 Hello everyone! How are you? Careful, thank you! Welcome everyone to Wikipedia's birthday celebration in San Francisco, California. Happy 15th birthday Wikipedia! Coming to you live from the Wikimedia Foundation on New Montgomery Street. I'm Rosie Stevenson. Good night! Better known to some of you as user Rosie Step. I will be your facilitator today. We're gonna start with thank yous. Thank you Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger. Thank you. Ward Cunningham and those who built the Wiki technology and philosophy. Thank you. Lila and all of our past executive directors. Thank you. Members of the Board of Trustees, all of you, past and present. Thank you. Wikimedia staffers and independent contractors and interns and externs and the chapters and the user groups, the thematic organizations, Wikimedians and residents, commons folks, Wikidavia folks, ARPCOM, AFCOM, FBC, Wikimedia organizers, committee members of every sort. Thank you. Donors, we appreciate you. Thank you. Open source software contributors. Thank you. We cannot do it without you. Readers, thank you for reading our words and having confidence in us. You are welcome to join us and become editors and editors. Last but not least, editors and other volunteers, people like you and me, people who write for the signposts, who review featured article candidates, who serve as hosts at the tea house, who run did you know people who delight in wiki cup, people like you and me who write articles on everything under the sun from apples to zebras, people who fix typos and add images and leave plates of cookies on new editors user pages just because it's a nice thing to do. Thank you, volunteers. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for contributing to the sum of all human knowledge and for joining us here today to celebrate Wikimedia's birthday. All right, some housekeeping. If you haven't done so already, please mute your mobile devices. Wifi access, you can take a look up here. The Twitter handle, please tweet. It's up here. The agenda. There's a simple URL posted up here too. That'll let you know what we'll be doing and when. Photos. It's okay to take photos of anyone up here, but ask before you take a photo of anyone who's at the audience. Restrooms, down this way and to your left. Refreshments are in that area too. Cake ad for 30. And one last thing, we'll be creating five YouTube's today and we'll upload them to commons. So some of the things we'll be talking about are actually going to be available for other people to see. So as a pilot said on my flight this morning, when I flew in here from the beautiful Silver State of Nevada, sit back and relax folks. We'll be starting with lightning rounds properly at one as we kick off celebrating Wikipedia 15. Thank you. We'll begin today with a series of lightning talks from people who have proposed ideas on our wiki. These lightning talks will go for no longer than five minutes. We'll do a few from here in San Francisco and then we'll move to some being presented remotely from Seattle, from Russia and potentially from New York City, depending on how much time we have. So if you have planned to give a lightning talk, please come over to the front and talk to me and we'll just cue them up and start with Stuart. All right. Hi, everybody. My name is Stuart Geiger. I'm a postdoc at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science and I recently completed my PhD at UC Berkeley where I wrote my dissertation on a lot of things about the culture of Wikipedia. And so I'm going to be talking to you today about some of the research that I've done and about particularly about bots, which are my favorite kind of contribution to Wikipedia. The proposed, the proposed format of some of the lightning talks for people who didn't have any ideas was, hi, my name is Blank and I've been a Wikipedia since Blank and Blank is my favorite contribution to Wikipedia. I've been a Wikipedia since 2004 and I'm going to tell you a whole bunch of reasons why bots, which have been around even longer than I have in that, have been sort of one of the most interesting parts of Wikipedia and will make it different from a lot of other sites online. So reason number one is that bots do lots of important work in Wikipedia. Pretty much any aspect of Wikipedia has something that has to do with bots. So all the sort of things that we were just hearing about all the different aspects of Wikipedia, everything from Did You Know to the newcomer's help spaces to the articles that you write to the ways that people enforce quality, bots have a role to play in pretty much everything that go behind the scenes. Now bots are, so bots are these, this is from the WPBots Wikipedia page, a bot is an automated or semi-automated tool, a computer program that carries out repetitive and mundane tasks to maintain the 38 million pages of the English Wikipedia. Now about 5 million of those are articles and the others are a lot of help spaces, talk pages, meta pages, and that in fact a lot of the work that bots do is helping Wikipedians be able to sort of keep on task and keep coordinated while they're trying to write and update and debate and talk. So just some funny statistics on some great statistics that show how big and important bots are. First bots are, if you look at the top 25 editors to the English language version of Wikipedia, 20 of them are bots. And you can see, and even some of the people who are up at the top might be bots, I'm not sure. But one of the very one of the earliest bots in Wikipedia's history was Rambot. And Rambot took public domain census data from the US census and created articles about tens of thousands of cities and towns. And it actually did this in 2002, and it doubled the size of Wikipedia overnight. Well, not overnight, over the period of a few weeks. It took a long time for it to do it. This is the first article that it ever wrote, on Artugaville, Alabama, the alphabetical name that came first. Bots also do a lot of cool work helping people keep track of issues, keep tracking, keep track of requests, problems and goals. So what you see here is the Wikipedia 1.0 bot that takes, that takes assessments that Wikipedians have made about how good an article is, the quality of the article, and how important it is. And to raise it in this sort of nice way that you can