of works that I'd never found And I found uh these images These are two and two more of Uh of 7500 Images of uh of fruits and nuts. They're all watercolors. They're painted between 1886 and 1942 with most of them around the turn of the century Um, they are Just, you know, obviously jaw droppingly beautiful. Um, maybe not, you know Sometimes have to look at a bunch of them before you find the really beautiful ones And they served a really important purpose. This was uh a century ago or more This was the only source of of scientific information about uh about fruits that may have been hard to observe in other parts of the world So the usda commissioned these Um from 21 artists nine of whom were women by the way, so it's it's like a it's it's a better Representative project than a lot of the ones that we talk about a hundred years later um Where these would get painted and then they would get lithographed and and put in official usda publications And that was the way that you would see, you know a mango from india or something And there are images from specimens in all 50 states and something like 60 countries and it's just this uh, this incredible collection The usda has called it Perhaps the most attractive as well as historically important of natural of the national agriculture libraries treasures Um, and so you can imagine the most beautiful the most important How is this being? Honored how is this, you know, how is this being made available? Um And the answer as I found when I when I stumbled across the collection, uh, is you're not very well I uh, they were all available online, but you got these wimpy 600 pixel Previews that was all you got and you knew that there was more uh because In part because the the uh, the images were all called screen dot jpeg So you're like, oh, there's there's print dot jpeg somewhere like this exists um But then also I I poked around and I and I saw that uh That you could request up to three images from the collection You pick three and you could request them and they would give them to you free Uh, but anything more than that and you have to pay ten dollars per image And I was like, okay, that's the There was a there was a moment Uh where I thought okay 7500 images like I could get the first three And then can I find seventy five thousand dollars for fruit pictures to just like liberate them? um And fortunately I did not you know spend a tesla worth of money on fruit paintings Um, but I did want to know more. I wanted to know how this worked Uh, how why is it that this collection exists and it was it's all been digitized But it's hidden here and does it like anyone using this is this a and so uh That you know entered the other interesting thing about government Works in particular Which is the freedom of information act, uh, which I which again probably won't come up too many times here But uh, the freedom of information act is a law that's been around for coming up on 50 years now And it allows you to request Certain kinds of information from agencies Within the executive branch The usda for example, uh, is within the executive branch Also, you know the department of homeland security or the fbi or whatever and usually when you read a story a news story That's been you know, according to documents obtained via the freedom of information act It's one of those more serious agencies um but You can you can do it with any of these and it I I think even more perhaps than editing wikipedia Making a a foyer request seems pretty intimidating for a lot of people. Um, I you know, I I think probably most people I know haven't filed one. It's very easy It's writing a letter basically you have to say three or four things um, you say what you want and uh, and then you can You send it off and they you know, they don't always get back to you. They don't always get back to you quickly um, but This is just it's not really that much harder than you know writing a professor and asking for an extension on a paper It's like it's it's a pretty straightforward thing And um, I use a service called muck rock, which is not you know, there are a bunch of these and they basically do The rest of it for you. So you don't even have to find the address You don't have to bug the agency like are you ever going to answer that? um, so I uh, I Really enjoy this and I was really intrigued and I wanted to know more and it turns out that you know I've got this law available to me uh to get to know more um, so I uh I had I I started with a simple request. I'd say in in february after finding it. I said Can you send me information about the costs and revenues associated with the with this collection? So And I actually you're supposed to give a date. I didn't even do that. I was just like costs and revenues And uh, and they responded and a month later I got an answer And it cost uh, and I got this actually this is very cool. Um You don't normally get this I think with these sorts of collections. I got the report the final report on the digital conversion project which has All the information about the the source images it has all the information they have about the collection basically It has you know, where they got the money from to do this and it's all this stuff It's super interesting reading if you're at all interested in in archiving and stuff and you see the way that they you know Uh, the resolution that they scan things at and and the resolution that they transferred things at and the the data sizes and stuff um And this was I this was responsive to my request for costs because because that was one of the costs um So what what I found out from this, uh, was that the costs associated with it were 288,422 dollars as a digitization project. Um, that was funded by a grant uh of the 7500 images in the collection, uh a little over 3800 are apples and there was an apple scientist who had come to uh the usda looking for The their images and he had a grant from this organization and And he said, you know, we can probably get you on to to digitize the rest of these and so they did that and so They got a grant a little under three hundred thousand dollars to digitize all these and put them all online um in the Five years since they started digitizing until I I discovered them. So four years of having them online, uh, they had Delivered 81 Files where people had requested Uh, you know, either their three or beyond the three. Uh, that was a total of $565 in revenue for them. Um, and having this information really changed the perspective for me It wasn't like I was going to be taking away money from Like the the department of agriculture or from, you know, our nation's farmers or from anything like that This was something that was not being used in that way. Um and so I I did what, you know, I I do best as a as a millennial I blogged about it. Um And uh, and this blog got some attention, uh inside of the federal government, apparently Um, you know, I probably in the halls of the USDA A lot of attention all at once on there. Um on on this collection was it was startling Uh, I know another thing that happened is that I said this thing about the three Images and then you have to uh, you get those free. Um, and so Uh, a wonderful, uh novelty account on Twitter who's completely pseudonymous. I have no idea who this is. Um Who goes by the name real avocado fact? Tweets as an avocado. Um started coordinating people to make, uh, like strategic requests for three Let's see how much of the collection we can get just from people getting their free part. Um, so so actually this had an unintended effect, uh, that They freaked out and they were like, actually, we don't have the free program anymore, which is not what I intended to do. Um, Uh, but this was apparently more attention than they were used to Uh, but at the same time, I also filed another four year request and I said, I know exactly where the files are because I had the digitization report I know exactly what format you have and and where they're stored even Uh, can you just can you just give me the files? And uh, and they did actually kind of one better than that, which is they said We've received your four year request. We have decided to put High resolution jpegs of all of the images online and there's now on every one of the pages Uh, a download link and you can download it's not screen dot jpeg. It's you know palm 000 zero zero Etc dot jpeg and it's a huge Uh jpeg file So that was great That was and you know that could have been a victory, but then I would be giving this talk at future farmers and not at uh at wikikon Because then what I did was I downloaded all of them and I uh, I had to Do a little script to do that. I hadn't done that before. It's like 60 gigabytes of fruit pictures Um, and you know, I completely saturated my home network connection Uh, ran it all weekend Um, and then I had them and then This is this is the part where there's a lot of dot dot dots. I figured out how to upload them all to wikimedia commons This was the hardest part of the project, uh, because a I had to learn Myself to python Um, but b the documentation is is getting better, but it's a little all over the place and so normally you've got the full cooperation of the of the like archive and Here I was kind of flying by the seat of my pants. Um So I used pi wikibot Uh, as I was going along I googled for like a million different combinations of like mass uploading batch uploading wikipedia wikimedia and I found all this stuff Um, and I got it and and I figured it out more or less Um, they are all in in the category and uh, I'm working on um Putting them in better subcategories now and also making them more discoverable uh illustrating articles, um And highlighting the ones I think make the collection special Uh, the collection really is special. Um one fun example was the same week I put at my blog post washington state university wrote about a researcher using the watercolors to Resurrect apple cultivars that had been lost for a hundred years and you know, but but maybe distributed through washington um, just this week There was this slate vault article about uh, the About the collection. Um, it is I think the first journalistic piece to avail itself of the high resolution photographs it it embeds them um What's really cool to me is that Its author appears to not know that I exist which is cool. I don't want to be in the middle of this fruit picture story I just want the public to have you know, that's that's a cool. I'm glad that like somehow the author found out about this um So I think that's really cool I've also had numerous people who teach watercolors teach watercolor painting Tell me uh that they either could have or will be using these as teaching aids because they're beautiful watercolors And they're a hundred years old So this is like the sort of thing that the n al might not have thought about But once they're out there once they're doing their public domain thing They can you know be be thinking like a dandelion and just you know growing a million seeds everywhere. So that's great Um, the usda knows how valuable they are uh with today's growing. This is from the usda Today's growing interest in heirloom varieties and others that are no longer commonly grown The collection is an invaluable storehouse of fruit knowledge and history. I agree They also said oh I said this before perhaps the most attractive as well is historically important of the national agriculture libraries treasures And now you can see it um In order to highlight it. I uh, I finally so this was a very personal project for a long time But the first like outside thing happened with this app palm or not I I Both recommend and request that you try palm or not what it does is it shows you two random images from the collection Uh, it's at palm or not dot heroku app dot com shows you two random images from the collection You say which one is better. I mean we don't like more interesting or whatever and uh, and then there's a leaderboard And almost all of them have been voted on at this point. There have been thousands and thousands of votes I've sat there for like, you know 20 minutes just like all right left. All right, right. It's fun. It's you know beautiful. You get you get to look at them uh, and You know at the same time we'll we'll know which ones to feature highlight or include on pictures There's one green apple picture that is just crushing everybody else Um, and and you know, I wouldn't have found it otherwise uh, so quick lessons um, and then I can I can cut to questions uh Be bold. This is like a you know good policy. Um, I Was inclined to be like well It's a bummer I even had people when I told them that I foy at it be like all right. Good luck getting that You know, you you only get what you asked for so I I appreciated that Uh, cooperation is better. It uh, I don't think foya is uncooperative But it really is nice to have the assistance of people who know what they're doing. Um, which does not include me most of the time uh Tapping into the community was super helpful. I ran into to pi wiki bot issues and Uh, and I would find developers and volunteers and people who every time I tweeted about like not being able to do python I had I had people reply to me and be like, okay What do you need? And that was super helpful. I I cannot overstate that Um, one sort of funny one is that wikis are quicksand It is if you've got a long-term project I strongly advise planning out the steps at which it will be like available for anybody to change parts of it I have been meaning to for a couple of weeks to fix the categories and now it's happening Underneath me and that's kind of scary But but but cool um and then finally Experts are really a thing. Um, I made the very early and totally correct decision to Link every every image to it's like canonical usda page There's stuff that they know to include there's metadata that they've got that I didn't know whether it was important or how to how to reference it Um, and I do think It's tempting to go like well. This should be free for everybody throw it on wikipedia, but also to say And we should incorporate the expertise of the people who know about this and in the case of of the usda Uh, that is definitely more them than me But I've become sort of a fruit pictures expert. So that's been Uh, that's how I spent my summer vacation um So thank you. Uh, I did go a little longer than I plan to but I do have time for questions um, and uh, which I can take at the mic or I can take on twitter or Uh, whatever you whatever you like Okay, yeah real avocado fact, which is a great account has apparently been live tweeting my entire session I made them Uh, I hope that I get good reviews from avocado and then this should dispel any rumors that I Am in fact avocado unless I am like very good at timing tweets or something. Uh, I have the best like, uh The best like ventriloquist like Tweeting while I'm talking Are there any questions does the usda only have fruit collections or are there other collections? Uh, so they actually have uh the the national agricultural library I didn't know anything about before embarking on this They've got some really cool stuff. Um, not a lot of it's digitized and that's you know, the next frontier after this This was and I I don't actually I'm not a fast enough thinker to avoid this pun but this was low hanging fruit in terms of the fact that it's uh, Uh, it was digitized. It was online. It was there. It just needed to get like the you know, just over the But they do have a ton of great stuff and actually I think I was in the I was in the cafe today