 Hi everybody, welcome to this session promoting WikiGlam projects in Latin America. For those who don't know me, I am Patricia Dias Rubio, and I am the Executive Director of WikiMedia Chile, but I also, I am personally very engaged in promoting open culture policies and strategies and projects in Chile, but also very dedicated to discussing these subjects and topics around our region, around Latin America. So, there's an etherpad that it should be linked in the chat where you can put all of your questions, comments, ideas or anything that you would like to share with me and with the audience. I'll read it very thoughtfully after the session, but I'll also be trying to collect or to answer your questions after the presentation. My presentation is not that long, honestly, to be honest with you. So, I'm leaving some space at the end of the session for us to chat and to interact a little bit as the platform allows us, right? So, we are going to, let's see if this works. Okay, I'm going to click again. Okay, so before jumping directly to the topics of this session, I want to show you or explain you a little bit how I'm going to present you these topics, right? First, I'm going to start with a little context and try to explain why this is something that I care about and why this is something that I would like to share with you. Then, I'm going to present you a little diagnosis that I have been creating or co-creating with other Wikimedians, regional Wikimedians. And finally, I'm going to share with you some ideas and strategies for Wikiglam projects that I have learned working with my Latin American colleagues. So, well, the context, right? Why talking about Wikiglam in Latin America? I would like to situate a little bit my own experience as an open glam or Wikiglam applicator in Chile and Latin America. Well, I am a social communicator and I have a diploma in cultural heritage promotion. And since 2018, I've been leading Wikimedia Chile. And since I arrived to the movement, I realized that open glam or Wikiglam was a very recurrent project or topic within Wikimedia affiliates, right? We have education programs, we have community programs, and we normally have Wikiglam or open glam programs and projects. So for me, it was very, let's say, natural or spontaneous the idea to engage in these projects and to start developing interesting things with glam or cultural institutions, right? Yet I found very quickly that it was very difficult to develop those projects or even connecting with glam because it was something very hard to do. I discovered that institutions were very reticent to work with us as Wikimedia Chile and that for them, Wikimedia projects were whether unnecessary or too complicated or unknown. And even for those who knew us, for those institutions who had worked with Wikimedia Chile in the past before I arrived, that they understood Wikimedia initiatives or projects or collaborations like a one-time thing. So they were not very enthusiast about the idea to re-engage or to give a certain continuity to these projects, which was very frustrating for me. And I also faced the difficulty that I didn't have or it was hard for me to find concrete examples of regional successful projects to show them and to invite them to join these initiatives. Sorry, my phone just... So I was thinking why it's so hard to find these regional examples of successful Wikiglam projects. So I decided to ask my colleagues why this is so hard, why it's just me or maybe there's something else here. So talking to them, I realized that it was not just a Wikimedia Chile thing, right, that executing Wikiglam projects in Latin America was a hard thing to do. Talking with them, I realized that we all had the same problems, that GLAMs were very resistant to work with us or with other open knowledge organizations or initiatives, and that when these projects existed, when my colleagues arrived to have these projects or to develop these projects, they were not representative of the amount of work and efforts that they used to put on them. So they were normally very small projects and just a few number of contents, so it was not very representative of the efforts that they developed. So the objectives or the things that I wanted to do knowing this situation and this is the thing that I want to share with you, is that I wanted to understand which were the experiences that Wikimedia regional affiliates were having around Wikiglam projects, to identify the arguments that regional GLAMs used to question or to take some distance from Wikiglam projects and also the most important thing, trying to create or propose common strategies to face those limitations or the arguments that this institution just gave us from a regional perspective. So just like I said in the beginning, I tried to build a sort of like a diagnosis. This is a collective diagnosis. This is not only my work. This is the result of a lot of conversations that I've been having with my colleagues from Argentina, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil and Mexico. So it's just not an Uruguay as well. It's not only a Chilean thing. So talking with my regional colleagues, just like I said, we identified four main limitations or difficulties for engaged Wikiglam projects in our countries. Limited resources, GLAM institutional structures, misleading conceptions about going open and finally, a certain prevalence of a global north perspective on how Wikiglam looks like. So I'm going to talk to you a little bit about these four reasons that we found. Oh, sorry. Well, first of all, this went crazy. This is going crazy. Okay. Okay, here we are. Well, limited resources, right? As many GLAMs in Latin America are public or depend on public funds, they normally lack of resources to invest in infrastructure, technology, staff training, or even in the maintenance of their buildings, just like the fire and the museum in Rio de Janeiro or Indian Cinematheque in Sao Paulo recently showed us, right? And this is a very regional reality. And this lack of resources also affect GLAM practitioners. Their schedules are normally overloaded, they are frequently underpaid, and they don't have many opportunities, time, or let's be honest, energy to train or learn new things like open strategies or open projects or open policies. As a result, going digital, right, which is key to create and to engage Wikiglam projects, it's a situation that is still very undeveloped within these institutions. And even though we have some successful experience in Colombia or in Chile, the truth is that many of these institutions need a lot of support, still need a lot of support on preserving digital copies of their assets and collections. The second reason that we identified is GLAMs institutional structures. Because regional GLAM practitioners are rarely involved in copyright or legislation discussions, even though these discussions or these policies really affect the way in which they work, and of course the administration or impact that their collections have. In Latin America, normally these decisions pass directly through legal departments or high-run executives, and they are not consulted with technical or specialized professionals who are the ones that we normally contact or connect with when developing these structures. And this structure, this institutional structure, which is very vertical and this is quite common within GLAMs, especially those who belong to the public sector, make harder for us as Wikimedians to reach those decision makers and engage them in the wiki ethos. And as many of you know, if decision makers are not engaged in wiki GLAM or open GLAM projects, projects won't succeed, unfortunately. I'm going to pass to the next topic. A third difficulty that we have found is that it seems to that some GLAM practitioners have some misleading conceptions about what going open could mean for them. They normally fear that going open or even going online it would translate into the situation that they might lose control over their collections. We have heard that they fear that their collections will be used wrongly or uncontextualized or without their permissions or even commercially, which is a highly no-no with some GLAM practitioners, especially or at least in the Chilean case where GLAM practitioners tend to be very conservative about their role. But talking to them, we have also identified that they fear losing their leading role or their particular role in the wiki birth, for example, where everybody can participate and where there's no mediation. And I say it like this because we know that that's not true, right? That going digital, online or open does not mean that mediation is not going to be necessary anymore. GLAM practitioners that we have met fear that they won't be needed any longer. And sadly that fear is expressed in a lot of negativity or even content towards wiki media initiatives or at least that has been our experience, I think called a little bit of everything, cultural extractivists that I want to take advantage of in institutions and some other things that many of you already have heard from me. I'm going to pass to the next. And finally, a fourth limitation. It's the prevalence of a certain global north perspective on how wiki GLAM looks like or how it should look like. And in the region in Latin America, talking with my colleagues, I realized that we have taken awareness that this concept does not make too much sense for us, the GLAM acronym. But first of all, because it is in English, right? So naturally it doesn't make too much sense for us. But also because it tends to be too narrow and do not represent the diversity of things that we do when we do wiki GLAM projects. And I think that we are very clear about the necessity to create a new concept or an alternative concept that could really reflect the work that we do with cultural and artistic assets and traditional collections and also with other types of cultural document or pieces like media or newspapers or photographs, but also the work that we do with communities, stories, with ancestral and artistic knowledge, with places and memory sites, which are a huge factor in Latin America. So, well, this is the diagnosis. Well, I would like to share a few ideas and strategies to promote these, let's say, open culture wiki GLAM projects or whatever the name that we want to choose for, call it. And these are all ideas and strategies that I have learned working with my original colleagues. So the first idea or the strategy to create those projects, even though we have already identified all these difficulties, we want to keep promoting these projects anyway, right? So the first strategy or idea is trying to identify what GLAMs need in general and how we can eventually help them in those needs with the resources that we have as wiki media affiliates, structures, chapters, initiatives, whatever. Because understanding that they are lacking a lot of resources, right? You know, resources are very limited within GLAMs. They have a lot of needs and we have some resources that can help them to overcome those limitations, right? So in wiki media tele, in wiki media Argentina, for example, we have been focusing a lot on training sessions on open culture, on what open culture means, for example, to try to help practitioners to understand what going open really means. So they can eventually be motivated or even engage in particular projects with us. We also invite you, if you are also thinking about developing these projects, in trying to identify and develop concrete tools and learning experience to share with GLAMs, right? Because it's really important to create learning experiences that they could translate into concrete and bounded projects. Because that's going to be easier for them to translate those ideas to their superiors, right? The objective of, for example, this activity that wiki media Argentina developed was to present them very concrete projects that they could apply into their institutions because that's more easy to present to others, to their bosses, for example, than just ideas or notions about what going open means. Focus on smaller scale projects or institutions. This is a very personal reflection, but even though we all want to engage national museums or big collections in our projects, the