see, well, what are the most important articles that are the lowest quality, or vice-versa, in order to see what should we focus on now? What's important to improve? Bots also help people keep track of different sort of events that are going on in the Wikipedia. This is actually a bot that I wrote, AFD StatBot, that keeps track of the articles for deletion debates. So people who are trying to keep track of which articles are currently nominated for deletion go and they have a way to figure out what kinds of, you know, what kinds of debates are going on, what the results are, and whether there's been sort of new aspects that they should then go into that debate for. Also sort of committees like the mediation committee, which does a lot of work resolving interpersonal disputes, uses a lot of bots to be able to come in and to sort of structure their own workflow to keep track of a lot of the different debates that go on. There's so many debates that go on in Wikipedia, as I'm sure a lot of you know, and if you've ever engaged in a debate, there's probably a bot that's keeping track of that, and if things get too heated, there are even sort of bots that look for that, and be able to sort of identify ways that people have, and sort of guide moderators and guide mediators into particular spaces. Well, let's also do a little tiny work, like they fix typos, they also sign the comments that you, they sign the comments that if you forget to do those four till days, they archive your user pages, so the talk pages don't get so long and complex, and they categorize, they also sort of track which articles have unsourced statements, which articles have citation-needed documents. And bots are also, this is the most important sort of thing, why I think bots are interesting, they're the top dandruff items, they're the ones that make sure that when people edit, you know, when people are, think they're being really funny and clever, and sort of add something to, add something to Wikipedia that shouldn't be there, they come in within seconds, literally seconds, they come in and revert those changes automatically. And I'll just sort of conclude by showing you a graph from a chart that I did, this is collaboration I did with me and Aaron Haffeker, where we looked at how long it took for humans, cyborgs, people using semi-automated tools like Coggle, and bots to revert vandalism, and what you can see is the bots come on the scene almost within one second and five seconds of vandalism being made, and they're able to come in and revert it. So, for those reasons that is why bots in Wikipedia are my sort of favorite aspect of the encyclopedia project. Thank you. My next. Okay, good morning everybody, good afternoon, thank you so much. Oh, who bought? Reload really quickly. While we're doing this, I'm just going to say it's so, so wonderful to see all of you here. Actually, my first question out of my mouth when I walked in through the door this afternoon was why don't we have the space open like this on a regular basis to have you come and join us here. And this is something I would really love to see more of and I'm definitely going to talk with our team internally to make sure that we can do something like this because it's so incredible to have you to have you here with us and to be able to talk to you face to face as opposed to you know the username somewhere on the list or on wiki. So, it's really a gift to see you here today. Another thing I want to say is I want to thank Pine who was insatiable at having me speak for a couple of minutes here and even he gave me topics for discussions some of them included going over all of the great things that our teams have done in the last year and there are lots and lots of those. I don't want to do the disservice to that because I don't think I can cover it in two minutes but I'm really disappointed Pine that you're not here today. I wish I got to see you in person and thank you for making me do this. So, instead of kind of bolstering about you know the good things that our team has done which are many and we should review in depth, I wanted to do something personal. I wanted to share my personal story and how you changed me in the last year and a half. How this movement has changed me and I wanted to share how not only did you change me but how you it doesn't work inspired me because the only way to change to really change as a human being is through being inspired to make a difference and to be part of something bigger so that you can shift. So, some of you who may know a few things about me you know that I have this crazy background where I hopped on the plane when I was 15 moved to New York I didn't know first thing about United States and when people asked me about it I tell them that I was led by curiosity I was curious about the world I wanted to learn about it but there's a big difference between curiosity and caring and when I think about readers on Wikipedia I think about all the people who are super curious about what you do how you make what you make and I was one of these people when I came here I tried honestly actually I tried in about 2005 to edit the Wikipedia and I was one of those people I was a student at Berkeley back in the day or I was still taking courses and I clicked the button the edit button and I kind of looked at it and I did nothing and as pathetic as it sounds. So, from this point of curiosity to this point of caring is the really important stab that each one of you who edits Wikipedia has taken and I wanted to understand that more so I took a few edits I had someone hold me by my hand and teach me when I was here but there is a moment in time when it's not just about there's with us one edit that you make for all of you I'm sure there's a different point in time when it becomes part of you it comes part of who you are in part of your soul and that's a point of vulnerability and openness and a point of change where you start you start becoming something that you are not before so what turns that person that was just a seeker just somebody curious and somebody who's engaged who is a contributor to somebody who teaches who proliferates who seeds and growth others together with them when was it personal for you when did the mission touch you for some of us it may be the content that we cared about for some of us may have been a personal