Of here, uh, and they've got posters agricultural posters Up on the wall like large prints of them And I think those are from the either the na l or the or the usda directly And so there's a whole bunch of stuff. They're really cool stuff and a lot of it lives on air and archive too Um, but you know, I like I like putting it on on wikimedia. I like the idea of people putting it right in articles Any other questions? All right, great. Thank you. I'm gonna go read the live tweets From avocado and uh, yeah, I guess that gives a couple minutes for us to turn over Hello, okay. Hi Great, so this is working. Um Okay, um Should I wait for a couple minutes given that it's like 243 or should just go ahead and start Okay, sure Right, right Okay, I can do that. I'm sorry Yeah, I'm um in my final year at the University of Chicago. I'm a political science major How how how did you tell? Oh, oh well, okay, that would do it Okay, nice to meet you All right Okay, well, um, I'll go ahead and start uh, and then people can kind of trickle in as they do But yeah, hi, my name is Smitha I'm currently in my last year as a political science major at the University of Chicago And this summer I spent three months as an intern with Pritzker military museum and library in Chicago Um, so I was both the rare books intern and also wikipedia library intern and during the course of the summer I realized that my Particular experience with Pritzker was kind of like right. It was a very individual one and I didn't Really get a sense of this big picture of what glam was trying to do and what and had it of what glam was trying to do As a broader sense of mission And so this kind of presentation comes out of me trying to think about the big picture of glam Um, and so to get started Okay, so in this presentation, I really want to kind of address three main questions The first one is what can be understood as this general shared sense of mission for glam institutions Secondly, um, when you look at kind of active student active engagement of student interns How does this either align with or? Or kick further the goals of glam as a whole and then kind of third if glam is considered not just exchange between kind of two stakeholders uh cultural institutions and wikipedia as a whole but as between three stakeholders between cultural institutions wikipedia as a whole And this huge class of student interns How does that kind of change the way that the benefits of this program distribute between the three parties? um, so that's a little bit of a Conceptual question. I'll get to it a little bit more. Um, but basically the way I started is so glam institute like glam institutions Glam acronymizes out to galleries libraries archives and museums, right? um But what I was trying to do and I was trying to get a sense of This this broader sense of kind of the glam project is I went to the wiki education foundations outreach page Where they have a case studies of 30 plus glam institutions and kind of what they've been doing Um, and so what I did is I tried to see which goals these institutions gave for the reasons that they collaborated in this project and worked with wikipedia most often and in the process I found seven They're on this slide and the next I'll switch over. I'll let you take a look at it Um, but I realized that these seven goals could really be boiled down to the fact that these cultural institutions Wanted to share their collection of content and wanted to bring attention to their area of interest Which makes complete sense and is what really seemed to incentivize the participation of glam institutions in this wikipedia project Um, so yeah, there are these five and then there are these two Uh, but yeah, so if you take these kind of as a given as the reasons that institutions decide to become a part of glam Um, what I did is I shifted base kind of and I looked at my My internship over the course of the summer And so myself and also most of the student interns that I met seemed to really engage with With glam institutions and wikipedia beyond that in four key ways through interactions with resources programs people and ideas Um, and so the first thing, uh, what what do I mean by resources? I mean that when I walked into the museum like right this physical tangible place that was The mediation in how I can like start began to contribute to wikipedia I'd walked on hallways that were lined with military posters Um, the Pritzker military museum and library is a military theme museum And they had all of these posters up that had to do with Upping recruitment that had to do with the roles of women in the military That had to do with encouraging the public to donate books to soldiers I spent the summer borrowing books and this was like really the first time I'd engaged with a library that was organized thematically on one particular theme as opposed to kind of every public library that I'd ever Interacted with experienced or even the research university of the research library at my university But kind of the most meaningful way that my engagement with resources happened was through the fact that I was also a rare books intern And so what this meant is I was being sent into the rare books room a couple of days of the week And being asked to photograph these old and very rare books and upload these images to the website's library catalog Um, and so in doing that I kind of handled all of these these really really cool and unique books For example the library has a copy of the field manual That baren von stuben used when he was drilling troops in the american revolution And so kind of being around this type of book being able to turn them over flip through them Was an incredible experience and it made me realize that when Interns and any member of the museum's community can come in handle and marvel at these books The museum's mission is really advanced Moving on programs. I want to quickly talk about the Holt oral history project because most of the interns I met that were wikipedia library interns were also interns on either the rare books project or the Holt oral history project So basically that project looked at conducting interviews with military veterans and asking them kind of about their experiences And so interns were mostly involved in doing research to prepare for these air views Um, some of the advanced grad students were asked to conduct these interviews Um, and then a lot of students were asked to kind of transcribe the audio or video files that came out of these interviews But also again, my most meaningful Interaction with one of the museum's programs was pritzker military presents Which in kind of the second third week of my internship was was my first big like my own article that I was writing on wikipedia And so what this is is since the museum was founded in 2003 They've been having book launches. They've had panel discussions. They've had Interviews with people they've had academic lectures on their premises And the museum's been taking videos of these and turning these videos into episodes for a public access television show that they produce in the chicago area And so kind of a project that had been waiting for someone to get around to it whenever they could Was to create a wikipedia page for this television show And so this was kind of my My entry into the world of conflict of interest and uh, how do I feel about the fact that this is An activity of the museum, but also overlaps with kind of the mission the museum is trying to push and bring attention to um and in Creating these tables and in working on this page, which it's 13 years of episodes So this took me like a couple weeks to get through But on working this I realized that essentially what I was doing is I was creating a catalog That networked the people themes and ideas that the museum had been trying to bring attention to for 13 years Um, so that was that was that was really cool Moving on people obviously, uh, I interacted with my fellow interns and I interacted with terry embry Who's the head librarian at pritzker and she's the person who really serves as supervisor and mentor for the wikipedia library interns Because it's an intimidating overwhelming task to be told. This is wikipedia Help fix it um And so she was the one who kind of sat down with you when you just went Okay, I could do any like number of 20 things and went what are your interests and what are your strengths and what should you start doing to like dip your toes in and she like right you There was very little like yeah, you're gonna start by just like adding oclc numbers or like Copy editing articles. It was like no like find something start And see how it goes because you're gonna realize right like that's gonna help get rid of so many of your inhibitions Um, but also the kind of unanticipated and really cool way that I ended up engaging with people was that through pritzker military presents um I started to hyperlink all of the kind of guests that had been prolific contributors or Who come back to the museum a number of times and whenever a name came up red linked I'd start writing articles for these people And in the process I started kind of following the educational and professional trajectories of all of these These cultural thought leaders and at the point that I'm at in my life right now It's really cool to kind of see what people did immediately out of college what they did before grad school Whether they went to grad school like right like really sooner after a bit and see how a person's educational And professional kind of experiences all really tie into what they end up doing Um, so that gives me hope that gives me hope that whatever I'm going to end up doing next It will be useful and good for me Um, but and then also the level of ideas So because I spent the entire summer borrowing books thinking about them reading them on the buses I started thinking about these and other lofty high high level ideas Um, and so I had conversations about these with my friends with my family And the fact that in the penultimate week of my internship terry said there's this conference in dc You should maybe propose a presentation at it I meant that I kind of curated those ideas a little further. I refined them further I'm here talking about them to you guys My parents in india said they'd stay up and wait and like watch this on the live stream So if you're awake, hi mom and dad um But this this opportunity to kind of report on my internship is one that not very many people get with the structure of most Internships the people who do trading for goldman sacks Don't get to stand up in front of a room of people and say this is what I did and this is why it was awesome This is why it as a program should expand and that's I think a fantastic and really cool experience And so these four ways that I as an intern Got to and managed to engage with my the institution I was at and also wikipedia as a community and a medium beyond that Um, it's something that I think is really unique and really special and can only help guide along these these missions the Six kind of goals that glam institutions put forward So what I've done sorry seven so what I've done is I've taken the seven and I've highlighted in blue The ones that over the course of my internship I can see actual engagement with and benefit from for myself as well as the institution I was at Which brings me now to my third question Which was if glam is kind of a partnership between three levels of people between interns cultural institutions and wikipedia Clearly institutions benefit clearly interns benefit But how can these benefits kind of translate over to wikipedia? In more than marginal ways And so this was something that I initially intended to leave as a kind of an open question But in conversations and in listening to people yesterday. I came to a couple Uh, yeah, um, I came to a couple conclusions. Um, and which is basically that there are two Ways that this is this really manifests one of which is the fact that people who come in as student interns Um, maybe they don't necessarily contribute more than five ten twenty articles to wikipedia But what they do is they come away with an understanding and an appreciation For the value of open source knowledge platforms. They appreciate the ways that information can be Organized stored sourced accessed further understood digitally and they take this into whatever it is that they do next Um, and then the other uh explanation kind of is one that like to me felt a little more tangible and like really interesting Which is that over the course of yesterday and today We've heard so many solutions and we've heard so many kind of Ideas of what the next challenge is for wikipedia as a forum and also as a community of people are And student interns can be the foot soldiers in making these things happen We can be the people who go to our professors and take videos of them explaining things and add videos to wikipedia pages We can be the people that kind of think about and try and help with the problem solving of how can wikipedia strengthen its experience in new and different mediums Yesterday andrew lee said that the fact that uh that that there are high school students Right that have never lived in a world without wikipedia and that's both terrifying and completely awesome But the only way for this to be a thing that doesn't turn at like everything and to write this This futuristic sci-fi dystopian. Ah the machines are at to get us Is if we as consumers remain active thoughtful and engaged Interactors with mediums like wikipedia and with mediums like the internet, right? No one wants to live in the world where the babies that are growing up with iPads and like their jumpers are Right like the completely dumb self-absorbed vapid people of the future We want to live in a world in which we're controlling thinking about and making sure that these mediums that we can use Work for us. So um, yeah, that's me. Thank you so much And um, I'm happy to listen to any thoughts anybody has or any feedback Thank you So I think I've got time for like one or two questions if anyone has anything to say I could probably hear you if you just want Um, so I'd like to say this is kind of growing out of one of our experiments at the wikipedia library Trying to merge the education program and glan wiki and I from your enthusiasm It's it seems like a glowing success And you're not the only intern that's come out like this. So we're really happy to see this kind of stuff happening Let's get more students involved. I think this glam thing needs more students. So more comment than question Well, thank you very much. Um, so I Correct me if i'm wrong, but from my understanding Pritzker's had student interns since like 2013 Like actively like four or five at a time Working on wikipedia Yeah, it's part of the model comes from what they were doing, but the the new curriculum has doubled their productivity Um, so they're creating more edits and more content on wikipedia in there And of course there's stuff and that that has a lot to do with the education programs success and creating preparatory materials like the student trainings and stuff Yeah, so the way my time was allocated was kind of uh was built by the fact that I had a grant from my University for my summer internship. So I had to go in five days a week Like right like a full work day like eight hours a day and so the museum said well, you can't do one thing Right, you're gonna go crazy. So on mondays and tuesdays. I worked in the rare books room and wednesdays through faradays I did wikipedia