 Good morning, I'm Peter, I'm from Namibia, I'm a by now relatively frequent guest at Wikimedia, I'm stationed at the University of Science and Technology in Wintourk in Namibia, that's the country to the north of South Africa. What I'm talking about today is Wikipedia for indigenous communities, you've seen that in the program, I guess that's why you're here. What I'll be talking about is the following, I want to go through a bit of the terminology, I want to say what's indigenous, what's knowledge, what's indigenous knowledge, and I'll also talk a little bit about Ubuntu, the words that is on the back of your conference t-shirt, and that has been thrown around quite a bit, and then you see I have some slides on indigenous editing, and then I have a chapter that's called Hostile Environment, I did put a question mark there, but we need to talk about that, and then as we don't want to end on a negative note, right, then I'm pointing out a few things that that could be done to improve the situation. Whenever you have a question I cannot easily see you, so because of the light of the camera there, would be nice if you not just raise your hand, but maybe make a noise of some sort, you're welcome to interrupt me, I don't want to go ahead and lose some of you along the way. Okay, so for the people that are guests at Wikindaba too, I have to apologize, you will see one or two things that have been there before, but yes I will be going beyond that, but it is what I'm presenting is a continuation of work that I've been doing before. If you look at the slides you will find everything that's blue is linked to some to some previous work which is likewise available under an open license. So indigenous, I want to keep it as general as possible, I'm using a rather common academic definition of saying well that's for now just something that's characteristic of a certain group in a certain environment, so it is definitely not, it's not connected to how much light your skin reflects, right? It's also not restricted to Africa, South America, I want to have it something in some general way. Knowledge, as some of you might know, is justified through belief. If I believe something, if it's true, and if I have a justification, that makes it knowledge, that definition is over 2000 years old, it comes from Plotter. Now what is indigenous knowledge? Obviously the combination of the two, I gave an extensive talk about that couple of years ago in Hong Kong with Timania, I will not go into that much detail here, just for now that it's important to know that a lot of that is not written. We are talking about oral knowledge repositories, oral communities, and the knowledge is being transformed in forms of narratives and dances, songs, practices, artifacts, things that have been created, that is the place where the knowledge is stored, not on paper or not in terms of a text file on a hard disk. It is very often practical, not very abstract, but it could be abstract, and you will find a lot of influence from the spiritual sphere, not just logical and deductive, so that makes it a bit different. It is of course transferred in an oral way, it's hard to capture for the rest of the world, but that is the core of my Hong Kong talk, and I'm going to repeat that here, to have you all on board if you haven't been there at that time. Indigenous knowledge is verifiable, it's not the chit chat on the street, it's not the singing in the bathroom, it is, it is a, it has a connection, or it adheres to a custom, right, that at certain places, by certain people, this knowledge is being offered to a general audience. So for instance, if there's the festival of the, of a bandero, then they congregate at Ocahanya in central Namibia, and you can be sure that a few minutes after the proceedings begin, somebody will stand up and declare something, right? For instance, they would give the biography of their first leader, or every group that's congregating would describe the place where they are coming from. That is not just, as I said, not just chit chat, that is happening at every one of those festivals, that's happening in a certain order, that has to be performed by certain people. In this way, Indigenous knowledge is verifiable knowledge, because if you come next year to the same festival, the same things will be said by the same role players, maybe the chief is now somebody else, but what's being said is, well, the skeleton of what's being said is the same thing. Now, you might say, if you look at this list now, one, two, three, four, five, what do you have to do to verify Indigenous knowledge? Well, it's not easy, right? That's not something you want to be doing every day, but if you look at it the other way around, we have all heard about Wikipedia being for everyone, and now that Wikimanias in Africa, we are even putting more focus on this statement. Now, imagine an Indigenous messiah who wants to verify Western knowledge, which is cited to a book in the Library of Congress. What would they have to do? They would have to travel to that location, right? They would have to learn the language. They would have to understand how Western knowledge is organized. Think back of your first time when you were searching something in a public library. It's not easy to find that, right? For somebody who's not part of that cultural circle, this might be a challenge. Then you have to gain the trust of the community. Of course you do, right? If you're coming into your traditional attire with a sprayer and leather clothing, would they hand you a book without discussing with you? Or would they think, oh, security guard, can you please make a