 to Hello, everyone Hello, and welcome Hello, everyone these these be seated these get settled in we're gonna start pretty soon You can fill up from the front. We've got plenty plenty of seats here in the front area and on the sides and the wings We'll get started in another two minutes They got two minutes to get seated. All right. I'm gonna ask if everyone can get seated, please We're gonna start Everyone can get seated, please We are about to begin All right. How is everyone enjoying this wicka mania so far glad to hear it? Get my notes ready This is the first plenary address of this year's wicka mania We've specifically chosen this one as the first one It because it provides an important layer of context for this year's chosen theme Martin Ditas will be presenting on knowledge equity and spatial justice on Wikipedia and I want to give you a quick bit of background on our speaker today Martin Ditas He started off life as a programmer and developer He then fell into accidental academia becoming an accidental academic Obtained his PhD at University College London and he is now a data scientist at the Oxford Oxford Internet Institute Please welcome Dr. Martin Ditas Thank you Douglas. I'm I'm Martin. I'm incredibly happy to be here for a whole bunch of reasons I think also maybe as a way of Of saying hello, I want to acknowledge that Wikipedia is an incredible and an historic achievement and I'm incredibly proud to be here today because I think I feel strongly about the significance of that achievement and I think it's worth highlighting on one hand It's the achievement of the of the scale of the amount of knowledge that's captured in it but for me personally also one of the things that Is maybe even more important is the significance of the collective venture that is Wikipedia how you Wikimedia Wikipedians come together across your differences and in an ongoing process find a collective purpose and Produce a collective output at a scale that as far as I know is in mankind's history is unprecedented So I think you should applaud yourselves Today I'm going to do three or four things I'm going to tell you give you a brief introduction to information geography, which is a strand of research That is concerned with the relationship with the digital and the physical world And I'm going to show you how that relates to Wikipedia I'm going to show you some of the research that has happened and information geography relating to Wikipedia I'm going to show you some previews of of new work that we're currently working on and Finally, I'm going to close with some reflections on this term knowledge equity that the Wikipedia coin community term coined last year to give you some thoughts on Of myself how I think about it But maybe also some of the questions that are associated with it this year is a Wikipedia page of a place in this case It's a castle in Germany One of the things that is worth highlighting when we when we look at Wikipedia pages of places is that a Lot of the time Wikipedia pages about places now have coordinates. These are highlighted here with the red boxes They are geo tagged is the technical term This view tagging allows for a number of things to happen. It allows Wikipedia to put a pin on the map So you can see in relation to other places where in the world it is But also it allows you to then link that location to other kinds of things for us as researchers It becomes really in it becomes a really important resource to try and understand where in the world have Our places that people have written about on Wikipedia 10 years ago my colleague my collaborator mark Graham Produced this map. It was one of the first times maybe the first time that people had produced a map of the geography of Wikipedia So he took all those geo coordinates all those geo tags on Wikipedia Identified the countries that they were they were based on and then produced this map So this map shows on one hand Wikipedia did at the time ten years ago It did arguably cover the world, but it also showed great inequalities It showed that certain countries like the United States like Central Western Europe have asked the more content relating to their size than than other countries of the world than the global South particularly Africa Did not had to have a lot of Wikipedia articles about places So we might call this an information desert This is a map that mark and his colleagues produced a few years later. This shows the same data the same The same geography of Wikipedia in much more detail in much more richness and on one hand we can we can see that Of course in Africa and many other places of the world are not necessarily populated So you can see the the the black spot of the Sahara desert for example at the same time you see that in in the places where Where people live in in urban regions? There are often articles about places that maybe didn't exist a few years earlier But people are starting to write about these places Wikipedia is growing and its geography at the same time There's still a great inequality Europe is incredibly. It's a it's it's rich with content and Many other places of the world are not as well captured This year is just another way of expressing that here. There's a map It has a as a weird Map projection. It's a geodesic projection where you put the world on a globe and then you kind of cut it open and flatten it This is the nerdy thing that geographers or cartographers do in order to reduce map distortion But the point behind this map is to emphasize the the difference in coverage between Europe which has an incredible amount of Articles about places and the rest of the world So the point that is being made here is that within the circle There's there are more articles written about the places within the circle than about the entire rest of the world This these are all examples of information geography to put To establish a relationship between the things that are digital that we think might be in in their own space Might be virtual might not be fully real and then demonstrating the the very tangible