 I stay folks so you're doing I'm just going to share my video for the little section. I just realize I can't see my slides anymore, which is somewhat confusing. Um, you can share your share your video and then be able to reshare your your slides afterwards. There we go, that's cool. That's what I was looking for. So hallo. Yes. My name is Sarah Thomas. I'm the Scotland Programme Coordinator for Wikimedia UK. ac yn ymweliwch ymweliwch diwethaf wrth am gweithio wecamediadau a activism. Rwy'n gobeithio gweithio bwysig, pepper o blaeswn i'r gweithio'r 30-menu penderfyniadauил na'r 15 ysgall, ac mae'r fydd yn adeiladau i'r sefydliwyd gyda i weithio, eu gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio ar y maffio gweithio'r gweithio. Yn gynghi'n dod eich llai, mae'n gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio. Here I said I'm the Scotland Programme Co-ordinator for Wikimedia UK, I've been being enthusiastic at people about open knowledge since 2015. I'd also like to draw attention here, if you're registered for the conference, I've received an email today about the launch of the Wikimedia and Education booklet. We've been working on this for quite a long time now, Wikimedia UK and the University of Edinburgh is a collection of case studies about using Wikimedia in education. ac mae'n amlwg i'r ffordd yw'r cyd-dweithio yn eistedd yn gweithio'r gweithio. Mae'r ffordd yn gweithio'r cyd-dweithio, a'r gweithio'r cyd-dweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio. Yn y ffwrdd yw hwnnw, mae'n rhoi'r llwythu yn ystrysydd dechrau Eudio 20, yna'r unrhyw ffordd o Ordeithas Gwyl-Ea-20. Mae'n rhai rhai ffordd o'r llwyddiad yn Gweith-Dwyll-Dwyll yn Feb. yw'r bach yn coronavirus sydd y gallu diogelio ar y cyfnodd. Mae'r gŵr yma'r gweithio'r wych chi'n edrych eu ddweud arall y gallu gwahodd ac yn ymgyrchu, mae'r gweithio'r Bryn Madaethau a'r Ffynchiru. Ac e'r ymgyrch yn ymgyrch yn ymdill, ac mae'n gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio. Why is it important to me because it was an enduring theme of the day? This idea that engagement with the Wikimedia project has a direct link to activism. As a phrase, as a concept, it's something that I first came across in an interview with a Wikipedia editor called Lucas Reynoso, who was studying at the University of Edinburgh, when he said that he liked editing Wikipedia because it allowed him to become an activist of knowledge. This theme was really interesting to me, not least, because I knew I was giving this presentation Gwlyaeth ydyn ni'n dweud o'i ddifŷch yn y byddwyr. Yn y cesenni, yn yr ystod, rydyn ni'n gweinio'r phatysgol a philio mewn cyfuniau y project enghreifyddol ei ddegwyddon â'r cyfnodau cyfnodol a'r cyfnodol, a'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud, oherwydd mae'n rhan o'r cyfnodol o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r cyfnodol yn y cyfnodol. Felly, oherwydd yn y cwybol, rydyn ni'n yn dweud, Be ghaith cyfaint iawn o'r cyfaint awdurdodd llun o'r cydweithio cydweithio'r cydweithio'r cydweithio'r cydweithio'r cydweithio sy'n mynd i gael ohi ffau gwybod honno i'r ddulliannol. Mae'n gweithio'r cydweithio'r cydweithio, mae'n fawr i'r gwahanol a'r wybod yw i gael cymran i trackun o'r cydweithio'r cydweithio'r cydweithio'r cydweithio. I believe that open practice is important because I believe that general public deserves access to high quality, accurate information. I believe that a general public that has access to high quality, accurate information, can in theory make more informed decisions. Informed decisions are in theory better decisions and in theory better decisions should lead us towards a better society. So for me, open practice has a moral and ethical dimension. I think there is a need for this. There is a need for us to be providing high quality, accurate information. And that's because people are in such high quality, reliable information. I'm hoping that this slide will come out. These are some screen grabs that I took last week of the page views on Wikipedia for various Wikipedia articles to do with coronavirus. So this is the one for coronavirus, the general coronavirus. 14.8 million people looked at that in the period between the 1st of February and the 25th of March. If I move on to the next one, this is coronavirus 2019, which is the specific strain that's affecting us at the moment. 6.8 million people looked at that during the same time period. This is the one that really blows my mind. The page for the 2019-2020 coronavirus pandemic, the particular events that's happening, 15.6 million people looked at that article during that time period with an average of 1.1 million people per day looking at that information. Those numbers have gone slightly down slightly now. I'm going to tweet out the link to that with some links in there after this. And you'll be able to see that now fewer people are looking at that. But basically the TLDR on this is that people are in search of information. Open knowledge letters stand on the shoulders of science. This is the thing that we keep on saying. Open knowledge leads us to cures faster. People like the Welcome, BloodWise, Cancer