 I want to say first, I've got no interest at all in defending Wikipedia, insofar as lots of people have lots of criticisms, anxieties, worries about Wikipedia for incompleteness, for inaccuracy, for the way it's written, for whatever. I have to say I was a little worried when James said that 70% of doctors use Wikipedia and I was like, okay, well, I'm going to ask my doctor next time I see them. What are you basing this diagnosis? I've got no interest at all in defending Wikipedia. Acres of Wikipedia is rubbish. In fact, as James said, that's what first drew him into editing Wikipedia, seeing something that was, seeing an article that was useless and rubbish, showing that he had the possibility of changing it, and that's the thing that drew me into it as well. Basically, a few summers ago, Wikipedia is fantastic for procrastination. So I was supposed to be doing something else and ended up sort of staying up late. I saw that there was an article on something that I knew about, and I was like, well, that's very strange. And then I started idly surfing and noticing that the articles, especially on the area that's my notional area of expertise, Latin American literature, were completely and utterly rubbish and on the whole, and starting intervening and starting to try and make improvements in these articles, running up against a bit of opposition of one sort or another, with other editors and thinking, I know what I have next semester, this is in the summer, sometime in the summer, next semester I have access to an army of potential editors, called them students, who can go in and try and fix some of these articles. So the essential notion, the first essential notion was students could improve Wikipedia. I've got no interest in defending Wikipedia, per se. Also, I recognize that Wikipedia can become sort of a cult or a sect, in which people throw around all sorts of, I don't know, bizarre language terminology and acronyms, I don't know, ARBCOM, COI, RFA, I don't know, all this kind of stuff, AFD. It doesn't help that, it really doesn't help that, for instance, Wikipedia markup language is different from anything you've ever seen in your life before. So, I mean, we can, I don't know, those who have done this before, when you click on the page to edit a Wikipedia article, they don't use HTML, they use some sort of, you know, the Wiki language is something that, for instance, students have never seen before, and so it can look very strange and intimidating to start off with. So, and that's one of the problems talking about Wikipedia that it's got, you quickly develop, it's got this cult-like atmosphere and you quickly develop your own language terminology and way of thinking about the world. But I do want to defend, I don't want to defend Wikipedia, but I do absolutely want to defend more than defend. I want to very strongly advocate for our involvement in Wikipedia. I think it is, I don't know what, a duty, I suppose, for the people within the university institution to be involved in sites such as Wikipedia. Why? Because we're at a moment in which, on the one hand, you have a massive expansion of the common, of common knowledge, of the possibilities of access to knowledge, information, criticism, analysis and so on. Wikipedia is one very good example of this, this enormous repository. I actually really like the fact that they actually use the term commons when they talk, in the sort of image repository that they have for images that can be used overall in one way or another, for one reason or another, public domain images. You've got this massive expansion, thanks to technology, other things as well, blogs and so on, the whole massive new possibilities for improving the state of public knowledge and public education on the one hand. On the other hand, we have a whole series of countervailing forces, new enclosures, broadly out in the world, things like patenting genes and so on and so forth, but in the university too. We have the Blackboard and Vista and all these kinds of educational ghettos and we have, as everyone knows, I think in this room, we have so-called access, copyright for instance, trying to restrict ever more the ways in which we can use the resources that often we ourselves produce. So we've got these countervailing, these two tendencies, one towards access and openness, increasing common, public good and the other new enclosures, new privatisations. I know which side of that I want to be. I think it is our duty as people in the public university to be involved in the fomenting and contributing to public knowledge and the public good. So Wikipedia is an obvious way to do this. So for instance, James is talking about the numbers of people who view individual articles. When I first used Wikipedia in the classroom, there's a point in which I discovered one of these tools in which you could see how many hits students have got and so I came in and said, hey, how many people do you think are reading these articles that you guys are writing? And they range from the sort of, I don't know, low thousands a year for really obscure articles that we just started from scratch to three-quarters of a million people reading the article on Gabriel Garcia Marquez. And this is, to the students, look, you're not just producing an essay that one person reads late at night at the end of the semester to give a grade, to return, and then they throw it in the bin, you know? You are actually contributing something as students, as undergraduate university students. You have the possibility also of contributing to public knowledge to the common good. The best example of this was in my, again, in that same first class. It was a class on the dictator novel in Latin America and they edited a series of