things And so it was one of those some of the books that I took pictures of inspired some of the articles that I went Looking forward to add content to or to rewrite. Uh, well, thank you so much I took a little different. I haven't seen some of the presentations here. I'm sorry, I wasn't here yesterday, but I was So good to see some of those online and that was enjoyable The uh, context to this is i'm an academic and uh, there is uh Repeated conversation about why can't we get more academic experts to edit and so I thought I'd talk about how I see this um And uh, so this is a little bit narcissistic because it's partly about me and people like me But I think uh, it helps inform the conversation or I hope it will And I've only got about 10 slides. So, uh, I'd be very happy to make this a discussion So I I serve because this is about me I serve as a professor at johns hopkins in infectious diseases and control medicine and oncology and also in health sciences informatics Um, I also carry a vice chair position in some other things and I teach I'll talk a little bit about those things But I interact with a lot of faculty. I see patients Actually didn't get to come this morning because I was seeing an AIDS patient on the ward but But I care a few hats and yet I'd like to see more Expert engagement with wikipedia. I'm just not sure how to make that work for a couple reasons. I'll talk about So I in preparation for this meeting I talked to a number of colleagues and I often have this conversation And I ask people about this and they say no, I've never edited wikipedia Have no really no real intention to try have never really noticed the edit button on wikipedia pages Yes, it is the first content. I see when I search the internet for topics Yes, I do want the public to understand science parenthetically Yes, I am funded primarily by nih and other public funding sources. Yeah, maybe I should edit wikipedia And so we go through the cycle where people come around saying, yeah, I really should do this But getting them to the next step. I think is is the challenge that we all face And we're also not sure exactly how to engage them once they arrive, which is a challenge So my context is I'm a physician caring for patients with AIDS and hepatitis General infectious diseases and general medical problems So I have a fairly broad interest in the content of wikipedia and my patients read it And they come to clinic visits with me with pages from wikipedia and say what about this I'm a scientist and I study viral evolution and the immune response Using computational biology. I'm a teacher. I mentor grad students and postdoctoral fellows. I direct A course in immunology in the medical school. I teach in all four years of medical school I direct a fellowship program And I also mentor junior faculty and I carry a bunch of hats administratively There is a wikipedia article about me. I don't know who wrote it It's it was a little weird when I appeared and I'm ambivalent about it because there are things in it that I don't I wouldn't put that way. I could edit it, but I'm creeped out about editing my own wikipedia page And I made suggestions on the talk page which go Unread largely because it's a low traffic page, which is also why I'm kind of creeped out about its existence Um My context as a wikipedia is I actually recently like less than a year ago created soup vector as a username But I've been editing anonymously for about 10 years And I'll talk some about that never had a blocker ban or anything like that Uh, a few prominent wikipedia's know my otherwise anonymous username And I and the fact that I continue to wish to keep it that way. Uh, james helman is one doc james um And I'm and I remain ambivalent about outing myself with that user name And I think that's part of the discussion that people often don't understand and and there are a couple of ways to explain that one is When you're editing as yourself Who you are becomes part of the conversation Which really I don't think the the thing that I love about editing wikipedia is it's about the content about your sourcing and not about Who you are so that arguments from authority Carry less weight and it's a good lesson for a physician To lose the power of argument from authority because you find out that you actually don't have good evidence for some of the things You believe or at least you're tested to find the evidence for the things you believe and that's healthy So if I edit with my name to the extent that it carried authority that would undermine that goal The other problem is illustrated by doc james experience with medical device manufacturers and others when he's been dragged into real life Drama because of editing under his name when really it was about the content And the only reason he got dragged into real life drama was because he'd identified himself And so I think for people who are visible and especially people whose Reputation is the currency of their career Editing openly is Is is complicated and I think There are good reasons for people to be concerned about anonymous editing And so I think we need to figure out how to manage that and partly develop normative expectations should Experts edit as themselves or not And I don't know the answer to that and if I were to say in my anonymous name that I'm an expert That would carry no weight. I shouldn't that a person shouldn't do that when I'm editing anonymously, but And I don't but uh, then it raises questions about How that person can engage as an expert if they are not Using their potential I thought this article by uh, I think her name's pronounced nuca ferritch Was very useful and if you haven't seen it, I recommend it. It's in the journal of medical internet research Certainly not a journal I read all the time, but but it does set up a nice framework for thinking about why health interested editors edit wikipedia What she found was that about half of the people who were active in wikipedia medicine project Were were Were what she considered experts and she had a an explanation for what that meant And of those she found that You know, they they felt that wikipedia is a worthy project. There was some personal fulfillment um And then uh, there are primary motivations the sense of responsibility obligation the duty to Enhance the world's knowledge, which I think most people in that space. Uh, this is something they value greatly um, they value education and they um Also liked like improving things and so I think all of these things play into why, uh, wp med Uh, participants edit, um But again very few of those, uh, are Valued by the people who oversee them in their positions for instance meaning that Uh, to the extent that an academic is required to do certain things to get promoted or to get ahead in their career Very few of these things as measured in wikipedia can carry any weight that can help them And so this would be entirely as a volunteer, which is not a bad thing But it does make it hard when you have competing demands on your time So I thought I'd make some gross generalizations about comparing the editing of scientific Academic work to editing wikipedia because I think some of these things play into how people Find it hard to enter so The sourcing in a scientific report is primary sources if I were to cite a review article in one of my scientific reports The reviewers would say why are you citing this? This is not the paper that described the the discovery of hepatitis c virus That was that paper from 1989 by chew it all in science You should be citing that original paper because they're the ones who deserve credit and part of this has to do with the way that Impact of articles is measured which is of course by citation and Review articles are seen as a second rate publication for an academic So to cite review articles would really be Polluting the evidence base because you should know the primary evidence and be able to cite that that's the perception in in academia many times And of course if there are other perspectives about this, there are people who are experts here Who should chime in writing a review article or a chapter often the same thing You'll generally cite the primary article not a paper summarizing that primary data Whereas in editing wikipedia, of course secondary sources are considered better evidence And so the writer who comes from the academic world has a hard time Adjusting to the sourcing guidelines, especially with meta rs Because people want recent papers not the classic paper You know, so the the wikipedia article describing hepatitis c virus is unlikely to cite the 1990 or 1989 first few reports that were just You know fabulous work, uh tour de force Uh Projects that people should read if they want to understand this area What they'll cite is some book chapter that is often inaccessible whereas that 1990 report is accessible on the web And so they'll cite some book chapter in a $500 textbook And that's better evidence than the original report that to me is is jarring Coming from an academic setting the language You know the the the measure of language in a primary report or review article is coherence with the domain So you should speak in the language of the domain and uh you use terms as they're used in that domain And it's not language directed to the general public whereas editing wikipedia. There's a lot of pressure to edit for the general audience Um And i'll come back to this, but I think that's a challenge that we could address Uh in a way that would engage everyone The uh measures for authority Um are really coherence and evidence and peer review in the primary literature and in review articles Plus when there's a review article or chapter It's the authority because you are selected to do a review article often or you've been invited to write the book chapter So there's some authority that comes with the person Uh and that's why you are editing that and there's a certain deference to that person to express opinion And in fact wikipedia leverages this because opinions expressed in review articles and book chapters are often used with citation as Uh as support for the same claims in an article And uh so that argument for authority is not as welcome in the scientific report, but certainly Is not something you can do in wikipedia Um and then I put the word consensus and quotes here because I'm sure you all appreciate how uh Nebulous that term is And it's very frustrating for a scientist to come over and uh tried to have a discussion about the evidence And uh tried to understand How consensus is established And especially when there's a sense that you're dealing with a bunch of meat puppets or some other group That are cabal That are uh editing with with a particular agenda or perspective that may not be the consensus in the scientific community The task of writing in a scientific report or a review article or a book chapter is linear you begin You finish Uh once you finish it's on your cv forever Uh for good or bad, uh you have to live with it, uh, but it is there and it's done It's behind you you can talk about it, but but uh, it's not it is what it is and it won't change By by by it's very nature And then Wikipedia on the other hand is never ending and you can go in and you can rewrite a chap A paragraph in an article and just know that that this is wrong. It's it's eight years out of date I I know of articles like this and you uh rewrite that paragraph you hit save it's reverted in 10 seconds and uh Then there's this ongoing conversation about that and And there are a variety of reasons sometimes ownership I think we understand that ownership is a substantial problem on the wikipedia And so this process doesn't end and for a busy person I want to do something I want to check that box be done and leave And the problem is if I leave then people will assume that I just wasn't really serious about that edit And if I don't return to discuss it clearly, it's not important to me. It's not important. It's not valid And it's gone And it's just in the edit history and it won't be resurrected. So there's really no no footprints of that activity, which is frustrating The process tone in in scientific writing is professionally adversarial is the term I decided to use Certainly the whole point of peer review is that there's an adversarial aspect of it because you need that back and forth But it's professional on the other hand editing wikipedia is uh, what is it called? unemployed phd deathmatch Was one of the Descriptions that's been used. I think that's inflammatory, but also amusing. So I used it But I think this the tone of the interaction can be frustrating And so for a newcomer as I watch newcomers try to do this They just are put off by those initial interactions and there's been a lot of conversation on wikipedia about this By definition scientific articles and review articles and chapters are owned by the author to a certain extent And I don't mean in terms of copyright. I mean in terms of content academically and so There's a sense that this is and this has to do with the Other things we've talked about with the task, you know, it's something that you've done Whereas with edit wikipedia, there's really no ownership at least none that we would want someone to feel and also As we talk about metrics for an academic There's no ownership meaning that if you say you edited this article What does that mean? How do you measure that? How much credit do you take for that article? Certainly, there's a relatively new process where articles can be written And brought to a status that can then be vetted by a journal like bmj and some other groups that have agreed to do this Which is very exciting And so that might be another way to do this, but that's a very different process from the general editing of wikipedia that we'd like to engage people in And then the proceed prestige in general of writing a scientific report or review article in chapter is positive General unless you retract it and generally proportional to the impact of the article How many times it ends up getting cited where it gets published that sort of thing and in wikipedia The prestige effect for you as an editor is I would say highly variable Probably mostly negative currently because there's no upside professionally in most institutions There's all risk And so I think this is something that we need to address And I think there are some systematic ways to address that I just think it's a current challenge that should be discussed So again My perspective there are many different kinds of experts in the world But what I do is I write a chapter for This infectious disease textbook. It's the primary infectious disease textbook in the United States And so I write this chapter on hepatitis c I looked to see in this last edition 25,000 words 12 figures 711 references a lot of work. I got zero dollars They charge four hundred fifty dollars for the book. So I'm pretty sure almost no one reads it But it does get cited in the wikipedia article about hepatitis c it's cited eight times Which is one of the reasons I don't edit that article because it would be weird to cite my own work While i'm editing that article and I also write papers on hepatitis c. So I just avoid that topic And then more recently I got asked to write the hepatitis c virus article for or the chapter for fields virology another virology textbook Again, it was interesting the correlation. It wasn't something I wrote these sort of in a clean room because the editors allowed me to do both But they wanted me to start over so 20,000 words 16 figures 710 