ways in which they connect to the physical and connect to the to the real to Establish these links between the physical and virtual attributes of the things that are now around us because our world is increasingly digital is increasingly Overlaid with with virtual information To try and understand what do these links mean what are these kinds of complex relationships between the physical and the digital One of the central questions that emerges out of these maps is on one hand What are the reasons in the world where we have this richness of information and this absence of information? Well, who are the haves and the have nots and On the other hand, of course it prompts us to ask why do we see this imbalance? Why do certain regions do so well and others are still struggling to be to to capture their knowledge to write about their world as It's been interesting for me to to participate in and today's Conversations and also the conversations of the last few days during the pre events because it's it's really apparent that the Wikipedia community is now well aware of a lot of the barriers that that are In the way to contribution to to participation I think ten years ago. That wasn't the case But I think now people are clearly aware and of course one of the biggest barriers is just the mere cost the mere economic Barrier to participation. This is a map of the cost of broadband access in relation to the average income and We see there is again. There is a vast difference in affordability of online access throughout the world in Certain countries of the world. We don't even think twice. We might get to broadband connections We have a mobile phone. We have a broadband at home, and we don't think twice about it and in certain parts of the world It might cost More than your monthly average income to go online at the same time Regions that are online don't necessarily participate so this map here shows The proportion of people who are on among the people who are online in each country How many of them how many Wikipedia edits are being produced relative to the proportion of to the number of people online in each country? And here we see that again certainly the global north certain countries in the global north relative to their Degree of online access that produce a large amount of contributions and other countries in the world where there might not be a lot of Connectivity there's even less content being produced So I think one thing we are starting to earn is broadband access is maybe necessary, but it's not sufficient in order for people to contribute in the process so one one of the studies that Mark Graham and and collaborators published in the last year was on this with what they coined the digital divisions of labor But also the informational magnetism and I'm going to speak about this in a second Is is the realization that there are inequalities in how the capacity to connect Is distributed, but they're even beyond that there are still differences in how people then participate And they're they're quite complex links and relationships across the world so here here this bar chart here just shows the vast difference and for for Regions in the world Asia Europe Latin America the Middle East and North America Sorry, the Middle East and North Africa North America Oceania and Sub-Saharan Africa the amount of content that local people are producing on Wikipedia about local places We see there are these towers of Europe of North America to the extent of Asia and then these tiny slivers of the rest of the world So these are regions that that might have access, but they don't they don't necessarily participate proportionally Additionally, we're finding a Number of effects that that were surprising that make this even worse One of them is that certain countries in the world Proportionally our much are incredibly active writing about other parts of the world. So we see here From North America these arrows pointing at other regions of the world This is the amount of contact content the amount of edits that North America is producing about these places in the world So here we can see that North America is a net exporter There are a lot of North Americans that are writing about other parts of the world Which isn't necessarily a good thing or a bad thing, but the point to make here is the inverse is not necessarily true In fact, the inverse is almost the opposite It's that a lot of places around the world are As likely or more likely to be writing about the United States than to write about their own country and this is So this is where the term magnetism comes from the phenomenon that certain regions in the world the North America is certainly part of it Europe as well have this property that the world wants to write about them To a degree where they might not want to write about their own places And I think this is something where we don't yet fully understand what is going on here This might be a question of cultural exports That people writes about cultural cultural artifacts that are now global that but are only produced in parts of the world It might be about the fact that Wikipedia might be also has a history that is Anglo-centric It's so it might also relate to the kind of the community that has formed around Wikipedia I'm speculating here. I don't want to overemphasize this point But I think this did their relationships here in how these edits at edit flows move across the world that we still don't fully understand So the this is research that has happened in the past. We're now starting to work on Start on your work on your research to go a little bit deeper on one hand These were all what I showed you just now. These were all snapshots at certain points in time We want to see how does it change over time? How does this vary? On the other hand, we also want to go a bit deeper especially we want to look at different spatial scales For example, we want to look at urban scales. We want to see beyond the country scale What are people writing about who's writing about what things? So this is an early preview. I'd