event for some of us may be fixing a little comma somewhere I've heard so many people tell me that it's just a little thing that got them excited first I really want to know from the moment that I came here I kept asking this question what makes that difference what makes that transition for every one of us what makes us take that leap that's really wonderful single moment when you start improving the world that moment of bravery the moment of caring and the moment of vulnerability so Jimmy I love this quote Jimmy says it turns out that a lot of people don't get it Wikipedia is like rock and roll it's a cultural shift and I couldn't agree more it's a shift that I believe everybody makes at some point it's a shift that took me a long time to really understand and I still am learning and understanding it and it's a cultural shift into a culture that's entirely unique it's and yet it's contagious rock and roll isn't just what was there yesterday it's something that is going to continue for a very very long time how do we engage the next generation the kids that are there today with knowledge in a way in the caring and loving way that's the question I ask myself and that's like what the question I want to ask you what makes you personally care so when I walk out of this door today later after I talk to you and after we have a hopefully break a beer or cheer around the 15th birthday I'm going to write down the moment that was significant for me I'm just going to post it on my personal page and I would love to hear from you what that moment was for you what made you care and what made you shift into the culture that you've created today so I would love to hear your stories that led you to be part of this incredible culture of rock and roll and open knowledge so with that and slides are not working still I want to thank you for what you do and I want to thank you for what you have taught me over the last couple of years and I also want to encourage you for those of you who are thinking and looking to create the next strategy for the movement not just for the foundation but for the movement to go ahead and and really inspire yourself and others and ask the foundation to support and help you because we want to see that next generation that next 15 years of people caring really deeply deeply caring for sharing this knowledge and creating more of those people who will proliferated further and that's it thank you the slides to switch over so my name is Greg Varnum I go by Varnant on the Wikis I am a contractor here for the foundation and the communications team but I've also been a Wikimedian for about nine years and have served on the affiliations committee and the elections committee and done editing and admin work and all kinds of fun stuff around so it's great to see so many people from the Wikis here in person I'm going to talk when the slides come up maybe about the Wikimedian movement and the challenge is going to be not talking about the challenge for me for special people who know me is doing it in five minutes so we'll see how this goes no promises yet so what is the Wikimedian movement for the purposes of this particular talk we're going to kind of break it into three different groups first is of course the projects the second is the community and then the third is the foundation so these are the projects these are all the different things that we do if you've never seen this little family of logos before it's really great to be able to see just how many there are and we often don't think about all of them we certainly all know of course about this is a pointer for you with that people as a pointer okay so we certainly all know about Wikipedia of course but there's these other great projects that we do we have a dictionary we have a news site we have millions of photos we have a quote database we have a free source documents that are available and they're put out in the public domain we have the support wikis like tech wiki for the engineers an incubator for things that we're developing so there's this whole big umbrella beyond just wikipedia and it's owned by all of us all of us in this room own those projects it's not owned by some corporation it's not owned by some entity we all have equal ownership of these projects of the content of the site they're maintained by us they're maintained by the community anyone can edit literally anyone on the planet can go with an internet access and edit there are 15 billion page views regularly on our sites we have 35 million articles across all of those project wikis this is the world's largest base of collaboratively editing and piled free knowledge on the planet it's amazing so how does this all work what's behind well there's the community of course and if you've never seen this this is sort of the adopted community logo also known as the meta logo they're volunteers this is always very shocking to people i love it when i hear from folks and they say i can't imagine how many paid editors you must have making those 35 million articles and it's like well they're actually not paid the volunteers there's 80 000 active editors in any given month and just so you know the way we define that is somebody who's made five or more edits beyond that there's a hundred over a hundred thousand people just there every week doing activities making an anonymous edit making a little Kramer tweak here there that's a lot of people if you think about it and they're all around the world they really are i mean they're really in every country around the planet i i i don't know if we've ever had an edit from an article but it wouldn't surprise me um there are hundreds of languages you can be anonymous or registered and they're also sometimes organized into what we call movement organizations so i'm going to talk a little bit about those so this is sort of our movement organizations overview so you can see the uh blue groups here what we call chapters and i'll get into this in just a little bit and these green ones here are user groups you can see just in the organized aspect of the community how far our reach is in other areas it's not that there aren't users in these areas it's just that they're not necessarily in an organized group so what are these groups the ones that people are the most familiar with and the ones that we've had the longest are what we call