references amazing one off 455 dollars retail different publisher. So I'm sure that's not any kind of Trust or working the the numbers for the publishers They probably know what libraries will pay But as I said on wikipedia, I avoid editing hepatitis c articles because that's really my area of focus And this illustrates the tension Because if you want an context expert to edit the article, but they're citing their own work with some frequency With any frequency that I'd cite it That would be creepy if I avoid citing my own work That isn't really the way we want to source articles. We want to use best evidence regardless of where they come from And so do you suggest that it's which will be ignored? Do you use you know, it's hard to know how to manage One's own editing when there's a potential conflict of interest obviously signing as myself Would help some because I could explicitly acknowledge my conflict, but then it would still look creepy So there's enough content. I'm interested in that I can avoid that topic But I'm just highlighting that when you're an expert in an area It actually is off-putting to edit that area because there's no clear path And the hepatitis c virus article is a hot mess. I'm very tempted to edit that article actively I'm just trying to figure out how to engage myself, but I think I'll talk about some of the ways that I may do that So things that could help and I'm nearing the end so load up But I think it's important to provide a space where experts can talk in the language that they usually use And I think it's interesting to read the general relativity article, which is highly technical And about 80 percent of the math articles are really technical And that's okay, but if you try to edit a medical article and be technical You get shot down And I think we need to have a space where somebody could do a pair of articles Like introduction to malaria and then malaria Or something like that and have something accessible and something accurate With the with the evidence and I think those two are intention I think one of the reasons for the existence of the general relativity article is it's hard to do an accurate article on general relativity For the layman, uh, those things just don't Jive well, and so, uh, I think we need to develop normative behaviors on Wikipedia that allow for technical articles Paired with general articles as one way to engage experts And I imagine this is happening. I'm I doubt this is a revelation I'm just saying that this is this is a practice that would be more welcoming And to redirect people to that article rather than say you need to rewrite this. Uh, this is wrong You don't know how to write for wikipedia You ignorant slut And then, uh, you know to have a sense that one's credibility would be enhanced by editing wikipedia Because that's partly how academics are wired They're partly conditioned for this because if you're not doing something to work on Uh, credibility, uh, then, uh, you're not going to get promoted. You're not going to survive in academia because your credibility is a big part of what you do Um, so academic leaders need a basis and metric for recognizing wikipedia contributions as scholarship or as service Uh, but right now we just don't do that. And so if a department chair is told by a trainee or a junior faculty member I've been having wikipedia. They'll say stop They will not say good job Because the institution doesn't benefit. Uh, they won't get a grant because they're editing wikipedia. They won't get, uh You know more credible as an author on other papers There's really no way that that's going to enhance their career because there's no database that says this person's a great wikipedia editor In a meaningful way and don't even get me started on ed accounts um So how to balance this then with this ownership problem because if you do edit an article and really feel some real ownership and say I did this one of the things you'll do is push back against other edits to the extent that you feel that ownership and that's corrosive One way to help with this would be for sponsors the nih the nsf Other sponsors to set expectations and say, you know The hepatitis c virus article really shouldn't suck if you are a hepatitis c researcher and That coupling is a problem and you guys in the hepatitis c field need to fix that Because we're paying millions and millions of dollars in grant funds and one of your activities should be to enhance The world's knowledge about this problem And so I don't know exactly how to do this except that we could at least have language coming from the nih And hhs the nsf saying our expectation is that scientists are going to participate in wikipedia because it is the de facto source of knowledge For most of the world And I think that would go a long way toward helping Um regulatory bodies in education We have the amc the american association of medical colleges the american council on graduate medical education Who have all kinds of things that they look at programs to see whether they're engaged in variety of ways with their community and with their trainees If they uh wanted to see language that says we are mentoring these people in the uh effective use and contribution to wikipedia uh that would be uh A significant incentive just to have that conversation have that when you're having your annual review of your program for them to say So how are you guys engaging? in Contributing to open source knowledge and of course they're not necessarily going to specify wikipedia But that would probably be the best place in the most accessible place for people to do this But I really don't think writing a book chapter does much for that Other than providing sourcing for wikipedia This is the other tension if I stopped writing those book chapters and just edit wikipedia. We wouldn't have Uh a secondary source. I mean, of course if I didn't do it somebody else would but but the notion is we need those secondary sources to be generated But we also want people at it and so the other thought uh that I've expressed is maybe What we should do is have a way to At least say We need secondary sourcing on this topic if somebody could write a review or call this topic Then we would have something and it would have to go through peer review But then we'd at least have something because there's just a paucity of sources Maybe in the recent literature or maybe just uh in terms of synthesizing primary knowledge into something that can be expressed On wikipedia because all we have are new in very hot areas. This can be a challenge So I think it's it's something where it would be nice to know that people need that kind of content Finally and I think this might be my last slide. There might be one more Um having a safe zone for inexperienced verified experts and this is a really out there idea But if they're an expert notice board where you could say, uh, you know If you're an expert and if you register somehow if we invited people to say you're an expert in this area And then you have a problem. So you're known your your identity is verified and you're just trying to Make an edit that somebody else can can build out the sourcing get the language right But not have a contentious battle with folks Who may not realize your motivations or your expertise to have someone else come in and mediate and say look You know, this person is an expert. They're not using language properly But maybe we can figure out this content and not make them feel like an idiot Just because they don't know how to use the language and and the combination of acronyms that best Invokes policy so that you're expressing The wikipedia consensus Because there there's so much style in communicating on top pages That is domain knowledge for wikipedia editors and is unfamiliar to experts and then Maybe a way for Editors who are not experts to appeal to experts in an area if the if someone designates kind of like watch listing a page I'm interested in this topic. I'd be happy to answer questions about it Providing a conduit for communication about that so that people could ask questions ask about sources Ask for the language used in an article if they don't have access to it To try to at least engage experts in the conversation about wikipedia articles. I think that would go a long way toward Gaining this trust and one way to do that would be for a department My division of infectious diseases at Johns Hopkins has 60 faculty You know those 60 faculty could cover much of the infectious disease content and that's just one institution If there were a list of people who are available and if one of the things that the NIH would like to see For a training grant because we have a t32 training grant from the NIH for infectious diseases Or something else and say how your experts engaged in this that would be an interesting way to do that And that way they wouldn't have to write the content. They'd just be a source for information Obviously you couldn't cite that q&a as as evidence, but there might be ways to to at least find good evidence and then Um When I write a book chapter historically, I've just published them. I submit them to the publisher the publisher then Gets the copyright I can actually reuse any any image that I've used previously in a paper or anything else or if I and I have to create them So for many of my book chapter figures, I've created them to novo I do them in illustrator and save them as scalable vector graphics and eps for publication There's nothing that would keep me from submitting those to wikipedia comm or wikipedia commons And just have them in the commons and then I say I want to include this in my book chapter There'd be no There'd be no friction there and those images would then be in the public domain Rather than In the book chapter and I'd now have to get permission from the publisher before I can reuse them And their licensing would not be conducive to wikipedia So I think making it super easy for academics to submit their images to commons Just you know, you're an expert. You're you're making a figure will help you Just give me the image and we'll ferry it through and do all the stuff that you have to do It's not that hard for you guys, but it's actually not at all Transparent to the user wikipedia commons Is confusing when you first arrive And so then you could have them licensed appropriately and they could be reused and put in the book chapters Then we wouldn't have so many Figures that that are just wasting away in a book and getting eating dust and then This is more complicated for primary journal articles because if you've put it if it exists anywhere else previously many journals won't accept it They need things to be primary And so that's more complicated unless it's just a summary picture You can reuse those, but I think this would really be for things that are not expected So review articles and book chapters would be the place to gain these figures primary articles. It's more complicated Of course, I try to publish in plus journals But for instance, you know when I've the last open access paper I published it cost me four thousand dollars For a standard article in the journal to make it open access public access And so, you know that money is not does not grow on trees So that's a real challenge for academics to publish in Mainstream open access journals There's a few of them, but they're not growing fast enough. So with that, that's the end of my slides I'd love to chat about these things And I hope this has been helpful. As I said, it's a little narcissistic. So I'm a little self-conscious about that But I hope it's useful Yeah, that was a really excellent talk. I really appreciate it and especially the way that you brought so many aspects of Yourself and your situation and how other people view it. Thank you. It's impressive um, I I think you convinced me early on that Actually getting a lot of academics most of whom are probably not like you to engage in this never-ending labor to actually put content in themselves is Is Not likely to be attractive to a lot of folks What I was what I was thinking of and I and you've really Put it there under expert q&a is Coming back to this notion of how from the keynote the first keynote. How do we Wouldn't it be good to view this as a social network? Wouldn't it be good to To have more than individuals Contributing to have me say, oh man. I'm all excited about who knows Diphtheria and oh my god, you're the expert on diphtheria You would actually talk to me about the wikipedia article and then I could like channel that You know that that seems like a a real good way to match You know capacity for work in the in the volunteers out there with with the experts and I heard this notion I I don't really know anything at all except I heard the notion of Oral interviews as something maybe we can set up a system where Okay, I'm like to schedule a phone conversation with you. Please pull up the wikipedia page. Let's just walk through it Let me hear what you have to say Throw out any sites afterwards if if you have time to do that But I will then take that And and kind of run with it as I have time or interest Yeah, there's not much more more invigorating to an expert than somebody interested in what they Care about yeah, so I think that kind of conversation is always fun Especially if that person has kind of read the article has a sense for what's there And then you say, you know, this is just wrong now One of the things that's going to be fascinating is the expert's going to turn out not to have evidence for what they Believe and so that will be a lesson for them, which is also really healthy And I think that may engage them more in the process I think the low apple for databases for that would be linked in which A lot of experts go in and say or other people say this person knows a lot about x And it would be not hard to map that or you know wiki data has to be public Populated with something but if you could get a link from linked in to wiki data To populate the list you're talking about you could just tag people and say You know according to this and the nice thing is you could publicly Engage that person on linked in in that conversation Right and ask them about the article I like that could we follow up in in in real time in in real life But I mean that would be one way to do this because the person's explicitly Acknowledging they're an expert on something. Yeah, and now you've got the bots involved to help us all out Yeah, I have the bots exactly But that would that would then at least give you a pre-popular list of people who might be Engaged in this topic and you could work the list until you found people and then say this person's actually accessible And the the tag in wiki data could be yes, and they actually answer. Oh my A live one a live one exactly at least for a while till you wear them out Exactly, and then they tell their grad students or whatever, right, you know Well, and maybe you could even meter the time spent You know this person is actually engaged in these conversations and somewhere there could be a record that this person spent two or three hours With me that could be the metric and then those other for the NIH for the NSF exactly this person's engaging Exactly, and you know any other way to plug into existing mechanisms for noting service, you know, but I think You know it almost makes me think of the whole Health fitness data thing What we've got data on wikipedia that would You could correlate with time spent and so on if we had just these tie-ins. So that's great I spend time