turn, right? And, well, the publishing, of course, if we want to witness that, then it has to be republished because it's already disappears into the sky, right? But this republication will be granted, particularly if it is indigenous knowledge of that group because the people have the knowledge birers are expected to share that knowledge. And they will share it with outsiders as well. That's their role. They will do that. So it's not much easier for a person from an indigenous community to verify what we would call our traditional knowledge. And yes, Wikipedia is for everyone, right? Why should it be easy? It just needs to be verifiable. And my favorite quote with my favorite emphasis, you all know this quote, right? The emphasis, all human knowledge. All human knowledge. Not Western human knowledge, not printed human knowledge, not logically deduced human knowledge, but all of it, right? And going back to the knowledge definition, if it's true, if I believe it, then if I have a justification, not necessarily, not necessarily a Western justification. A justification is if it works, for instance. That is a good justification that makes a belief knowledge. And we want to collect all of it. So I think we need to make further steps towards those communities. Now I want to say something about Ubuntu. You probably have all heard I am because you are, right? I am through the group. However, with group, we do not mean society. With group, we do not mean a country. It is a community. And what a community is can change. That can be the people speaking your language. Those groups can be pretty small in Africa, right? That can be the inhabitants of your village. That can be people that are working on the same thing. So in a way, we are a community of Wikipedia. Those roles can change, but it almost exclusively never means society. So that Ubuntu is not the same as humanity either. It is a clearly defined group within which the principle of Ubuntu is working. And that group is rather small. We are talking dozens of people or hundreds of people. So certainly to a degree where you know every member of that community. That is why it is very often misunderstood. You can check it out on English Wikipedia. It is actually completely wrong. Maybe somebody wants to change it. That has a few interesting consequences. Also consequences for scientific work. For instance, we love polls. We like to go around and say, please fill in this questionnaire. I had to fill in quite a number of questionnaires before even coming to Wikipedia. For indigenous people, that makes sense for as long as it is not a community matter. Otherwise, it doesn't make sense at all because that opinion doesn't exist. They do not have an opinion. And if you give them a form, you force them to form an opinion at that very moment. And there are also cultural influences. For instance, the majority of people that I have been working with, when they see the questionnaire, they will look at it and they will think, like what does he want me to answer? They want to be nice. Which means they will fill in what they believe I want to hear. Because this concept of having an opinion about everything is not so much in them. So he can't relate to what my opinion about Trump or about the president of Namibia or about this or that. They do not have an opinion. If they need an opinion, they should together inform one. Which means certain scientific methods are not applicable among them a questionnaire. Now, my talk in London, I don't know how many people were there. But if we're writing Wikipedia we are expressing our opinion. All of Wikipedia writing is original research except when we are creating a little stop and saying something happened at this day in this year at that place. That's not opinion. Everything else the sources we pick, the words in which we put it, the evaluation, the linking to other articles, what is related to this is all opinion. Our opinion. If you don't believe me, just look at the talk again. There's a video. I think I was quite convincing at that time. So we are not typing slaves. Right? And many of us have developed into experts on the topics they are writing. I'm sure you know what I'm talking about. So to go to an indigenous community and to make opinions out of that, it's not going to work. I learned it the hard way. It's not going to work. Maybe some syntactic improvement, closing a bracket here and putting a headline in somewhere. That would be working maybe. But writing something from scratch means you have to form your own opinion about it and for that they need a group. They can't do it on their own. Which means the way we are currently writing Wikipedia is not the way. Because we are sitting alone and this bird is a bird in South Africa and that one is a bird in South Africa and that one is a bird in South Africa. Save, save, save. It's individual work. It's not the work of an indigenous community. And I'll obviously tell you how the work of an indigenous community would look like. So if we do it culturally aware according to according to the principles of the community. I took an example community because that's the one that we are working with in Namibia. We have several communities of Ochie Herrero speaker. The people are called Over Herrero. Ochie Herrero is their language. And we are working with them for over a decade now. And among the things that we did was we, I had a student who had a, I'm IT remember, I had a student who did persuasion you know via cell phones and messages and all that. So we created a framework where a group of Ochie Herrero speakers was, well I put it like gently forced to write an article. So we were reasonably