 I'm very pleased to introduce to you two gentlemen today. First on my far left, Professor Gerard Gogan is a professor of media and communications at the University of Sydney. He has an international reputation for social justice and disability activism. His research focuses on social, cultural and political aspects of digital technologies and how they affect disability and accessibility. He's published 20 books and over 170 journal articles and book chapters, and is a board member of the Disability Studies and Research Institute. And his Wikipedia page is way out of date. I promise you, Gerard, it will be improved by the end of this conference. He's recently returned from Singapore. He's back at University of Sydney and it has a whole... Anyway, it needs updating. Graham Pierce probably needs no introduction, but I will anyway. He is a Wikipedia rock star. Graham made his first edit on the 17th of February, 2005. He corrected the spelling of kananara. It has two n's, not three. Since then, he has made more than 258,000 edits across more than 147,000 pages, has himself created more than 14,500 pages, and, importantly, he has thanked more than 2,700 people, WikiStyle. He's a founding member of Wiki Blind User Group, and his own user page is full of barn stars and thank-yous from fellow editors, which, as we know, says a lot. So I'd like to now hand you over to Graham and Gerard. So just thanks again to Bunty and to Frances, and it's a great pleasure to meet you, Graham, and so I suppose I just wanted to invite you to tell us a bit more about yourself. You're obviously well-known to some and many here, but could you tell us a bit about yourself and how you came to Wikipedia? I'm Graham Pierce. He's an Graham 87. I'm totally blind. I was born... I became blind because I was born 15 weeks premature. It's called Resonopathy of Primiturity. You can Wikipedia it. I've always been interested in correcting people's mistakes, and if I'd get work brailed out for me, I'd find all the mistakes and want them to be corrected. So Wikipedia was kind of a natural fit for me when I'd finally discovered what it was. I first found Wikipedia through a copy or mirror called thefreedictionary.com, but it took me a few months to realise what Wikipedia actually was and that I could edit it, and once I started editing it, I was hooked for it basically. That's great. And so can you tell us a bit about also, maybe, you know, the technology you used, or the technology you used initially, and also the technology you're using now when you, you know, get about and edit Wikipedia? You mean the technology I used when I started on Wikipedia? Well, yeah, I would be quite interesting. I have to out myself because, actually, one of the areas I'm really interested in is internet histories, and actually I started an academic journal called Internet History, so I'm kind of interested also in how things progress. So I would be interested to hear you talk about early days in terms of using the technology and then what you do now. I guess we don't have all day, but I first started on the internet in the late 1990s at a computer club at what was then the Association for the Blind. I didn't get home internet access till the year 2000, and by then we were using Windows 98 and Internet Explorer 5. And I've always used a screen reader called George, which makes a computer talk to me. And now I use George with Chrome, which probably some of you would be familiar with. So what Bunchy might do now, and Josh might do, is just play a clip from Think A Peace You Did With SBS. Because I'm blind, I use, I think, a screen reader that makes a computer talk to me. I've been using this sort of technology since I was about four years old. I just practised so I could listen to it at a very high speed. So somebody's obviously had stuff that they shouldn't have to be article. Every day I probably spend about four to eight hours in Wikipedia. Sometimes more. So I think the idea of that was really so that, Graham, so you didn't have to get your kit gear set up to actually replicate the sounds of what you do with the screen reader in your computer as well. But tell us a little bit about that set up that you have as well, because you've now got a quite small computing device that you work with. It's a thing called a NUC, or Next Unit of Computing, Next Unit of Computing made by Intel. There's sort of a bit like MacBook Air. They're very small. It's box with a computer in it, and you connect a monitor, I don't need a monitor, but you can connect one, or a keyboard, or headphones, or whatever you need. Great, thank you. Unfortunately, I think it doesn't power. It has to have the one you've got needs power, so we've got this venue that's a bit trickier. So can you tell us a little bit about how you started to approach Wikipedia. I think it was covered a bit in the clip, but just to tell us a bit about how you really started to start to edit in Wikipedia and then sort of progressed to become an administrator. And the kind of things that took your interest, it's really interesting to just hear a bit about what really drew you to it. Yeah. The first things I started to edit were actually a list of interesting or unusual post names, as Spunty was according to in the intro, where I was fixing a spelling of the count of Kananara. And then I edited random things I studied at school, or just really completely random things that took my interest. One of my