with reporters from That's for the money Chocolate Tribune or the New York Times just giving a background conversation to help them inform an article And that's time I get no credit for and I do it because I want them to get it right But wikipedia would be something I'd much rather enhance right because they go to ask another question So this um chapter figures thing also sounds I think that's brilliant, you know because right need to put it in their face The question is how do we get into that process where they're thinking you know what? I should put this in a public domain before I put it into a book. Yeah, uh, and that would be easy But once you go to the other path first you've lost it. So I just wanted to follow up on a couple of points you made because I also agree this was excellent and Very very useful to those of us who are more active, you know on the site to How different people in different professions react I I write some legal history articles and sometimes I get it to controversy And sometimes I get it to no controversy And I don't know the problem of anyone else wanting to own my article or or anyone else wanting to read my article I mean, I'll I'll go back and something I wrote five years ago and no one fixed the typo so But and and then you write an article and you you know have 27 people trying to um edit it And I wonder if again the the the dynamic of editing a medical article is different if you're in an Erica area With there's a lot of controversy either within the medical profession or maybe ill-informed controversy among the Among the general public the dynamic of editing an article about hiv or an article about vaccination might be very different from the article writing You know an article about Blood types or how to care for a broken leg Hepatitis C might be somewhere in the middle on that continuum and The other thing I wanted to to mention though is Your comment about primary sources and original sources and of course, you're absolutely right that we need secondary sources We're not going to to found an article upon a primary source being a medical Journal article from 1999 why obviously because you know, we need to know that it stood the test of time And I don't know as a I know in my profession I don't know in yours if you took a sample of articles from 1999 some will turn out to have been seminal In identifying a medical problem a legal problem how to solve the problem how to cure the problem a new discovery Some will be Accurate but secondary sort of on a peripheral point and haven't really built up a literature And some will have turned out to be incorrect If we stopped yeah, if we stopped our sourcing with the primary with the primary source You know a lay reader trying to decide, you know, how how much weight to put on the article How much to trust the article would really be informed that doesn't mean that does not mean we shouldn't cite the primary piece at all For example, and an article is important as as hepatitis c and I'm not familiar with but I have a layman's knowledge For example of the discovery of helicobacter as as the core of core for ulceration Obvious it was the cause of ulceration Obviously and I haven't read the article recently but obviously the article talks about secondary literature and and And so forth But I'm absolutely certain that is as a matter of historical fact it references the original article And similarly if you if you were hypothetically editing the hepatitis c article or some other article You certainly would cite journals textbooks secondary sources Demonstrating that there's a that the consensus of medical knowledge is to a certain effect Particularly if it's something that's you know in any level of dispute But that absolutely doesn't mean that you that you wouldn't and I don't know whether there's a section of the article that talks About the history of the recognition of the disease the evolution treatment of the disease You absolutely would say I recommend that the article would say you the the virus was first discovered by by jones in 1999 and cite the original article And confirmed by smith in 2000 citing that article and then citing the secondary source that pulls it all together So that absolutely you know would be there. I wish your balanced perspective were shared more broadly but With some frequency you cite a secondary source and then Primary sources for details and people say you're over citing this This is unnecessary that secondary source contains this information And they'll just delete those and I've I've seen this over and over again And I think as a point of information as And for for a variety reasons including making this an educational resource, you know for trainees I really want them to go back to primary sources That agree with secondary sources as you're saying it is very hard in medically Related articles to get people to allow Persistence of primary sources and when they go to good and feature article Review those get cleaned out pretty aggressively and again. I think one way to deal with that would be to brand I don't know whether this is something you've tried or the medical editors have tried is to break out a section of the article focused on the history But you know, but there are a lot of details that that are that have historical underpinnings that are worth citing that aren't in the history section and and I just think that the the primary sources have real value and and I forget the commonly cited thing in Wikipedia, but you know, we're not running out of space Well, that that's no real problem in in providing references to the seminal articles for particular observations But it is very hard to get articles long older than five years that are primary And that combination is deadly At as someone who looks at the at the medical articles just as a reader I have to say that doesn't make a lot of sense I mean if I'm writing about the the evolution of the right in privacy, I'm going to cite with homes in war in 1890 I'm not going to start with You know and for historical purposes, you know something that seminal is going to be there, but there are a lot of details I just think this is a tension that that we should Try to balance. There are wonderful Wikipedia project medicine members who will remind people You know, as long as it agrees with secondary sources, there's nothing wrong with the primary source They can be they can add real value But there are some editors who are who sort of go through make a report of all the references and clean out anything older than five years And anything that's a primary reference the only the only other I Inspired plenty of thoughts in my mind. I'll give a talk next year, but The problem I see with the we've been talking about expert validation for years about eight years ago There was an incident. I think it was wildly blown out of proportion where somebody was claiming credentials that They didn't have and I think it was Somebody very a very very prominent Wikipedia said well, maybe we need to have a registry where you know all the experts could verify their credentials So that idea was was shot down and hasn't been heard from since the linkedin idea is interesting I think it'll be vetoed sort of institutionally because linkedin is proprietary. I mean and and not open source in and of itself But the bigger problem is It let's suppose you have an expert who says I'm willing to put, you know, 25 hours into into improving uh into improving A wikipedia article, uh, you may be getting it bona fide expert You may be getting the world's leading expert on the topic You may be getting you know some nudnik who's way out of step on the topic So uh, so that becomes uh, you know with the mind run of experts be You know self-selected in a way that might be might be troublesome. That's my other thought I love the idea, but we need to figure out how to do that. Exactly Thank you. Sure I I think so Yeah He covered some of you know what I was going to get at I think that that um You're part of the problem may be that that even the very notion of what a primary source is and a secondary source and a tertiary source Varies widely from field to field and a lot of incoming people don't understand that our original research policy Has definitions of what those terms mean on wikipedia and all you have to do Is read those and say, okay Well, what I'm thinking of is this kind of source is really this here And then you can actually use a lot more primary sources than you think you can And also it's not that wikipedia doesn't want any primary sources They just need to be used cautiously because people can And frequently do Misinterpret and spin what they say into something else So we want the secondary ones because you know, it's not just secondary sources in general But it's weight reputably publish secondary sources because it's been through You know external brain filters saying this actually matters and here's what it really means And then if you back those up with also here are some, you know You know primary sources from which this is drawn. That's great And I'm you know with you on on on this problem of people wanting to lop off the primary source You know sites saying oh, it's over citation when it's not really and if if there's anything I can do to help I'll be glad to and we've we've talked about this some on on the nor you know talk page and and and the rs talk page but It seems to be there's just a lot of people don't like these policies to to change much And if you even try to tweak them a little bit then there's a lot of reverts and but I think over time and With careful explanations like you give and especially if there's a space some kind of t-room that Integrates more expert editors that that kind of process Of change would go a lot more smoothly But right now it's mostly a bunch of of anonymous editors Arguing you know back and forth and so there's not a lot of progress on this but I've been noticing this for Probably eight years that the most of the problems that you've outlined have not really Improved any And I think that that that's extremely slow rate of change is is a bit alarming So appreciate that. Yeah, I'm I'm with you on advancing that And if anybody knows what the schedule is Please Two minutes. Okay. I'll just talk to you later Thanks all All right Co-founder Sean Evans unfortunately could not be here today But she will be making an appearance tomorrow as a giant project projected feminist overlord head Um, so that would be great Tomorrow afternoon, we're having an organizing meeting for the 2016 editathons Um, uh, just a quick show of hands just a sense of who's in the room Who here has attended Organized been trained at or helped facilitate An art feminist marathon can you just stand up Just so I can see This is like so we got about 50 50 about half the room is His facilitators and half the room Is maybe curious about how we pulled off such a large event For those of you that helped facilitate, please Add your voice to this chime in interrupt us Bring it up in the q&a, etc Um, I want to just say like there's been some great gender gap Uh an intersectional Presentations earlier today. Uh, we are by no means the only people doing this We are not by any means the first people to do this We do think we've done some things differently that have led to Some of the effectiveness of our campaign and we want to share those with you Um, and you can find our outline for our top today on um the meetup page for Yeah, the event page on the wiki conference USA There's a link there that has the pdf. So if you want to see the outlines, um It's all there. Um, so over the weekend of international women's day march 6th to 8th 2015 Approximately 1,500 participants gathered in 75 locations in 17 countries on four continents To edit Wikipedia articles on women and the arts And so during that weekend about 400 articles were created and 500 articles were improved We got a lot of press coverage The new york times wall street journal art news amongst others And this was a really productive substantial growth from the inaugural event in 2014, which drew around 600 participants And created 101 new articles and improved 90 So today's talk is really process based getting into the nitty gritty of how we did what we did And we're just going to share that with you in hopes that you can go out and have similar results So for organizing I think a difference of what we were doing was that we organized around theme and not asset So we chose feminism and art as the subject and then we found a venue Rather than finding a venue and working from their holdings. So, you know, for example It's not like the queen's library said we could host an editathon there and then we go and we edit about queen's history So that means that you have participants who are passionate and like invested in in the subject matter Um, we made an off wiki home base. Meetup pages are terrible It can be really hard to understand if you haven't edited before and you know, you feel uncomfortable with the interface So an easy thing to do is to create a tumblr or wordpress site Um, where you can have this information Um, and for the organizers you should create a gmail because hopefully, you know, your event will be fabulously successful And you'll have a lot of incoming messages and it's just kind of easier to separate that from your personal email accounts Um, so I think a big difference Was that we organized primarily off wiki So a lot of outreach that we did getting people involved was on social media In the past couple years, we've learned that facebook is much better than twitter It was on facebook where I first posted, um, you know, saying that we're doing this thing And I tagged a bunch of friends and I boosted the post Um, and you know a number of events Uh, resulted from that initial message, um as well on our facebook event page that we created this is in 2014 Events came together on the page itself So you have people in portland Tagging each other and saying we should do this Um So hashtag is also a really good idea because it's a way to sort of visualize your community. Um, and in fact for 2015 we Created a functionality for our website art dot plus feminism dot org Where it would pull in content from twitter and instagram that, uh, had the art and feminism hashtag So we could see editors in england and you know across the world That's a wordpress plugin called social hashtags. Yeah Um, and but you know this said you have to be realistic about labor Um, we don't have it twitter because it's also just too much work You know maintaining a really successful social media campaign takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of effort So, um, you have to be realistic about that from the outset Um another way to get people involved is through professional listservs So for us um our co founder and organizer Sean evans is a librarian So she always sends out the calls for participation to the librarian listservs And you know, what is the percentage of events that are organized by librarians or something like 60 percent So this is a very effective way to um get people involved And then personal and professional networks. We sent it out to colleagues to friends To anyone we could think of who would be interested in getting involved Um, and then when you have this group of people using a service like mail chimp to send out, you know regular easy to digest updates Uh in a semi consistent manner, uh is very advantageous And to go back to facebook and having a facebook event that links to event fright This is good for