Research UK all know this. If you get a grant from them, then you have to publish your findings openly because open research leads us to cures faster. This does, of course, assume this idea that we should publish things openly and that this will lead us to better society. Assumes, of course, that anyone's reading. This is one of the most depressing things I've ever seen on the internet. These are the page views for the European Union. English Wikipedia for the European Union, taken on the 27th of June, the 22nd of June, so that's 55,998, 55,000. The 23rd of June, 100,000. And the 24th of June, which the eagle-eyed among you will recognise as the day after the referendum in the UK on the European Union, 1.2 million. So that's the day after more people looked at it. So when 1.2 million people look at the Wikipedia article on the EU on the day after the 2016 UK referendum, compared to just 56,000 the day before, you can sometimes be left wondering what the point is. The starting point that we have here is that access to information is key. The access to information is what we need. But it's a fallacy, of course, to believe that access to information purely on its own equals instant enlightenment. Information literacy, the desire to look for information, to be able to understand it, to ask intelligent questions of it should, to my mind, be a key skill for the effective participation in democracy. We keep getting asked to make big, huge, life-changing decisions based on incomplete and inaccurate information, and that is not good enough. Knowledge is knowing that to mark the wisdom is not putting it into a fruit salad. So to my mind, knowledge is nothing without literacy. Just providing information isn't if, isn't enough. People have to want to look for it. We have to understand how to be able to interpret it. Perhaps a lesson in the comparison of these two events and those screen grabs is not about public consciousness, about a desire for information, and the role of public discourse in determining what it is that people look for. I nearly put those two events in the opposite order, to be honest, because it was a bit more hopeful, but I thought that that would have been a bit too easy. Knowledge is nothing without literacy. At Wikimedia UK, we know a bit about literacy. We know a bit about digital literacy and media literacy and data literacy. Last year, two years ago, we did a bit of research mapping Wikimedia project engagement against existing digital literacy frameworks in the UK. I highly recommend that you take a look at that. It's a really detailed piece of work. It really has revealed to us how the work that we do engages with these existing frameworks of data literacy, information literacy, media literacy, and how that kind of core belief that engaging with our projects can really help with those. One of the things that I want to touch on here is neutral point of view. So neutral point of view is a really central ten of Wikimedia. It is a pillar of Wikimedia, and it comes back. It really speaks to the idea that Wikipedia should not be biased, that as far as possible it can be neutral and that it reflects just the facts. There's been a lot of pixels built on non-political action within Wikipedia. It's also crucial in the idea of reaching consensus. Catherine Mayer, the CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, has pointed out that Wikimedia is the one place on the internet where you go for an argument and you become more reasonable over time. But open practice is not non-political. Open practice to me is intrinsically linked to issues of justice. Neutral point of view can be difficult for a couple of reasons, primarily because nothing is ever truly neutral. The complete object of view is really difficult. It can tie people up in an obfuscation of privilege and the occasional mischaracterisation of the endeavor to plug particular gaps in knowledge as being a soapbox or agenda. This is unfortunately where we sometimes see the on-wiki perpetuation of off-wiki societal issues, the recreation of bias. The ways in which knowledge is produced is not neutral and it is in effect of privilege to believe that it is. For the most part, the Wikimedia community is also aware of its own issues with systemic bias, for example around gender. It's also been well documented how some countries have banned or sort of restrict access to Wikipedia, including Turkey, China and Russia. In this way we understand that providing free access to information is a political and in some context radical act. This slide I've got is the Wikimedia Foundation's strategic movement strategy for 2018-2020. I've pointed to the last aspect there of knowledge equity. This is something that Lorna Campbell talked about yesterday. Knowledge equity, looking at the gaps in knowledge. Looking at structural bias, looking at how it is that knowledge gets on to the biggest encyclopedia in the world. We've been aware in the Wikimedia community of these issues for a long time. We've been working to address it at a community level and a strategic level. One of Wikimedia UK's strategic goals for the upcoming