sure that this would work. And then we observed how they would go about it. And this is how it happened. At first they agreed to meet. Nobody brought a computer actually. They all have a computer, but nobody brought it along. And then they met and discussed. Right? And then they tried to reach consensus on everything, on the content, on the wording, on the length. And once they had done that, they elected a representative who was typing the result of the consensus and uploading it via cell phone. So that's not really how we are used to work, right? That's quite different. And it is painfully slow. So the result of several weeks of meetings, so like one hour, two hour each, was an article with ten lines of text. So that is something where it will take a long time before we have a Wikipedia in Ochie Herrero which is reasonably complete. Sorry. Now it's maybe coming back. So ten, fifteen minutes are probably the average attention span, so I'm starting to lose some of you. And that's why and that's why I want you to do an activity only in your mind, because if you're all running out and you're all grabbing a coffee, then my time is up. I want you to imagine we have a group, in this case it's a subgroup of the Ova Herrero, it's the Ovan Banderu. This subgroup is not represented anywhere. The name of that tribe is a red link on Wikipedia. Their culture is not there, Wikipedia in all languages, never mind which one it is. There's not a single item of their culture on, there are no articles about their traditional leaders, about their history, about their aspirations and so on. So this group of people, Ovan Banderu, they met for six consecutive weeks and for one, one and a half, two hours and through the persuasion they had to submit something. They can't come up with empty hands, but it's like a blank sheet, you know, they can write about anything. Try to imagine, what would they be writing about? Try to imagine it's day one of Wikipedia, nothing is there. Wherever your heart is, you could start writing what would you be doing? Or try to imagine what would an indigenous group be writing about? I was actually hoping that this comes back at some point in time but I guess they ran out not to leave me stranded here but to solve the problem. At least that's what I hope. So in the meantime, try to imagine, what would you do? What would be your very, very first article if you bring a Wikipedia from zero articles to one article, what would it be? Well I can collect a few opinions and I'll show you what they came up with, that's of course the point. Who are we? So you would start with human or you would start with your user page. Okay, alright, so we would have something like Ova Madero, the name of the group. Aha, the home village. And the second article will be about their native language or dialect. Okay, or the dialect. More ideas? Okay, so something that happened yesterday fresh in your mind so that you have a good start, that's all a good idea. So far, what has actually been created is still very far from the suggestions. Do we have indigenous people here? That's true, he's indigenous, he was born here, yeah? I was suggesting maybe something very general, like rivers or land. Okay, rivers, natural features. This is not just a slide that I've been telling you about without the projection, what will they be writing about? You all have been thinking for now, and what they wrote about is this. Those are, the five sacred trees of the Ova Madero of Epochiro, Epochiro is the name of the village and they didn't write about the village and they didn't write about themselves and they didn't write about anything else they wrote about, well, a natural feature. Actually I can tell you, you can see it in the background, it's not even like remarkable trees in the term or in the meaning that they are particularly large or particularly old, but you see the fence around it, that's quite uncommon for Namibia because it is a communal area you're actually not supposed to fence it in, so this is the meeting place of the chiefs and at the same time there's a belief that it is the underground meeting place of two or three rivers. Now a river in Namibia, I have to explain that probably but there's a lot of international folks here, if you fall off a bridge in Namibia, what do you do? You should know or so. What do you do if you fall off a bridge in Namibia? There's no water in the rivers, it's sand or dust so when I say this is the confluence of two or three rivers, then it means that there's, well, one and a half weeks where those riverbeds actually have water and I didn't take the picture in those one and a half weeks. So there is an article on Imbonde Vittano and that was the only thing they produced and that was the first thing they produced. So we have to think of maybe notability, right? And we have to, well it made us think like do we really understand what's important to them, right? And I know I shouldn't be using this us and them vocabulary but at this place I'm like really scratching my head. I say okay, this is worth their time, it's all people with a job, right? So it's all people that have restricted spare time and they met for six to ten hours to produce a documentation of this place. So in the effort of explaining that what we know for sure is that the values are vastly different. The values in that group differ a lot. For instance, that something is effective or that it doesn't take a lot of time. This is not meant in a demeaning manner but it's not a value at all to teach someone from that group how to do something faster. They will look at you and say why? What's the value in that? Or why should we