 That was such a great panel from such a group of eloquent experts. Thank you so much for joining us at Wikimania. I don't know about you, but this is the kind of nuanced conversation that always helps me put our work in perspective. We will now welcome a contribution by Dr. Jess Wade, a beloved community member and physicist at the Imperial College London. She will talk to us about science and storytelling, who we talk about matters. Hello to everyone at Wikimania 2021. I am so thrilled that we could all come together and celebrate this completely bizarre year and what has been Wikipedia's 20th birthday. There's never been a more important time for democratised access to knowledge and I know that everyone attending this symposium and part of the Wikimania efforts is truly on the path to changing our future. My name is Jess and I'm a physicist at Imperial College London. And today I'm going to talk to you a little bit about the work that I've done on Wikipedia. I've been working for a really, really long time to try and improve the representation of women and people of colour and LGBTQ plus and generally people from historically marginalized communities in science and engineering. Because I truly believe that we will do the best research, we will make the best discoveries and we'll build a better world if everyone is involved with that effort. And for a while I had been thinking I really, really need to be part of this movement to change. What can I do to improve the representation of women and people of colour? There's an incredible quotation that's inspired much of my efforts from the US novelist Toni Morrison. And in that quotation she says, I tell my students when you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. And I believe that about outreach and advocacy. I believe that about our work on Wikipedia. And I believe that about every single thing I'm passionate about. I'm incredibly lucky to have found science to have been supported to become a scientist and to truly love what I do. But some part of that luck means that I have to give back to the scientific community. So when I was an undergraduate and a postgraduate physicist at Imperial, I started arranging all of these events, bringing in high school students, bringing in hundreds of high school students to be introduced to science and engineering in our ancient lecture theatres and to learn about how extraordinary science can be. But that wasn't quite enough. I didn't feel like I was reaching most of the population. We're limited on the numbers of interactions that we can have in person. And also, I left feeling a little bit like when these kids leave these lecture theatres or these seminar rooms, how are they gonna remember that scientific information? How are they gonna remember the stories that we told? I then read two phenomenally important and powerful books and books that really transformed my life, Inferior and Superior by Angela Saini. Angela is an engineered and award-winning science writer and journalist. And in these two books, she unpicks the origins of racial and gender stereotypes in our societies and shows just how bad science has been weaponized against people from marginalized groups for centuries to try and show to them that they can't do science and how incorrect and damaging that has been. These books made me really speak up. They made me speak a lot louder than I have been before on issues around stereotypes and what we needed to do to change. And also what the scientific community needed to do to get better. I also started thinking about how people got information. You know, they get it in a whole bunch of different ways, whether that's what they see online, what they get through social media, what they watch on the television, what they watch on the radio, all of these different channels are plowing in to what people feel or think about as subject or topic. And we know that mass media representation of different groups can have a huge impact. We've seen it with shows like CSI, where having female leads, having particularly women leading, had a huge impact on the number of women studying forensic science at universities and still has that legacy today. More recently, we've seen it with incredible movies like Hidden Figures telling the stories of the African-American computers who enabled human space flight and the transformation that has made for young women and young men all across the States and beyond. So storytelling matters, who we put on platforms matters and how we engage with the public really matters. And lo and behold, the best place I think that we can all make a difference in that is on Wikipedia. You all know how important Wikipedia is or you wouldn't be here, but it's the fifth most frequently visited website in the world. It's accessed every single month by about 1.5 billion devices who look at it about 15 billion times. And this has only become more true and more important throughout the pandemic. Wikipedia is relied on in education settings, whether that's in your high school, whether that's in your college, whether that's someone at university, but particularly for countries which don't have access to printed materials and resources like some other countries do. There, they need offline content to really easy to access state of the art, high quality information. And Wikipedia is the platform that people go to to get that knowledge. It's used by teachers putting together the walls that they have in their science classes. It's used by kids putting together their science reports and