chapters and we have 41 of them they are geographically based groups of Wikimedians working towards the collective goal of our vision we also have thematic organizations right now we have one and they're similar to chapters but they're thematic base so these are actual uh legal entities that are organizations similar to the foundation where people are coming together and working on a very specific topic and then the other group we have that's really exciting to me and it's a growing group are our user groups we have 51 of them now and that number has been increasing each year and the great thing about user groups is it really just takes three people to start one it's that easy if you have one view yourself or a person which hopefully you all are and then there are two other people if you're a bot we have a different group for that but if you are three of you that's all you need just an idea it can be a geographic scope it can be a thematic scope we have a whole wide range of user groups and they're really exciting and easy to get going and then of course there is the foundation so the foundation is the united states based 501c three charitable organization which is just a really fancy way of saying we're not a corporation we're we're not a for-profit corporation we support the projects and the movements so that basically in the sense that we do grant making we do communications we work we do the technical work to make sure the servers stay online and we work with those organizations that I was just talking about to sort of do things like this for example so all around the world this weekend there are around a hundred events happening just around the birthday that a lot of those organizations were involved in putting together we also own the trademarks so just sort of the legal protection entity of being able to protect the project in this this world-owned entity and then of course the servers somebody technically has to actually like pay for the electricity and keep that stuff going to make all that work there's about 250 plus staff and contractors which is as I like to think of it a tiny department in one of the other top ten websites so it's a lot of seems like a lot of people would you put in the context of being the largest nonprofit website on the planet it definitely doesn't feel that way we're headquarters here in San Francisco of course and I hope you are all enjoying the time and then your your beautiful faces here and I love what Kim talks about the foundation he says we're not a foundation with a community we're a community with the foundation and that's absolutely true that the foundation is a support piece and we want every one of the community to be very very successful so that's a real quick five-minute breakdown of the three kind of biggest components and I just wanted to leave you with this vision statement that I hope we are all familiar with but all those three pieces are coming together to contribute towards this big idea so thank you so I'm giving the slide set a break and you can come back in five minutes to that but I figured I would just talk to you guys a little bit so my name is Jacob Rogers I've been at the foundation for about a year I'm one of its legal council but I've been looking up legal issues on Wikipedia since memory serves either 2004 or 2005 and I've been interested in that topic so I want to talk to you guys today about looking up court cases and legal issues and legal topics on Wikipedia and kind of what that says about media and how people work on there and maybe some insights that I've seen so you know I looked at a few different things in preparation for this the first thing I actually went and checked out was the legal portal on Wikipedia and the very first article on there was execution by elephant which is perfectly encapsulates the entire setup I think it is actually has been a featured articles extremely well written and actually shows I think is a great introduction to legal issues because it shows the reach of the project it's not just a list of American court cases so this is an international topic area that covers history past and present and really goes in a lot of different areas but I decided in preparation for this talk to look at some of the basic stuff that people look up for like a first year law students because that's certainly something that I did and that I know a lot of people do today and I think there's some interesting results there so one of the first things I looked up was contract law and the case that I found that was great was called parabolic smokeball which is an old case a couple hundred years old from England about a flu remedy at the time they thought that if you inhaled smoke three times every day you wouldn't get sick and the company was so confident about this that they offered to pay people if they got sick while they were inhaling from this smokeball turns out it didn't work very well so the several people sued them and that article when I looked through it is just incredible it's actually better than anything I've seen in a law school textbook or practice practice reference guide by even the best law question in the world it's got a really good summary of the facts it covers the different judicial opinions that were written by the judges in that case along with excellent excerpts and analysis and then it has a section on modern commentary on the case including both some interpretation by modern professors and some critiques is really probably the best source you could find on this case anywhere on the other hand I took a look at some areas in civil procedure and standing which are a more technical area of law but one that is actually pretty important because it's about like who can sue somebody or how you actually do a lawsuit in that area it had a good summary of things but it was something that I felt wouldn't have been well understood by somebody that didn't already know about it and when I took a look at one of the cases in standing called fair child be hues which I think is important because it's the case that says that you can't just sue somebody about anything you don't like in the world you have to actually be related to it that case is got maybe like a couple paragraphs but it doesn't really have too many references or link it into the broader importance of that case or explain the facts behind