experience, the regional experience, showed us it's better to start with local institutions in a smaller scale. If they are successful, these projects can be later presented or escalated to broader territories or bigger institutions. So even though maybe it's not the ideal thing to start by engaging the national gallery of your country or your territory, you are going to have maybe more impact in a smaller community. And you can have better collaborations in the future if you start with smaller institutions. A fourth strategy or suggestion is to centralize some efforts through relevant collaborators. So if we have the chance to work with a big institution or an institution-sized medium, they could play a hub role by centralizing resources or capacity-building experiences and then passing them on to smaller institutions or territories. So for example, we have some experiences in the region where Wikimedia chapters had identified not national but regional institutions like regional museums, for example, and they have training them, and then these institutions have done the same, training smaller or more community institutions, so like that we can pass the message to a broader territory. Also, it's very important to work with local cultural practitioners. That's fundamental to develop successful and long-standing Wikiglam or open-glam projects. Engaged practitioners are one of the best type of ambassadors that the Wikimedia movement can have in this quest and having them in our site represent an enormous collaboration possible. Reach out to them and make them feel part of a community. Invite them to your activities, prepare training sessions especially for them. Try to engage them in your chapter, in your group, in your initiative and somehow that they could really feel that they can be sort of like a bridge between Wikimedia and their institutions. And finally, and this is sort of like a challenge for us as Wikimedians, is trying to redefine what Wikiglam means for Latin American Wikimedians and our communities. This is an image of a workshop that Wikimedia Colombia launched in 2020 or 2021, I am not sure, but it was a workshop around images of the protests that they had around those years, political and social protests. And we considered that as a glam type of project, right? Because for us in Latin America, culture means way more than just the things that happen within libraries or museums, you know, like institutions or places or practitioners. We try to understand culture in a broader way. It involves the different ways in which our societies express and represent themselves and their history and their diversity and things that are happening right now today in our streets, in our public places. So we know that this is a huge challenge, but understanding that as Wikimedians, we want to collect, register and preserve all type of content. So we have to start seeing culture as something bigger, brighter and way more complex and diverse than the way in which we traditionally understand glam projects. And this is the invitation that I wanted to do to you as well today. Thank you. Thank you so much for this time. I'm going to extend the chat because it's so small that unfortunately I don't see very well. So I don't know if you have any questions that you have put on the chat before. Unfortunately, I cannot go back to the chat. So if you have any questions or comments, please copy them again so I can see that because when I was presenting I wasn't able to see the chat. But I do agree with what Anna is saying that we really need to follow this discussion, right, to continue with this discussion in Latin America and hopefully in other regions of the world. Well, thank you. Thank you so much for being here. If you have any other comments, it's okay if you don't have questions, but if you have other comments or reflections or anything else that you would like to share with me or with my original colleagues, please put it in the etherpad so I can collect them and then share them with them. And please, if you can write your name and maybe the city or the country in which you are, that would be really cool for me and it allowed me to understand this map of people interested in this perspective. So thank you. And yes, good idea, Scanne, we should have a telegram group or I know there's a, I know that there's a wiki-glam, like global telegram group, but maybe we should have something more regional or, I don't know, a different thing. Oh, there's a lot of comments. Thank you, Anna. It's that I, let's see. Sorry, this is very uncomfortable for you, I imagine. Yeah, I'm going to read it. These are all great points. Even for us in the global north, we are struggling many times to display the impact of our wiki-glam. Okay, very true. A lot of those in GLAMs are very touchy about being open. I saw it first-hand organizing wiki-loves Africa in Nigeria. Well, we shared the struggle. I agree that the GLAM acronym is too narrow and even though in practice we embrace it much. Okay, so some possible terms we could try beyond GLAM, cultural and heritage partnerships, or more generally, memory institutions. Sometimes I use the phrase knowledge in the public interest. Oh, I love that. To describe entities that have a common cause. But few of these are easy to say like GLAM, yeah. It works. It sounds good, but maybe not that good for people who does not speak English. Let's say the smaller institutions can then advocate for you to larger institutions when they see the success. Yeah, that's the idea. Is it hard to explain when institutions are about to open movement? Yes, very hard. Okay, so we have to go. We only have like 10 seconds left. Thank you so much for coming. I'm looking forward reading your messages and ideas in the etherpads. And thank you. Thank you so much for being here. We'll be in contact. Bye. Gracias. Chao. Muchas gracias. Hola. Bueno, espero que me escuchen bien. Yo soy Rocío Aravena. Soy la encargada de educación y alfabetización digital de Wikimedia Chile. Y hoy día les traigo una presentación para contarles acerca del cuadernillo digital que desarrollamos desde mi programa desde Wikimedia Chile. Así es que voy a compartir mi pantalla ahora. Estoy muy contenta de estar acá. Y muchas gracias a quienes se han podido sumar. Perfecto. No sé si ya están viendo mi presentación. Espero que sea así. Bueno, la presentación que traigo el día de hoy lleva por nombre herramientas Wiki para la educación patrimonial. Herramientas Wiki para la educación patrimonial es un recurso educativo abierto, nuestro primer recurso educativo abierto creado desde nosotras. Acá están viendo la portada del cuadernillo y este es un recurso educativo digital que fue pensado para que lo utilicen docentes, profesores, profesoras, pero también cualquier persona que trabaje en alguna organización o institución que desarrolla iniciativas de educación patrimonial. El cuadernillo lleva por nombre herramientas Wiki para la educación patrimonial. Y un poco, como el título lo indica, el objetivo que este cuadernillo tiene es poder aportar a la formación de las personas, de las comunidades educativas, escolares, universitarias y también no formales en el uso de Wikipedia y Wikimedia Commons para poder promover el acceso, la investigación, también la sensibilización y la divulgación de los patrimonios locales. En ese sentido quería compartir con ustedes las etapas de este proyecto. Nosotras iniciamos esta iniciativa el año pasado, el 2021, proponiendo al Instituto de Historia de la Universidad Católica de Chile una pasantía. Teníamos la intención, hace harto tiempo, de poder contribuir a través de un recurso educativo a la formación y la utilización de Wikipedia, de Wikimedia Commons en el aula, pero no sabíamos muy bien cómo hacerlo. Y ahí fue que decidimos, digamos, enmarcar la formación en Wikimedia, dentro de lo que es la educación patrimonial, puesto que notamos que es una cuestión que preocupa muchísimo a las comunidades educativas en nuestro país y también en la región. Así es que este proyecto se inició el año pasado, durante el 2021, recibimos a un estudiante de historia como pasante y ese estudiante tenía, digamos, la misión, el objetivo de conocer, de formarse en Wikimedia Commons y Wikipedia y desarrollar una propuesta de 11 actividades para ser realizadas en contextos educativos. La segunda etapa del proyecto fue en enero de este año, ya de 2022, cuando revisamos el trabajo que realizó este estudiante, obviamente, con nuestra supervisión y apoyo y comenzamos, cierto, a generar las adecuaciones, los cambios para luego pasar a esta tercera etapa que fue el desarrollo del contenido y el diseño del cuadernil. Es decir, no queríamos que el recurso fuesen sólo 11 actividades, sino que quisimos realizar una primera sección de este libro digital donde pudiésemos abordar los contenidos de educación patrimonial y de proyecto Wikimedia y luego, en la segunda sección, tener las actividades. Así es que durante el primer semestre de este año estuvimos trabajando codo a codo con nuestro diseñador para que el diseño y el contenido del cuadernillo estuviesen en sintonía. Y la última etapa fue el lanzamiento, o sea, la difusión de este proyecto. Organizamos un panel junto al Instituto de Historia al Centro del Patrimonio de la Universidad Católica y, por supuesto, a Wikimedia Chile y, actualmente, estamos trabajando en promover la utilización de este recurso por parte de las comunidades educativas no sólo de Chile, sino también de América Latina a través de un curso de formación docente. Así es que les quería mostrar brevemente el cuadernillo. Pueden descargarlo en Wikimedia Commons. El cuadernillo tiene una licencia que permite, cierto, su utilización, su descarga, su divulgación. Así es que este es el cuadernillo. Esta es la portada. Algunas cuestiones interesantes. Para promover que el cuadernillo, efectivamente, fuese utilizado por las comunidades educativas, nosotros trabajamos en la alineación curricular. Por lo tanto, todos los contenidos que están presentes en este cuadernillo forman parte de alguna de las habilidades que están dispuestas en el currículum escolar chileno y también que forman parte de alguna de las habilidades que estipula un esco. Así es que eso es lo primero. Lo segundo es que todas las imágenes y las adaptaciones, digamos, más artísticas que tiene el cuadernillo forman parte del repositorio Wikimedia Commons. Y todas esas imágenes, a su vez, han sido el producto de diversas iniciativas como campañas, concursos, fotográficos, donaciones de museos que hemos impulsado desde Wikimedia Chile. Así es que lo que están viendo ahora es la sección de contenidos. El cuadernillo comienza, cierto, con el contenido de patrimonio y patrimonios del siglo XXI. Si es que se fijan, intentamos promover a través del diseño del cuadernillo una lectura que no fuese lineal. O sea, las personas que lo utilicen van a poder acceder a links internos y externos. Van a poder, digamos, al clicar, llegar a la imagen original, por ejemplo. Intentamos también que todas las imágenes patrimoniales representaran la diversidad territorial de nuestro país, no solamente imágenes de Santiago, de la capital. Y en la parte de los proyectos Wikimedia, centramos el contenido de Wikipedia y Wikimedia Commons en los objetivos de educación patrimonial. Por lo tanto, presentamos Wikimedia como una herramienta para construir narrativas locales y presentamos también Wikimedia Commons como una herramienta para representar a través de imágenes los patrimonios locales. Intentamos utilizar imágenes llamativas que representaran patrimonios locales subrepresentados en internet. Tenemos toda una parte donde educamos acerca de las licencias libres, por ejemplo, para luego llegar a la sección de actividades. En esta sección hay 11 actividades que encuentran, digamos, ordenadas de manera ascendente. Van desde las habilidades más básicas hacia las habilidades más complejas. El trabajo en equipo, la colaboración, la creatividad. Ya convocamos, por ejemplo, acá a los estudiantes no solo a que explore en Wikimedia Commons como un archivo, no solo a que explore en Wikipedia, sino que también utilicen herramientas como Wikiatlas y, sobre todo, que puedan impulsar y aprender a impulsar iniciativas de educación patrimonial como pueden ser concursos fotográficos, campañas, diseño