love for you to to tell me afterwards How we can how we can go deeper what other aspects we should be looking at the starting point of the research is the realization that in the last 10 15 years the world is the entire world is moving online these here are Charts that it's it's a these are charts to nearly demonstrate relative to 2016 Well, the the line every line here is the degree of broadband connectivity per country and every Line per country every block here is a global region. You see in North America Latin America Europe and so on and The vertical axis is the degree of connected activity relative to 2016 The point that is being made here with this visualization is that in the last 10 15 years every country in the world has increased their connectivity Some of them significantly so so the world is moving online and we've not stopped yet I think there's still potential so a lot of the change that we've seen and how the Our online experiences online devices have shaped our world have shaped our capacity to produce knowledge to share knowledge This process has not stopped We are we're still in we're still in the middle of it and I think it will continue for some for some time So the question we now have to ask is when this increasing connectivity happens. Does that improve participation in Wikipedia? Does it mean that regions that were previously less represented on Wikipedia? Are they catching up? What I'm doing for now is I'm looking at anonymous edits on Wikipedia When you look at the edit history of an article you see for anonymous edits the IP address the IP address then allows us to Roughly look up the location of the anonymous editor in the world and we use that as an Identifier of to identify where in the world our contributions coming from this here is one simple Way to statistically compare the link between increased connectivity on one hand and Wikipedia participation on the other hand Every dot here represents a country on the horizontal axis is the average annual increase in broadband connectivity over the last 10 years on the vertical axis is the average annual increase in Wikipedia edits over the last 10 years and Both visually we see that there seems to be a relationship with them But also statistically in a correlation analysis analysis. There's a there's there's an association Countries that had more connectivity tended to end up producing more content on Wikipedia Which is which is great news which means as the world is coming online? Most likely the world is starting to participate in ways in which maybe previously it wasn't in a regression model Where we can account for the overall trend over time? This is we can confirm this and we can also find a bit more new on so we see on one hand as countries are moving online overall Contributions are increasing but importantly both edits To other countries like these magnetism edits are increasing So people writing about from their country writing about the US writing about Europe But it more importantly also edits to their own country are increasing so as people are moving online They are starting to document their own places However, and I think this is maybe the the main bits to take away from this It vastly varies by region it vastly varies by region in the world This is not This effect although it happens on at a global average when we start looking at different regions It's not the same in every region this year Visualizes for every region of the world the degree to which this effect takes place to which connectivity produces increased participation in Wikipedia and we can see here the the blue dots Which is high up which is North America Surprisingly although this is a really mature community already and a really active community already they still with a the same amount of Increase in connectivity they have an incredible increase Incredible growth and participation whereas for most other countries in the world this effect is much smaller and for for sub-Saharan Africa It's not even clear what the effect is. It's not statistically significant, which means Most likely it's such a diverse region of the world where certain countries in certain countries It works well in other countries. It's more complicated So we don't really fully understand the relationship yet Which means as we said earlier connectivity helps, but it's not enough and sometimes most likely Oh, we also need to look at other barriers to participation and this might be contextual This might depend on where in the world you're you're looking So our under represented regions of the world catching up I think the important thing to say is yes, things are improving As the world is moving online people are participating more at the same time Certain regions are growing faster and responding to connectivity more strongly than other regions So there's an inequality even in the growth not just in the in the size or in the existing size of participation Also in the growth of participation And and the most important thing as I said this varies by region So I think one of the as we start thinking about these issues We have to appreciate the context. We're looking at we can't I don't think it would be fair to apply a global recipe a global growth Recipe to all of Wikipedia I think we really need to look at the specific context and people's specific circumstances Where what I'm producing here really gives you the crude overview gives you the crude direction But really what is necessary is work where people sit down With potential Wikipedians to try and learn What what does the what is the lived experience? What are the actual the concrete barriers? So I was talking about how connectivity relates to participation Let's just very quickly look at the growth of content over time this year by global region is the is the amount of geotagged articles as and as as they grow over time the red line this is Europe and Central Asia Vast amount of geotagged content and and it keeps growing. It's it's quite It's quite striking a lot of other regions of the world. They have a lot of content