years is that of addressing underrepresented content with focus on those voiced left out by structures of power and privilege. This for me is where learning intersects with agency and of learning as a political act. Dr Al John did some research on editor funds at the University of Edinburgh a couple of years ago. The key quote from the work that she's done around that around looking at the editor fund and the process of becoming a Wikipedia editor is that learning becomes personal but it triggers forms of agency. We have this movement and we see that it's reproduced in a lot of the work that we do with Wikimedia and Education. We have this movement from learners being a passive consumer of knowledge to an active producer of knowledge. That's really a key shift in the way that we think about learning and that we think about ourselves as learners in the way that we approach information. Being involved in the production of knowledge gives you agency and insight to a degree which is not possible from the passive subject position of being a consumer of knowledge. Here's when I want to move on to some of the projects that we've been involved in helping people to move from that passive consumer of knowledge to that active producer of knowledge and how that intersects with activism. The first of these was Brave Edit. This is a project that we undertook with Amnesty International as a worldwide project and this looked at getting primarily biographies of women human rights defenders into Wikipedia. There was also a lot of other work that went around with that and getting these women's stories and the causes for which they work known onto Wikipedia. This was an interesting one actually because normally you wouldn't ask people permission to put their biography onto Wikipedia. But there was a lot of work that was done by Amnesty International in the background to ensure that those women actually wanted their work being promoted. Because for some of them obviously there was an element of safety in that that we had to consider to come back to our theme of care to consider whether or not those people actually wanted their work to be up and out there. But this was an element of where we had people working in activism for Amnesty International to have a real opportunity to get these women's stories told to get that information up into Wikipedia. The second one that I want to point to is Art and Feminism. Art and Feminism has been going now for, I want to say, five years. And it happens that every year around about International Women's Day and it's about closing the gender gap on Wikipedia. We know that there is a gender gap on Wikipedia and about getting more articles and more coverage of women and feminism and art. That one in particular has become particularly popular and particularly successful over the last few years. The Dumfries Stone Carving project in the slides I've linked out both to a blog post that I wrote about this and to a paper that I gave at heritage.myself.tarabeel from the Dumfries Stone Carving project about how engagement with the Wikipedia project for community heritage projects helps to give those projects more longevity, the outputs of those projects more longevity after the end of the project. I've done a lot of work with Tara in doing the kind of things in the Dumfries Stone Carving project was about a community heritage project, kind of taking ownership of their project, looking at this incredible history of stonework in Dumfries Stone Carving in Dumfries and getting that content out into many different formats, one of which was Wikimedia Commons. Getting that output out there meant that once that project finishes and the project has now finished, those images are kind of released into public consciousness. The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, which has been an absolutely fantastic project, which was a data literacy project working with the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, a great piece of research done by the university of Edinburgh. Getting that information into Wikidata, which allowed a data visualisation intern at the university to put together and a lot of other people at the university to put together this incredible website, this incredible research. One of the things that I really took away from that is that data visualisation gives such an entry point into understanding data and understanding cultural history in a way that just a regular database can't. There's been an awful lot of media interest in that. Moving on now, this is the last one, kind of bring it up today, the COVID-19 task force. So there was a great wired piece that I've linked to you on there. There are two Wiki projects on English Wikipedia, on Wiki project medicine dealing specifically with COVID-19. And another that's Wikidata. Again, looking at COVID-19 and trying to get the best quality of information out there on Wikipedia as possible. So, yeah, this is just to wrap up there. Engagement with the Wikimedia projects for open education is for civic engagement and democracy. I want people to get involved with the knowledge activist. Thank you very much.