do that? If we can do it slow why should we do it fast? Or why does that even matter, right? But also on the Ubuntu side of explanation, self-fulfillment, right? Individualism, those are not values of the group that we are working with. Instead they have something like pride and stability, don't change something which has been working yesterday, don't scratch where it doesn't itch. Those are values and knowledge sharing is a value. It's an expressed value of the Ovoherero and that sounds good for Wikipedia purposes. But there is a very strong result from research in human-computer interaction that our software enshrines our values. I will give you an example right away because you might say well, to congregate as a group online on Wikipedia is actually not easy. Yes, I know there are Wiki projects and you can drop your name there and so on but to really be together at one place virtually is not very easy with our software. To see what your fellow group members are doing, now we are getting into at once territory. Remember that they are not yet editing Wikipedia. They are beginners. But that would be the first thing they want to know. How do I see what the other one is working at? Well, you can't. For as long as I haven't saved anything, for as long as I'm still in preview mode, you cannot see on a remote place what I'm working on. Right? And then we come to the absolutely impossible thing to check what people did last week. I can't. I would have to be check user and misusing my privilege. Right? And then I could geolocate the IP address but I mean don't expect to teach that to a beginner. That's not happening. Right? So all those things incorporate one value. The values in individualism individuality is not a value of the indigenous group that we looked at and not a value of many other indigenous groups from what we read in the literature. Of course, we're not on an island. We work on one group of indigenous people but we also check out what other people are doing. So software insurance values, western software insurance, western values, media wiki is western software. It makes certain things easier that now again the wordings, certain things easier that we are used to. And other things that we are not used to are terribly difficult actually. Now I come to, this is also a favorite thing of mine. Those who have seen me before have probably seen this graphic before. We have a language which is an incubator. In incubator you have restrictions. So Ache Harero currently has 105 articles or something. So we are nowhere near getting it out of there. In the incubator we have restrictions. Due to the restrictions, partly due to the restrictions, I will explain that in a moment, we have reduced editing activity. And because we have no editing activity we remain an incubator. So I have to say I can't think of some advantages of having an incubator for our work but it's not good. Not good at all. So what are all those restrictions? At first, okay, that is a general restriction of being a small Wikipedia. It's not useful. You can look up whatever you want. You won't find it. You want to look up the moon? This page doesn't exist. You want to look up Washington DC? The page doesn't exist. You want to look up Hartman's Mountain Zebra? Sorry if this page doesn't exist you want to write it. So it's not an encyclopedia because you can't look anything up. It's also not indexed by search engines. So even if you happen by accident to get the one article name that does exist, it's not popping up in Google. You have to browse to page 10 of the results to get anything there. And I think this is also quite an established result. If you have no readers, you have no writers. Many Wikipedia editors actually started spotting a mistake thinking where does that mistake come from realizing oh I could repair it doing that and becoming hooked. It's not the only way to get into Wikipedia but it's certainly a very common way. But if you have no readers, nobody is spotting the closing bracket that's missing, then you're losing that one person that would maybe be hooked by that. Then we have rule restrictions. For instance we don't have file uploads. Remember that I mentioned that the Ocearero speaking people have an oral tradition. Which means they put a lot more focus on spoken things, on dances, on performances, on artifacts. All of that you wouldn't describe with text but you would take a picture or a video or you would make a drawing. None of that can be locally uploaded to the incubator because the file uploads are switched off. And generally many of the features that differ between one Wikipedia and the other incubators having a few thousand languages but the rules are the same for everyone because it's only one wiki. So flagged revisions are on or off. For instance and the incubator has inherited certain assumptions from the larger languages because also the incubator was of course created by somebody with a western background and not somebody with an indigenous background. So for instance group accounts are not allowed. It's not against the terms of use, it's just a habit. It's not allowed in English, it's not allowed in German or in Portuguese, so it's not allowed an incubator without further thinking about it. So what's the damage? Why not? But those rules are still the same and I've known yesterday about this focus on translation. That's not the idea. You don't want to translate something that somebody else has written about you. You want to write about your tradition. That's the value. Otherwise that's not the first thing that I would encourage them to do to translate other stuff into their language to fill up their