de archivos locales y colaborativos. Así es que, bueno, ese es el cuadernillo lo pueden descargar, por supuesto, nos pueden contactar en caso de que necesiten ayuda o que eran algunas orientaciones para implementar, por ejemplo, alguna de las iniciativas. Y quería terminar mi presentación, entonces compartiendo algunas recomendaciones o algunos tips pensando en aquellas personas o capítulos que quieran implementar iniciativas similares. La primera recomendación sería tener un objetivo claro, es decir, para qué queremos hacer este material. En nuestro caso, el objetivo, como yo les comentaba, era contribuir a la formación y la educación patrimonial poniendo a disposición de las comunidades educativas, recursos abiertos, plataformas como Wikimedia donde pueden acceder a imágenes, a obras patrimoniales, pero, cierto, que también estimulara a que fuese las propias comunidades las que pudiesen aprender como usar Wikipedia y Wikimedia Commons para divulgar su patrimonio. La segunda recomendación es definir la audiencia. A quiénes está dirigido el recurso? Es distinto crear un cuadernillo para estudiantes de primaria de enseñanza básica que crear un cuadernillo para profesores y profesoras. La tercera recomendación es trabajar en la alineación curricular, intentar que el cuadernillo, o que el documento, o que el recurso, perdón, esté relacionado a ciertos objetivos de aprendizaje o habilidades que disponga el currículum de los países de los cuales forman parte. Y, finalmente, el diseño consentido. O sea, que el diseño del cuadernillo está en sintonía con los propósitos que ustedes tengan. En este caso, nosotras queríamos un diseño que apelara a la participación, que mostrara links que fuesen de interés para los estudiantes, para los docentes que utilicen este material. A través del diseño, quisimos estructurar en una sección de contenido donde pudieran ponerse a explorar los aprendizajes que habían obtenido. En el mismo diseño, también, quisimos mostrar fotografías que representara la diversidad geográfica de nuestro país, por ejemplo. Y, también, que el diseño, en este caso, que tenía, bueno, diversos collages que hizo nuestro diseñador, mostrar, a partir de eso, como las licencias abiertas pueden permitir que imágenes, fotografías, sean reutilizadas en el diseño, por ejemplo, de colates, de afiche, de un cuadernillo educativo. Y, finalmente, la última recomendación es que intenten divulgar el material, que el material no se pierda dentro de los millones de archivos que tiene Wikimedia Commons. Entonces, promuevan su uso, presentenlo a la comunidad, intenten definir la audiencia e invitenla, por ejemplo, a un panel, a un conversatorio, y luego intentar utilizar el cuadernillo en actividades de difusión, por supuesto, pero también de formación. En ese sentido, nosotras ahora nos encontramos desarrollando un curso para profesionales de la educación y también para gestores de patrimonio. En ese curso, el cuadernillo es una herramienta fundamental. Así es que eso espero que la presentación haya sido de interés y, por supuesto, nos puedan contactar al correo que aparece acá, Educación Arroba Wikimedia Chile.cl en caso de que quieran conocer más acerca de este material o saber cómo implementar iniciativas similares, utilizarlo en sus comunidades o lo que sea. Así es que muchas gracias. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Don't Sight It, Write It. What professors think about Wikipedia? I am Leanna Davis. Some of you may know me from my work on the Wikipedia and Education User Group globally, but I'm here today representing the Wikia Education Foundation, which is the organization that runs the education program in the United States and I am joined here today with four of our wonderful professors and one of my colleagues who will be on this panel discussion. A couple of quick housekeeping tips before we get started. The first one is I just want to extend a huge thank you to all of the Wikimedia organizers for their excellent work putting this conference together and a special thank you to the translators who are making this possible to happen in so many languages. It's great to see that inclusiveness and I really appreciate all of your hard work. I will try to speak slowly to make translation easier and hopefully my fellow panelists will as well. But we all get excited about Wikipedia and Education and speak a little fast, so hopefully that will go well. A second note is to please go ahead and put questions in the chat. I have some questions I'm going to kick us off with but we wanted this session to be interactive and so if there's questions you have for professors who teach with Wikipedia this is a great opportunity for you to ask them. Just stick them in the chat and I'll kick us off with some initial questions and then we'll have some time for questions from all of you who are watching too. I will get started with introductions and then at you are next to me on my view. I'll go ahead and start with you if you can introduce yourself and share how long you've been teaching with Wikipedia and where you teach. Hello everyone. I am going to try my best as a person from New York to speak slowly. I am deeply appreciative of the opportunity to be a part of this esteemed panel. I appreciate being called the professor. I am still a PhD student at the University of California Berkeley in the sociology department where I have been teaching with Wikipedia. It's either been six or seven years consistently now including semesters and summers where students receiving independent study credits have been working to tackle the lack of information, publicly available information that's out there on privacy, cybersecurity and surveillance. We've been at this for quite some time and I'm very proud of the mostly women of color mostly undergrads that have been doing this work with me for the last six, seven years. Hey, thanks. Shira. Hi, I'm Shira Klein speaking to you from Orange County, California and I have been using Wikipedia with my students for ten years. I think I was one of the first people to join the program before there was I think before wiki education even existed and so that's kind of the long and the short of it. I have been starting to get interested in disinformation on Wikipedia and I've started to research that actually it turned from a teaching project to research project but I still have my students edit on Wikipedia and the courses I teach where they edit are history courses Jewish history, migration history and European history. Okay, thanks. Heather. Hi everybody. I'm really excited to be here. I'm passionate about Wikipedia and believe in the idea of universal free knowledge that it embodies. I'm a professor in the department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. I'm also chair of my department. I've been teaching with Wikipedia since spring 2019. I have used it in classes with everybody from first year undergraduates through PhD candidates and my goal has been to engage the students in writing original articles for the forum on topics relating to Middle Eastern and North African history and to the history of the University of Pennsylvania and its scholars. Okay, thank you. Andelia. Hi everyone. I want to echo Heather and say thank you all for being here and it's just lovely to be a part of this conversation. My name is Delia Stevenson. I am an assistant professor of African American literature at the University of Florida and I teach this is my this will be my this fall will be my third time teaching the Wikipedia assignment. I believe my first year was right before the pandemic and I generally work with the wiki African diaspora. So we generally work on African American literature in the 19th century. So thank you all. Thank you. And Ian. Hi, I'm Ian Ram John. I am the Wikipedia expert with wiki education. I based in Michigan originally from Trinidad and and I am a plant ecologist by training. I've been with wiki education since 2014 supporting I don't know hundreds of classes and students and instructors and I've been a Wikipedia since 2004 and again thanks everybody for being here this is the panel. Yes, thank you all and so I want to jump right in with my first question I'm going to send a Shira which is why do you teach with Wikipedia? Yeah, I I'm just going to time myself just one second. The reason I teach with Wikipedia I mean there are a whole bunch of them but my biggest reason I think is because I see it as a type of service learning. I see it as a way in which students can help the world the risk of sounding sort of idealistic or naive and and to sort of explain that you know the students in the college where I teach are so privileged and we have access to all this information that is behind paywalls for most people and they have the privilege of taking classes with great professors and so they have so much to give the world and by having them edit Wikipedia and incorporate scholarship into Wikipedia and improve information that the world can read I see it as sort of their chance to do good or my chance to do good or my chance to force them to do good and through them do good and yeah I especially felt this in the pandemic when I really wanted to contribute but I couldn't because of my family situation and because of everything that was happening during the pandemic and so Wikipedia was my one little chance to do something for the community and even now when things are a little more normal that's the way I see it. Great thanks Delia did you have any follow up stuff you wanted to add to this question? Oh no I was just I literally was just aiming an aiming corner for you. Excellent okay the next question is for Heather what are your students perspectives on Wikipedia before they take your class and how does that shift throughout the term? So a couple of things on the one hand there's a kind of an extreme some students think Wikipedia is a go to source for everything and they can trust it because it's out there and then there are others who think it's a really dodgy source and they shouldn't trust it at all and so I try to make them all skeptical and supportive of Wikipedia at the same time and by the end of the class they realize that through editing they become more aware of the meticulous sourcing that is required and they become more aware of the potential for revising and improving text in a way that can translate into their own skills like prose writers so that's sort of a before and after but one of the really striking things also is a lot of my students seem to think that when they start that everything that's important is up there on Wikipedia and by the end of this semester after we write articles and we do that through teamwork together they many of them say by the end wow you know I thought everything was up there and now that we've just written and done this article together I can't imagine that it wasn't up there before and I think it makes them more keenly aware of the gaps in Wikipedia the potential for improvement and how it can be a forum that requires and benefits from constant addition and revision and that it's a process so it really benefits their own research they gain a lot of respect for it and they say especially they gain respect with regard to the rigorous sourcing requirements and also copyright requirements for images which is something that we also end up discussing a lot during the semester that and finally the gaps the gaps in Wikipedia it's a big thing that they become more aware of as we go on any other panelists want to chime in on that yes I wanted to actually chime in on this one because I think for the Wikipedia project that I have taught this has been at the let me slow down this has been at the upper division undergraduate level so these are juniors and seniors I have not done this with any other groups or graduate students or first years or second years but what has been the overall or the majority of people's opinion about Wikipedia in my classes have been like why is she we're in this English literature course why are we doing something on Wikipedia it's anyone can edit it and so it's not a legitimate source and they have this type of they've been trained from high school like don't use Wikipedia which I think is nuance like don't site Wikipedia per say but then at the by the end of the Wikipedia