 Tea House, which is an online area where you can engage in conversation informally and be welcomed into Wikipedia. I think last month I was sort of talking about how Wikipedia can feel like it's kind of a harsh place. The Tea House is one of those places where it's sort of like an oasis of welcoming friendliness in Wikipedia and you can relax a little bit. So I think that's a really pleasant sort of contrast. And afterwards I'd be happy to sit down with anybody and take a look at the Tea House if you want to welcome somebody on there. I think in terms of general announcements, we have a fire escape over there. The internet password, one edit can make a difference, is on the wall over here. In terms of what this event is all about, this is a community driven event, so both Wayne and I are volunteers. Wayne does the vast majority of the work, as well as doing an enormous amount of editing of Wikipedia. And we are actively open to anybody else who wants to get involved. If you have some ideas about the food, which is provided through a grant from WMF, let us know. We want this to be a community where you can come and hang out and see familiar faces and learn more about Wikipedia and have some fun. Also some credit to Steven and Jacob over there. They're two WMF employees who help us by making sure the space is clean and allowing us to be here. So and also doing some help in the organizing as well. Yeah, I think if you do see somebody who you don't know, please say hi, we want this to be friendly so we don't want people to feel like they're not getting the chance to meet people or they're excluded. So and definitely also let us know if somebody's making you uncomfortable because this is supposed to be kind of a safe place. I think with that, I will. I also wanted to ask everybody, we normally meet on the last Wednesday of every month, but this time we met early because of five or six different holidays. And so next month, we would normally be meeting on the last Wednesday, but there's a chance to do what's called wiki day, which is done every year on the anniversary of Wikipedia. And it happens to fall on Sunday, the 15th. So right now we're on the 21st. Would it make sense to have our next wiki salon on the 15th instead of more towards the end of the month? So maybe a show of hands who would like to combine the wiki salon with a wiki day here on the 15th? And who would be opposed to that? So we'll do it, we'll set it up for the 15th and we would welcome volunteers for that. Also, Jim, his username, if you wanna look him up, is colon 328 and also Ben is kind of focused on wiki but we're all about wiki media, which is there's 15 other projects like the commons, which PAX is very active in and Stevens active in and other things, Wiktionary, et cetera, et cetera. So with that, let's turn it over to Jim for his presentation about the tea house. Okay, can everybody hear me? Sounds pretty good. Okay, on the back. All right, my name is Jim Haife and my slide shows, okay, it's up on the screen, right? We're gonna be talking about the tea house this evening and I'm really, really grateful to all of you for coming out tonight, so close to so many holidays and happy holidays to all of you. And I wanna start out by saying that I welcome questions during the course of the presentation or at the end, your choice. I got some vision problems, so if you wanna ask a question, give me a big strong wave and I'll be happy to recognize you. We've got some portable mics that we can pass around. If you don't wanna use it, just speak loudly and I'll repeat the question so people watching the video can hear it. Okay, so as I said, this presentation is about the tea house. I wanna start with some credit. Some of the statistics I'm using are by Jonathan Morgan of Wikimedia Foundation. The house logo was designed or at least the design was coordinated by Heather A. Walls and it's available through Creative Commons. I am including a lot of photos of teapots in the presentation just for visual interest. I took the photos and my wife Deborah here is a teapot collector. So what you're gonna see is only a very small percentage. We have a couple of teapots here tonight that are Hanukkah teapots because Hanukkah is starting in a couple of days. I wanna thank everybody who assisted me with this presentation. So this is one of my favorites. We got a little tea party going on on top of the teapot. Okay, so here's a little bit about me. My name is Jim Hafe. User name is Cohen 328, C-U-L-L-E-M 328. So I've been an editor since June of 2009. That was a statistic as of October 2nd, 43,000 plus. I'm probably well over 44,000 edits at this point. I'm the most active editor at the tea house. Got well over 4,000 edits or answers, contributions to conversation at the tea house. There's several others who are almost as active as I am. So I've written 76 new articles, expanded hundreds of others. I'm also involved in articles for deletion, which is a process where we do the janitorial function of taking out the garbage, you might say. Sometimes articles just aren't appropriate for the encyclopedia. My attitude is I try to save any article that really can be saved if at all possible. And I have on my user page a list of 96 articles that I've saved by expanding them and adding references to them. That's probably the most important thing. If an article is endangered, if you can add good solid references showing that the topic has received coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the topic, then it's very likely that that article can be saved. I'm