wiki. That's also nice to have two articles on general knowledge but to preserve the traditional knowledge that doesn't do much good. And then we have usability restrictions. I mean wiki syntax is already difficult enough. Now imagine you have to prepend before every internal link you have to prepend slash WP slash HZ. HZ is the language code for OJ Rero. Then you even have to use piped links everywhere because the language rules are in a way that different letters can be capitalized depending on which case, which flexion the word is in. So this is a possession mode where from the normal word epokiro, the name of the place, that word becomes wapokiro because you write about something that is in epokiro. So I'm sure there's a technical solution for that but that is one further problem. But even categories, you know, even the category has a WP slash HZ in front of it. The URL is impossible to remember. So teaching beginners on the incubator has disadvantages. I taught them before when I do Wikipedia outreach, I taught them before in English Wikipedia that has disadvantages as well because before I can even go into making something bold and italics and putting a headline, I have to explain the thousand rules of English Wikipedia. You may not do this and you may not do that and always put this and never without a reference and this and that and manual of style and kind of story. So that wasn't good either. Then I moved over to the incubator, then I realized oops this is actually technically for somebody who handles more a cell phone than a computer and who's not having a degree in computer science, it's actually not easy at all. But we can do a few things. So it's not entirely negative. I'm not coming here to just tell you it's not possible. At first what we still want to do is we want to have an exciting and rich media example of how such a Wikipedia would look like. I can tell you that a Wikipedia for an overly dominated knowledge base will be dominated by video and audio. In fact it will actually not start with a text but it will probably start with a map or with a picture. I'm writing about Vintuch Town Council. I start with a Vintuch Town Council building. If you click on it you see a table the table has seven chairs and the seven chairs sit the seven councilors and the pictures of them. If you click on one of those somebody will be telling the biography of that particular person by means of a video. This is how it should look like. And maybe the very last link can be, oh yeah actually if you want to see the text click here. But that's an afterthought. Just like the picture and the video is an afterthought in English or German Wikipedia. If you have a picture it's good, you can illustrate it. But mainly we want to have the text so now it will be the opposite in an Orchera Wikipedia. I do have an example, you see whatever is blue you can obviously click on if you download the slides. So there is one example of an image map where we start the coverage of a town with a map imported from open street map and then you have map regions. When you hover over the mouse over it you can click on it on the different things and you will get to another picture and at some point in time you will get to some text. But it's not yet exciting because we started with Opuvo and Opuvo is terribly far away and Internet access is very slow and so it's not yet exciting. It is an example how it could look like but it's not really beautiful yet. Because also of course I don't want to go and write Orchera Wikipedia, at least not the interesting content. I can do something like the lion is an animal in Africa safe the giraffe is an animal in Africa safe. Even that is difficult as you have seen the language is not easy but I'm not going to write about the history of their culture and tradition. If we do that then we are importing colonial thoughts again. Even though I'm aware of it I cannot help the way I was socialized. The other thing we need, we should have it by now unfortunately my student jump chip we should have an app to really easily upload material because you see we have another stream of things happening and that is that almost nobody in Namibia owns a computer, a classic computer. But almost everybody owns a cell phone and many of the cell phones are actually cell phones. Now I'm sure you are aware that if you have tried that before that it is much much easier to handle audio files and videos than it is to enter text, wiki code curly brackets, square brackets, round brackets, pipes asterisks. I mean you always have to go to the third layer of your keyboard to even find that kind of thing. But to take a picture to read out the GPS coordinates to say yes I release it under the license that I always release it you know with a setup like the Wikipedia app is doing where you just once give all your details and then it's using all those as assumptions and default values, that's a lot easier. So why are we not using that? So we want to be using that. We can't upload it to comments because of many things that I'm not going into but you can contact me if you need to know. But an Oche Herrero Wikipedia would be an image repository with links. It wouldn't be text. So we wouldn't want to write it directly on comments, right? And cell phones are everywhere and I was at that festival now in Okohania quite a number of insiders were actually taking videos pictures. We just need to convince them to make them available and to somehow link them to where they belong. And yes, we need a live Oche Herrero Wikipedia, not an incubator. We have, while the first consultations with the participatory design, the first thing they requested