first edits was about one of the hottest towns in Australia called Marble Bar, because I'm obsessed with... One of the things I'm obsessed with is the weather and meteorology. And I added in the exact dates of the record run of high temperatures there. And so I had the reference as well, which is very unusual for 2005. And I really hit my stride when I found what's now called the typo team, where people got ranked right in typos. And I just found that really interesting, reading random articles. I corrected the typo, but people would spell Portuguese without the U. And I found all sorts of interesting articles about like a famous female racing driver, all sorts of random things about... and how to do a Portugal and Portuguese. And I just got hooked in from there, really. And so what happened then? Was it partly that, as well as just having that opportunity to work with things that you were curious about or found interesting, that were you... Was there something about sort of seeing that resource and feeling that it was incorrect or there were problems with it that you were keen to then work on and then eventually become a custodian of? Is that part of what sort of animated you drew you to it? Yeah, I think it just happened organically. Like, yeah, I would add... On Wikipedia, a lot of regular users have a thing called a watch list, a list of articles they keep an eye on or an ear on, in my case. And I just had any article that was interesting, really, and it just built up and built up until it was very substantial. And what was the shift like when you then moved to being an administrator? Did you find that kind of shift in going to that? It wasn't a major shift for me, but the biggest problem was always new buttons that were kind of in the way, like a rollback button. But that's a problem for science people, too. Yeah, I don't... Actually, when I became an admin, that's when I started getting really into Wikipedia archeology or wiki archeology. Right. Yeah, and can you tell us a little bit more about wiki archeology? I mean, for the non-initiated, what is that, and why is it important? Well, on Wikipedia, every edit should ideally be saved in what's called original history. And Wikipedia archeology is like looking back through history and finding things about when the article was made or sometimes I do a history emerge which basically fixes attribution errors. So you can see who actually wrote the article properly. And occasionally, there's times where history was missing completely because it had been deleted years ago. One of the most notable gaps is actually the article about the Italian mafia, of all things. Quite a sec. So, I mean, this kind of works really crucial to the sort of integrity, right, of Wikipedia in doing this kind of restoring and going back through to make sure this is complete record. Yeah. Is that the kind of stakes in it, in a way? Yeah. Yeah. And one of the things that you've got that you've got some sort of more public attention for is trying to stop and intercept vandals. Can you tell us a little bit about, you know, that kind of the ways in which that's come under your radar and sort of the things you've done around that? A lot of the articles on my watch list are not subject to I'm interested in. They're the subjects where I've found vandalism that's lasted for more than a couple of days. And sometimes I just find it by reading. Like, I remember one day I was reading this article about, I think it was the term neurosis. And it said, this term was coined by Hannah Johnson in the 18th century. And I was thinking, that'd be really unusual to have a woman doctor in the 18th century calling a term like that. That sounds a bit sus. So I looked in the article history and yeah, it had been vandalised probably a month or more before. And I went to fix it. It's been on my watch list ever since. And what, I mean, do you have, what's your sort of theories, I suppose, or ideas about, you know, why does the vandalism occur? I mean, what, what's, you know, attracts people to kind of doing this kind of thing, is it just mischief and, you know, being able to play around and trick people? Or what do you think sort of lies behind that? Most of the short term vandalism is probably just board school kids, aren't we? We've got nothing better to do. The longer term stuff, like the boy band vandal you heard about earlier, that I don't understand, but people are obviously lots of people who do it. Yeah, I mean, maybe that's part of a sort of broader, whether it's a like a pastiche or satirical or other ways that people maybe take things and remix them too. Yeah. Maybe it's part of a continuum or something like that, yeah. Interesting. Well, I wanted to just ask you, I wanted to just sort of shift direction slightly and just to ask you about maybe from your experience and the work you've done as well around questions of accessibility. Because obviously with, I suppose with the web and with things like projects like Wikipedia, I mean, one of the issues, and I imagine one of the ones that's animating this conference as well is about the accessibility and inclusiveness of it. So for say, for people with disabilities and a range of other people, I mean, how accessible has Wikipedia been? I think it's reasonably accessible because there's a standardized way out but there is always room for improvement. To sign up, you need to fill in a capture and the only way to fill it in is by