 Okay. Hi everyone. So it's okay. Yeah, you know, this is a very open thing. Hi. Welcome everyone to the Wikispoor workshop. This is an informal session where we're going to show you how to play with your own wikis on Wikispoor. Wikispoor is, it's really great to present it at Wikimania because Wikispoor started at the last in-person Wikimania in Slack Home. It's why I'm wearing the shirt of the Slack Home Wikimania. You'll also know that the shirt of the Slack Home Wikimania is the most tasteful Wikimania shirt because it has the Slangster Botanical theme, which also echoes with Wikispoor. Wikispoor is a place to grow new wikis in the Wikimedia projects. If people are familiar with incubator for different languages, the idea is it's a place to start new projects and new genres, which we've historically had issues with doing. It happens very occasionally when there's a great amount of energy and enthusiasm and money and political influence. But hopefully we can find more easier ways to start new projects in a smaller scale that require less investment economically, socially, politically, etc. So we've been working on Wikispoor since about 2019 when we were able to get some gracious help from the Wikimedia Foundation having some space on the cloud server. We've had a lot of technical help. Technology is not my strongest suit, but we've had a lot of technical help, including by Gere Gautisha, who's been our chief technical officer of Wikispoor. He's in that such a thing could be said to exist, as well as other folks who've helped out in different areas. So I want to share the website and show people how it works, its philosophy, and I want to get people editing. If you can edit a bit today. The nice theme of Wikispoor is you can edit on basically any topic, as long as you act like a good person. That's the operating philosophy, unlike Wikipedia, where we have all these rules. Wikispoor doesn't have rules except when they're really strictly necessary. So yeah, you can visit Wikispoor. It's hosted on WMF Labs. You can also just get it at wikispoor.org and you'll see the wiki. You can see these are the principles of Wikispoor. So Wikispoor rests on a tripod, but sort of there's a bowl and there's three legs and you put the plant in there and it grows. So first is the put down roots. Everything should be linked to Wikidata and where possible. The idea is there's a lot of stuff that's on Wikidata that doesn't have narrative content on Wikipedia or on other sites, and we want to provide a place where that's there. And the important thing, the valuable thing about Wikispoor, as opposed to random other wikis on the other parts of the internet, is that it is part of the Wikimedia universe. So it's designed so that you can query wiki data and also find the Wikispoor page and find all sorts of other things. And of course, by being part of the Wikimedia universe, it's non-commercial, it's nonprofit, it's not tied to some weird political agenda that some random thing on the internet might be, and hopefully it's more of an ongoing community infrastructure. The important thing is to, it's important to dig carefully, so we don't have any no original research policy, but we do have a policy that you should be careful when we're using extensive use of primary original sources and do some things, reasonable things within the context. So we don't have this puritanical idea of no original research, but we want you to do things in context. And the other piece of the tripod is, for the tripod is no weeds. We don't want, we'd like behavior or harmful content, so we don't want a lot of violating personal information. But if it's like sort of fun but boring information about your great grandfather who was a sea captain, that might go on Wikispoor. Or it might be a fun but maybe boring information about the mural at your community garden, that might go on Wikispoor. Things that, you know, might be interesting but they might not fit in Wikipedia or similar projects. So the whole idea, philosophy of Wikispoor is that it's a bunch of small projects and these are, you know, these are being developed as, you know, but they're sort of a placeholder things for now for different topics. So for example, a spore focused on art, focused on biographies of people. And of course that might involve, you know, potential privacy issues where there might be limitations. Focused on events, focused on geography and graves on queer LGBTQ topics, on visual stories, on works or on entertainment. I wanted to share one of these. This is Geospore. This is focused on geographical sites, so geographical locations. There's been a lot of work on local Wikis but it's not quite integrated into the Wikimedia universe. So I wanted to share this work. It's been largely done by Sam Wilson, who's a coder from Australia who's at the conference but actually is doing another session right now. But I just want to share some of his work there. And the nice thing about this, I'll just share a street in Brooklyn, New York City, my hometown, McKibben Street. This is not a very famous street but it's on Wikidata and it's on Commons. And we can write a little bit about it because it's linked from Wikidata to the item. So you'll see here on Wikidata, there's a Wikisport ID and you'll see this template here which Sam Wilson developed just has Infobox, Place and the Wikidata QID. And obviously this can be done in a more sophisticated way but it's better now than it was in the past in that most outside Wikis. And this is Wikisport is technically is not on the regular server, it's on the cloud server so it doesn't normally have access to this kind of thing. We also have, so just to show some of the other areas, there's been some work on art topics, on art galleries, on specific works of art and specific places. There's been, some of these might be interesting, there's been work on, sorry, there's been some work on visual stories on sort of something that might be, that might not quite fit on, this doesn't fit on Wikipedia, this doesn't quite fit on Commons. So telling a story using images. This case it was made by Wikimedia in doing a project on the hat making industry in Curacao in the Caribbean. And sort of making this narrative that's informed by images but they aren't necessarily reliable sources in the traditional Wikipedia sense. Similarly there's, this is for organizations. We've actually done a bit. We had an experiment it was funded by a grant to work on different organizations in the Wikimedia universe and represent them with using different tables. So