a strong advocate for smartphone editing and feel that it's an important mechanism for us to reach out to less developed countries. There's over two billion Android smartphones in operation around the world right now. I use an Android smartphone for probably about 80% of my editing. Also, Wikimedia Commons was mentioned earlier. I've donated hundreds of photos to Wikimedia Commons. Most of them I took myself, others I found that were in the public domain and added those. So this is what people say, the text they see when they go to the tea house. Welcome to the tea house, a friendly place to help new editors become accustomed to Wikipedia culture, ask questions and develop community relationships. So the shortcut was just something you can type into the search box. So if you type in WP colon THQ, that'll take you straight to the tea house question page. So our goal there, we're not perfect, we make mistakes, but our goal is to be friendly, welcoming, helpful and encouraging to new editors. Here's a little history of the tea house. It started back in 2012, formally kicked off February 15th, 2012. And it was supported by WMF staff and fellows at the beginning. But within a few months, it became completely volunteer run. So staff people stop by every once in a while or deal with a technical problem or something, but the vast majority of the work of the tea house is carried out by volunteers. So here's a quote from a research staff report. The tea house offers personalized support to new editors, providing an opportunity to learn the ropes of Wikipedia in a safe, friendly and engaging environment. That's our goal. So here's some statistics, a couple of months. Let me back up a little bit. I first gave this presentation about two months ago at the Wikimedia North America Conference, which was held in San Diego. So the statistics are a couple of months old and the data I used was from August. So take that into account, but honestly, not an awful lot has changed since then. These numbers have just bumped up a little bit over the months. So 15,888 questions answered. Three quarters of the questions come from new editors, but we don't exclude more experienced editors from asking questions. Sometimes there's something that they've never run across before the project is massive, it's vast. So if an editor who's been around for five years has a good faith question, they're more than welcome to come. But the majority of questions come from new editors. Over 10,000 people have asked questions at the Tea House. Average time to answer a question is two hours and four minutes. Sometimes it's 10 minutes, sometimes it can be five or six hours. And especially if a question comes in when most of the active Tea House hosts are asleep, it might take a while. But usually we answer the questions pretty promptly. Average question receives roughly three replies, 1.94 as of those statistics. So that doesn't mean three different answers, but often what will happen is that one experienced editor will answer, somebody else will elaborate, somebody else will add a little bit more information. That's a very common pattern. The importance of a friendly welcome, this is something that we really try to emphasize. When somebody comes in, we try to say hello, welcome to the Tea House, you know, greetings, that type of stuff. But I always say welcome to the Tea House. When I engage with somebody, I just think it starts the conversation off on the right foot, a friendly foot. So Jonathan Morgan looked it over and found out that about 56% of the time, the initial response includes that. But when it doesn't include it in the initial response, because I mentioned earlier that there's roughly three responses. So oftentimes the first to respond might be in a rush and they may not welcome the person, the second person may welcome them. But we work on that, we want to increase that, we want to make it as friendly as possible. So the heart of this presentation is that during, I took every conversation that occurred during the month of August this year, and I read it and I categorized it and I kind of studied it. And so if you really want to delve into the data, we have archives for the Tea House. So that series of conversations starts archive 510 and goes through archive number 521. There were a total of 312 questions that month, so on the average about 10 questions a day. So basically what I did was that I went through, I meant to bring my worksheets. I'm kind of an old fashioned guy. I actually worked on a yellow legal pad and I just categorized them with my little personal codes. I ended up with 25 pages and notes and then I started counting them all up. So for example, if somebody asks a question regarding the neutral point of view, which is kind of the overall guideline for how we write encyclopedia articles, I just categorize as NPOV, just a very simple abbreviation. So I ended up with 120 different categories and subcategories and I didn't assign one category per question. Oftentimes if it was a complicated question, I give it two or three or four of them. So the purpose of this presentation is to give you an overview of the kind of problems that new editors run across, how they struggle almost always, but not 100% of the time, almost always in good faith. They're struggling with the complexity of the project and our goal there is to assist them. Solve their immediate problem and give them some friendly tips on how to proceed. So my goal here is to offer a frank assessment of the strengths and the weaknesses of the P-House and make some recommendations