looking at the picture. There's no audio alternative. And looking at diffs, I've found a way around that but it's a bit interesting sometimes. Yeah, so I mean, can you tell us a bit? I mean, I suppose because one of the advantages that Wikipedia's got is being, you know, associated with web and internet where standards have been worked on. Can you tell us a little bit, I mean, more about, you know, some of those challenges and the ways in which, you know, you've either been able to shift the needle or the community has dealt with those? One of my most famous or infamous work of that was in 2006 when, for example, Wikipedia had come up with a new main-page design which it still uses for its home page and the problem was the initial design and I didn't have any headings in it and blind people rely on headings to navigate a page and I complained about that and they've put the headings back for me. So it was something that's fairly easy for people to take some sort of corrective action on that case. And what, I mean, in the next, I don't know, five to ten years, what kind of challenges do you see or that would need to be tackled in terms of accessibility? I think the most important is a much more accessible capture. I don't know if this is still true but I remember reading the capture it's also only in English, not in any other language and that's problematic as well. Yeah, it's, yeah. I mean, it's an interesting thing with the capture because I think people have been trying to work to get some change in action for quite a while but there seems something around, and ironically around identification, right, just verifying people that that's a huge blockage where it's increasingly now, whether it's Wikipedia or across different technologies, that's really become so critical, I suppose partly because of the hackability of systems, right? Oh, yeah. Another kind of question that I was interested in, I think, might have wider resonance as well is about within, say, Wikipedia itself in terms of the actual content and material. Is there a kind of movement about as there has been, I think we'll hear in the next session around, say, and we heard earlier today around the sort of diversity and the range of representation and inclusion. Is there a movement around disability representation with Wikipedia entries? And what's the state of play in that? I mean, I work on other areas of media where people are pretty annoyed that, you know, were annoyed that there hadn't been like a more diverse representation of people with disabilities on television or different platforms. Where does, what's the state of play as you see it with Wikipedia? I'm not honestly the best person to answer that question. I think there have been small-scale efforts but the problem is with a lot of disability content there aren't many references. But the times I've tried to find references, it's not been very easy at all and it's honestly not worth the effort for me. For fundamental thresholds. I feel like we probably in university have got a bit of a role to play there in terms of producing some material, I suppose, and references as well. I mean, my sense on that count is there is more material coming through but I'm intrigued. And what about, I mean, another thing I was just wondering about in terms, is there a sort of participation gap around sort of people with disabilities participating in Wikipedia? So I mean, I've got colleagues who've worked on, they call it, say the pipeline to participation in digital technology and digital culture. I did say, well, look, you know, is it a, you know, in your case, obviously it's a very rewrite-edit culture, right? You're very engaged in the community here, many represented here are very actively engaged, right? But what's that pipeline look like for people and is that something that needs attention? Is there a sort of disability participation gap in Wikipedia or in other digital cultures? I think there is, but I'm not the best place to how to deal with it, I'm straight to everyone, I just prefer to go in and edit. No, fair enough, indeed. Well, look at this stage, maybe we should just open it up to questions if anyone has questions and comments. Oh, there's one minor thing I want to say. Yeah, please, forgive me, go ahead, Grant. Bunty had said I created 14,500 pages. That's not quite... It is actually a technique, but a lot of those creations were me fixing attribution errors in page histories and fixing authorship. I probably only created about 200 in total, like actual articles or expanded them. I'm not one of a super creator. Well, it's kind of interesting in a way because I suppose with editing, there's long been that sense of pre-digital that the role of the editor is in some ways to be invisible or the work that gets done is incredibly important, whether it's in the infrastructure, in the custodian, in curating, but in a sense it doesn't get some of the glory of the creator. That's why Bunty was suggesting 14,000. Yeah. Well, look, let's go... Let's go and hear some questions. Yeah, please go ahead. I just was wondering... Yeah. Sorry, can I just... For the people on Zoom, we carry his house... So the question is about the Paralympic project and someone drawing our drawing grants or reminding Graham about the Paralympic project Yeah. I was heavily active in that for about a year. I actually became really interested in it. I was on the edges for a while, but I became really interested