you as an organizer because it's a way to sort of guesstimate Your attendance So if 100 people rcp on facebook actually only 20 to 30 percent of that will show up Um, and if you know the same hundred rcp on event fright, that's 50 to 60 percent So it can help you plan in that way Um, I mean, I think the biggest thing when it comes to organizing is consistency. So both Uh consistency in message and frequency to the participants And then as organizers, you know, we would meet every two weeks In the lead up to events and then you know once a week Yeah, so I think that's very important um, one of the things that we wanted to do in this As we proposed it and as we're in this space We're kind of imagining that it may or may not work in this quite large auditorium with Lots of space between all of you was to do a kind of I mean this was billed as a workshop At least we proposed it as a workshop To do a kind of breakout moment That seems a little diffuse, but mostly wanting to think about what those networks are that you have access to in your You know in your areas of interest or expertise What mailing lists might be available to you? What uh groups like that are a possibility and maybe we can just Shout some of that out or you can think about it and do some research Which would you prefer you want to talk it through now or do you want to move on? Show hands who wants to talk it out nobody Who wants just to move on and keep talking Can you rephrase your question? What are we talking about? Uh, so I want you to I want so your interest. What is your interest in in in hosting an editathon? Oh into getting people to show up. I think this is really generative Okay, so what I'm asking is You're in seattle. Yeah, right What networks in seattle do you have access to to tap into to try to catalyze people to show up? Okay, so What what networks let's just let's talk this through let's think about this. Let's brainstorm this Yeah Perfect example, right? So like you've got you're tapping into so that's about sort of about choosing venue Which we're going to talk about in a second, but right so there's a there's a network based around the gallery And maybe even if you weren't having the event in the gallery, you could still approach that gallery and you could say Hey, you have this network. Can you spread this amongst your artists? Yeah Yeah, um, and I was wondering if that Various conceding obviously, I've only been to the ones, you know, locally And but it did It was a dynamic that worked really well for us And a few people can do how to edit who's generally on but I I didn't wonder if that looked differently San Francisco was pretty unique And that san francisco Both was organized was was attended primarily by experienced wikipedia. I mean, it's san francisco. It's tech culture The foundation is there, etc um, but also, uh, it It didn't have as much Dynamic there's there wasn't as much structured organizing around it. Um, and it's a san francisco is a little bit of a mystery to us San francisco in boston boston also a mystery anyone from boston in here That was our sense of san francisco that's a really that mean it's great to hear that but that was our sense of it Is that there was more experienced people? There was more it was less bringing in newer editors And and the other dynamic at other events was different. Yeah I would say one would think of someone there was able to set up a pink sound so that every time the hashtag Art whatever our hashtag was for the event. Yeah. Anytime somebody in the world was creating a new article for use that hashtag Um, so this is the kind of thinking in each each event's going to take a slightly different shape But i'm imagining that that there's that there's probably some galleries that you could check in with I'm sure that they're you know, like can you get university of washington, you know to uh tag on to this because i'm You know, i'm guessing that that some of the people will have affiliation with udub like how can you do that? Like are there Uh, are there hackers or hacker maker spaces that you can tap into in in washington in in seattle those kinds of networks? um Are what we're talking about right in a more local sense and in a national sense Um, you know, we're we were we were talking about our list, which is a art librarian society of north america List so it's like all of the art librarians, but i'm sure that if you were going to do something about medicine I'm there's got to be an association of of librarians who focus on medical research or there's maybe a medical researchers Uh network of you know conversations that can happen on so that's the kind of thinking that Is really important the idea is that you're not going to bring new people to wikipedia or to bring new people to wikipedia You have to go to where they are because they don't know how to find a meetup page I mean, it's hard to find a meetup page. Yeah, I I have trouble finding meetup pages um so So that was sort of more about General organizing when it comes to the actual events what we figured out is that there's four needs You need to have space If you're going to meet in person, right? We've talked about virtual meetups. Rosie talked about those earlier today um, but in terms of getting people into room To train them. It's also really productive to meet in physical space. It's great meeting some of you who I've you know Uh, eric over there. I've known on the internet for 15 years before wikipedia existed and I got to meet him for the first time today Which makes me very happy Uh, we need space We need knowledge, right, which is specifically We're talking about subject area expertise and there's been some sessions about that We need publics and Much of the time we talk about students, but it can also be a greater sense of publics. For example in los angeles There was almost no students the organizers were not faculty. They were activists and organizers Um, uh and and writers and critics And we need wikipedia expertise Space knowledge publics wikipedia We found that you can usually find these in three people Um, rarely can you find these in two people? It's helpful to maybe talk about our first organizing when we when we were organizing for 2014 a group of us came together Jackie, Sean Laurel Patak and myself were like, let's do this thing and they're like, oh, maybe some other friends might want to do this and so Sean checked in with two librarian uh Two two librarian friends. I'm in chicago. So I'm in here in dc And they're like, yeah, that's that's awesome. Um, the ones in dc had some experience I mean the the dc group here has been doing a lot of organized editing Uh, chicago, they couldn't do it all themselves. They the librarian had access to space has subjectary expertise Um, didn't know wikipedia Had no publics in that regard. So I came in found like three faculty of the schoolyard and said to chicago who could handle some of that and then richard Uh, nipal came in and helped find wikipedians Now maybe chicago isn't the best example because we had the hardest time finding wikipedia in there But that's generally how it worked um Sean sent that email around through arless And we had like a dozen people contacting us jack. He sent On facebook a message to all her canadian friends. She is a dual national and knows people at all the canadian artist-run centers um and tagged them in the facebook and called them out publicly and And uh, and before we knew it, we had all these people that was like, oh now we got to find these other components That's the way we've approached it. You could just as easily approach it from the other end Which is to say, I know all of these wikipedians now Let's go find space and let's go find subject area experts But we do find that you need all of them together in one um, the day of the event, uh, we We rely on a whole range of volunteers and it's important to note the range of volunteers um We really are Grateful for all of the wikipedians who show up to these events whether it's the you know 37th level wizards who can like do all of the awesome things like when we were at MoMA all of a sudden we got the whole the whole Whole thing got blocked because ap we're adding too many times whatever And you know, we had like five people on it and it was like turned off. It was awesome It was you know Richard and some other people solved that like I have no idea how to do that And that's really great like um, but uh, we also Have a really benefit from having people who have 15 edits there Who can help sit with someone who's never edited before and they can show them how to do the basic edit They can show them. Hopefully maybe how to do a citation or add a link So the people with only that tiny little bit of experience are really really valuable Really, it's really important. That's something we learned That's something we learned like we they're the first year We also have non wikipedians who help um a number of the people helped that helped organize at MoMA this year We had to have get you know traffic management and making sure the food came in and going in to get coffee and Those kinds of things really valuable to have people who don't necessarily Have wikipedia experience. Um, but can help make the event run well. This event right here has run really really well And part of that is that there's an excess of people who are helping run it and that's really good So I'm gonna clap again for the food in a second Um librarians and archivists also really really important having them as participants But also having sort of formally designated people who can help with some of the questions of research Now in a one day in one day editathon It's a little unrealistic to try to do research and then execute on it But frequently what we've done is we've had um the librarians or archivists in the places where we're working Actually do some research beforehand and bring out some books for people to work from because you're going to get people coming in with a range of motivations and Focuses so like one person is going to come in and say I am here to write about this person Who was you know, maybe has a conflict of interest? Maybe is notable, but that's really all they care about and the other person, you know ranging to like I'm here Because I want to do this. Uh, I have no idea what I'm doing, but I'm here and so for the you know, these people it's about triaging notability triage and conflicts of interest Ranging to these folks who are like, oh your fear great the librarian has picked these books This is for example moma's modern women, right pick any one of these people and go add a citation to this book With like make a make a new claim based off of the book, right? So it's a really focused Not I don't want to say spoon fed but like there's a very contained thing for them to do Um, and lastly, we have had some really wonderful remote angel editors who've come in and Parachute it in when things get, uh, you know, nominated for deletion. They patrol the pages preemptively. They see what's going on They reorganize things Gobinobo, Marymark Arcabloom Um another believer Some really awesome folks And that's that's just three to come to mind. There's there's many more Langley In terms of the logistics when you're dealing with this many people It's really important to try to get them to either create accounts beforehand or to get all of the organizers to get account creator status that Once you go over five you get IP blocked, etc So, um, we when we do the big one We actually make a list on wiki and we tell all the organizers to put their username up there And then somebody goes in Usually Richard again Richard awesome Um, uh, and gives them all permissions. Those usually get Reverted I think for a lot of them afterwards because it's just a one-time thing Some of them they they persist Um, but it's best to get them to create have accounts created beforehand Um So that's some of the logistics about organizing in terms of venues. It's really important thing about venues. This is a phenomenal venue Um, it has a like this venue, right? It has authority It's centrally located. It's got great facilities Um, and uh, it's got a really really long line that they let us cut, you know So, um, when we were thinking about organizing the very first time we just organized at ibeam Uh, because I have a relationship with them. I was I was a resident and a fellow there for four years Laurel was there at the time. They were willing us to give give us the space. They've got a lot of technology They had a lot of computers. They're centrally located enough Um, and so it was just no brainer Uh, but when it came time for the second one, we thought a lot about where we wanted where we wanted to organize because Ibeam had an in the meantime move to sunset park brooklyn, which I don't know if you know anything But that is not that is not centrally that is not centrally located It's not that they give a space actually as it's been reformatted So we really to rethink that And our actual we we thought a lot about it. What was our ideal space? What was our sort of uh acceptable and what was our backup? In the end, we got our number one ideal space, which was MoMA MoMA is centrally located It carries a ton of authority. They have a lot of space, but they don't have this computers But really think about location because it determines a lot in terms of The uh The ability to get in we also really wanted to have I'm cuny faculty And I could get us Probably well, I couldn't get the graduate center because it's closed on weekends We had to have it on a weekend because otherwise people couldn't come I could get us at most of the cuny I could find someone at most of the cuny campuses We could have gone to hunter we could have kind of john j Um, we could have gone to baruch but to get in there you have to show An id card and we didn't want to have that barrier to entry so accessibility is really important We run trainings all day. We start trainings 30 minutes after the start time or run trainings every hour A lot of people just come and and do the training Just to learn we think that's a valuable experience We also think that in an hour you can get enough of an overview that when you leave the training you go out into the Into the rooms where people are editing and you sit down and you kind of remember what you're supposed to do Because you don't entirely remember and there's a wikipedia at the table with you and you can ask them and they will then Reflect they will that you can walk through it with them Um, and they'll help you as you go It's unrealistic to think that someone coming out of an hour two or three hour training is completely prepared to ready to go But it's realistic to say that someone coming out of a one hour training Can then start making the basic steps with someone holding their hand And typically what we found is that one person can hold about five to six people's hand at one time To make it happen um Food and coffee Coffee needs to be there Uh before the event starts Seriously The food here Superb right We need food to keep people focused you need food and coffee to keep people from getting angry and and You know angry from their caffeine headaches Also, if the coffee isn't there they're gonna leave to go get coffee and they might not come back. This is just people management, right? um That costs money Write a grant. We didn't write a grant the first year. We had 200 dollars from ivy the first year We wrote a grant for the last one We wrote a grant to cover our organizing as well as the event Um And we made a pretty