it and what I got from this looking through is a couple of things I mean I think one the really impressive thing is that this is an area where you'd think that you'd need expertise to really get into it most people think of laws kind of mysterious and you have to spend years learning about it before you can get there but that's not true at all where people get interested and a lot of people think a topic is important and work on it they're going to produce the best work that's out and I think everybody should congratulate themselves for that on the other hand I think that what this shows is that trying to produce something good is better than trying to produce something that is complete and in fact somebody actually tried on the wiki project law to make a list of every case and other topic that is missing which is a bit of a syciphean effort because it's there's always new cases and always new things coming out I think what's really important certainly for somebody that is like a law student trying to learn about a case but as well any member of the public who wants to learn about a topic is to make sure that it's really not just accurate but completes and covers it in a way that somebody who's read that would then be correct when they're talking about it and so rather than trying to you know fill out every topic or fill out every possible case that comes up when people take the time to really identify what's important and work together to put effort on that I think you get something really really great that's been my experience with law on wikipedia hello everyone my name is Asaf Boutouf longtime wikipedia and I work at the foundation I'm here to talk to you about something called the hundred wiki days or why you should let it eat your life so our story begins exactly one year ago today a brilliant Bulgarian wikipedia and mathematician called Vasya Atanasova was responding to a facebook meme called hundred happy days which commanded you to find something you are happy about every single day and post about it on facebook as people do she succumbed to that meme and tried to do it after a few days she failed she just couldn't think of a single thing that made her happy that day and she reached the reasonable conclusion that maybe happiness is just not for her however she's a wikipedia and wikipedia makes her happy and so she said I know I'll start 100 wiki days and I'll get back to contributing like I used to in the old days she's a veteran user she's an admin she's you know patrolling and monitoring recent changes but she wasn't really writing new articles all that often and so she started 100 wiki days with the intent of writing one new wikipedia article every single day seven days a week no matter what at least one article a day now the definition of day this begins to matter is between when you wake up and when you go to sleep you ignore the you know date and stuff so she started she just wrote an article that same day posted it on facebook January 16th 2015 and she posted on facebook and said 100 wiki days number one the next day she wrote another article in vulgarian wikipedia posted it on facebook said 100 wiki days number two didn't explain anything to anyone but you know a bunch of us are connected on facebook and stuff people started noticing that every day she posts an article and says 100 wiki days three four pretty soon another vulgarian wikipedia fell victim to this new mean and started writing articles as well yours truly was victim number two that is she's patient zero right so i'm victim number two i was the third person to fall victim to this and i started writing a one article a day on the Hebrew wikipedia now i'm a really busy person beyond my job at the foundation i have another volunteer project going i'm super busy i don't have time to write an article every single day plus the Hebrew wikipedia has a strong anti-stub policy so yeah i knew i knew i mustn't commit to this i don't have time to do it and i resisted for many many days it took me about 16 days of Vasya posting an article every day to succumb but i did i started i lost that battle and i started writing an article every day which is something i haven't done since my earliest days i'm on the Hebrew wikipedia and i want to share with you a little bit about what it's like so some days you don't get to the part where you can write an article and for me at least it takes at least an hour and a half two hours to write a decent non-stub article and you need time and you need peace of mind and you need sources and you need a good Wi-Fi connection and some days that's just hard to do and some weekends you have clients and sometimes you travel and by the way i travel internationally and it's hard sometimes in a 24-hour period you literally don't have enough time need next to a Wi-Fi connection to write an article no excuse by the way you cannot prepare articles in advance has to be the same day so you do it anyway you do it anyway and you persevere and sometimes you don't feel like it and you do it anyway because that is the commitment that is the challenge that's why it's personal challenge you're it's not a competition as the romantic American painter Washington Austin said the only competition worthy of a man is with himself forgive the sexism he's from the 19th century so so you learn perseverance you learn how to make yourself put in that effort out of the commitment but one of the most charming side effects of this project because you post I forgot to mention this you post that article every day on Facebook right so I started posting articles people started asking me what is this what what are you doing and I explain and you you chart your progress and very soon there was a meta page I encourage you all to go I didn't prepare slides just go to meta and type 100 wiki days and you'll see everybody's 100 wiki days in multiple languages in multiple communities and you learn from each other or you're inspired from by each other you know you see that the Ukrainian wikipedia wrote an article about this person you've never heard of you look it up you translate it or you you write your own article about that same person you also develop some tricks you realize that writing articles about chess players is fairly easy there's the stats there's the chess federation you know it's a good reliable source it's pretty