for improvement. So a lot of questions have to do with deletion of articles which I briefly mentioned earlier. Why was my article deleted or why was my draft deleted? A lot of times it's a draft article that hasn't actually made it in the main space of the encyclopedia. Or what can I do to prevent my article from being deleted? So speedy deletion is when somebody judges that an article is really in poor condition and has almost no chance of surviving. Articles for deletion is a more formal, lengthy process. So articles for deletion is for more borderline cases and normally it's considered a one week debate. It gets listed in any editor who's interested in comment pro or con. But the idea is you're supposed to base your comment on I think it's a great article or I think it's a terrible article but specific things having to do with policies and guidelines about why that article helps the encyclopedia or doesn't. So there are about 41 conversations related to deletion. A lot of questions about images. And it's very, very common that new editors do not understand how strict we are on copyright, especially pertaining to images. A lot of people have the misconception that they can go to Google or do a Google image search or whatever and whatever they find there they think they should be able to use an encyclopedia article. And in most cases that is not true. So we have to explain to them proper licensing under Creative Commons licenses or finding images that are truly copyright free. For example, if they were published in the United States and any other countries before 1923 they can probably be used. But obviously that's not very much use for a lot of contemporary topics so that's limited. So we have to explain to people the best thing to do is take photo yourself. If the person is alive we don't allow a fair use photo because the assumption is that somebody can always go take a picture of that person and donate it to Wikimedia Commons and it can be used on any Wikimedia project or anywhere in the world. Because if it's on Wikimedia Commons anybody can use it for any purpose whatsoever. Commercial, non-commercial, whatever. So we have to explain and also insist that people comply with these policies. So that month there were about 38 conversations about images. Notability, so notability as Wikimedia defines the term. In one sense it means eligible for an article on Wikipedia. But in another sense it means that the topic has received significant coverage in independent, reliable sources. So independent and reliable. So the person's own website might be reliable but it's not independent. An interview with that person might be reliable but it's not independent. So we deal with those kind of questions a lot. So we had questions about the notability of businesses, musicians, academics, a band, an athlete, a radio station, a village. So that's like really common type of range of different topics that people ask questions about. 51 conversations that month. Articles for creation, a lot of questions about this process because this is a process that doesn't go back to the very beginning of Wikipedia. I believe it was set up roughly five years ago. Correct me if I'm wrong but basically articles for creation was set up as a process where new editors could draft an article and draft space or sandbox space so these would not be generally widely visible as encyclopedia articles but works in progress in a sense and when they thought that they had the draft article ready they could submit it for review and various volunteers who are experienced editors would review the article and either accept it as an encyclopedia article or decline it. People say my article is rejected. Well it wasn't really rejected. It was said it's not ready yet and so they're supposed to give some information about why the article isn't ready yet and hopefully some links to resources that'll help them get the article ready. But in all honesty a lot of the AFC reviewers are very perfunctory. They're very brief, formulaic. They don't really give very much detailed feedback. So a lot of people will come to the tea house for a little bit friendlier, more lengthy, detailed explanation of what's wrong and maybe what they can do to solve it. So we had about 30 conversations about that process. Copyright, another big issue. A lot of lack of understanding about how strict we are about copyright. As far as written text it needs to be either completely original, in other words the editor needs to write it in their own words, original writing, or if they use a brief quotation. Now a quotation of two or three sentences probably isn't gonna be a problem as long as it's enclosed in quotation marks and referenced to the source of the quote. So you can't just take three sentences from somebody else's writing and some magazine somewhere and plunk it into a Wikipedia article without clearly indicating that it's a quote and attributing the quote. So this is another area that we're constantly having to explain what the policies are and how to go about complying with the policies. Verifiability, so verifiability is one of the core content policies, one of the most important policies. So the idea is that nobody should trust anything that any editor writes on their own with the exception of the grandest statements like the sky is blue or the sun rises in the east but if Paris is the capital of France you don't need to reference that. But anything that is conceivably could be challenged or could be questioned needs to be cited to a reliable source. And so somebody in