and Particularly in the last few years. They're growing quite quickly, but you can see they're still a white margin Let's put this in in proportion. Let's put this in a In a relationship and a particular I want to highlight the north and south Africa. So if we compare in order to understand at what scale are we in Europe compared to Sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa what I'm doing here is I'm showing the amount of content in separate sub-Saharan Africa compared to the amount of content in Europe and again for North America for North Africa Compared to Europe. So what we see that's 10 years ago Europe had about 20 times more geotagged content than Africa and in the last few years you see this incredible period of growth and I think this is the catching up This is in large parts Your success because in the last few years there was an increasing awareness of this knowledge gap of this representation Gap and an incredible amount of initiatives that try to address this and you see here I think once when you look at it from this perspective you can argue Previously underrepresented regions are catching up. They're still a vast gap Saharan Africa still only has a tenth of the amount of content of Europe. It is the same size Geographically it has the same population and the same number of people living in it the same Population count but only a tenth of the geotagged Wikipedia articles so its places are not as well-depth documented But there is growth and I think that is that is hopeful So what why does this matter? I think one one way in which this matters is as I think became apparent in a lot of the sessions today People need to have the capacity to tell their own story To the extent that they want to they should have the ability to decide how how they are being represented to the world online This here is a map of Wikipedia edits And I'm putting into in a relationship between the location of the place that is being written about and the location of the editor And I'm trying to understand for every place in the world What proportion of edits came from locals from people with a domestic IP address again from among anonymous users So here we see This is a bit of we mentioned it earlier a little bit. This is really just a Geographic perspective on this a map representation of this certain places of the world right are happily writing their own story There's North America Europe Parts of South America Australia and so on but certain parts Africa China certain parts of Asia These this content is largely written by Potentially outsiders potentially diaspora. We don't know this but the point is largely written by people who don't necessarily live in That country at the time when they're writing that article Let's go a little bit deeper. So this this gave us the global view at country level Let's look at some cities. We picked seven global cities Montreal greater London Brussels Jerusalem Nairobi Johannesburg and Cape Town We picked cities that we were vaguely familiar with or where we thought they might be interesting to compare There are many more cities, of course that we could have looked up. We chose these seven Here you see for every city the the administrative boundaries of each city and The location of geotagged articles And this is already quite interesting to look at by itself You see particularly for for Brussels and greater London, which are quite quite actively editing Which are places where people are quite actively editing with Wikipedia articles and there's loads of content You already get a sense of the the urban structure. You see the big almost black Region and London and the center where the the Wikipedia content the location of Wikipedia content already points at the Already tells us this is the the dense place in London where people where people want to capture the knowledge and again in Brussels as well Jerusalem has this as well Cape Town. You see that as well Montreal When we now try and try and ask who has written those articles So again, we look at the degree to which these regions have been written out Have been written about by people with domestic IP addresses who come from the same country of That city so in Brussels from people in Belgium from Cape Town has it been written from people in South Africa Then we see a mixed picture and it's quite interesting to compare this to the picture that we saw earlier So in greater London, for example in the top right There there's a fairly low proportion of editors that had local IP addresses meaning central central London Which is the most well documented place in London the most well-documented region Has an incredible amount of foreign Editors writing about this place Brussels is the same story. I don't know enough about Nairobi Montreal Johannesburg or Jerusalem have not been in those places So I can't I can't interpret those but if you if you're familiar with those cities I would love to sit down with you today or in the next couple of days and look at those maps and interpret them I think Cape Town is interesting to look at I've gotten to know it a little bit in the last few days I Want to highlight two things here on one hand table mountain to have a laser pointer I don't think I think I'll just point to point at it by hand. Oh, it doesn't sorry. I should have asked you earlier This here is a central center of Cape Town and Right next to it is Table Mountain, which is on the map is here Table Mountain is as far as I know is not Populated it's not inhabited. It's a natural reserve At the same time, it's also maybe coincidentally. Maybe not. It's also the region that is by far most likely to have been written about by Non-domestic IP addresses by people who are not in South Africa when they're writing When they're contributing to Wikipedia articles about this place and the the Cape Peninsula Park Which is more clearly visible is down here, which is here. You see on the map here the green The green side of Cape Town has the same property So these are regions that are have apparently a kind of fascination to two people