when I found out that there was an order of... There was a medal of the order of Australia missing in one of the entries, and I'm like, let's find out if there's any more. And that actually got me hooked in of all things. I helped clean up... I helped clean up articles written by one of the other Paralympic editors and created a few of my own, but there was so much to do and such a high volume of work that I'd just go back my involvement after a while. Thanks Graham. Thanks very much for the question. I think that's really interesting. Please go ahead. Thanks. I loved hearing about the typo club. Sounds like a club I would like to join, but I was just really curious to know what a typo sounds like to you. Because hearing the screen reader, I was kind of wondering, is it just that a typo gets rendered as separate letters rather than a word? Is it an approximation? What do you hear when you hear a typo? It tries to make an approximation of the word. There are some typos where I can't tell that they're typos. Actually, I got in a lot of trouble when I started editing because I didn't really know the difference between how it's built wear and tear properly. Because my screen reader said wear and tear. Some typos are very obvious. Like, if you miss out the second eye initiative, the screen reader will say, inattentive. If you miss out a U in Portuguese, you'll hear Portuguese. So, yeah, it was typos like that that I usually worked on. Yeah, I did wonder if there was something that made them stand out more for you or that sort of attracted you. Sorry, could I ask a second question? Actually, could you mind introducing yourself as well? Sorry, of course. My name is Fiona Romeo and I work on Culture and Heritage at the Wikimedia Foundation. One of the things I'm obsessed with in that role is images and increasing visual representation on our projects. But I think it's my understanding that that's one area where Wikipedia actually isn't great from an accessibility point of view. As a primarily text-based project with predictable structuring, that's good. But actually, I think fewer than 5% of the images, even on English Wikipedia, have good alt text. So I'm wondering if that's something that sort of disrupts your use and enjoyment of the projects and if you have thoughts about what we could do. Honestly, alt text is the sort of thing I don't know what I'm missing out on. It's hard for me to give feedback on alt text because I can't see the image myself. The awkward thing is that the images have captions and often they're sufficient as alt text but you don't really know if that's the case or not. And the other unique thing about Wikipedia is that most images have links attached to them, they link to the file page or to the media viewer page. It's a hard problem and I don't really know what the best solution is there. Hi, it's Tom Graham. I live in Western Australia as Graham does and I rely quite a lot on Graham's administrative capacity to be able to fix up things where in the past I used to ask a more active admin community in part of Australia that I'm in but it's reduced. So I'm wondering of the sorts of challenges that I've asked you, Graham in the last year or so of dealing with a range of issues what do you think the most problematic ones that you've said no, so I don't want to know about. I'd be interested to know what your reaction would be to that. What's the most problematic ones? Honestly, I honestly can't remember. I'm just suggesting there are any technical things or more whether it was certain sorts of editors or editing behaviours that you just find problematic that you would rather just let somebody else deal with. Yeah, I don't like dealing with complex communication like things that require a lot of communication. I just want something that's more black and white really. But I've been very impressed by what you've been able to scan through on something and solve and it makes me wonder more and more about what Jaws is actually doing for you to be able to get through fairly large either talk page items or large articles. Is it what you were saying earlier on to do with headings? Sometimes, yeah. Yeah, sometimes it can be for headings. Sometimes I just know where to walk for something. Yeah. Thank you, Grant. Thank you. You've got a couple of questions. Thanks. Hey, Graham. It's Meredith Porzacki from the Movement Communication Team at the Foundation. For those of you that may not know, Graham volunteered to participate in the Sound Logo Contest and he actually screened close to 3,000 Sound Logo submissions, which is just incredible. Thank you. So I'm curious, Graham. What was it like? Were there sound vandalisms that you caught? You caught a few that were very obvious copies of well-known sounds, like one of them I think was the ABC Australian news opening chart. So what was that experience like? And I'm also curious to learn, how did you review sounds with a screen reader, and what was that process like for you? It was kind of, it was interesting, but it got more hectic as it went on. And yes, it wasn't vandalism, and someone took a lot of care to make a brief production of the Channel 10 news thing. That was interesting. And there was also some more creative vandalism as well. With a screen reader, it was pretty straightforward. The only minor problem was when you hit the play button, you'd hear this sound cannot be played, but I just ignored that. We need to screen