project after we spend you know eight or nine weeks doing this project they literally are like Wikipedia should always be the first place you go to find information and as Heather was saying the sources are just fact-checked and they are have to come from these types of sources that they that helps them to be able to use those sources to go to the original source themselves so I think in terms of sources my students really found that useful and also doing the week doing the Wikipedia project really allowed them to think outside of what African-American literature is and then thinking about issues of access I know we're going to talk about this a little bit later and things like that so I think that my I can see a major shift in the ways in which people approach Wikipedia especially because they think about the community like someone is out there they're watching my page and they notice when I put another sentence in this you know page on this certain journal and so they really think like wow I am a part of this knowledge I am putting knowledge out there that is oftentimes behind this pay wall that people will be allowed to have for free and open access so I think that students even though sometimes they don't really care a lot for the coding but others do but they really see overall like impact that Wikipedia has on knowledge producing absolutely so the next question is also for you here Delia so I'm going to keep it on you and we know Wikipedia content gets better from students contributions but what do your students get out of a Wikipedia assignment I think this is kind of what you just we're just touching on but maybe you want to expand on that a little yes so a lot of times my students really we talk a lot about the privilege that comes with being in this university and having access to to databases that one would have to pay for outside of having this access so they many of my students have found it of utmost importance to get this information they they feel like wow somehow I can be I'm seen as a gatekeeper to this knowledge and I want anyone to be able to have access to this knowledge it shouldn't be behind a paywall so I think that having that mindset really motivates my students to fish for more information and to actually put more effort into improving and creating Wikipedia pages and so I think that many of the students understand a different type of writing as well generally in my classes there are a lot of analysis or different types of writing different types of writing that allows them to expound upon things and take things from the text but Wikipedia is a different type of writing and they always think it's going to be easier but a lot of times it becomes a little bit more challenging to them but it allows them to use their mind in a different way than they would ordinarily in other literature courses or other humanities courses that they might be taking that has a writing component so the students are getting a lot in terms of writing in terms of thinking about sources in terms of collaborating as well. Great is there anyone else who wants to share other things beyond I think Delia did a great job of summarizing what a lot of students get out of it is there any other learning objectives you want to share as well? I would just add some terms that haven't come up yet one that I emphasize in my classes is the role of students in producing public facing scholarship instead of having them write papers that they'll hand in in a class and never look at again by writing for Wikipedia they put something that will benefit the public for years to come and another phrase that hasn't come up yet would be digital citizenship participating in communities of knowledge within the world and then it also I think we see an echo of that in the title of this panel don't cite it write it the idea that students can be original producers of knowledge and scholarship and not only consumers. Absolutely thank you it looks like we lost Nanette here who was my next question she was in a dodgy internet situation so hopefully she will rejoin shortly but I'm going to jump to some of the questions that are coming in on the chat so we've already got a handful of questions so thank you the first one of these I'm actually going to send over to Ian oh Nanette is back so I will ask the original question then after all Nanette so my next question is for you which is knowledge equity is one of the pillars of our Wikimedia movement strategy how do you see your students contributions as advancing knowledge equity Thanks so much for the question and for your patience in my returning to the session so my gaggle of students sometimes as few as three often as many as 50 represent I'd say the diversity exceptional diversity that is in the United States large amounts of women almost all exclusively people of color we set to work on on Ekingaway I think the magic percentage was something like 10% of Wikipedia editors are people of color and women so just in our presence in the space Ekingaway at any type of work in the space we're helping to guide Wikipedia a better place of equity with regards to the voices that are contributing my students I'd say are often very excited about learning digital literacy skills and finding a way to live up to their expectation when they arrive at college of doing something to change the world so I think in our gathering of women and people of color who are focused on a topic that can be very difficult for most people to wrap their mind around on a good day privacy, cybersecurity, and surveillance I think that also our topic area also goes a long way with equity is we're translating as many others have mentioned paywalled highly complex articles for a lay audience so the parents we're trying to decide if they should buy a connected toy a toy that interacts with the internet can look at the page that we created and learn about that they won't have to find that information in a highly complex computer science journal or dig into Wired Magazine which I love to find that information it's at their fingertips and I'm deeply proud of them for the work that they do towards that and their bravery some of my students come from universities where Wikipedia no longer exists and so you know there's a beautiful thing about the work that they're doing to make sure that voices whether Wikipedia exists in their country are not are heard. Thanks and that was a great answer is there anyone else who wants to talk about the sort of context of knowledge equity as a cornerstone of your assignments Well I would just add that in writing biographical articles which is most of what I do with my students we try to enhance equity by featuring many women and in my case many people of Middle Eastern and North African origin in the Middle East and North Africa and among people who have settled in the United States or in the English-speaking world so we try to make them aware of knowledge equity that way but then also to emphasize this idea of having accessible articles that's a form of equity too as you were noting it's to write in clear prose that non-experts can understand that's a very important aspect of promoting equity through Wikipedia I'd love to jump in and share one other thing that I forgot until you mentioned the Middle East one of the projects our lab works on is translating articles across Wikipedia so we'll find a great piece written on Privacy Cyber Security and Surveillance and bring that into English at Wikipedia not just the opposite so I think the opposite going from English to others happens quite a bit so that's something we're quite proud of as well we have an initiative that seeks to translate articles on Privacy Cyber Security and Surveillance across languages as well absolutely Shira I was just gonna chime in not with a way to I guess improve equity but a challenge that I've been having in that regard so I teach Jewish history and something I sort of had a vision of having my students edit articles relating to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict I don't know if this will come under equity so much but sort of social justice making sure that the historical narratives that scholars come up with are represented on Wikipedia rather than I guess national ethos narratives and that's actually impossible because that area is one of one of the few areas on Wikipedia where the topics are you cannot edit them unless you're very experienced so I just thought I would just to say that there are also some hindrances to the sort of wonderful free editing absolutely well we're getting a bunch of questions coming in on the chat here so thank you to those of you who have put questions in I think I will move over to the questions from the audience at this point and I'm gonna send the first one here to Ian which the question is the panelists that we have here today seem to be from human sciences what about natural science and engineering and any thoughts or experiences and Ian do you want to share about some of the other courses we support so we support an awful lot of courses in the natural sciences and probably one of the easier areas to write about is species articles we always get a lot of people a lot of students creating articles about species there are a huge amount of gaps in that area it's you know with millions of species to write about there's almost an ending collection of things and also higher taxa apart from that we work with with quite a few medical schools working with medical students who improve Wikipedia articles Wikipedia articles on medical topics are some of the harder topics to work around because of the sourcing guidelines and the real world implications of medical content on Wikipedia so those are great people to work with we also have classes in places like immunology and so on beyond that there is a range of engineering and robotics and bioengineering and classes like that that do contribute sometimes it's easier to contribute in the sciences because the information is a lot more sort of fact based and there's less need to account for different perspectives of scholars because there's sort of one broadly accepted of working on things sometimes it's more difficult because well climate change so yeah I think we probably support about half of what we support is probably in the sciences and the natural sciences engineering and very occasionally math class those always those are always a challenge can I jump in on this one as well? absolutely I appreciate the way Ian expressed that it reminds me of Neil deGrasse Tyson's quote about physics is easy compared to sociology so I'm sure a lot of us especially if you're teaching across the academic spectrum will have students in the natural sciences so one of my favorite privacy articles that came out of our lab is on DNA encryption it was written by one of our students that studied biology so I love that question and I would say to the person that asked it I suspect almost everyone here has probably coached somebody or worked with someone on an article that isn't quite in their area of expertise but overlaps with their course it's one of the things I love about my lab is every major French Spanish biology, computer science has worked with this on this I think it really speaks to the interdisciplinary possibilities that I think higher education really stands for so I love that question. Great we have another question from the audience here are you concerned about the differences in the form of writing between Wikipedia and other academic writers editing Wikipedia certainly has elements of creativity but it also has no original research while essay writing is often mostly about creative synthesis or having an angle and referencing in this case the WPSA short link. Well I would just add that I use Wikipedia as one component in a class and then I always have students do an original research paper as well at least one and have them do other kinds of creative assignments as well so I see it as part of a class and not as the sole focus of a class. I think that's a great question and I find difficulty with it my students always want to make an argument because that's what I teach them to do in the rest of the class and they're always perplexed at why it has to be descriptive or why they can't bring in primary sources into