theory can look at that source and read it and judge for themselves whether the summary on the Wikipedia article is accurate or not. Those sources don't necessarily need to be online. If high quality sources are available online then they should be linkable so they can go directly to that website. But I've many times referenced books that were published 50 or 75 or 100 years ago that are not available online and you give the full bibliographic description of the source and that's acceptable. So we get questions, just general questions about verifiability, questions about how to identify a reliable source as opposed to a source that's not so good, technical questions about how to structure the reference, the type of information to get it displayed properly in the article and so forth. And questions as I mentioned earlier about attributing quotations, how important that is. The neutral point of view, I mentioned it at the very beginning, neutral point of view is another core content policy. The idea behind that is that a Wikipedia article should summarize and reflect what the range of sources say about the topic. Now on a lot of historical topics or basic science and technology topics that's not too hard to do but if the topic is highly political or controversial it can be very, very challenging. And a lot of editors come to the product with very, very strong points of view on various issues and so it can be difficult to get them to understand that the purpose of a Wikipedia article is not to persuade people. We say we're not a soapbox, you know the old thing in London it used to be that you could go to Hyde Park, put a box on the ground and stand on the box and give a speech and try to persuade people. That's not what Wikipedia is all about. We're an encyclopedia, we're not an advocacy website. Doesn't mean we can't write about topics related to advocacy but we have to write about them from the neutral point of view. So there were about 37 conversations about that and it kind of ties into promotionalism as well which is a major issue that we deal with. So somebody, you know here we are in San Francisco where tech startups are, I don't know there may be more tech startups than people in San Francisco, I don't know. But people want to promote their venture whether it's a new business or whether it's a band. They've just released something onto the internet in form of recorded music and they think it's wonderful and so they want a Wikipedia article about their band or their musical performance or whatever. Many other aspects that people try to perform. We get people who want to just in the last 24 hours or so we had somebody who thinks that they've got new insights into the theory of relativity and they want to promote that on Wikipedia. So tell them get published in a physics journal first and then we'll talk. So we discuss a lot of that stuff with people. Biographies, there have been major problems in the past with biographies on Wikipedia, especially biographies of living people. If you're writing a biography of somebody who lived in the 17th century, it's not as much of an issue but if you really screw up a biography of somebody who's alive right now, you know people's feelings can be hurt, their reputations can be damaged, their business interests can be damaged. So we have to be very, very careful about that. And we write conservatively. I'm not talking about conservative politics, I'm talking about conservative editorial judgment. We want to be very careful that we don't damage people's reputation. So especially if the material is contentious, controversial in dispute, we want to be very careful to use the highest quality sources, present both sides of the argument. So a lot of discussion about that and autobiographies are always a problem. So a lot of people will say, you know, try and write a hard, fast rule against an autobiography. I've actually seen a few people succeed in writing an article about themselves if they're a highly notable person with some guidance, with some input. But I would feel pretty confident in saying that 99% of people who set out to write an article about themselves end up failing, getting embarrassed and humiliated in the process. We don't want to humiliate them excessively, but it's very, very difficult to write a neutral article about yourself. And so that's something we deal with. We give people advice when they're dealing with that type of stuff. Conflict of interest, this relates to promotionalism that I mentioned earlier. In a certain sense, everybody has a certain conflict of interest. If you decide, hey, now there's well over five million articles on Wikipedia right now. And if you say, I want to work on this article about tennis, because I've been playing tennis ever since I was seven years old, but I don't want to work on an article about golf, because golf bores me. In a certain sense, you could say, well, that person has a conflict of interest in favor of tennis and against golf. But if their goal is to improve the encyclopedia and not write an article about a tennis tournament in 1980 that they competed in and came in 14th or something like that, just to highlight the fact that they had that accomplishment in their youth, then there's no problem. If they just want to focus on tennis and they understand the notability guidelines for tennis players and they want to be consistent with the way that we present the sport of tennis, that's perfectly okay. But if they're getting paid to write an article about the company they work for or their boss, for example, that's a