easy to kind of cook up a a simple and they're all not I mean all the top ones are notable by definition it's very easy to crank out a chess biography and so you do that on on those days when you you can't really afford to do something more serious by the way I I personally took a kind of side challenge which is I wanted my articles to all be biographies of women so I started writing 100 biographies of women to somewhat address the content gender gap on my wiki the Hebrew wikipedia but generally most people write about whatever comes to mind that day there are quite a few women grandmaster chess players don't worry so one of my favorite aspects is the mutual inspiration how you you learn about new things by the choice of your other your co-victims choices for what they wrote about that day in their various languages so I encourage you to consider this I will say that it's a challenge that was typically taken by experienced wikipedians in a kind of return to the roots mood but quite a few newbies have also attempted it many of them failed by which I mean there was a day in which they did not write an article many of the experienced wikipedians also failed it's hard yours truly failed and has only written 87 articles failing is fun though because you get to try again from the beginning from the beginning of course so I'm I'm I'm gathering up the courage to try again very soon but I encourage you to look at the page on meta it has statistics there are so far more than 100 victims it's not a program it's not a project it was one person inspiring another through Facebook through social connections more than 100 people have attempted the challenge there are almost 30 successful alumni who have written 100 articles in 100 days of them by the way only one on the English wikipedia which is another favorite aspect of this project for me it is very very international there are six alumni in the Punjabi wikipedia six times more than the English wikipedia by the way that one person who managed to write 100 articles on English wikipedia for 100 days is a newbie a very inspiring lady and overall there have been more than 4,700 articles with sources and citations written as part of this project I encourage you to let it eat your life too and again this was started exactly one year ago today happy 100 wikidays Vasya Hi my name is Mithar I am a wikipedia and also UC Berkeley student in fact I have very short teacher Diaz I got when I was reading media coverage of the anniversary no there were many interesting and beautiful things said about wikipedia but there were also these issues about growing and what about you know new wikipedia how is this happening decline and so on and so on and while reading that I felt strange I felt strange because for me it's so strange to talk about this necessity of growing for you know constant growth we are all the time hearing about that and I I started thinking that maybe we shouldn't be thinking about that in wikipedia that we need constant growth that maybe we should think about more about sustainability that what we need is sustainable production and maintain mentorship of knowledge not just growth to growth to growth and that was like the first thought I got is like where are we getting this you know maybe we are getting this from the for-profit corporations in the area and Silicon Valley and maybe we shouldn't be thinking so much about that so maybe we should be proud of the fact that we grow to the the size we are that we already have all this knowledge available and that we should start thinking about maybe how to maintain that more than just grow for the sake of growth of course it shouldn't mean that we shouldn't grow I just shouldn't be our like pain should not shouldn't be a painful so the point of this is I want to be controversial that's why I'm bringing this up the second controversial thing after thinking about this I remembered Jeffrey Builder from Crosschef so that's another big a non-profit what he said at one of meetings was that every non-profit or every organization with a mission their goal should be to make themselves obsolete it's very common for non-profits and organizations and projects to start perpetuating their existence by not really removing the reason for the existence for example in the case of Wikipedia what we want is all knowledge to be available to everyone we want that it is pre-available editable by everyone created by everyone we might want and that's this controversial controversy that we want to remove ourselves it wouldn't be great that there will be not not 30th and version of Wikipedia because all knowledge would be already free all knowledge would be already available to everyone anybody who could edit anywhere not just on Wikipedia on any site on the web any knowledge there link it together and so on so maybe we should think of that instead of growing instead of sustaining maybe we should try to make ourselves obsolete thank you hello I'm Jay Martin I'm a user of Wikipedia and a minor contributor and I am here to testify Wikipedia is the internet we wanted I'm a 51 year old guy my entry into the workforce was in a small office at the same time the computers arrived in the small office and all along that's what I've basically been doing I've been a computer user in small offices and when the internet came along this this was new to me it's not a thing that came I was born into this is a world I saw arrive and what we hoped from the internet was that information would be shared and what we got is the internet of advertisements and commercials and instead we have this refuge called Wikipedia it has saved me personally and that's what I'm here to say today six years ago in 2008 I was at a company and they lost a big contract and they laid off 75 percent of the workforce and I had to switch jobs very quickly I was editing medical information and suddenly I met a company reading about buildings and air conditioning systems and I'm lost but there's a Wikipedia page called HVAC I didn't know what that was I saw it on a page and I have to orient myself I can understand the grammar but I can't understand the terminology of this new world but a Wikipedia page called HVAC explained to me that heating ventilating and air conditioning is a real field it had all these terms on it that I could learn and use in my new job and instead