this is for the art and feminism user group and you'll see there's some different qualifications of it and there are ways of sorting various tables. So there's some various systems of tables here. So activity, Glasgow 1980s project, different movement strategy activities. We converted all sorts of movement strategy activities to work here, sorry. Just various examples, different fields. This has, uses a different media wiki functionality that's not normally there, which means you can sort of write, it's a little bit of halfway between wiki data and Wikipedia. You can write text in different fields and sort of sort them and collate them and play with things like that. So wiki spore is meant to bear four fruits, just the share in general. It's meant to be a wiki farm. It's meant to be a wiki farm for new topic areas. It's meant to be a narrative base as opposed to a database that wiki data is. It's meant to be a knowledge repository for different types of knowledge including oral and visual knowledge that aren't traditionally as welcome on Wikipedia projects and it's meant to be a testing ground for for new sister projects and things like that. And I would, so I encourage you to look at the list of spores and think of topics that you might want to work on that might be interesting on wiki media projects that you haven't had a place or time to do and I'd encourage you to make a wiki spore account and try creating a page or editing a page now if you have a device and it could be on anything that is true and not harmful. That's those are the major criteria and should it should be green if possible. Yeah so people maybe want to share if you're things that you might be interested in documenting that that you haven't been able to document that you've maybe doesn't quite meet the criteria. Anybody want to share any of any have things that you'd like to share? Well yeah why don't you get out get out your laptops if you have them and if you'd like to and we're gonna have a we're gonna have like a mini editathon if you'd like. I'd like to ask if this is structured like the incubator for languages. Are they individual wikis or is it one wiki with these different namespaces? Right now it's because there hasn't been enough energy to justify more of it it's one wiki with multiple namespaces but it's set up to accommodate multiple wikis. Yeah multiple wikis are technically possible but in general media wiki doesn't support well deed application of work between multiple wikis so you need to create the templates freshly in every wiki and so on so it's unless it's really necessary it's generally not a good idea. I think I think we've set up a bit of package so it can be done with this like a so we have a test wiki that's set up with the sort of the same same general parameters and we can sort of duplicate them the more is necessary I think. I'm just wondering like does your project accept oral histories because we've recognized that a lot of cultures and people do not have the what's called considered as like western science or western kind of literature to document their histories and one of the I remember that foundation or on wikipedia it has initially done a little bit of oral history I think they even got some funding but then there's a lot of pushback from the community saying that like well those aren't reliable because it's from someone's else personal perspectives so I was wondering if wiki spore would be a better avenue for collecting these oral histories. Yeah thanks we do want to be open to oral histories we have a page on wiki spore as we do for many things for oral knowledge so yeah we want to have oral knowledge is accepted on wiki spore you know it has to be in sort of the context and you know it involves a little bit more work you know you'd have to describe where where you got say an interview from or what type of knowledge it is if it's like general knowledge in a cultural community if it's specific knowledge from a specific interview but yeah we welcome it and and we encourage it basically if it's if it's if it's interesting if it's interesting information and it's not causing harm to anyone it's welcome at wiki spore and we hope to have more of that we're trying to get a proper template for the site oral things so we have the citation templates but we have citation templates for books for the web for academic journals but we don't have them yet for oral citations and we would like to include that there we've linked to wiki spore from different articles on English Wikipedia and we hope that it could be like a supplement it's not necessarily maybe a source of a major topic on English Wikipedia but it could be an illustration so there might be a thing on the side that you know explains more about say this particular game or this particular feature of a small town that maybe the the regular Wikipedia article can go into but that can be expanded on wiki spore because it has this more open policy could you say a bit more about wiki data integration and particularly interested in whether you can do site links to wiki spore from other projects and whether something like the wiki data info box we have on comments might be useful on wiki spore yes so yes this is mostly thanks to sam wilson so i'll just you know like to give credit where credits do we do have an info box we have info box particularly for geography and there's maybe a more generalized info box that we should have which we don't quite have yet but i'll just show it again so this is an example of a geographic info box for in our complex in in korea it has of course a map it has a wiki data number it sort of zoomed in it has a little plane it has the image and it has a summary this is all drawn from wiki data right here just it does have to be manually put in the q number because we haven't quite figured that out yet but it still works pretty well and if the wiki data item changes this changes too yeah so i think a more generalized info box like is on wiki media commons would probably help for cases where it's not as specific but one of the potential advantages of wiki spore is that this type of box can be specialized in in in in various ways but dependent on the topic because some of the topic some of the the subject areas might be very specific and you move right one very specific type of boxes um yeah yeah yeah sure i was wondering uh do you manage multilinguality in yes with uh with limits right now we mostly have uh right now we mostly use the the meta translation tags the meta style translation tags so you make sure you've seen