from the outside world Again, maybe this is about tourism I've not I've not yet looked at those articles But this is one of the ways in which we can start understanding the relationship between the the knowledge that is being produced the people who produce it to Then try and understand their motivations and the kinds of stories they might be writing about those places Here on the on the left we see The visualized the magnetism, which is the degree of kind of global fascination with an urban region This is really just visualizing the number of countries that were involved in writing about these places and again both Table Mountain and the Cape Peninsula Park where apparently have our great interests to the world much more so than For example district 6th Which is right next to the center, but apparently has as much less international Magnetism who's writing about Cape Town a lot of people from South South Africa, of course But also the global north and people from from other countries So why do we care? What why does it matter? Let's let's go back to this Observation in the beginning information geography is about understanding the relationship between the physical and the digital world One of the things that is happening That everybody here will be very familiar with is wherever we go. We have these devices with us our phones Maybe our computers, maybe our smartwatches if you can if you if you want to spend that money and they The surprising thing about those devices There was maybe part of the initial hope but maybe also is a surprising effect and it's in its Magnitude is that these devices as we carry them with us They shape how we understand the world how we relate to the world and then how we act in the world We might call this a kind of digital overlay where suddenly the physical and the virtual are merging and they become the same in To to make a cartography joke that the map suddenly is the territory That the digital is really the world now as we know it where maybe 10 20 years ago We thought the digital is its own place They are interwoven in ways in which we don't really fully comprehend yet So what's happening online now? What's happening digitally is of great importance to us in the physical world Oops I've got a button to turn this off when one way of illustrating this is There's a Google Maps screenshot from a year a few years ago. That's mark made with Matzook He they looked at Tel Aviv a map of Tel Aviv And they searched for restaurants in English and when they did that they Was that me I Really should have gotten a tutorial further. I apologize. I'll look it up online later How to how to handle your clicker? Yeah, I think I owe you all a drink. I'm sorry So that does the map of Tel Aviv They searched for restaurants in Tel Aviv when they search in English. They broadly get results in this region They search in Hebrew. They broadly get results in similar region. Maybe slightly different but kind of similar streets And then they search for restaurants in Arabic And they get pointed at different parts of the city So the the processes behind this we don't they're not necessarily well documented Google Maps is not as Transparent as Wikipedia and in the process that that produces it we can maybe speculate maybe this is about how restaurants market themselves Maybe this is a result of personalization that certain languages trigger a certain kind of are associated with a kind of interest And and that amplifies and reinforces Inequalities and so on but the the bigger point behind this is that the digital information systems we're building they might Shape our understanding of the world and our actions in the world our movements in the world in ways that we might not anticipate Then we might not understand So it becomes really important to better understand. How is this knowledge captured how this is in this information captured? How is it produced? How is it being made available? on Wikipedia one version of this is Looking at the relationships of different languages on Wikipedia This is a map by trace media from a few years ago. Some of you might know this. This is a map of Spain Visualizing in different colors the different languages that were used When to write about different places you can see here on the on the rights Catalonia is this incredibly bright spot heavily densely documented, but then also other other regions of Spain Written about in the in the Basque language and others So the point here is to say there are really different versions of Spain Based on the language that you're looking that you're reading when you're on Wikipedia When you're in Catalonia, and you don't speak Catalan There might be nuanced knowledge available to you and rich knowledge available to you that you cannot understand It's it's right there, but you can't you can't read it on the other hand if you're Catalonian and Well, Catalonians read Spanish, but let's say if you're Catalonian and you don't read Basque and you're in the Basque country Or let's maybe say the other example you're a Catalonian and you prefer to use the Catalan version And you're somewhere else in Spain, and you realize you You really need to switch to the Spanish Wikipedia in order to get the knowledge So the point that's being made here just to to emphasize that the the question that arises is who owns controls who shapes and who has access to those Augmentations to the those kinds of knowledges that shape our understanding of the world and our actions in the world one of the way of Looking at this question comes out of from discourse in geography There is this notion of the Right to the city. It's a discourse that was introduced by Henri Lefebvre who's a French philosopher a few decades ago He observed that cities urban spaces are places of encounter and are places of opportunity opportunity of opportunity and based on that you can derive an argument that everybody should have access to this opportunity and this kind of account encounter because being being able to be in those places meet people and and and get opportunities for