of being lost I was oriented the other thing that happened is the layoff I went through was a peculiar experience and while it was dragging on we were always trying to understand what exactly was happening to us here and one of the things that happened is we got a notice because everybody was being laid off and it referred to something called the WARN Act well I looked that up on Wikipedia and it was a way for me to kind of understand what we were going through and it also pointed out that we weren't really going through this the way we should be going through this it wasn't quite right and I started reading all I could about it following the links on this page and I began to see that this company had not handled this correctly they'd given us a notice about the layoff but it had expired by the time the layoff came around it wasn't individual to us and it inspired me to every time I I got some information about to begin editing that page WARN Act this was the first base and I began editing seriously and I realized now this is a thing I can say from being a 51 year old guy that things you know about kind of are fleeting for a brief time I knew a lot about the WARN Act and I was able to take the things I was reading about and making sure they would appear on the page I think that was probably the first thing I ever edited on Wikipedia and there was this wonderful moment too where I would look at the history and I would see the contributions of people and add it there was this moment where after I'd added several things an earlier editor who knew what they were doing came back and put some more on the page and my things weren't removed they were accepted I was being welcomed into this community of Wikipedia and more it was a wonderful way for me to handle the personal thing I was going through which is what exactly happens when a company has to fire people what is their responsibility to those people the last thing I want to say is this ability to edit Wikipedia is an extraordinary experience for me when I was in when I was in college this book got handed to me called How to Read a Book and it was already 50 years old but it had this strange advice about actually taking a pen and when you're reading a book interact with it mark it up you know circle things that are the main points write little notes about how this is bringing back another argument I I never really brought myself to touch pen to a book but this concept of being able to do more than just read was very important thing to learn when I was a college student and here it is represented in Wikipedia I think a conversation when people are talking to each other is a very important thing to learn and I apologize that all I'm letting you do now is listen to me but on a Wikipedia page if my words were there you can think about the person who said those words and you have an open invitation to go to that page and correct the thing move the pieces around add to it change it it takes what is the written word which is a very important invention and it opens an invitation to actually interact with it to participate in the written word that all over is being seen it makes a page more of a conversation and that that is what I'm here to testify today thank you okay we're transitioning to our next lightning talk which will be broadcast to us from Russia in the meantime I wanted to point out we have a URL up on the wall over there that has the meetup page on Wikipedia the place where people organize this event here and if you click the talk tab up on top you can leave comments to us you know the organizers you can share ideas you can post links to things that you do like 100 wiki days or something else so I'd encourage you all to visit that URL and click the talk page and just get involved with the local group here hello everyone hello everyone I wonder if you can hear me and see me see me hi Yuri we can hear you so go ahead whenever we just can't see your screen right now oh this is oh this is strange strange you should see my face my face anyway I guess I'll be presenting without visuals unless well let's try that screen sharing works and then we can move on from there this apparently is something oh yep I think it is working all right my name is Yuri and actually I want to continue right off from where the previous presenter left off interactivity wikipedia is great because of community and because of the content content is wonderful but you cannot tell the full story if you just have text and images you have to make it interactive you have to engage people if you go to a hands-on museum like the one in Ann Arbor, Michigan where I went to school or in San Francisco Exploratorium you see that all the kids there really engage with the exhibits they really play with them and that's how they learn so I feel that we should move in that direction in terms of content so I wrote this vision that's a vision as I see that's my personal vision of how I see wikipedia grow in terms of content in terms of how we can tell the story better with better data with better interactions with better different diverse content I've been with wikipedia for a while I actually began volunteering in 2005 and at first tried contributing content but I wasn't very good or at least I didn't feel I was good at it so I contributed in the API world I wrote scripts and did all sorts of other fun development stuff and that's where I took off and later got hired by the foundation to do this full time so my project that first started off as an off shot of zero work grew and now is part of the discovery team allows interactive graphs or just regular graphs you can build any kind of graphing for you for the wikipedia pages right there on the wiki very complex graphs I hope you can see my screen well you can use external API like page view data this is like the the distribution of how desktop and mobile and app traffic goes to that goes to the main page or you can have more interactive stuff like this like a stock market and see how different stocks grew relative to one another at different points of time like a flight routes in us for example you can have this kind of information showing how different airports are connected or something much more interesting where life expectancy versus family size where you can see each country and where it is on this the size of the family