them these things but that's mostly because it's sort of convenient and you can do you know seven or eight languages but there's no reason why a lot of things can't be you know purely one language or another language in a different namespace or on a different wiki so we're we're very open to having different languages as as they might work out is there anything that that you might want to share people have questions about like the technology um or how how how how the wiki data might develop okay i'm gonna yeah i mean now that you're bringing it up it could be interesting to hear more about how you're thinking about the integration wiki data especially for things like oral history or things that feel a bit more nebulous in terms of how it might connect to certain articles the way i think about it and i think you know we've been talking about different folks at the conference uh and other other other places is um that say the wikipedia article might provide you know a basic summary of some things of a topic and you know the wiki data item and it provides one narrative on it but there's a lot of other pieces of narrative connected to a topic that won't fit there and maybe would be a supplement and it would be different supplements for different contexts and having that on wiki data would be a useful tool not just for um not just for wikipedia and the wikipedia projects but potentially for third party for third party users um hoping to uh work on a map particularly of of new york city uh with all of the the the places including the streets the small streets in brooklyn um being able to pop up the wiki data item for these for these smaller places and wikipedia article if there is one if not a wikispor item a wikispor article or or something else that gives some more supplementary information i don't want to sorry this is this is an this is an advertises a workshop uh so yeah i would encourage you if you have any wacky idea for a topic for a topic or a type of topic that should be on the wikipedia project somewhere i'd encourage you to try it um encourage you to to take out your your thing or at least maybe think about or what uh what type of thing you might want to do that's different um yeah hoping to be a little bit practical i don't know if that works go ahead uh yeah i'm just hoping the recent changes and found out that there is like backup wiki which says like that uh this wiki for backing up pages on other wiki subjects to sneaky vandalism so it also works like a backup for it seems like many languages like there's some articles in spanish so it could work also like that it could potentially that's something that someone started recently um as as an experiment it's meant to be an experimental place um and it's some some place that someone thought maybe it would be good to have a second copy that's that's more watched but in general it's uh you know it's it's open the idea is it's opening the experimentation as long as the experimentation is not actively harmful and that that that project didn't look actively harmful so we didn't stop it anybody want to share maybe uh if if you know what topics that um topics that might be missing or maybe the functionality that might be useful okay sure can you make an account usually you need an account yeah you can make an account it'll be linked to your it's not the same as some single user login but it'll be linked to your account um i don't i'm not sure what the proper language for that is but uh yeah okay i'm gonna i'm gonna stop speaking yes i like i think this is a workshop and we should be workshop and we just hang out that's okay yeah i mean we do hope we do hope to be you know sort of like a full wiki media project a place and not only that but a place where people can start new projects things on topics like uh geographical topics entertainment topics uh things about uh say books individual books that are not always notably enough for wikipedia but i think every book in the library should have a wiki page every every film on and and radio program on internet archives should have a wiki page to me it's a little silly it's that they don't um there's actually even been some experiments with artificial intelligence uh that i can i can share if you're interested in that kind of thing um because there's there's so many topics that are underdeveloped uh so one area is um oh yeah it's called new pedia and i think uh it's from s j kline um and is he was also sharing this a bit uh in in the future this is like a three or four d pun uh because the the project before the project before wikipedia in the first few months was n u pedia and this is n e w pedia so if you appreciate that then this might be the room for you um this is just yeah these are some artificial intelligence we we did some experiments with artificial intelligence the chat gpt and other uh related things on wikipedia itself but um s j kline thought it would be fun to sort of experiment a little bit more and so we put in some some things here like a lot of local things in brooklyn um uh so for example the the christin mccall of school or whatever uh this is a school named after a national who died in the challenger disaster and it's a local school in brooklyn um so some information about it um which was verified and you know it was it was journeyed by a robot but it was also verified by human and his link to wiki data item and has a nice little map and it's under this little new pedia label and says new pedia version zero source being review level low so we try to be transparent about how good or how not good it is um and this is a just you know just some uh just some some basic information and the idea is you can you can you can experiment with this in a way that you wouldn't have to have a six month review process on english Wikipedia um which is how you would you would do this on english Wikipedia yeah yeah so about um that active harmfulness um i'm thinking about advertising so how do you define what's actively harmful because advertising is something that's um fron upon on on wiki projects but also um a valid topic like if you want to present your company um so how do you tackle that yeah advertising as such hasn't been a problem so far we wouldn't want advertising that's like as advertising sake um but i do see potentially the use of like local directories of you know local businesses and things like that um but you know there would have to be some criteria involved there um maybe you would just be that it's like wiki data type information and a little bit more um because the