major conflict of interest. If they're getting paid, they're required to disclose that. That's a policy of the Wikimedia Foundation and that's mandatory. That's not negotiable, okay? So a lot of times the problem is they're not getting paid but they're so devoted to their area of interest, so dedicated that they just get blinded and they don't understand that they're just single-headedly pushing their own agenda instead of building the encyclopedia. So the way that we sort that out into acceptable and unacceptable is what's your primary goal here? If your primary goal is to improve the encyclopedia and uninvolve people looking at your work say, yes, this work improves the encyclopedia, then it's okay. But we had about 22 conversations that month about this area, conflict of interest. This teapot right here, by the way, is I think the oldest one that my wife has and it was owned by her mother and she got it as a wedding present, am I correct? Your mother got this teapot as a wedding present, right? So this teapot right here is 70 years old and something that my wife treasures. Okay, so a number of questions come up about user accounts and editor issues as I call it. So user names comes up. You can't have an overtly promotional username. You can't have San Francisco widget startup. You can't have that as a username. That's the name of an actual company. It's not allowed. But Joe at Bank of America is an acceptable username. But personnel manager at Bank of America is not an acceptable name because that's a job title and people could come and go. So questions about what's an appropriate username, a username that's harassing, that's racist, that's sexist, those type of user names are not allowed. And as you can see sometimes, there's borderline questions, we have to work it out. People are allowed to edit Wikipedia without setting up an account, which we call IP editing. That's perfectly acceptable, but questions sometimes arise. Questions about people's own user pages. And the general thing about user pages is as long as the purpose of the user page is to facilitate building the encyclopedia, it's okay. So a typical thing is people will have a user page and it says, I'm interested in these areas. I have expertise in these areas. I'm working on this or that article. I've worked on this list of articles in the past. You can contact me this way, that way, the other way. All of that is appropriate. But we're not a web hosting service. So you can't promote your business, your freelance ventures, that type of thing. And again, there can be gray areas. And so it has to be discussed and worked out. Questions about mobile editing, how to sign. On talk pages we have signatures. Questions about just how to get started, how to use a sandbox. Auto confirmed status. I just had a lengthy discussion with an editor a couple of days ago. What that means, it's not self-explanatory from the name, but if you've been around for a certain period of time and have a certain number of edits, then you can edit pages that are semi-protected without having to post an edit request on the talk page of the article. If an article is very controversial and heavily vandalized, it will be fully protected, which means only an administrator can edit that article. And if you want changes to the article, you have to post your proposed edit on the talk page for the article. But then there's semi-protection, which is kind of an in-between status. So if you've been around for a little bit, a little while and you haven't messed up badly, you can edit those pages. So we get questions about that. Service awards, that's just an informal thing where if you've been around for five years and had 30,000 edits or something, you get a little badge you can put on your page, which I have on my page. You can see what it looks like if you want. So this is a little bit late, but hope you had a nice Thanksgiving. Okay, so we do get some questions about behavioral issues, which are commonly called drama. Sock puppets means that people will create multiple accounts to support each other, and Editor A proposes something controversial and they create another account for Editor B and Editor B comes along and says, oh, Editor A is completely correct there. They're really on the ball. They're an outstanding editor, I agree, 100%. They're the same person. That's not allowed. We call that sock puppetry, and it will lead to people getting blocked. So we get questions about blocking and what to do if you're blocked, how to get unblocked, that type of stuff. The administrator's notice board for incidents is kind of the night part of Wikipedia, and that's where problems get dealt with. It can be ugly. You don't need to go there. I suggest you stay away. But if you have an interest in disruptive human behavior, you can take a peek. Edit wars. So that means when people repetitively do the same thing over and over again and somebody else undoes it, which we call a revert and it goes back and forth, that's not allowed. Three times in 24 hours, you gotta stop and talk about it on the talk page. That's a general rule, but if you do it two times and threaten to do it a third time in one hour, that's just as bad as doing it more than three times in 24 hours. Or if you do it slow motion, if you do it two times a day, day after day, week after week, that's just as bad. So edit warring is not allowed. The idea is if somebody disagrees with you, take it to the talk page and work it out and build consensus. The speed resolution, if talking between two editors doesn't work, what do you do? We've