versus how long on average the population of that country expects to live and you can see that different countries they move in time with years the closer the longer the or the family sizes is a very clear inverse inverse relations and there's a small tutorial that I just built on how historical fertility rates in different countries where you can see what it was in different years and you can move back in time and you can see how the scales change with time and you can learn how to build this right here in the tutorial that is being currently translated step by step one little thing at a time but this is much more event very technically programmer type that's great too because there's people like MPS in German Wikipedia who has built these amazing simple templates for simple graphs any kind of graphs and more will be built soon I'm sure on top of that I'm involved with maps because graphs tell only part of the story and maps could tell much more like historical maps how borders have changed or where things to something that's already being used on wiki voyage something like this where you can see the the map of south work and you get to also see something like this where you click in Russian Wikipedia you click on the GPS coordinates and now you have an interactive map which you can zoom in and zoom out of and you see what the point is about so I'll leave you off with just a minor thing that this is the next future project where we're trying to really make it possible for Wikipedia contributors to build maps content and have amazing fun stuff thank you very much so Steven we have pine on now should we go to pine or new york city if new york city is ready let's put their talks up is that jolly all right new york we're ready to go whenever you are hi uh this is new york can you hear me yeah we have a little bit yeah we have a little bit of an echo yeah you may have to mute when we're on our first presenter was just plugging in and getting going I think she's ready so uh where are you are you seeing us okay we're seeing yourselves right now awesome hey guys I'm Cassie and I've been working on a project called wikis on it which generates sonnets from wikipedia and what it does is that me and my two my brother and my dear friend that I've been working on it with we've scanned all of wikipedia and found every single line every single sentence that someone has written in iambic pentameter and scraped these and then are assembling these in dissonance so um let me read some of the ones that it's written or I can show you them here's one about ketchup and so a local version uses coconut notations slightly different from most important cities in the soviet location of the data to the host this is because it simulates the heat and richness of the dishes should surprise an internship in order to complete to ask for reinforcements and supplies banana ketchup or banana sauce depicts a slaughtered dog in a storehouse a blend of herbs and spices used across the lower garment and a linen blouse it was the winner of the golden prize and consequently tasted belgium prize I think and when we so it starts pulling lines from the actual page you know from ketchup let's see which of these are from are any of these from the ketchup page or here's one from the mustard page and then it starts pulling from pages that link to that page and then pages in that same category we've categorized all the Wikipedia pages as well and then assemble it into um assemble it like following the rules of Elizabethan sonnet and following grammatical structure rules so um let me read another one I can read one about the room this one is pretty good in later versions this cardboard cutout decided to adapt organ to the afterlife for running theme throughout a past relationship between the two the room originated as a play promoted from inspector in the sand gardenia flower which were used to pay that the professor is the wanted man the overall reaction is the sound despite the fact that Peter was to play the necessary force to overcome a way of life and sees it fade away Ophelia has been a frequent subject of time to dedicate to the project so I think what's interesting about this is that these sonnets it's in the same way as Wikipedia they're written collaboratively and in fact if you've contributed to Wikipedia and perhaps the page for the room you could be a partial author of this poem which is which is pretty cool and I think it's interesting that we Wikipedia the the purpose of the text is to express information and in this project the the text is art and the words are not as much to express information but express like different changes context which is cool I will read one more poem about Kim Kardashian this this I really like this one the Iceman comment by Eugene O'Neill online before transferring their career for two additional seasons in a deal continue to perform throughout the year because this was what does in years ago the glamour of her Hollywood lifestyle and concentrated on his western show in the creation of the Gothic style the show continued on its tour throughout this spring of that year roulette released the track American music for about recorded for the Boomerang soundtrack a comprehensive book of interview cartoons are aired English and Urdu so if you want to use it you can go to wikisun.net it's still a work in progress and we're going to continue to work on it through the next month but if you have any questions, comments feel free to talk about it thank you yes okay um so any I'll throw the microphone to anyone who wants to ask questions all right no questions thank you all right Stephen are we ready Stephen are we ready to go Donald we're waiting to hear if Seattle is technically connected if if they're able to do something we can go to them otherwise I think they might have tech problems okay um I saw them online just a second ago but it's like they left okay since we're having trouble connecting with Seattle I think we'll move on with our next scheduled talk I'd like to invite Rosie back up if she's ready for the the first full talk of the day so we have a so we have a second we have an additional youtube stream for this separate from the one that was doing the lightning talks if you are following along you should go to the second URL that's also up on our event page if you'd like to click there