original research so yeah that is definitely something and then the other thing that I think Heather was getting at before about how you write equitably because so often scholars don't write that way they write for an expert audience and they use jargon and so my students also want to do that because of course whatever scholars do that's the best thing right and so that's also something that we have to sort of work on or work against yeah so I think that's a great question. I love that question as well because it touches on you know the importance of teaching students the wide array of ways that they might write and I would also add to that that if the person who asked is an early in their career Wikipedia never underestimate the ability of the community to police something that is not written the way it's supposed to I've gotten those emails and my students definitely have as well that the community does a beautiful job of guiding folks you know when something is not as it should be and I think that's a great lesson for our students as well as we teach them and as we all struggle with our own perfectionism that you know sometimes you don't get it right the first time and that's okay yeah this is oh Ian sorry go ahead I'd just like to mention some feedback that Laine got recently from an instructor talking about their students saying that the difficulty in writing for Wikipedia includes the fact that they can't use lengthy quotes and that they've always done this and this forced them to treat sources differently because if you have to put things in your own words you have to understand what you're saying what they're saying well if you can just quote it's easier to sort of assume that it's in there and that it really improved their writing across disciplines so I thought that was a really nice sort of other side of this I mean building upon that point I think writing for Wikipedia has noticeably improved my students writing skills as a whole it's partially because they then look at articles critically and realize what sounds confusing or they realize what it means when something is sort of oblique or sounds like jargon and then the other nice thing about Wikipedia is I get them working as teams and which is fun for them in the classroom but then they can also edit each other's writing and the result is that the pros improves and I think they bring some of those skills again back to other forms of writing that they end up doing in the class but also in their careers as they go forward absolutely these are great questions from the audience so definitely keep them coming we are a couple minutes ahead of you so put your questions in the chat now so that we will have time to answer them and wrap up the session another question that we had are there particular Wikipedia policies that the students you've worked with have found to be unintuitive well I mean I think we've alluded to it before but the fact that students cannot use oral sources or archival sources which for historians those are gold if you do an advanced degree a bachelor's degree or you do a PhD in history you have to cite ideally would cite primary sources so I think one thing that surprises them too is that it then becomes easier to use more internet sources which are not necessarily of the highest quality relative to oral sources so that is one tricky thing that they struggle to understand and to deal with yeah I'll add to that I think this is such a great question and also the one after it is such a great question I think one thing that my students don't fight intuitive is WP Undo and WPOR so original sources original research and then that something has to be right is just not important enough to be in Wikipedia because they sort of ask themselves why is it important enough for scholarship and not for Wikipedia and that's very difficult for me to tackle often because I think that term undo is so subjective right undo is what the other person thinks sort of you know how they say like politics is what the other guy thinks well so is undo and so very often I struggle with that like they'll find an essay about I don't know a certain topic historical topic and I'll say no that's too esoteric and I'll say well why why can something else go in and I struggle with that absolutely we'll move on to the next question here what if any assurances do you find your students needing to feel safe or welcomed or empowered to edit and do the assurances students need very based on qualities like race and gender I have strong feelings on this one I don't know if anybody else has come across this but I find that editing Wikipedia induces unbelievable anxiety for some of my students I don't know if any of you have come across that but to the point that sometimes I need to modify the assignment and to allow them to submit an assignment just to me saying what they would have done on Wikipedia but I mean I'm talking panic attacks and like anxiety I think it's partly just the idea that thousands of people are going to read what they write or hundreds of thousands depending on the visibility of the article and partly just the idea that it's going to be up there forever and those are also good things for some students it makes them more tuned to the quality of their writing and if they'll write a sloppy paper for me they'll be sure to write using clean language for Wikipedia but yeah that's something that pains me because I think my students are stressed enough without without having this extra anxiety and I sometimes think of how I can work on it with them but not being a therapist or anything I don't have very many ideas but yeah and I don't know if it varies by gender or ethnic group or race or disability I haven't really tracked who among my students gets anxious I just see that it happens every single semester I see that some of my well to be honest I was very anxious about Wikipedia I did it because the first time I did it I did because my university is what are you doing in digital humanities so I said okay I need to do something in digital humanities what are my other colleagues doing oh you can do wikipedia what is that okay I will do wikipedia and there I go off to do wikipedia and I applied and I was so you see the wikipedia dashboard and it is laid out but I know nothing about code I knew nothing about what went into wikipedia and I did not enough research beforehand to understand I did some of the modules so the first time I was doing it I was so overwhelmed I did it in an honors african-american literature course so I only had about 8 students so we were kind of working on it together but often times I would tell my students oh I don't know the answer to the question just go ask the wikipedia person that can help you do those things I was just bearing with that myself because I said I can't do this I don't know how to read this code this is embarrassing but my students somehow without my help I have to be honest really made some amazing articles and so then I said wait a minute or edited some amazing articles so then I said okay Delia you really need to work this out and what I did was I took one of the what is it informing citizens course actually within who just it's just like a wikipedia just god there he just has so much information and so helpful it was a course that actually guided me through this is how you set up your dashboard this is how if you want to you know insert an image or different types of code that you can use or the easy type of code that I use like the picture code these sorts of things and so that one that entering into this course that was over the summer really helped me prepare myself to be able to actually teach my students how to do it the problem was I wasn't able to teach my students because it was such a challenge for me that I was almost frozen but then the next time it went around when I saw that students were frustrated like I can't do this as opposed to saying telling them okay well why don't you just go and ask the wikipedia person to help you I was like okay I struggled with this as well and now I can actually show them how to do things and I know that I take more class time helping my student making those errors and mistakes with them and then giving them a lot of encouragement and encouraging just to make one small edit and let's put that out there and okay let's see what happens so the students as well have anxieties but also it's something that's new and I think that the more time that I spent doing it in class alongside of them as opposed to just I'm over here and they're doing the assignment really helped to alleviate or I think a lot of the anxieties that my students were having because I was collaborating with them I was okay let's figure this out you all or when they found something new how to they love giving each other those little barnyard animals that you can give like you've done a great job and so when one person figured out how to do that they would share it amongst the class so it really was a way to connect my classes as opposed to being overall alienating yeah we had a comment in the chat here while you were speaking that I think is great here in response to that which is I think something amazing of this experience is that it disrupts that traditional power dynamic between a teacher who knows it all and is the expert versus the student who's doing everything for the first time right in line with what you were saying there and I would also add it's a great opportunity to bestow leadership on students from previous semesters so I invite back and there are sometimes called buddies other times called coordinators a person to help me run the project that has some experience so students can reach out to them and ask them questions and they get the chance to see how a course works from the inside as well so I hadn't thought about it as disrupting and thank you Delia for that and thank you Leanna for that and whoever put that quote in there disruption and I love the opportunity for students to then become teachers themselves in this space absolutely absolutely and so I'm going to move on to the next we've got several more questions coming up here and we're running short on time so I'm going to move us on to the next question this person writes I'm a high school English teacher in the US I love Wikipedia but I see a real disconnect between what students are told about Wikipedia in high schools and how they are informed about it on a college level how can we make the labeling of Wikipedia more in sync between primary and higher education campuses so students aren't experiencing a double take using Wikipedia as a valuable source this is a great question that maybe requires some thought but I don't know if any of you have some initial thoughts here does Wikipedia have a high school initiative we do not we have talked about it maybe that person takes the first class but the Wikimedia foundation has reading Wikipedia in the classroom the Wikimedia foundation's reading Wikipedia in the classroom program is great Melissa was actually the one who had that comment I read she works on that project with the foundation team so yeah I definitely recommend looking into that in fact I think she's putting a comment about it in the chat right now a little behind us I don't let students cite Wikipedia in research papers and it's interesting that the title of this panel is don't cite it write it I do tell them don't cite it unless they were to write a research paper about Wikipedia I should also add we read articles scholarly articles about Wikipedia the politics of Wikipedia and its potential so I tried to make them aware of it from an intellectually critical way great the next question is how has it decided how much the reader already knows so I think this is maybe a question for you about your students when they're working on articles how do they decide what the reader comes to Wikipedia with for my students a lot of times we're I have them write like literally when you're googling something Wikipedia is if it's not the first hit it's like the second or third so a lot of times people might not know anything or they might know a little bit but where my students use to gauge how much information or what information to put into the Wikipedia page they actually use other Wikipedia pages as a guide