got a number of mechanisms for working that out. So people have asked questions about vandal fighting. Ownership means somebody writes an article and they think that they control the article and nobody else has a right to work on it. That's not how Wikipedia works. When you make a contribution, there's a little notice in the edit window that once you click that button, anybody else can modify it. So we only had 29 questions about that and most of them didn't turn ugly. So it's not so bad at the tea house in that area. It could be a lot worse. Administrator's notice board has 29 ugly things happening in a couple of hours, I think. So five minutes, technical issues. I'm getting close. Almost done. All right, so these are some of the technical issues we give advice to people on. Templates, which display standardized stuff on a Wikipedia page. Tags, which are like warning that there's a problem with an article. Redirects, which means you type in a search term and the article has a different name. Type in Abe Lincoln. It should automatically take you to Abraham Lincoln. That's the simplest example. It gets more complicated. The relationship between Google and Wikipedia comes up. Page protection I mentioned earlier, if a page has been vandalized a lot. OTRS is like a volunteer service to help with problems that involve personal information that you don't want publicly available. Scripts is a little technical thing that carries out a program. Transwiki issues like moving things from one Wikipedia to another, another Wikimedia project. So a whole list of other things. I won't go through those. Issues about articles, moves. This is something that new editors get confused with. They say the title is wrong. I made a typographical error in my title. I can't correct it like I can correct anything else. Well, once an article is, the title of the article is like the place it is. And so instead of changing the title, what you do is you move it to a new title. So if you misspelled the person's name, you move it to the correct spelling of the person's name. And that's a little bit tricky to new editors and we explain that a lot. Stuff about categories, manual of style, info boxes, which in a lot of articles is a box that kind of summarizes the content. People argue about it, amazing. Some people argue for months or years about various info boxes. It gets ugly, but translating from one language to another. We've got hundreds of Wikipedias in different languages. Now I only work on English because sadly that's the only language I speak fluently. But I know I can read kind of enough Spanish and French and maybe a little German to mess around. I don't write in those languages but sometimes I read in those languages. Okay, occasionally we get questions about the tea house at the tea house. Doesn't really come up all that often. So since they're so infrequent, it seems most people who come to the tea house really understand the concept. Miscellaneous, people ask questions about my first article, et cetera. Whole list of stuff here. Wiki projects comes up. I mentioned commons, which is a repository for media files. We get questions about that. One unanswered question in the whole month. And it was kind of a question that really wasn't appropriate because it was a question about transferring images from the Indonesian Wikimedia to Wikipedia to Wikimedia Commons. But somebody should have replied but it dropped off the page without an answer. So I'm sorry that that one didn't even get a brief reply but only one question in the whole month. So that's pretty good but we gotta do better. Okay, here's a list of the most active participants from April to September. Most of them are hosts who actively answer questions. Some are just super active question answers. So here's some preliminary research from Jonathan Morgan and Aaron Haffeker. I don't know if they've published this yet but as of the time I first gave the presentation it wasn't quite ready. But a preliminary comparative analysis of editor survival between groups so that tea house invitees were significantly more likely than the control group which is people who didn't get invited to the tea house. We've made one or more edits three to four weeks after registration and we're 10% more likely to stick with the project. So this is my forward summary of how to be a tea house host, be friendly but firm. In other words, our goal is to build an encyclopedia we're not there just to make friends but we wanna encourage people and help people to build the encyclopedia in a friendly, helpful fashion. So here are my final recommendations. Emphasize friendly greetings, avoid brosk answers, recruit more hosts. Any of you feel you're experienced enough to answer questions, please feel free to join in at any time. Increase bot invitations. In other words, we have automated programs to send out invitations. Reconsider top hosting. This is kind of an internal thing but the tea house is one of the few places where the new questions go to the top of the page instead of the bottom of the page and that can be confusing. And to consider possibly a frequently asked questions. So I have on my user page at user colon 328 slash tea house host remarks. I have a lot of comments from other tea house hosts and briefly summarize their feelings. That is my presentation. Thank you very much and I do welcome questions. Desperate. When you collected statistics about deletion related questions, did you have a separate category for prod? Because proposed deletion is even more confusing than the other two processes