science projects. Wikipedia is massively important in education in 2021. It's also used by the media and I never really appreciated this until I started editing. Wikipedia editors contribute to the global understanding of emerging issues. If you're about to go on air to talk about a particular topic, maybe you're going on to talk about a coronavirus vaccine, it's unlikely that the broadcaster will be trained in mRNA, but they can go on the Wikipedia page, have that jargon-free introduction, see who's really big on the research, see how the field has evolved and be confident in their own knowledge to go and present that show. And really Wikipedia is what enables and empowers that. It's also used by programmers when they're deciding who to bring on air or who to not have on air. Wikipedia is massively important in science and engineering, particularly for people like me. I work in a really interdisciplinary area of science and making sure that the pages, that the research that I work on has content on Wikipedia, means that more people from chemistry, physics and materials will join us in our effort to make more sustainable electronic devices. But Wikipedia is important in indirect ways too. So if you've ever asked a question to Siri or Amazon Alexa or Google Home, the place they go to for information is Wikipedia. So what's on Wikipedia really, really matters. And I guess for the last few years, since reading Angela's book, since thinking about this more and more, I've been asking whether what really, really matters is on Wikipedia. And overwhelmingly, the answer is no. Particularly when we look at the biographies on Wikipedia, Wikipedia has a bunch of biographies about incredible notable people in all different languages. But if you look at the genders of the people that those biographies are about, we see a massive issue. Less than one in five pages, biography pages on Wikipedia are about women. This is the statistic for English language Wikipedia, but it pretty much holds for every other language Wikipedia. English is just the biggest and the one that I edit in. So fewer than one in five of the biographies on Wikipedia about women. So that means when you're putting together your science classroom or when you're doing your homework on a particular topic or you're creating that lecture course, you're not getting the stories of the incredible women trailblazers who've built a better world. And the same goes for other marginalized groups, whether that's people of color or LGBTQ plus scientists and engineers or even disability activists, we really don't have enough of their stories. It's why when you do things like Google, famous physicist, you get a nice wall of old men physicists because these are the people who have Wikipedia pages. These are the people who have great Creative Commons license images on their Wikipedia's. It's why in countries like the UK, our national curriculum, which is what's taught to children when they're at school, our national curriculum doesn't include a single name of a woman scientist in any of the sciences at the age of 15 and 16. Now this is massively important because this is when young people are making decisions about their future. And because there isn't content on encyclopedias like Wikipedia, textbook writers and teachers aren't getting that information and that's influencing what young people perceive about science and about their own ability. So since the beginning of 2018 now, just over three and a half years, I've been working every single day to write the pages, the biographies of women working in science and engineering of people of color working in science and engineering of people from historically marginalized groups contributing to our understanding of the world. And I've written about neuroscientists and physicists and chemists and deep water divers and all of these different people who've really, really made the world a better place and also given me huge amount to learn from and be inspired by actually every single day I feel phenomenally lucky to investigate, to research and then to write these Wikipedia biographies. It's kind of kept me going. It's kept my enthusiasm and energy and love of science alive in so many different ways. I've actually just written over 1400 and that's part of a growing effort from projects like Wiki Project Women Scientists and Wiki Project Women in Red to really make sure that women are recognized and celebrated on this incredibly important platform. Now there are lots of these stories that I think are sensational but perhaps my most favorite Wikipedia article that I've written is of the phenomenal Gladys West. Gladys West is an African-American mathematician who was born in the 1930s in Virginia. She studied maths at a historically black college and university and then went on to become a maths teacher. Now after she was a maths teacher she worked for the US government and what she did for the US government was do all the early programming for GPS technology. So she is a true hidden figure and when I wrote her Wikipedia page in 2018 I was kind of clutching at straws. There were a few little facts about her on the internet but nowhere near enough of her phenomenal story. The movie Hidden Figures had just come out so I was like, ah, this is a hidden figure, I'm writing it. She's all of her work had been redacted because she worked for the US government so there's so much secrecy around it. And I knew at the time I was writing about a staggering person. A couple of months later, just about three months later