to do that and I encourage that because oftentimes they'll say well if it's a person you want to know some of their the overall who they were, what they did and then you want to have personal life or their filmography or conflict or things like that so they use other Wikipedia pages in order to determine or have some sort of skeletal skeleton to be able to fill in and then as they go based upon the editing that they're getting they will even decide okay well what else would I put in here or what should I take out or what is not clear and I think they never leave my course thinking I am done with this there's no more that can be written on this article or on this Wikipedia page so I think they're constantly reimagining what the audience should know so it's not static I think they start with something this is how these other pages are modeling it and I'll add that information but then perhaps by the end of the course what they might put or not could drastically change great we're getting short on time here so we have a couple questions remaining I'm just going to answer one of them here which was does everyone encourage their students to edit without logging in or actually registering for an account we at Wiki Education actually require the students to register for accounts so we can monitor what they're doing and that's a cornerstone of sort of our programmatic support so that we get flagged when students are running into trouble Ian does primarily and Ian can jump in and help them as needed which is important for the support we provide for faculty like the four of the instructors who are on this panel today another question though for the panelists is are any of you familiar with collaborative reading platforms like Hypothesis which is an annotation platform I'm not sure if you are and if you are how do these compare to Wikipedia as a learning tool Shira I use Hypothesis regularly in my courses but it's completely different it's like apples and oranges so Hypothesis I use that to make sure that students do the reading I'll have them annotate documents that we're reading so you can put any PDF into Hypothesis and have students annotate it on the document and then they can see what other people are annotating but it's confined to the classroom so where it's confined to whoever you tell it to be confined to it's not available for the world at large whereas Wikipedia when they're editing Wikipedia they're writing for the entire world to see so I like both of them but yeah for very very different purposes and goals great and I think the last question here we've got two minutes left so the question says I'm curious if you saw the recent new study that showed Irish judges were influenced by Wikipedia in their rulings this could have huge implications for Wikipedia's influence in the real world and wonder if you think this information would motivate more of your colleagues to teach with Wikipedia did anyone see that I did Heather go for it yeah I mean this is why in a way right any kind of scholarship is a work of social and political engagement and the article was about how very specific words phrases conceptions that shaped articles then informed legal decisions and you can see that in many realms people are reading Wikipedia even if they don't cite it even if they don't cite it in a scholarly article or book thank you while I'm sharing my screen unfortunately I can't watch the chat but I am relying on my my wonderful team behind me of that's not the right button the chat and let me know if anything comes up but let me go ahead and first of all open my speaker now and also say hello welcome thank you guys so much for joining us for this presentation my name is Amanda Figueroa I am the community director of the curationist project I'm really excited to use this this time we have together all 15 minutes of it to talk to you about this platform that we've been working on for quite some time and about how it fits into this broader open knowledge ecosystem and about how we truly are at curation is trying to reimagine what curatorial work looks like through open knowledge along the way we'll also do some interactive stuff led by my colleague Neha who will introduce yourself to you in just a moment and we're also going to be able to show you guys a demo of what's to come for this platform in the very end so I'm going to hop right to it again thank you all so so much for being here what a compliment to have your close attention so our project is called curationist and right at the heart of that word is of course the word curation all of us in sort of this Wicca media community and all of us in open knowledge broadly understand that so much of our work is curatorial work is this work of taking care of organizing and making visible all of the knowledge and all of these artifacts and all of these images that exist in the world but the work curation and the active curation is a little sticky is always the word that I like to use for it it's sticky primarily because especially in the western world all of our curatorial work is rooted in a singular western tradition and that tradition began initially with what we could call cabinets of curiosity the collections truly the literal cabinets that were put in homes of wealthy people to sort of showcase their travels and showcase the places they've been in the wealthy that accumulated so when the British Museum was founded in 1753 it should be no surprise that it also took on that sort of cabinet of curiosities form meaning that it really became a place for the might of the British Empire to be displayed just like those regency wealthy families were displaying artifacts from their travels so too the British Empire was displaying evidence of their travels primarily in the form of looted cultural objects from Africa Asia and all around the world as a result although we as a field, the museum field the open knowledge field the cultural heritage fields have all moved away as much as possible from that colonial legacy the fact is that so much of that stuff so much of that legacy remains in the way that we classify and organize our artifacts so much of that remains in the ways that we create taxonomies and metadata structures now that we're taking collections online so that's why I say it's sticky that's why I say that as much as I love this work as much as my colleagues at curationist love this work there's more to do there's a lot more to do which brings us to here you can see exactly what I was talking about previously which brings us to this fun little joke that one of my colleagues always likes to say in our meetings is that yeah it's curationist but often it's curation ish what I mean by that is that in our pursuit of this really important curatorial work we're also encountering amazing beautiful inspiring alternatives to that legacy that western colonialist legacy that got us really excited and really inspired us as a team to start to invent this platform which I'm going to get into depth into a little bit later we saw an incredible amount of knowledge being held in local level and grassroots organizations all around the world people who really had such an intimate relationship with these objects and had the historical knowledge behind them to really offer something that we're not seeing in institutions to offer a different take on the institutional taxonomic and metadata structures that we're seeing in museums, art institutions, cultural heritage institutions broadly and so the project for curationist became to really understand how can we augment and support what I'm calling curation ish work and there are three things that we can and should do both ourselves at curationist and the open knowledge field in general those three things are of course to make images and artifacts widely available I'm speaking to the Wikimedia community I don't need to tell you guys that you're down you get it and along with that we also need to grant knowledge holders access to share their information that means we have a lot of work to do in closing the digital divide as cutesy of a name as that is the fact is that if open knowledge and especially digital open knowledge is going to be a force for good in the world it really really needs to enable internet access broadly and the last thing which in my mind is the sort of most important hurdle is we need to find a way to put local level knowledge on part with institutional expertise we really need people in their local communities to be able to speak to these large institutions and to be heard by these large institutions and to be able to do so both on the level of conceptual knowledge sharing and also on the level of that metadata also on the level of those taxonomic structures so towards that end we at curationist have been developing a platform that is working towards these things and I'm really excited to take you through it a little bit more in depth but first I'm going to hand it over to my colleague Neha to take you through a little activity to illustrate exactly what I need towards that end Neha go ahead and say hello and introduce yourself. Hi how are you everyone I am one of the content editors here at curationist where we also produce features and collections on the site for people to see how our tools are being used I am going to do a sort of visual associative brainstorming game with you to make you aware of how there are gaps in metadata right now so we can do that game and yeah there are gaps in metadata but there are also resources out there and although we are going to use Wikimedia Commons as our search bar in order to do this game and all of you are welcome to participate in this game the Jamboard is in the chat that's where we are going to be working so it's for those of you who don't know it's a whiteboard that is run by Google and we all can contribute to it it's super easy all you have to do is if you are on another website and you want to copy an image and place it in this game you are able to just do that by copying the image and then pasting it in here and yeah there is no login needed the next slide please so what we are looking at is a cat mummy in cartonage that's the title of the object as you would see it in the Brooklyn Museums website that leaves you thinking of a variety of associations with it not the least of which maybe if you don't know the word cartonage means next slide please I'm just walking you through how we might work this example so you might be reading this and it tells you it's a painted plaster coffins and now you might be interested in plaster you might be interested in painted coffins there is a diamond shaped pattern you might get interested in how the linen is arranged in that cross pattern that it's a wild desert cat you might be interested in that none of this is necessarily in the metadata here and then it was shown in an exhibition called soulful creatures animal mummies in ancient Egypt so that's kind of exciting there's actually more description on their website and more images as you can see on the bottom left including their x-ray images but we're going to move forward to the next next slide so this sort of cat mummy can lead us as a group for instance or any group to research cat figures in jewelry or look up Egyptian mummy portraits or we may think of Jaguars aka wild cats and pre-columbian or Mayan art what I wanted to point out is I I'm going to go clockwise from the top left so the first image is the linen from Tutankhamun's embalming cache so I only put in the search from linen bandage in the Wikimedia Commons image search and this was one of the images that showed up so that was pretty easy that kind of puts us in the right neighborhood the next one I know about all these mummy portraits and I was like oh this cat mummy makes me think of mummy portraits where these paintings were made and placed on top of these mummies so that was a useful search term next time instead of doing cartonage which doesn't really quite give you important links the definition of cartonage as painted coffin led me to this painted coffin of Lady Nefer so far so good but then when I started searching for cat jewelry or jewelry depicting cats or anything like that it was well not impossible I was just getting one thing and the rest were not useful search useful images are coming up