for most. I don't think we had a question about prod in that particular month. But what he's referring to is we have three different types of deletion procedures. Speedy deletion, which is supposed to be completely non-controversial if somebody posts an article that's just gibberish, random typing on the keyboard or it's a whole string of swear words or something like that. That's category for speedy deletion. I mentioned articles for deletion, which is a formal one week debate. And that might be a minor author who had a book that was reviewed in three hometown newspapers within 100 miles of where they live. Is that person really notable enough for an encyclopedia article worthy of debate? But the prod is kind of in between. And basically it's somebody says this should be deleted. And if nobody objects, then an administrator gets around to it. It can be controversial, but yeah, if anybody objects to a prod, it should go to articles for deletion. But I just don't think we had a question about it in the month of August. Thanks for the question though. Other questions? So you mentioned the topic of biographies about oneself. Yes. And I'm interested in that because I have a, I mean, I'm not notable enough to write about myself, although hopefully someday I will be. But I have a friend named Giozio who has an article. He didn't write it, but he is on Wikipedia. And he wants to improve the article that's written about himself because he thinks it's not very good. And he unfortunately couldn't make it today. But I'm wondering if I can give many tips as to how to go about doing that. Yes, the first thing for him to do would be to go to the talk page of the article about him and open a new conversation there. And first of all, he should openly admit that he's the subject of the article. And he should say these are the shortcomings that I see in the article. And he should provide links to reliable sources that back up what he says. Now, if the article has high visibility and a number of editors are watching it, hopefully he'll get a response within a couple of days. If he doesn't, then he can, there are a number of things that he could do. But to keep it simple, I would recommend that he goes to the biographies of living people notice board. And the shortcut for that, he would just type in the search box, WP colon B L P N. Go there, open up a thread, and there's a bunch of editors who are interested in biographies who monitor that and will give him some assistance. If he, he can contact me also on my user page. I'll be happy to help. Anybody else? Well, if that's it, I wanna thank you very much for coming out tonight. It's been a real pleasure. Thank you. Before Jim steps away, there's something on Wikipedia called barn stars. It's actually, it goes back to an Amish tradition of when a barn is raised, that a star is put on the top. And Wikipedia, when people do good things on Wikipedia, they get barn stars on their talk pages. So I wanna give Jim a barn star. Thank you so much. Thank you. Five years, he's been doing the tea house. Let me just mention that, yeah, this is a miniature, well, I got my mic on. Yeah, this is a miniature version of a real barn star. And if you go to Petaluma, downtown Petaluma, there's the Mystic Theater, and don't remember the name of the building next to it, McNear, it's a McNear's building. And right there, there's a big brick wall, and barn stars are also used in earthquake retrofitting. And you can see a whole bunch of them there. And I have been collaborating for quite a few years with an editor in Oregon. And like me, he reveals his real name, so I'm not outing him or anything. His real name is Tim Davenport, and he edits Wikipedia under the name Careite. And he found two barn stars, two real barn stars, I guess at an antique shop or something, and he sent them, they just came in the mail the other day, full size. So thank you very much, that's very nice. Thanks to everybody. Earlier, I also forgot to mention that we have a couple of special guests. We have a seven-year-old here, Samantha, and we also have Jim's dog, Dexter. So at this point, we wanted to open up the floor if anybody wants to make a three- to five-minute presentation about something, or if you have any community announcements, this is your time to do that. If you do want to step up and introduce yourself, you're also welcome to do that. It might take a while, but if everybody does, but... Yeah, and editing, editing what? Yeah, and afterwards, I'll be here for about an hour, at least. So if anybody wants to get their hands dirty with editing, I'm here to help if you want, and I'm sure Wayne would be happy to help too. Yeah, and or just hang out and have some wine. You don't have to hang out and edit. So, yeah, is anybody interested in speaking for a few, a couple minutes? Okay, cool. Hi, I'm Pax, also known as Fun Crunch. I'm on English Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. So about a month ago, don't have to get great pictures. My partner taking over my camera duties there, Isaacie. About a month ago, an edit filter was deployed based on an RFC that I started to protect user pages by default from anonymous editing. Because until last month, basically anybody could edit a person's user page on Wikipedia. For those who don't know what it is, when you create an account on Wikipedia, you have the option to create a user page that you can put some basic information on. It's not intended to be a webpage replacement for Facebook or anything, but you can just put what Wikipedia projects you do on, some basic