 Welcome everyone. Good afternoon to the people here in Singapore. Good morning to the people or afternoon or evening to the people or night and to the people all around the world. Welcome to the Wikishtetl session. My name is Amichai Bannet. I've been a Wikipedian for which is calculating 17 years. It's a long time since 2006. Mainly in Hebrew Wikipedia I made tens of thousands of edits and in my professional life I work in educational organizations working with Jews in Israel and Jews all around the world in the diaspora and just under a year ago I started a new job at Herzog College and director of Herzog Global. Herzog College trains teachers and we do the same thing with Jewish school and communities around the world and they told me listen there's this this project that started at Herzog College. One of the lecturers started something called Wikishtetl and we just got the government of Israel are partnering with us the Ministry of the Asperer Affairs United which is an educational organization funded by them. Would you mind? I said would he mean Wikishtetl? The legendary project that has been working and you'll hear about it now so I won't go into a lot of details and I said that's so great because this is a connects my hobby of Wikipedia which I spend a lot of time on with my day job that pays me a salary so what could be better right? So here we are today looking forward to hearing about Wikishtetl my colleague Dr. Tila Hertz who's a professor of education and history at Herzog College and an educational entrepreneur. We're gonna hear from her about how the project started and what has been done until now and we'll talk about what is what we're planning to do in the future as well but I'm asking you the people either watching live now here or online or if you're watching it in the days weeks and months to come as well to think about how this can be relevant for your either Wikipedia editing or your communities so that's what we're asking you to have in mind. Before we actually start I wanted to to mention and to talk about Dr. Lin our friend somebody that we did so many things together on so many different aspects of life and Wikipedia which is intertwined with each other. You could see on the right side the small picture is drawing I about ten years ago on a trip which I think bed guvrin in which draw organize the trip in order to take pictures of the area but really in order to socialize and meet and and get new people to edit on Wikipedia and this is from last summer the big pictures from last summer you can see drawer holding this was when he was notified that he became the Wikimedia Wikipedia laureate of 2022 and you could see that guy smiling on the right that's me with a little bit of a scrubby beard so drawer we remember you and we'll continue remembering you and now I would like to introduce Dr. Taylor Hertz who is also on Wikipedia you'll see her username later thank you and thank you for coming and so in 2016 I was teaching a teacher training course in Holocaust studies and I wanted an idea for an assignment that would have extra value with meaning and connection because our story doesn't begin and end with the mass destruction that was Holocaust and who we are as the people is much more wide and deep and profound than what was done to us by the Nazis I was already a big fan of the free open encyclopedia and with the understanding of the power of the connection between stories of the past and technological platform of the future Wikistat was born the project aims to commemorate Jewish communities that no longer exist in the original geographic place by writing about them in Wikipedia and uploading historic photos and visual data to Wikimedia Commons later on we held three open Wikipedia contests giving people from the Wikipedia community and outside it the opportunity and incentive to tell the stories of their ancestral communities the project was originally aimed in communities that were destroyed in the Holocaust but later expanded to Jewish communities that existed all over the globe through the program we have witnessed memories living within survivors and laying forgotten in dusty archives see light today would like to share with you 10 things that you can take from the project and suggest that you considered adopting and adapting this model to record the past of other lost communities so curiosity and involvement is something we see in the project word of the contest gets out to the public and many people we've never edited in Wikipedia sign up our family history and roots mean a lot to us and putting them out there in the world gives us place and value for example this is how Schmuel a survivor from Slovakia thanked the student who wrote an entry on his community we encourage people to write about communities they have a personal connection to in the students freestyle feedback you can see is the dominance of the roots and how they mirrored by the branches that symbolize the present and the future when working on weekish total entries the older generation brings its knowledge memories photographs and stories and the younger brings it 21st century skills that enabled those memories and stories to live on to future generation it is our view that no community is too small or any potent to be deserving of mention and memory like the community like the community of nudge follow whose small Jewish population was completely wiped out in the Holocaust with the information on the community almost didn't exist even in the ad vashem database through the weekish total project the community was internalized and its people given face and name with the project people get closure like the father of novina ducks a woman who was murdered by the Nazis with her husband and their baby son before he died before her father died he gave her photo to a close family friend and asked her that she do something with it with the project she fulfilled the referral father's will the switch from being a knowledge consumer to being a knowledge creator is very meaningful and in a constructed learning environment it is much needed switch weekish total has all the advantages of project based learning that involved many subjects and developed a variety of skills service learning takes the learning product out of the classroom to the benefit of the community for example the entry on Benghazi Libya the students who wrote it wanted to raise awareness to the Holocaust in North Africa since Holocaust studies focus mostly on European communities but North Africa Jews were part of the Holocaust as well one of the students showed the entry to her father-in-law who started to cry and told his teachers never believed him when he told his family's Holocaust story and now we finally get validated with weekish total students work on information collection independent learning problem-solving team skills and interest intercultural skills Wikipedia represent the belief that knowledge belongs to everyone and that the truth is reached when a variety of people work together each adding from their knowledge and