was, but if everybody can edit that what will happen? And we need to forbid that and that cannot be the idea. But in fact I guess most people in this room would not edit Oche Herrero Wikipedia because you don't speak the language. And the language is also very local. It's not like English where you have to share it with 100 countries. Secondly, within the Oche Herrero speakers, there would be a significant self-regulation. Nobody would stand up from a grade 10 class and start writing the biography of their chief. They just wouldn't do that. They would leave that to the people that they believe should do that. So it wouldn't be much of a problem. We still might have quite unusual Wikipedia allowing oral citations, possibly forbidding written citations for certain things. I can't see the number but I'm running out of time, I understand. But you see it's like when I'm 13, so I'm basically through. There's also theory discussions that still need to be done or to be intensified. A lot of innovations from the West have done devastation among the culture and tradition of the indigenous population. For instance, formal schooling. We interviewed someone and we said, but why do you think your traditional knowledge is disappearing? And then the old man says, but you know these days the kids are at school. They come home at two or half past two. Then they have school work that they have household chores and then they're tired. Nobody's sitting at my fire and listening to my stories anymore because the kids are at school. Right? So while they didn't see that negatively, they said, no, no, the kids need an education. They understand that. And they said, well, it's actually destroying our village life. That's the situation. And there's many other examples. If you're interested, we can meet outside. But also the ethical discussion needs to go about if we collect all that knowledge. Currently for this knowledge you need to visit a knowledge bearer. You need to go to a festival or you need to approach this person. If we simply collected all in form of videos and you can just, you know like with watch this video, watch that video, watch that video, then if it leads to a situation where you have no need anymore to go to the community gatherings then we might be destroying more than we are improving. So we need to talk about that. So what we don't want is to create a cultural second life where you're not participating in the real cultural events anymore or you have a digital somewhere and it's on your USB stick and some point in time I'll check that out. And we need to talk about legal considerations because there has also been a lot of damage done in Namibia and I'm sure in other countries as well of somebody revealing a certain technique on video somebody else releasing the video under CC by SA and somebody else taking it as if what was released was the description of what the person said. To an extent that indigenous Damara may no longer harvest certain plants because a pharmaceutical company came along got the patent for that, lobbied government so that the plant is under 100% protection now and now it can't be used for its traditional purposes anymore because it's been sold in little pills to indigenous in Europe. So this must not happen and it has happened before and I think it's well I wanted to put that acronym in that I am not a lawyer but I thought well from my understanding this is a misunderstanding because if I take a picture of a building and I release the picture I'm saying nothing about the architectural rights, the architectural idea of that building all I'm releasing is a photograph from this angle under these conditions so the content of my work is not the building or the dress the content is simply how I took the picture analogous if I take a video of an elder describing a certain technique and I release the video according to my understanding it can't be that I'm releasing his description under an open license but it should be that I'm releasing my way of capturing an audio signal but we need to have that dialogue because even the elders are sensitized to that and they are asking and it's good that they are asking. Alright that was a lot 13 slides and I still run out of time I'm not quite sure whether we can his shaking his head really not even one question Thank you very much for this sort of critical thinking I want to add one more sort of critical remark there was some discussion elsewhere about this offline editing systems this person was questioning offline editing and well I don't want to go down to the discussion but we have to remember that offline editing is one way it's not the network it's a system it's one way I understand it's trying to avoid accessibility a question which is a big deal there but still it's one way communication Thank you very much offline editing if it's being used as a vehicle as a vehicle to improve access like as to if I don't have internet access then I can do offline editing I think that's coming too late there is even in the remotest area there is network these days in Namibia it's actually very very cheap we pay for a week of connectivity we pay less than 3 US dollars probably $2.30 which is within the reach of even the poorest parts of the population at least in Namibia it's a middle income country on average but yes if we are using it in a form of forming this group and consulting about what we are doing before putting it live then that makes a lot of sense I would guess I don't see those numbers I see you lifting up something so one one one I got a one who wants to take okay alright then you should have kicked me earlier okay thank you very much