biographical information, et cetera. Unfortunately, since by default, those are unprotected, they are one avenue of harassment as I experienced myself. So I proposed during the IDEA campaign in June that those be semi-protected by default so that you had to be a confirmed editor, auto-confirmed access on the English Wikipedia, I think is currently four days and 10 edits to be able to edit semi-protected pages. And with Chris Shilling with the Wikimedia Foundation, with his help, I developed an RFC which gained consensus to have some protection for the page, but what we ended up doing was creating an edit filter instead of making the pages semi-protected because that was much more straightforward to implement without requiring a lot of a program or time. So the reason I mention this now is because it's in the signpost that just dropped today, I think at five o'clock today, it finally got published. So you can read about it there. And if you have any feedback, I know that this is kind of a controversial issue with some people because they feel that Wikimedia should be completely open to everybody for every purpose, but user pages are not actually part of the encyclopedia. There's a template that actually says this is not an encyclopedia page that I have on my user page and many others do as well. So basically the reason I did this as part of the Inspire campaign against harassment was because especially people from vulnerable populations, women, trans people, people of color can get targeted for harassment. And even though that can happen places other than the user page, when it happens on the user page, it just feels particularly violating because that feels like people are basically spray-pating hate speech on your front door. I actually mentioned that in the article that's in the signpost. So yeah, if you wanna check it out, check out the article. If you have any comments, I'd be very interested in reading them. And again, I'm Fun Crunch, also known as PAX. Thank you. How's it going, everyone? Good night. Good evening to you all. How about this teapot, right? This recursive has a teapot on teapot. It's very impressive. I'm very impressed by that. Yeah, so I'm Matt Wood, Hashemi. I'm half of Hat Note, if you've ever heard of them. I'm just mostly here to talk about Wiki Loves Monuments, which analysis results this 2016 international results just this past week. And yeah, you can download the PDF of the international jury report with the top, what is it, like 50 winners or so? The top 50, I think 25 of them are winners, or at least, I know that United States took 11th place with a very beautiful image from Colorado Springs or something like that. Crystal Springs, somewhere in Colorado. Yeah, so we had about 275,000 entries this year, which puts us above a lot of years. And it was the first time we had a report since 2013. So it's actually a significant uptick in a lot of ways. And yeah, I encourage you to check out wikilevesmonuments.org if you wanna find the report. And there should be a blog post or two about it as well. If there are no questions about Wiki Loves Monuments or other forms of entry, I'll hand it over to the next person. I've been Matt Wood, you've been great. The other day, I was looking at a visualization, a data visualization project, and it was created by Stephen LaPorte and somebody named Mahmood. And now I know who Mahmood is. Hi, I'm Jasper, and I made a mistake of using my real name on Wiki. So I'm also used to Jasper Dung. D-E-N-G is my last name. And I'm an administrator of WikiData. And I just wanna make sure all of you know what WikiData is. It's my far newest WikiMedia Foundation project. It was launched in, I believe, October 2012. And the idea is to extend the magic of WikiMedia Commons to human-readable data. And I just wanna make sure all of you know that we're there to keep information and that Wikipedia has so far not realized the potential of WikiData to store so many things. The nice thing about information, after all, is that it is independent of language. So why should information that's sourced in English stay on English Wikipedia? Why can't everyone else have the same access to it? And furthermore, why shouldn't computer programs have access to it? If you have questions about WikiData, what it is, how to get started, you can go talk to me afterwards. Thanks. If that's it, I'm going to close with a quote that I saw from somebody who donated to Wikipedia that sort of just made me warm inside. When you think about a global movement, when I am disillusioned with the state of human affairs on this planet, thinking of the success of Wikipedia with the contributions of millions of dedicated unpaired, sharing knowledgeable volunteers serves as a reminder to me of the goodness of many people on this earth. Thanks again for creating one of the true marbles of the modern world. I think trying to be a little inspirational about joining this whole group, but Wikipedia is an amazing thing and I think you can see here just how amazing the contributions of volunteers are with all the work that's been done in the tea house, one of the most important areas of Wikipedia. So thanks again, Jim. I think that's it and yeah, thanks for coming. It's not it, so to speak. We have the room for another hour, so we can still mingle, we can munch, we can edit, we can ask questions of each other, whatever. Yep, yeah, don't misinterpret my words, but I do have to say that this is it for the mic. So to clarify, anyway, which means you are free to, you know, not to talk and chat and everything. Cool.