the BBC nominated Gladys West as one of their top 100 women. So on the BBC home page was Gladys West's story and that means the traffic to the Wikipedia article was absolutely massive. And then the US Air Force inducted her into their Hall of Fame and as all of you Wiki Commons contributors will know this means that we then had creative commons license images of Gladys West that we could use on a Wikipedia page which made me completely thrilled. Only a couple of, well maybe this was a year afterwards but the Guardian last year, so last November actually the Guardian, our big national newspaper in the UK wrote an incredible story about Gladys West and how she was the hidden figure who'd helped to invent GPS. And this just made me so happy to think that there were journalists out there now going to her Wikipedia page to read that biography, find that story and put it on a national, if not international platform. The most extraordinary thing happened in June though when the Royal Academy of Engineering which is a super prestigious engineering body in the UK made the announcement that Gladys West had won the Prince Philip Medal for Engineering. This has never gone to a woman in its 30 year history and the first person to get it is hidden figure Gladys West. So I've been talking about Gladys West anywhere and everywhere I can for as long as physically possible since I learnt her name and actually I was talking about her at a big tech conference a few months ago and they said, oh, Jesse, you free on Thursday for a Zoom and I said, oh yeah, I mean, I'm sure I can make it work. And lo and behold, this was the best Zoom of my life because they managed to get me on a Zoom in this very room speaking to Gladys West. So really she is a queen in my eyes. She is an absolutely sensational person and Wikipedia has been a platform that let me share that story and hopefully let other people read about her too. But it doesn't stop at people like Gladys West. It's people like Sarah Gilbert and Kizzy Corbett, the incredible vaccine designers and scientists who through the AstraZeneca vaccine and the Moderna NIH vaccine are helping to get us out of this extraordinary past few years. So what you're doing matters. Wikipedia massively matters. It gives us the opportunity to give proper recognition to people who actually did the work. It helps us to improve global access to scientific knowledge which has never been more important, particularly now as the kind of fights around science and these discussions become increasingly partisan to have a nonpartisan up to date localized platform like Wikipedia is more important than any ever before. It's also part of these ongoing efforts to fight scientific misinformation in pseudoscience and every single one of you in this Wikimedia audience is part of the efforts to make that happen. So I wanted to end by saying happy birthday to Wikipedia, you're 20, you've grown up a lot, you're changing, there's still work to do and that's why everyone's here and to remind you that Wikipedia really is the last best place on the internet and we have to truly celebrate that and reflect upon how extraordinary you all are. Thanks so much for listening. If you have any questions, you can find me on Twitter at Jess Wade or you can drop me an email at my Imperial email and I will endeavor to reply to you. Thanks so much for everything that you're doing and hopefully catch you and in-person Wikimedia soon. Bye. Hi, my name is Phoebe Ayers and I am a member of the Wikimedia Steering Committee and on behalf of the committee, we wanted to say thank you to all of the participants and all of the organizers of this year's Wikimedia. Thank you to all of the volunteers and staff who worked so hard and thank you to everyone who participated in sessions and made this conference a success. Hi everyone, my name is Yoranda Pensa and thank you to all of us, the organizers and participants of Wikimedia. Hi, I'm Doror Avilin. I'm also a member of the Wikimedia Steering Committee. I'd like to thank all the volunteers who worked and participated in the meetings. And of course, thank you to the organizers who are the first to work on the Wikimedia online and who will do the work further. Hi, my name is Sivan Martínez. I'm a member of the Wikimedia Steering Committee and this video is just to thank all of the people who invested their time in making a great Wikimedia. This is especially valuable in times like these, the hard times we're living in. I just want to say thank you to all of the volunteers who invested a lot of their time in making a great Wikimedia. This is especially valuable in hard times like these. Thank you, I just want to say salut. Hi, I'm Butch Bustia from the East and Southeast Asia and the Pacific speaking to you from Singapore in this very late hour. I would like to thank everyone who participated in Wikimedia 2021. It's been a very tough time. We cancelled Bangkok 2020, but we're hoping that we will be meeting soon in an in-person event. And I would like to thank everyone who participated and contributed to Wikimedia. The Wikimedia Foundation, the Wikimedia Steering Committee, the core organizing committee and those who watch ours and participated in lectures and interactive sessions. I would like to thank every one of you. I would like to thank all of you for the help you gave to Wikimedia. I would like to thank all of you for the help you gave to Wikimedia. Cheers, Kampai, tagay na. Cheers, Wikimedia. We're so glad you came this year and we hope to see you again next year. Yes. Cheers.