elaborate one because we're having events, you know around around the world But even then we encouraged some of our note events to to to to create their own grants for their own expenses, which they did um I've written A fair number of grants over the last 15 years Uh, just quick show hand who's who's written a grant for the wick media foundation This the number of hands that go up in this room should be much higher I Tell you it is it is the best odds I've ever faced first of all, but also it is The most generous process in terms of a process you propose something You get feedback the grant officers are there to help Direct your prop your proposal and or cut it off at the past It was just not going to fly not waste your time Get you focused And then as you propose it once it's proposed then you get all this comments And you have to change it you get to change it Right, you get to change it you get to narrow it you get to refine it increase things decrease things until it's all basically Tailored into something everyone can agree on right? um If you are organizing an editathon and you come up with a grant proposal I'm not going to say this out. I'm not going to say you're going to get funding But I would say it's it's likely you're going to get funding if it's if everything is together Um, because that's what the program is there for so I really encourage you all to do that Um, sorry seco and marty for telling everyone that they're going to get funding and you're going to go a whole bunch more But you know like you guys should really think about that. Okay. Um, the other approach is to collaborate with a venue to become part of their programming um And they often have some budget for food, but their budget's going to be a hundred dollars 150 dollars for food It's not going to be the kind of money that you need to get a hundred people in there and actually give them lunch Right lunch for a hundred people costs eight hundred dollars a thousand dollars Um computers are really important. You got to make sure everyone brings their computer That seems obvious to all of you who all have your computers out in front of you It is not obvious to your attendees, especially non-experienced wikipedia You've got to say it again and again and again that they need to bring their computers and you also still need to have computers there for them to work on um Big iMacs are particularly good because um, you can sort of work together with somebody else's to a laptop They're also harder to walk away with Not not an insignificant thing um, child care We uh have had child care at all of our events. We have in our grants. We write money right right in child care for the for the note events Child care is really important both symbolically as well as materially We find that more people think that they're actually going to use child care than actually show up But enough people show up that it's still worth it from a kind of Material point of view, but symbolically it is very very important. Um And another thing that's really really important is signing everyone in metrics Like we are in a data-driven society metrics become important It's how you justify blah blah blah those of you who have had to Deal with that aspect of the wikipedia foundation. That's what that's a lot of what matters, right? You can't do that unless you have Usernames have everyone sign in that's really important um We have people going around constantly checking with people making sure they're signing in Again at an event like maybe the san francisco one where you have experienced people You don't have to do that, but when you have many more new editors you have to do that um Along the same lines when we when we encourage all of our events to have a major d at the front To do sign in check in give them name badges all that Um, but we also at that point triage the attendees and give them accounts And by triage, I mean we check in with them and figure out what their level of expertise is and you can you can just sort of say Like there's this very simple like so Are you an experienced wikipedia? and If there's even the slightest hesitation. Well, that means yes, right? That means that they have Done 20 edits or 30 edits or 100 edits, right if they're like That means yes, okay? So, um, I remember having a conversation with Kimana Gallardo and she came in the very first time at our 2000 fortune event Who's now one of the, you know, organized. She's on the board of wikipedia nyc. She does a lot of great um education organizing And she came in and she was like, well And I was like, yes, I know you I know, you know what you know the basics You today are deputized your job is to help us because we got totally overwhelmed with how many people showed up We thought 30 would show up. We had like 100 I thought 10 would show up And if they say no solidly near way then you ask them do you have an account right if they have an account Then they send them on send them directly to the training if they don't have an account You make them an account send them the training send them the training immediately They'll sit through the second half and stay for the next the next the start of the first half um It's really important in all of this that you frame um It is a really welcoming environment We've had at our events in new york and in some of the events in other places issues Uh of safe space or safer space um people shamed or felt made to feel uh inferior for not having edited before for not knowing basic policies um for uh Things like that for for for for being for being female or female identified um and It expresses itself in in a variety of ways all of which are awful And one of the things that helps is is making it very clear at the start Like we give everyone a handout that says what the safe space Uh So the policy is but it's also, you know letting you know that's not acceptable Um It's really important In terms of training We we do a variety of different kinds of trainings Um, we do trainings leading up to the event which we're called we've called train the trainers Which is we're happy really happy that other people are adopting as a model Um, there's a variety of people that need to be trained. We need to train The people that are helping us that are volunteers that want to help out We have to train the um Uh, we have to train the um We're going on we're going along aren't we? Yeah, yeah, we're going along. We'll just say there's a lot of training We can talk about that. I'm going to pass the pass to jackie about press. Oh, I think you have to make that point Oh, right. There's one really important point that maybe is controversial in this context, but controversial Yeah A good teacher who knows nothing about wikipedia Is better at giving a training than an expert wikipedia who knows nothing about teaching Mike job Okay, so i'm going to try and Nerd uh, i'm going to try and go quickly through uh talking about press and communication strategy Which is very important for a successful event So you want to make a pre-event press release Feel free to review ours as a model or even if you google press release template template You'll come up. It'll show you basically what you're supposed to include, you know, venue location date times all these things Reach out to the signpost the wik media blog to see if you can write a post about your event A really important thing to do is to identify your press targets So an example of this, um, it's really important to do your research So from the other part of my life where I am curator Um, I was organizing a show in toronto and before I went because I don't know a type of people in toronto Um, I researched what local writers had written about the artists in my show in advance And I made sure they got the press release and then I followed up with them individually Um, everyone gets a million mailing lists. So it's really important to have personal contact with people Um, so basically you're looking for writers who have written on similar topics wikipedia beat writers tech blogs that kind of thing Um, and so like I said, you should reach out directly. You can do this email. You can do this on twitter You can tweet at someone. Um, or What I like to do is put the journalist's name into facebook and see if I have any friends in common with them because that's You're more likely to get in contact and have someone write about your Your project if it's, you know, a friend of a friend And you also want to make a post event press release Um, and in this it's important to include numbers and a few quotes from participants So like how many people participated? How many articles were created or edited? Um And for the timing of these things you want to send a save the date out to your community as far in advance as possible So letting them know, you know, where your date and venue the date of the event what the venue is going to be and ask them to You know participate as well And for the press release that should go out three to four weeks in advance Um, and it's really good if you can get uh, you want to do pitches as well to Outlets that have calendars like time out in new york or something like that It's really really really good to get on a what to do in town this uh this week listing We've found that we've gotten a lot of foot traffic from them Um So you should resend the press release One week out and the day of the event to your press list and then send out the post event release as soon as possible And so now for talking to the press Which can be difficult It's really important to have talking points and stay consistent with them And I learned the hard way that a journalist will pick your worst line so you should stick to the script That's really important You just want to like have some cogent language available about like why you're doing what you're doing why it matters Why people should come and how they can you know get involved and take uh take charge and you know participate Even if they're not in your city You will save your time yourself a lot of time and frustration if you make a press kit So including like web ready and print ready images Resources for the press so they don't have to go out and research You know you can provide the research for them FAQ your press release texts organizer bios and some kind of like History or narrative of your project and why you do it And and we say it's really important as well to keep a private Like FAQ for yourself and your fellow organizers Because we've experienced that the press wants special treatment They always want to think that they're getting like a a line that you've never given to anyone else But that is exhausting Especially when there's a lot of press So conserve your energy by reusing snippets so anytime we answer a new question We put it in a google doc and then you know review what you've said in the past and sort of like come up with new lines from this text Um, you know, it's it's a lot of work In 2015 we had six people working on the communications and press for art and feminism So Don't underestimate how much time and energy that takes Do you want to Um, I think that we would you know I think one of the your tasks if you're thinking about this is to actually do some research on what the writers are I think in the interest of time we did start about 10 minutes late Um, but we do want to leave a little bit of time for q&a We just want to identify a few things that we're changing. I mean, this is a process of becoming Um, one of the things we're doing this year is we're implementing project management software and using a crm Which is customer relationship management software. It's like sales force. It's stuff that you use to sell people stuff Um, but what it really does is it allows a variety of people to Triage incoming emails track communications because when you've got communications last year we had at one point we ended up having 75 events, but we had a spreadsheet that had 105 110 events with different people on it And we'd have meetings and we would spend an hour just being like, okay So wait where we are and all of this stuff So we're trying to triage that especially as we project maybe 50 growth year year on year Um, that leads to sustainability, right? We one of the biggest issues that we talk about You know the conference last year that one of the keynotes was about volunteer burnout and and sustainability of of volunteer labor We needed to we learned we need to reach out to international chapters way earlier. We had a couple of snafus With countries that shall not be named Um, some of whom just mostly ignored us others got very upset that we were contacting them so late like Six weeks out And others that just needed to Have their sense of territorialism Massaged for a long time until the muscles relaxed Um, this is all being recorded. This is being recorded I did not I did not name no name no names And lastly we're doubling down on safe space. Um, we had a note in california that had an incident where One of the organizers was kind of harassed and there were people that kind of came in Experience wikipedia's who wouldn't sign in wouldn't give their name sat there listening Waited to see what people were working on and then went back in and started Questioning and flagging all the things everyone was working on So we're going to be doing a little bit more safe space safe space slash safer space training We're going to be talking a lot about intersectionality Um, and those are those are sort of the forward things So technically we we have 10 minutes left based off of when we started But we're late into the next session. But do we have some questions? Yeah, if you want to grab the mic. Yeah Oh one thing March 5th Oh, yes March 5th, 2016 is the moment date March 6th is the lack mandate. So it's that weekend Ideally what we've seen is that universities tend to organize on fridays when students are still in session And faculty can actually strong arm faculty into coming in And then saturday and sunday that weekend And yeah So get involved So I have some really basic questions because I've never done one of these or been involved with these But I have a space. I have a venue. I have computers. I have a librarian me Um, what I don't have is um experience wikipedia or any idea what I'm doing So is there a handbook or like a basic page or a mentorship program that somebody can Help me through the steps or something like that going on all of the above very excellent organizers kit that you can download from our website art dot plus feminism dot org Um, and we have started a sort of ambassador program Um, it's you know, we don't have as much coverage across the world as we'd like but we're working on it And it's people who have organized a forum who can help Um, you know with those details of like, oh, this person's really good and they get the gender gap And they're a great wikipedia to work with and we welcome those of you who are not involved who are interested in being involved to uh become ambassadors Which really just means I'm willing to come and be an expert wikipedia At one of these events and help this move forward Now is there somewhere like You have somebody who's willing to do that remotely because i'm in the middle of nowhere compared to y'all florida There's someone in roland's park Winter park winter park. Oh really? Yes. Um, oh that is last year But here's the thing. Oh, yes. I would like to be in touch with them. Excellent. Here's the thing Here's the thing you have expert level wikipedia knowledge. Yes. Yes, right 10 years Somebody at your school who has