perspective it is our vision that as weekish total expands people from all over the world get involved helping the dissentment of Jewish communities that existed in their cities and towns preserve their memories and preserve their own local history thus waving together the human tapestry so the Jewish story is unique but it is also one of many stories of the people who no longer exist in the place they did we believe the weekish total model can be adopted and adopted to conserving other communities we invite you to make to take this model to your communities especially if you are part of a group that no longer exist in the place it originally had to preserve your unique heritage language costumes art music history and stories thank you thank you very much so we when we ask about what's next so we heard about this amazing project growing from 2016 starting with Dr. Tehla Hertz's students at Herzog College expanding to the entire Hebrew Wikipedia community and now together with our partnership with with United and with the the government of Israel the Ministry of Asper affairs we're able to take it globally so what have we done and what do we want to do and then we want to hear from you what you suggest or what you're thinking about as well so one thing we want to think we want to think we want to do is we want to prepare we already prepared a program which an educational teacher training program throughout this this coming school year it starts in September 2023 in the northern hemisphere we're going to work this year with four schools as a small pilot two in Israel and two outside outside of Israel and we're going to train the teachers in Wikipedia what does it mean of course first as knowledge consumers like Tehila said then how to write in Wikipedia had a had of research in order to find the information that you need as you know my grandmother told me we don't think your grandmother lied but that's not a source that you can trust or use on Wikipedia but there's your grandmother can point you in the right direction and so this this teacher training program is already being built as we speak it's going to run for the first time this year and then following that starting next year 24-25 we're gonna have an online asynchronous course which we we're gonna work hard to prepare and then you can use it many many times we're starting in Hebrew and English but we're really open to have it in more languages so you think about your languages and of course we're looking for people around the world whether you're watching online or whether you're here that want to partner with us whether it's because you want I mean the you want to preserve the memory of Jewish communities like we've done so far in Israel and we want to do it around the world or whether you want to use this model to preserve the memory of other lost communities or communities that perhaps are being lost as we speak and using our model and what we want to do is we we know how to run these not only know how to run the the competitions and to train the people to do it we also know how to give prizes which is you know and an incentive to people to register to Wikipedia and join the competition if you want us to join you and to help you to do that we know how to do that and we'd love to do it with you so that's the you know what we're doing right now there's many people to thank all that we put many logos as you can see as we mentioned already speaking about the people and the people on Hebrew Wikipedia who helped us we're very very very grateful to them and to the people that are here of course that are listening and that are watching right now as we speak and now we'd love to hear from you so there's two options option number one is just to contact us directly that's my user English and Hebrew Tehila wrote her name in Hebrew so you can also use of course the email addresses if it's easier and in a second I'm also gonna click on a padlet page that we opened we also you can use the QR code to get to this padlet page if you're watching this you know later than August 17th 2023 you can go and into the padlet and see what people already commented and suggested and comment on what they say we get notifications when this page is updated so you can continue watching and doing this as well so if you have any suggestions questions comments we'd love to hear please yes the microphone is here we go yeah there we go also introduce yourself if you don't mind I'm Mickey from Wikipedia Serbia I'm really interested in your project and it's been transferred to me how we can actually use it as well for the communities that we had and lost within Serbia's territories so we also had a lot of communities that Jewish communities that were that perished during the Holocaust so my I mean that's why I want to thank you for this project and it's really significant worldwide my question is how do you tackle the lack of information that is I mean you want to inspire people to write about the communities or territories that were lost that the communities that people that were lost but you don't have probably a lot of resources where they were mentioned how do the students tackle that problem you said my grandma told me but if if not by grandma how else are we going to have this information if you know that communities have perished thank you okay so we'll listen to more questions and then we'll try and answer at the end there are I mean I could say in generally of course that there are there is the energy of preserving memories people don't always know what to do with it something is happening or happened and it could be something that's even happening today there's a war or a community being lost for whatever reason and people want to help so some people will go to the on the ground and try and help and save lives some people can't some people can't right now travel and they're sitting in their pajamas or in their slippers at home and you could still change the world in your pajamas and slippers you know that right your Wikipedia and we do that every day and every night so so what I'm saying is that we can come in the fact that you're on the ground in Serbia helps you to know to get to the people that have that information so that's why if we would you know if we would choose to partner I think it would be you know that's a coordinator let's say and through Wikimedia Serbia that would be talking or finding this information or the people that have the information or the archives that have the information or the people that know where the archives are even buried maybe even somewhere and and that's how they would they would they would they would bring and use the knowledge that the know-how that we have to connect it so obviously there's a lot of details that we could talk so I see officially time is up so if there's one last comment good so thank you very much everybody now we'll just take a we need to take a picture with this this easy cool take a picture of us with this hi hi and that's the man okay thank you thank you very much everybody yeah thank you hi everybody