nice thing about wiki data is you can't really be too promotional on it um but it's factual yeah so basically you would want factual information um you know it it would we would there would have to be some more discussion about that it hasn't been an issue that's come up so far uh but yeah we definitely i think it would it would be useful to have directories of of places in in in in cities and and places that are not notable enough for Wikipedia but that are still interesting but you know maybe not you know every plumbing supply person but things that would be interesting things that would be i mean to my to my mind something's to be on wiki media project if it's interesting to someone who's doesn't have a personal benefit from it and is is not harmful and is citable in some way um and i hope that we can sort of do some of the things that are missing on on some of the wikipedia's anything you want to share from a tech tech point of view sorry things that might that might that that are working well things that might be working better um things that you know from the technical point it's it's also an experiment so so the long-term vision is um this is a project proposal as you probably know the sister project proposal process is completely broken there hasn't any new sister project being accepted through the proposal project since certain years or something like that all the ones that were accepted happened because a board member happened to be personally interested in the same or an x board member or someone like that and they expedited the process so we aren't really expecting that to happen soon but the the long-term idea is to run these on on wiki media infrastructure and and have it work as like incubator too uh so the incubator is for languages and this would be for new sister projects but since right now we are running it on labs that that means that technical experimentation is also very easy the wikipedia wiki media wikis are very interlinked which makes it hard to deploy new stuff because security issues on on one wiki can be very easily extended into security breaches on other wikis and something that that is running on labs doesn't have this problem so it's very easy for us to deploy new stuff uh as as Richard said some route and extension for connecting with wiki data for example which is um i that functionality didn't exist before so so wiki data is planning to support federation of wiki based instances but they they haven't found the time and resources to do it for a long time and now with wikis for the status ground there is an extension which can do it most of it from the client side so it's it's also a technical testbed for for wiki media like small wikis it's it's a very poorly set up technical testbed so if if if you are a developer or assist admin and look at how it's being done you will probably be scandalized but if you're scandalized by wiki sports tech infrastructure that's good uh we we're we're wiki in in all senses of the world word if you ever wanted to be an admin on a media wiki wiki media project if you want to be like a sysop if you want to have the ability to add random extensions and break everything wiki sports the place for you um where it's open as they come in the wiki media universe and yeah if you want to if you want to play with random extensions and and try something totally weird as long as it's not actively harmful uh yeah this this can be this can be your big chance yeah basically we are a startup so you can come and move fast and if you break things it's going to be all right yeah so I hope you know people uh uh you know the the the longer term vision is that there are a lot of things that are on like random commercial wikis some of them are you know some of them are okay some of them are not so okay some of them are run by people close to us some of them are not so close to us um and the the idea of wiki sport is that uh the the information ecosystem as a whole might work better if these things are more connected um like you know there are kids who are interested in pokemon or like actually there are a lot of elderly people who are interested in pokemon nowadays um or whatever the the youtubers or twitchers or or or tiktokers and a lot of this information is is in eyes either it's on social media or it's on specialized like meme wikis or it's on something or it's some of it's on fandom um and a lot of these newer or more or more niche topics are not going on wikipedia and and the related projects and I think we're losing a lot of the newer editors um and so yeah I think it's important for the wiki media movement that we not be so narrow and so artificially conservative um and that's part of the idea of having a silly a silly wiki uh you know with the theme of like growing things um and like based on like like uh plants and fungus and things like that yeah so if anyone wants to edit something or work on something I would encourage that um if you want to uh if you want to do something on on your favorite book that does not know enough wikipedia or some tv episode that you that you liked or didn't like we welcome that if you want to do something on a mural that you saw or or a vending machine maybe in Singapore yeah we need to we need to do vending vending vendopedia um that's all that would all be welcome if people want to want to play with that um I should share uh just that we we're going to have another session uh paired paired with uh paired with sj uh I think it's on let me just I think it's on saturday sorry let me just check um yes it is um yeah on saturday from uh from 330 to 350 uh there will be the new pd a session with sj Klein and following a meeting meeting immediately after that and uh there will be the wikitopia panel group discussion from uh starting at uh at 350 focusing on ways to make a bigger better wikimedia movement um of which creativity is one of is one of the missing puzzle pieces um and the other ones are autonomy and solidarity and uh maybe we'll try to find out how to how to how to be something more ambitious than just than just a new version of Britannica okay I think I'm gonna I'm gonna wrap this up and if anyone wants to hang out and edit something uh that would be welcome or if you just want to talk or hang out casually that would also be welcome or if you want to uh if you want to go to make you give you the ability to destroy the wiki entirely that is also yeah that delete the main page delete you should you should put all the extensions you can put all sorts of weird stuff on it that that's the goal thank you