read you. We need to ignore a lot of things. Thanks very much. Here we have another question. Thank you. Hey, I'm Sadeep. I'm from India. I also work with the cultural heritage team at the foundation. I've been a Wikimedia as well for a long time. And my question is about navigating that subtle difference between a curious newbie and a vandal. How do you do that? A curious newbie and a what, sorry? And a vandal. A clear-cut vandal. I have a joke with a good friend of mine that I'm a Wikimedia meanie. It is probably true. I'm probably more harsh than some other people would be. It's all a matter of intent. And you're like, are people editing good faith or not? And sometimes that can be hard to tell. You've got to just think, would I as a newbie do something like that for the good of a project or if I really just messing around? And sometimes it's really obvious when they're messing around, but sometimes it's not obvious what they're actually trying to do. Was a copyright violation. Oh, naughty, naughty. Yeah, so I didn't know, and then someone came and told me, and today I have like more than 200 quality images, more than 12 featured pictures and comments. So like I did need that first hand holding in a way. And I think that's something that's missing on our projects and could benefit a lot and bring in more people. Yeah, mentorship is hard on Wikiprojects. Mike Dickerson from New Zealand. Following on from the alt text question, I was sitting here puzzling and I'm sure other people are. It's my first time even encountering something like a screen reader. I hadn't even entered my consciousness and now I'm wondering, what are some things that we as cited editors do that make your life harder? Well, what could we do differently to make your life easier when we're editing? Some of the hardest things are relatively esoteric. Like putting blank lines with no content between list items. If you write, say, star A, then press enter twice and star B even enter twice and star C. Instead of coming out as a list of free items, as you'd probably intended, it'll come out as a list of one item A, a list of one item B, a list of one item C and that's really hard to read for a screen reader. And also, please don't move the table of content around into weird places in the Wikimarker because we sort of expect the table of content to be in a certain place when it's moved around that can be disruptive. On the English Wikipedia, a few people have kindly made bots to fix a lot of weird problems for me. Yeah, that's really cool. I wanted to just pick up, I think, what you were just saying there about, I mean, is there a play screen that you see for either the classic kind of training or toolkits or FAQs to sort of address some of those kind of issues you're just talking about then? You see value in Wikipedia's been thinking about? There is a very sense of accessibility guideline which has sort of information about that. And there's a more simplified page called Accessibility Do's and Don'ts, where I had to go in and fix help fix the accessibility of that page. That's great. Well, look, Graeme, I just wanted to ask you, I mean, a sort of a question just taught, you know, really a final thing to say, well, you know, is there anything you wanted to add? But also, I just wonder, I mean, how do you see, you know, Wikipedia in, say, five or 10 years? I mean, what's your vision for it? And also, what would you like to be doing in that vision? I honestly don't know. Like, a lot of the things that I want for Wikipedia are very esoteric. I'd like to be able to... I'd like to be able to move edits around easily, more easily, like a revision move feature, but it's very hard. But for how it will be in the next 10 years, honestly, who knows the way technology is going and AI and stuff. Just, yeah, it's impossible to know. Hopefully, it will be better. Yeah, it just looks like we've got time for just one final question. So, I understand most of your editing is on English Wikipedia. Have you tried other projects, and what's your experience of accessibility on the other projects? Yes, I have tried... I have, as a quite a lot of other projects for various reasons. I uploaded a lot of classical music to Wikipedia Commons, and I also uploaded images of white canes to Commons. The only accessibility problems I've ever had were related to the capture and trying to become auto-confirmed so you can bypass the capture. And I actually got blocked from the Chinese Wikipedia once. Because they were like, what are you doing? You don't know any Chinese, and you're trying to become auto-confirmed. And I had to explain that I'm blind and I'm trying to fix some links on their pocket, and they did unblock me. There you go. Well, look, this might be the point I think we need to close. So, I just wanted to thank you, Graeme. It's just been a real pleasure to meet you. And also, thank you so much for sharing with us and talking a bit about, you know, your contributions to Wikipedia, how you see things, as well as some of these, you know, kind of accessibility issues and so on. My sense is that your contributions have actually been deep, varied and consistent. And that you managed to sort of just get on with it. I think you seem to have that practical ability and desire to really nurture what Wikipedia is. And I think that's obviously why you're held in great esteem by the community and more widely. So, thank you very much indeed for today.