articles about authors in the books that we were reading. One of the authors was Mario Vargas Llosa. At the time, and they turned that into a featured article, as James said, these various sort of Wikipedia evaluations, featured articles that say they're fanciest and best. It means that the article can go on, can go on the front page, like this is today's featured article on whatever that is. The new South Wales, whatever that plant is. One day we had Mario Vargas Llosa up there. This is something that Wikipedia was proud of and was showing off to the world. That day there was a little spike in the number of people who looked at the article. Of course, the real spike was about a year after the class was over when Mario Vargas Llosa won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Suddenly from, I don't know, 2,000 people reading the article a day, we had something like 140,000 people reading the article. And this is the first point of, port of call for all the journalists who were told by the editors, this is proving guys won the Nobel Prize, going to find out something about him and write an article. And that was, my students had written that, had essentially written that article. The other thing I want to say about the, so I think it's our duty, I think we should be involved in projects such as Wikipedia, I think we need to get out of the educational ghetto and refuse the kind of restrictions that are being increasingly imposed upon ourselves. Wikipedia itself has always been a little bit ambivalent about academia and the academic institution. On the one hand there's a sort of anarchism inherent to Wikipedia, which I kind of like, sympathize for, about credentials. People would come, academics would come to Wikipedia and start to get involved in debates, in debates on particular articles, and people would challenge them and they'd say, well, I'm Professor So-and-so. And the Wikipedia would say, we don't need your stinking credentials, you've got to prove what you've got to say, you can't just rely on the fact that you are Professor So-and-so from University So-and-so. The suspicion of people who would come in and flash their library cards, as it were. For good reason, because don't trust anyone on the internet. Some people could say that they were Professor So-and-so. In fact, one of the early big scandals about Wikipedia was about somebody who claimed to be a Professor of Theology at some small American college and turned out to be a massive fake. So on Wikipedia people want you to argue on the merits of a case and rather than just claim some kind of expertise because of whatever your title is. On the other hand, as well as their sort of anarchism and skepticism, there is actually a great desire for legitimacy on the part of Wikipedia. That's why, especially over the last couple of years, there's been this reaching out towards the university. I think that the next speaker coming in from Skype is going to talk about campus ambassadors and so on and so forth. But Wikipedia have written a large number of grant applications, got a lot of money in order to try and work with higher education, work with us, essentially. So this is a very propitious moment, I think, for us to be involved in Wikipedia, for us to be involved in this massive project for the common good and common knowledge. Okay, I want to say just a couple more things about what I have done and how I have used Wikipedia. I want to say one other thing about the whole question about the conflict between the commons on the one hand and the new enclosures on the other. There's also this right-wing populist tendency now to persuade people they can turn their backs on the university. There's a woman called Anya Kamenetz, for instance, who wrote a book called DIYU, which basically said, look, there's Wikipedia. We don't need the university. You can put your own degree together. We don't need research, essentially. You can make up your own credentials. When universities are charging, whatever, $30,000, $40,000, $50,000, why should we go along with that blackmail? To an extent, I agree, again, with some of the anarchist tendencies there. The problem is that it does. It is easily taken up by a right-wing populist agenda that has the suspicion of all state institutions. So I think it's important for people in the institution to justify the possibilities that the institution still offers. Okay, what did I do in Wikipedia? Again, essentially, it began through Knights of Procrastination, in which I just sort of idly edited things, and then I thought, I've got this army of students and they can be involved, too. There were also a lot of kind of spin-off reasons to involve students in Wikipedia, discovered as the term, as the semester went along. The first project was a wildly... Whoops. The first project was a wildly ambitious one to get featured articles on these dictator novels. It's thinking, here we are. We called it, I called it, murder, madness, and mayhem. Essentially, I still love that quotation from this guy. This guy, Gregory Coase, is a great opponent of Wikipedia, mainly because he's been repeatedly banned. And so he spends his time sort of saying scurrilous things about it. So his daughter is now coming to the University of British Columbia. Anyhow, so these are the articles that we... that I got them to write in groups about Latin American dictator novels or their authors. The first one we got was this one called El Señor Presidente. This is a sort of great, an initial great triumph. This is an article that I began in class for them. They still said, well, how do you start a Wikipedia article? And I said, this is how you do it. And then about five minutes later, it went back to the page that I just started and some other