employment and so on is a Transformative experiences. It's it can have a significant impact on your life having that access or not having having that access He proposed based on that argument to The notion of a right to the city everybody in the world should have a right in this to be in the city to get Access to these opportunities My colleagues mark and Joe Shaw They published digital pamphlets, which you can download for free. It's it's worth Reading on our digital rights to the city So what they are doing is they're applying the notion of the right to the city Which spoke about urban spaces and they are trying to apply it to digital worlds Trying essentially to make the same point because digital knowledge digital platforms Have this transformative power like Wikipedia does Everybody should have the rights to participate in this in this process and to have access to that knowledge a Couple of months ago. I was at a conference where I was introduced to to Dario Tara Borelli and to Catherine Maher of Wikimedia and they both told me about This concept of knowledge equity which Wikipedia introduced and strategy discussions last year. I Was incredibly happy to hear this term who here in this room has heard of knowledge equity Who here is familiar with knowledge equity? There's at least half the room maybe more. This is great As I understand it Is it it's a term that was coined with the based on the realization that? access to Wikipedia knowledge and access to the capacity to produce this knowledge is unequally distributed and There the Wikipedia community not only acknowledges that but also agrees to put effort into Remi to rectifying this imbalance in The there's a Wikipedia page which documents the intention and I just took out a sentence here Which which really emphasizes the points we will strive to counteract structural inequalities to ensure a just Representation of knowledge and people in the Wikipedia movement. I was so happy to hear this term because it's an incredibly powerful set of notions Again quite complicated relationships Placed in a very short and very evocative term and one of the things that from for me personally makes it incredibly powerful is It creates a link between the stuff that we work on between the articles that we write and the knowledge that we capture Between our individual acts and motivations of us as people and our curiosities and our capacities and The collective purpose the reason why we are here together But also the reason why we come together as as Wikipedia's and It does it not by enforcing a particular Procedure when you look at that Wikipedia page it doesn't tell you how to produce knowledge equity Instead it comes at it from a perspective of values It's tells us the text tells us these are the things that we hold as important in this moment about what my Wikipedia is trying to achieve They told you you're crazy. No, we're not crazy At the same time, I think we also need to acknowledge that At the core at the beginning of Wikipedia was also an assumption of equality that doesn't necessarily hold It was the assumption that if we give Everybody the same access we allow everybody to contribute we get rid of the experts and everybody now can edit The assumption was that this is enough. I think one of the powerful things about Knowledge equity as a term is that it's explicitly acknowledges. We don't believe this is enough anymore I think we need to we need to try harder and this is a question of equal treatment. Everybody gets the same Capacity to create an account and log in and make edits and equal opportunity Which is about the acknowledgement of structural imbalances barriers to access structural injustice and And the powerful thing about that is that Wikipedia as a community acknowledges we need to put Efforts behind that in order to achieve that we need to go beyond our individual Needs our individual curiosities our individual motivations, which are still important and they're still what holds Wikipedia together But we need to be go beyond that and also find ways of providing support for others and In that I think it's also important to acknowledge that knowledge equity as an approach is inherently unfair It's by design. It's unfair certain people will get the support at the exclusion of others So really it's important to understand that Fairness is maybe not the way by which we should negotiate how to achieve knowledge equity and instead we might I Offered to to think about questions of justice instead. So here Again justice is a complex term and there are many ways of understanding justice There's a very nice overview that David Smith wrote in 1994 in a Geography book on geography and social justice where he collected seven conceptions of Joe social justice These are seven ways in which you might reason about or achieve justice From egalitarianism which is about the equal distribution of wealth and power. Everybody gets the same stuff To utilitarianism the greater good for the greatest number a just outcome is Perceived as an outcome where we have more people who have contributed knowledge than those who have not Libertarianism which is a valuing the freedom of the individual contractarianism which is about Everybody stating their preference and then we negotiate and we form agreements about that Marxism which is about rewarding people's contribution to the full extent not only the things that are perceived as as valuable in marketplaces Communitarianism which holds as the highest value the benefit of the of the collective Feminism which is addressing about Which is about addressing power imbalances between groups and I'm sure there are others these are Only only seven ways of looking at questions of justice and I'm as I say I'm sure there are others So which of those do we choose for Wikipedia? What does the social justice model that we plug into knowledge equity? Well, I don't think there is a single model and I think that's again important to acknowledge That justice is is contextual and justice is complicated Is also Good to say good to understand that