so I went to the Wikimedia page for Egyptian cats directly and found this image Egyptian cat amulet and there are obviously there must be tons of jewelry out in the world that has cats in it but there was no way for me to get there this is off off topic in some ways right like a cat mummy in cartonage doesn't necessarily need to lead you to cat amulets but cat mummies exist because Egyptians revered cats and of course they would have cat jewelry and they had tons of cat amulets but there was no way for me to go from cat mummy to Egyptian cat amulet the way the metadata currently exists the next the next one is the bottom left image I did the search term Mayan jaguar because mayan cat or pre-columbian wild cat or pre-columbian cat or any such combination it did not lead me to what I knew existed out there which are these jaguar sculptures and amulet decorative items that they had in the pre-columbian age so this is just to set out how this type of thing can go the next slide shows how we might actually work if we had just started with the cat mummy image next frame please so our game is to use wikimedia commons for the images the yellow sticky note tells you that you can copy I'm gonna I need to be in mine hold on I'm gonna catch up to you guys so the yellow sticky note tells you that you can either copy the image from your search in wikimedia commons or you can use this tool on the left side which is to the left of my my laser pointer and you can use that to create a sticky note and just put your search term up on the jam board so we're gonna basically use another image to do something very similar like this cat mummy I could have searched for just so covered mummy cartonage animal mummies pet burials I did wild desert cat cat headdress cat jewelry cat worship which I didn't search but I could have the mummy linen strips and the linen bandage that's kind of like the search term universe and you can obviously put in either the term or the image next slide please but we're not gonna use the cat mummy for the image we're instead going to use this image for this work which exists in I cannot see the bottom I think it's in the Brooklyn museum and I'm going to could you shrink the or put the text somewhere else it's at the mat okay and it's a jade item from the early classic Mayan period I just want us to observe like if you had to like now go and make some thoughts about this or follow up on this what could you possibly be looking for you can notice that the creature is seated it's cross legged so you could be searching for something cross legged I'm not going to give up too much about this but if you know about the piece of course you may look for those pieces or shrooms the pose involves the hands like this if you notice there's a beak in the face and then additionally if you look at the two eyes it seems like there's a series of receding eyes but there's something even more novel about the eyes they seem cross eyed just like it's cross legged it's kind of a few key things to give you something to go off of think of jade as Chinese and precious jade artifacts come from China or at least regular Americans well but there's also these plastic Maya jades so I kind of wanted to put those two together and our next slide please that is our jam board so I've shrunk the deity figure and we can search in Wikimedia Commons maybe someone can put the link in the chat for those who may not know how to get there for whatever crazy reason and based on whatever you find or what your search term might be I would love it if you guys were able to populate this for me it could simply be a search term or an object and I know I know Amanda is going to help me share Amanda is I was just typing in the chat please feel free to jump in this jam board with us add your images or potential search terms based on this image to this jam board you shouldn't need a login to be able to access it but if you are having any trouble go ahead and send me a direct message and I can help you troubleshoot you should also just be able to copy paste images about needing to save them if it's difficult or unintuitive to you go ahead and let me know I'm also going to come at my search term to add for search for thanks everyone for being so active in this jam board I just get a thrill to see things start to pop up and what I'm doing is I'm actually trying to put the image I'm trying to do some of these searches and find images and I'm putting them right next to them next to the search terms but if if you go to if you were to put that search term in your thing in your browser you can right click and just copy the image and then paste it directly you don't have to actually download it or anything we can probably take let's say five more minutes you can see I'm thinking of so many things as we play I'm delighted to see so many things on this jam board that I either would never have thought of or actually I'm not sure what they are we'll give it a few more minutes guys for any final thoughts right about 60 more seconds for any final thoughts any last search terms or images well alright I'm going to do a last call Neha I think you're ready to walk us through our results whenever you're ready yeah give me two seconds I'm putting this text down there so great we've come up with a lot going from everything from ancient Mayan jade artifacts and ancient deities to search terms that are about modern jade figures and animals clearly this one's not white human even if it's anthropomorphized so what happened to the jade mining image did it get covered hmm it's all good so let's check that one out this isn't upright over here it's a hyena which is sort of like the Caribbean Puerto Rican in Cuban in that area like an inhaler so not the right neighborhood of where we're looking at and not even quite the similar thing and I could not find anything like our object when I did cross-eyed deity so that kind of gives us a clue of what's missing we have I also did the search and things have moved jade artifacts or something and I came up, oh ancient jade that was ancient jade and I came up with this jade cong from China the Neolithic period and that was interesting when I did Maya jade artifacts I got this Maya jade mask so there's a range of things we are able to find and a range of things that we might have more trouble with what the curationist in some ways is trying to do is not only create the imagery I mean create access to all this imagery and all these works that exist in the partner archives but also create a second layer metadata level that may not exist in the original websites to create a possibility for thinking through some of our questions and in some cases it's as simple as writing some colonialist strong in some way or by writing the information or by adding information because the metadata has not been supplied because it's an object of low rank in some sense for the museum that's holding it but may not be so from the point of view of the culture from which it was collected so we're working all of those angles and that kind of gives you an idea of how this board might end up the next slide please this is just to give you an idea of what in the next slide what slide before it sorry yeah so this tells you what the website actually tells us on the mat it's an object that's well researched and there's a lot of text on it but you might be searching after you read this text you might say oh I'm going to look across legged figures or I'm going to look at something where there's an imagery of arms bent in towards the chest and curled in the crab claw position the deity is actually named it's a principal bird deity and so we don't know if it's actually the bird deity itself or a human wearing that mask as they do during rituals that is depicted in this imagery as I mentioned the figure is cross-eyed we did not nobody caught onto the square pupils part but they are square so you could have gone searching for that these kinds of eyes I used to identify shining solar and or splendid supernatural beings it could have led us to searching for solar beings various solar deities and creating a collection that has to do with solar deities for somebody to come and look at on our website or somebody's research paper might be on solar deities how are we on time we're doing great on time thanks for checking oh great would we like to do a very quick second jam board in this case I'm not going to give you very much information at all and I want to see what happens when we work with that image and so this is a bowl with kufik calligraphy this is all the information I'm providing it's from the arts of the Islamic world it's categorized as that in the Berkel museum from the 10th century and all we know is that it's from the Summoned Period which doesn't tell us unless you read carefully in the text where it's from next slide please and that will be our jam board here we are make this image smaller please so we can put other things on there how's that yeah that's great let's go for it let's try and come up with again everyone is free to hop in this jam board and let's see what we can turn out for this object even though we have so much less metadata originally to work with so again similar to the previous the previous artifact please feel free to jump in and add post it notes with search terms add images that come to your mind I see we're already thinking Islamic ceramics and again that information that we were giving is down here in the bottom right hand corner Kufic was absolutely going to be my first search term and we'll give it about let's say seven minutes maybe even a little briefer someone put us on the jam board we too are search terms each and every one of us I am going to move that with apologies to its to its creator a couple more minutes for any final thoughts for images excellent about 60 more seconds for any final images search terms thoughts of any kind additional screenshots of the zoom room yeah this is great so I can see vessels calligraphic vessels but people also want to know about calligraphic tools like how did this thing get drawn on this vessel that's an interesting thing to think about how was it thrown Islamic ceramics the Kufic script itself and then we see it being used in the Quran in a couple of examples here which might lead us to think oh it's got very flat and tall writing style which is correct to sort of squared off a script summoned art it gives us a beautiful vessel but what is summoned so just found the area that it's from over there so these are great these are great wide rim platters we could go with that we could go with shallow bowls we could go just text on vessels it doesn't have to be Islamic calligraphic I really love the spiritual ceramics sticky note that someone put up because that's something that is absolutely something could be searching for and it's not necessarily here in the metadata and Islamic that could take us in another way like dinnerware what's the purpose of this writing might take us to like proverbs on on or reminders on our ceramic ware so and slip trail painted text amazing great that's so useful in terms of what we can and cannot find from this in terms of the actual image it would be nice to go to the link and I'm going to put it in our chat so that here's to everyone in the meeting so if we can throw that up on our screen for us to read what it says which tells us what the the inscription says that it is painted in brown slip on a white slip ground someone who was looking for slipware was in the right place we didn't get to Iran but that's the summited period once you saw the map you would have gotten to that point and start looking up Iran if somebody wanted to be nationalist in their search terms they could go in that direction the script is actually placed there in Arabic which is great and it tells us the proverbs are attributed to Imam Ali and where they were published so there's a lot of information here if we keep scrolling down it tells us not much else the catalog descriptions has large bore bowl with flaring sides ceramic transparent colorless glaze brown slip so this is all technical the first half then it says huge kufic characters form with center the interior design outside is plain but the kufic characters it's where it's left it doesn't say the proverb part you actually need