subject area knowledge Yeah, yeah, and can get a public there Right, and I think that what the question is is about how to organize how to structure one of these events Right, exactly. You know like that's built in that's baked into the organizer materials A lot of these organizer materials and we're also and and many people in this room also who've helped run these events are here as resources Excellent Thank you Any other Um, I had the sense From urals rapid, which I think rapid growth, you know But there was an activist Kind of mentality behind this and this is something that people on wikipedia are kind of allergic to as activists traditionally And it it kind of really empowered me to like push back on that because I really feel like it's important Like we have done networking before with people academics and people who like to sit around and talk about In theory the idea It's a great idea for wikipedia to work together with academics But I felt like activists actually go out and want to do things And so I feel like it's a really good space for us to be working and I I think as wikipedia's we should really embrace that and push back on the community that's Afraid of activists afraid they're going to come in and write too strongly from a point of view because if you know If if you have good people like you all running the sessions and it's based on referenced work It all should turn out fine. So I think that um, I would encourage people here to To to embrace it and do you have that same sense that you do have activists involved? Uh, yeah, it's one of the things that jackie likes to say is that Is it feminism is the radical notion that women and men are equal? No, but you it's somebody else's right? That's someone else's but you say that all the time No, I say my line you fuck it My line is that utopia is no place utopia is processed. You also anyway, whatever It's radical, but it's not radical, but it's not radical. I mean, that's what I mean to say I think the reason we haven't been attacked in the way that maybe other projects are is because at the end of the day It's super nerdy work. Like we're adding citations to like, you know, 16th century painters of flowers like And as well that you know I Why I think art and feminism has been really successful is that it does both really concrete work of you know Creating and editing articles But as well it creates a space and a platform for a more speculative discussion and for people to think through The issues around being female online and who gets to write history And you know, how do we can we have a radical encyclopedic project? High fives Wickey women's user group next steps. I am rosie stevensson. Good night. Otherwise known as user rosie step I'm sydney poor otherwise known as user flow night, which is short for Florence nightgown Because nursing Yes, and I'm Emily tumble would otherwise known as user calana All right So we're going to talk about next steps and the first thing i'm going to talk about Is to say that we are this close to having a dot org Domain name It's being created for us as we speak and once we have that created We're going to be able to put out our mailing list Yay Yay Now I don't have experience as a moderator or creator of a mailing list And so i'm going to fall on some of the folks that we have here to assist me with that There's one or two names that have come to my attention as people i'll be reaching out to and so If I send you an email I've announced it right here that I might be doing that Agenda Okay, we have an agenda. Yeah, okay. Well, I mean What a large part of why we're here is because the group got formed and We're really just now finding our legs. It's a way to say it right now And we've actually done stuff already you collaborated with other people who are doing things But we really have not you know Got it going so this is this opportunity for us to be here together So we have a list of items of things we wanted to Do and we want help getting them going and plus advice so one of the things that Is near and dear to my heart is the safe space or the friendly space policy And we are planning on having that on our work area on On meta and if you don't know that already fairly recently within the past few months The grants program put a friendly space policy into place there on Wikipedia servers on meta and the world did not come to an end So I feel like that, you know, we can take this and we can adapt it to our use I think it won't take a lot of work to do that And I would really you know, we're not in a great setting for the you know any video to get picked up but I would like people's feedback on that and plus I would love people to Volunteer to come in and help support that concept if they do support that concept So I kind of kind of a show of hands who here is on board with us doing that and would support us in doing it That's good. I got plot that Okay, so um, if you're not familiar with the grants one I'd go ahead and read that and you know, and we'll we'll put it up Like anything else we'll take feedback for a short period of time before it will be finalized and then we'll finalize it So feel free to give the feedback on that Oh Okay, so the next thing we need to talk about Is having a plan Of some kind for where we're going with this group because as Sidney said, we're just getting our legs We want we we have some ideas about where we want to go with activities with meetups With online events, but we want to hear your feedback And eventually we want to Create an annual plan and apply for a grant as one does as a user group To fund all of these activities The one that I want to mention as a flagship would be the diversity conference Which will be happening right here in january And we want as many representatives from Diverse areas as possible But any feedback that you guys would have for us on Activities that you want to see or things that you want to participate in Um, we would appreciate that as well Um, yeah, I feel like that you know coming in I think part of this will be Pro-ortizing, you know, because you know, is anybody that's starting you do have capacity issues And so we can't promise to do everything and do it well And I think that as we begin asking for money to do things they want people want to know that we're You know being successful in what we do so there will be pro-ortizing So we really would love to have you come to the wiki woman's You know user group page on meta suggest ideas and we'll get you know a group of ideas together And then we can you know prioritize what what we're going to do um Is there anything more you want to say about that in terms of you know I guess there's there's the distinction between things that are that can just be purely done on wiki that don't really take Extra planning and aren't events. I mean we can we really can probably have a much larger capacity to do those If there are people that are interested, but you know, we're thinking in terms of along the lines of things like participating in the diversity conference You know helping support events like the art plus art plus feminism, you know having a whole of you know a Sin of the day I can't think of the word but a whole series of different types of things like scientists like I love scientists Right, you know, right, you know engineers architects. I mean there's a long list So, you know like putting those together and so if if you come forward and say yes You know, we really really want to work on on architects, you know Or whatever then we as opposed to us trying to go out and recruit people Then we would make that probably be more of a priority. So that's the kind of feedback we're wanting, right? We're beholden to you all It's not like it's the three of us being like, oh, we're dictating things. That's not how this works So any feedback that you have for us? um Is deeply deeply appreciated because we want to do what you want to do all right, so is there so sorry I was going to say I'm going to build on um what Emily and s- knee have said that Though this project was created in the english language It is by no means limited to the english language speaking world in my mind. We need to look at this from 60 000 feet And invite anyone in any language who wants to participate and um at their page in their language If they wish to or just communicate in in a foreign language on this page and someone can do that translation So that this is an international um Meeting of the minds and the synergy we can get from that is going to be far greater than what we can do Just in the english language world so We welcome you if you speak a foreign language to talk to those Others who do and invite them to join our membership list has people in foreign languages and I think it's safe to say that There's a new group a sister group um wiki moharris That is doing the same thing as us that will be um if they haven't been approved yet They will be approved as a wiki group pretty soon. Maybe Later this month. They're doing exactly what we're doing They're the sister organization of us and we look forward to having other languages Do take that same model and make it work for them so that this can truly be an international collaboration of people working on wiki women So we want to hear your feedback All right, so here now if anybody have any particular Areas of interest projects that's the question. Yeah, they've already be getting you know Already are working on that they would love to loop in with us. Um So we can kind of Can you keep microphone so we can I'll hear you? Okay, I'll speak really loud Yeah, we want to have volunteers for now. Yeah, you know, we've we've talked about this I mean we we've thought about you know, we you know the grants program is being re-enraged right now and there will be um, you know the simple Annual playing grants we anticipate sometime, you know With maybe a year or so or or maybe even sooner going through that process But at this point in time, we're still interested in doing Um, probably events, you know get event funding right now. Um, I think we want to see where the interest is Uh, how much support we have to really assess what we're going to need and go from there rather than building the structure and then trying to You know find the people that want to come volunteer you want to do a bottom up. Yeah other questions I just quickly wanted to ask if uh, is your mailing list going to be set up on the wikimedia lists serve Or no, it's not No, it's not it's being um It won't be on that it'll be elsewhere Okay, good. Thank you I just give you a data point that uh, sometimes i'm the only person working on the cleanup queue uh, specifically working on the cleanup queues for the wiki project orphanage, uh orphaned articles queue and I go from there into, uh, women writers Uh, women's history women scientists, and I think there's one other So, uh When you do massive article generation, then there's there's a lot more to be done So there that might be a tool for you to actually improve quality Would be to consider organizing some events, uh, taking advantage of the the cleanup pages That's a good idea having a cleanup drive of some kind And that could be something that women in red does too. Yes per our earlier Talk by rosie. I know that someone yesterday brought up the concern about backlash towards a private gender oriented mailing list But it just occurred to me that since it is going to be a registered recognized user group Besides for all of the private glam and education mailing lists Every single chapter has their own private mailing lists also Indeed they do. Thank you I apologize if you've covered this already because I came late, but are you going to have a blog or something like that? We haven't gotten that far It's a good idea. I would encourage you to do that just to you know to put out your own analysis and and Hope hope to see it get picked up else, you know in the in the press Yeah, I think that's a great idea. I think blog and also a facebook group Is well, yeah, we haven't we have not taken that stuff yet either I think both of those go hand in hand and we know how important our reach on social media is So we we will be engaging in that and we have we have experience doing it. We just haven't Gotten going yet, but I'm glad to see that that's something that people want. This is our first Meeting since subsequent to organizing our group out with mania and so we're very glad to be together And we're glad for your input as you watch us grow from from just the very starting days Other questions thoughts comments Words of wisdom I think that's all of our agenda. Oh a logo. Yes. If anyone has suggestions for a logo too. Oh, yes We have one more question and then yes, we need to hit I just had a comment if anyone is interested in following legislative issues um I've just started looking into some of that if you're interested You could see me when you go out and put your give me your contact information I think if you're able to add to the talk page for wiki women's user group on on meta Said that might there might be some interest. No, okay Thank you I'm not quite sure what words I want to use for this but one thing that I found Very helpful for my own work You know in for my own Feminist activism Has been to be incredibly inclusive in what my concept of gender is And to not just focus on women, but expressions of gender and you know across the spectrum So to really be trans inclusive, of course and be at which it is but to be very explicit Yeah, about that that component and our friendly space language once we get it all Settled out will definitely include explicit language about trans and non-binary identity inclusivity Yeah, yeah, we don't big thumbs up and everything for that. Yeah. Yeah anybody else Okay, um, we do want to talk about a logo because we need a logo There what sorry? Oh, no Um Yeah, um, oh, yeah, but we do need something Logo ish, so we are accepting requests or not requests. I get suggestions So if we have any designers out there, yes, we welcome your suggestions. Yes Um, and maybe perhaps something that's not pink And something that's not culturally appropriate. It would be really nice We would we would appreciate that And really all in all and we would love to just have everyone that's in the room, you know visit the wiki woman's user group page Yes, please and kanai and you know Help us just keep it fresh and active and and with new ideas and projects link us to people that you Awesome people that you know, we're doing awesome things Tell us about projects projects that are happening so that we can you know be sure to Act as a multiplier for those and get more people attending and more people participating There's a large part of what we will be doing will be not just our original ideas of the three of us But also just helping over anyone else do something really well And this weekend we've already been able to hear about some people that are doing some really great things And that you know, we can Help people repeat those and spread the word really on what they're they're doing Yep, we don't want to be stove piped We want to connect with you and the different things that you're doing just let us know what those are Yeah, let us know how we can help you And when we have a blog and such we will let everybody know on the meta page so that If you want to contribute we would love to have as many voices as possible contributing Do we have any other questions? I hear cricket I thank you for your time and for joining us Not this last session. Yeah, so thank you so much