it's almost never about just picking the one out of the seven Sometimes it's a combination Sometimes it's all of them that are that need to be in the room when the when the discussion happens But I think the the most important part when we're looking when we're trying to achieve knowledge equity is to look at a particular context and trying to understand the circumstances the Participants and their and in their situation and their capacities and their needs and so on and to try and specifically articulate What I what is the injustice that we are trying to address? At the same time also acknowledging that there is no such thing as perfect justice I think what we can do is is to pursue to pursue it to our best effort It's important to aware to be aware of of tensions that are involved It's not always possible to resolve all the tensions and Maybe my most favorite part of knowledge equity is it requires us to be actively engaged in the process There is not a single process or a single single recipe of Achieving knowledge equity what really it requires us to do is to Unlearn to get out of our habits to listen patiently and carefully Maybe even find new language find new concepts in order to negotiate our collective understanding of a situation So this is this is why I'm incredibly excited about Wikipedia coining this term because it's it's such a It's such a striking such a powerful way of of looking at the Participation inequalities representation inequalities that have been identified at the same time It is a new path for Wikipedia But I think also a new path in a in a larger sense because as so many times in the past with Wikipedia There is not a clear way not a clear model of how to go about it as there was in conversation in the last few days With the Wikipedia's here and people who already run in their own initiatives to achieve knowledge equity and to achieve Justice of representation of participation one of the things that struck me is that a lot of the time they do their pioneering work their frontier work to their best efforts making new knowledge and Often gets distracted by having to justify their work. It's not always clear to people Why this is necessary why they should be providing this kind of support One sometimes one of the things that come comes back is the observation. Well, people already can participate in Wikipedia Why do we need to spend money on on stuff? Or why do we why do you spend your time with with stuff and so on so I for me? It's very clear why we're doing this work and it's of course we're doing this work But it also in the conversation. I acknowledge not everybody Comes with this perspective. So I think part of this work of achieving knowledge equity and achieving justice on Wikipedia is also learning how to make the argument So one of the things that we we came together over in the last few days with a few other Wikipedia's is we are trying to collect a one-page fact sheets just to on one hand illustrate the central inequalities, but also the central Intervention opportunities and the symptoms as some of the key initiatives that are that are coming up So that people don't have to make the argument all over again and instead there's a place that we can point out So people can organize more and argue argue less So I would love for you to tell us Your version of this I would love if you have made experiences if you if you found yourself in these discussions Also, if you found ways in which knowledge equity can be important Then please Let me know come speak to me or send me an email and I would love to hear a perspective on this in particular versions of stories about communities that feel Not well represented on Wikipedia but also stories about the if the real effects of missing information on of misinformation on Wikipedia just in order so we Illustrate better to people by pointing at a single document. This is the stuff that happens that we want to rectify So in closing just a few words It's very exciting to me that Wikipedia is so mature and so old and yet We keep running into new new frontiers running into new challenges. It's very exciting to me Sometimes it means we we are these are these are challenging moments and moments of blindness Having to look for new answers Sometimes it makes it look like a Wikipedia is incredibly messy At the same time it's important to acknowledge that Wikipedia has transformative powers and so as an encyclopedia. It tells us About the world. It allows us to understand the world in ways in which otherwise we couldn't and It still remains a pioneering project in this The the fact that as a collective venture in its processes. It still keeps running into new questions The thing to I want to tell you that I'm sure you're aware of but I've known from my From my own experience the world is botching with a keen eye Not only because they keep running into Wikipedia articles on their Google searches, but also In research communities in online communities I worked with the open street map community and many other communities Wikipedia because it was so big so early Ran into so many challenges so early, but also built technology so early Many other communities around the world are learning from you are learning from your challenges from your discussions From from the knowledge that you are building and the questions I think that we really want to ask at this point. What is the global future that Wikipedia is helping to shape? at Decolonializing the internet Pre-conference event in the last couple of days one of the participants said this wonderful sentence We're trying to imagine a world that has never existed And in order to do that we need to dream big and I think that really holds in this case as well And the one of the questions we need to ask is as the world is coming online Are we addressing the concerns of these newly connected populations and who is it? We'll be writing the Wikipedia of the coming decade. Thank you. Thank you very much Martin I've got a few short announcements After this event, we're gonna break up for meetups there are