Wikipedia, this article needs to be deleted. I was like, uh-oh, okay. We need to sort of justify the presence of this article. So it began in some quite inauspicious circumstances and it became, after a thousand or so edits later, it became something that the Wikipedia was willing to parade amongst its best work. I say one of the spin-offs, the various spin-offs, virtues of the Wikipedia project that I hadn't realized to start off with, one really it teaches students about revision and writing in a way that the normal essays that I asked them to write didn't. The fact that this went through a thousand or so iterations, that they had endlessly to go back to the article challenged often by other Wikipedia editors or in the review process to get to the first good article and then featured article. The fact that Wikipedia articles are always in process, that there's a reason why people contribute to Wikipedia called editors and not writers, and that they're working on a document that is constantly in process. That gave them a new way of thinking about writing, about academic writing, I think, rather than the notion they had a deadline in the semester they'd hand in their paper, they'd get the grade and so on. Here that they're contributing something in process and their work also has to be continually revised and revisited. Another spin-off which I hadn't really thought about to start off with was the extent to which Wikipedia in that it is, in this encyclopedia, in that it is a compendium of knowledge rather than a place in which to advance an argument, these Wikipedia assignments were essentially research assignments. They had endlessly to be going to the library, endlessly to JSTOR and so on and so forth. One of the best evaluations from the class that I liked best of all was a student who said, I'm now in my final year, this is a political science student, this is the first class in which I've had to go to the library. The notion that there's some kind of competition between Wikipedia and the library, I think easily, or Wikipedia and some of the virtues that have traditionally been propounded by the institution is I think illusory. I think we can and should be on much the same page and there's insistence on sources, insistence on citations is something that the students weren't used to, frankly, in quite the same way or with quite the same rigorousness from some of the other classes that they had been taking. So we'll see, I mean this is like thousands of words that they produced and then at the bottom is the footnotes and sources and so on and so forth. There was a point of which as I'm in the library I might as well mention this, this is a group of two students who did this, at one point they were sort of desperately looking for more and they came to the library, they came here and they came to the reference desk and they say we're looking for sources on this novel of Señor Presidente and the reference library said well there's a really great Wikipedia radical on this. We wrote it, we're trying to improve it. Since then, I mean this was a very sort of high profile, high intensity project the first time I did it, this murder madness and mayhem, since then I've been trying to tone things down, take it a little bit more relaxed, it's like when I did blogs, the first time I used blogs in class it was all like oh this is sort of exciting and different and so on and so forth and now I like the fact it's just completely normalized, you know at the beginning of the semester I tell the students right you've got to open a blog, you've got to write an entry a week, you've got to do a couple of comments on other people. It's not something I make a big deal about anymore, it's just one of the things they have to do. So I'm trying to get the Wikipedia aspects of what people do in my classes to be a little bit more like that. So we're not going for feature article status anymore, I've tried sort of different iterations, different versions, playing around with things in different classes. This semester for instance I'm using Wikipedia in a graduate course, in fact in Spanish and they're writing articles about Borges, the course is on Borges, the Argentine writer and so they're writing articles about Borges short stories. Again we're trying to make a big deal about it without trying to, but just you know this is your contribution to the public good to common knowledge. I try also not to make Wikipedia the focus of the class, I mean Wikipedia isn't the focus of the class, it is just another tool amongst others, a tool of evaluation to some extent and one of the outputs, one of the outcomes that they produce in the course of the class. I think it is the outcome, the output that they're most proud of though. It's the one that they can show their parents and their friends and so on. I did that. It's the one that endures more obviously at least after the class is over, after the semester is over. I very much believe that students need to be able to keep the products of their work. That's one of the many reasons why I'm against Vista and Blackboard and so on. Once the semester is over it also disappears into these. I think students have their own blocks for instance and they keep it and they tend to turn it pink or green or their own pictures on it or whatever they do. To some extent it belongs to them. The work that they do for Wikipedia doesn't quite belong to them in the same way because it's a process which you can edit and use as well. But if they've put in a good deal of work to an article it's something to which they can point and say, I did that. Tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands of people are reading that and benefiting from what I did in that particular class. I'll stop now.