to get to the inscriptions part for it to tell you that it's a proverb so if this object hadn't been fully catalogued and the inscription hadn't actually been noted then the description at the very bottom would be the only metadata in a way that we would have to work with any thoughts that anyone else might have to add to this otherwise I'm done here I certainly have some something I'm widely known for is my constantly having thoughts so thank you so much Neha for that wonderful activity which really shows the way that not only are we as humans subject to our own biases and our own sort of trains of thoughts when it comes to describing images cataloging images putting images into organization and taxonomy and metadata we also have all of the legacy behind us of the history of these objects of the history that we have captured and that we haven't which is what brings us to first certainly to our metadata storytelling we can share these slides after the presentation which will include the associated visual brainstorm and for those of you who are even interested in more metadata a link to our medium publication on metadata learning and unlearning but it also takes us to the original question which is what is curationist to do about having so many different systems for metadata tagging some of which are living with us sort of the choices and non-choices of the people living now as well as the legacies of these objects and the colonialism and the conquer that they went through curationist is a platform that's doing our best to ameliorate some of those issues and access databases from individual institutions like we saw the METS like we saw the Brooklyn Museum and making them all searchable in one place one platform but then trying to go a little bit further and making a place for for those additional metadata and additional community cultural level knowledge to be helped so I'd like to take you now briefly through what our platform looks like we are launching officially in October this year and before then there's a beta open and available to you at curationist.org where you can also sign up to be on our newsletter to hear more about the platform and with Front and Center that idea about reimagining culture it's at the heart of everything we do and so towards that end I'm going to bring us down quickly here since our time is limited to look at some of our editorial features this is the place where on our platform we're showcasing not only these open access images but also the information that goes along with them for example if we come in here into Marshall goddesses and mythical queens we can see so much information so many images that depict mythical queens but also so much information that was contributed by and then if I scroll back up quickly I can also show you what the search looks like so say I read this editorial feature and I think gosh I want to see more pictures of armor because who wouldn't if I simply come up and type in armor just like on our metadata jam board you can see that we get a bunch of different things this feels like a wildly disparate collection here we get both images of armor but we're also getting weapons so if we come in we add let's say women so we're getting a little bit closer, our metadata is becoming clearer both because of the metadata of our partner institutions that we're drawing from and because of the curation of sort of streamlining standardization process we've got women let's also filter by material let's say we only want to see bronze goddess statues so we're getting even closer things are shaping up finally then I say let's find an image that I'm really intrigued by I can come in, look at it here view all the images read information about the work and see the original inscription that comes from the Metropolitan Museum of Art from there I'm able certainly of course to add it to a collection let's see armor goddess it seems like the right collection to add in and then if you come to my profile hello this is me I can also make this collection either public or private again allowing people to choose the level at which they contribute their knowledge so in our last five minutes here we are back at the curationist homepage to come again when we launch very soon and I'll speak just a couple minutes more about where we're headed even after this like I said in the beginning our metadata and our taxonomies are the ways that we find and access images but they're also the way that we make those images and those artifacts known to other people so a big next step for curationist even after this original platform launches is to think about ways that we're contributing our metadata and the grassroots level community cultural heritage knowledge that we're canvassing for in our editorial features in our fellowship program in our critics program we'll be able to contribute it back to this large open access ecosystem what we're exploring ways to contribute that metadata back to the wiki data and the wikimedia community as well as back to the home institutions for so many of these objects we really see that as part of our role as just a good citizen in the open access open knowledge space so there's so much more to come from curationist I really hope that you guys were able to get a sense of our work but also how we do it and what is important about it to us and in our very last five minutes first of all let me thank Neha for her amazing thoughtful work on that on that interactive activity and let me thank Raven and Steak and Alison my teammates for also being here and then if you guys have any questions we would love to hear them I can stick around certainly until our time slot ends to answer any questions or hear what you guys think or perhaps I'd like to hear from my teammates what sort of metadata they were putting on our activity board I was the one that came up with the spiritual ceramics well done that was amazing so please just remember to follow us on social media as we will be giving you more updates we get closer to their product launch in October I have shared information about where to find us on social media and the chat well again thanks everyone so much for being here what a joy to get to share so many people's hard work with you there's so much more to come from us like I said please stay tuned and if you'd like to connect I'm going to go ahead and put my direct email address in the chat so if you have any questions, thoughts, ideas or you just want to have another conversation please don't hesitate to get in good night everyone good evening my name is Carlo Brescia I'm from Peru and I'm going to make this presentation about a glam photographic journey into the world of sacred plants from the Peruvian Amazon region next slide please this slide is do you see the, no you don't see the next okay so this is the structure of this presentation I will discuss present some background of what is indigenous knowledge epistemic decolonization and this glam project we began last year so the next slide is in the picture you see a Shakapa which is a a written instrument so there are many definitions of indigenous knowledge the one I am presenting here right now is one from UNESCO there are many many ways to define indigenous knowledge but it's a way of of understanding the world knowledge it is important also to define who defines what is indigenous knowledge it is done from an inside perspective or from an outside perspective this is very important when we we are in this colonialism and decolonization we understand by knowledge now I am presenting what we usually understand by colonization the action or process of setting among an establishment control over the indigenous people of an area usually to get the resources and use the population for the benefit of the colonizer in the image all the images I am presenting are with media commons and you see that is a book published in 1552 that is a short account of the destruction of the indias and this refers to the americas written by Bartolo Melas Casas a spanish priest that denounced the violence being done against the indigenous people of Peru and beyond the next slide is another definition of what is colonialism this is a recent article from 2019 that was published in a National Geographic the National Geographic webpage a history of colonialism is one of brutal subjugation of indigenous people indeed it's brutal and although there are some positive effects of cultural exchange there are products that come and products that go also is violence structural violence physical violence economic, symbolic, psychological sexual and epistemic epistemic violence has to do with the way the way we had a way of understanding we were suddenly second class citizens and the people that were the colonizers were first class citizens and here trying to broaden our understanding about epistemic violence there are some concepts that come from some European writers like Gramsci, Kultralgemony the clips of reason it has to do with reasoning making an argument in order to understand the situation appearing like correct just justifying this violence against the people this has happened in the Americas and has happened in Africa and in Asia and also there is an internal colonialism some countries do colonialism inside their territories that has happened in France the US, Peru and many countries one vision from an elite is imposed to the other societies inside one country it's a shocking experience and you have a book by Franz Fanon from Martinica from the Caribbean that discusses this a lot the impacts of colonization and also has to do with the loss of memory and this is very critical because a lot of knowledge developed by civilizations indigenous civilizations suddenly was erased persecuted and for example there is a Francisco Gabila I'm citing Francisco Gabila quoting him he wrote didn't I myself remove more than 30,000 idols by my hands for 30 years from the towns of the Corregimento of Borachery and Chaupi and other towns and did I burn more than 3,000 bodies of the deceased whom they adored this Francisco Gabila was one of many exerpadores de Lotrias these were people that were in charge of destroying persecuting reduced items persecuting people that accumulated knowledge in Quechua a person that accumulates that knows a lot, that has a lot of wisdom that gathers the knowledge of a society called a yachak and a mauta too and these exerpadores were persecuting and disappearing these wise and in the Andes like in other regions most cultures have ancestral codes that honor memory that honor the wisdom of the people that were before the lineage honor the territorial and nature in this image you see Awanka which is a monolith present in a temple this still remains this exist this survived the conquest and the colonization because it was not discovered so old that when the Spanish arrived it had like 2,500 years old so they missed it and luckily it still is with us so all many other things were destroyed and this has an impact is a loss of memory and this loss of memory loss of connection with nature the territory of lineage has develops a collective amnesia of what was before you where do you come from where who are you you lose identity and many people are uprooted in a very violent way compared to migrants for example migrants go from the Americas to Europe or from Europe to the Americas they are kind of uprooted but in colonization this is very very violent and people don't remember people don't have the ways to remember and have an impact till the present day now I will quote something that said a president of Europe he said in 2007 Africa's drama is that the African has not entered into history how can a president say this how come Africa has not entered history so this I quote this because it's an example of the amnesia that people have not only the colonized people but also the colonizer there's a collective amnesia some years ago we were working in Belgium about the memory of Africa in Europe and this memory of what happened in Africa was not told at the school scene at that time in Belgium so there are like educational policies that decide what story to tell what what events are being told on which are not so this is very hard because when you don't remember what you did when you don't you have this collective amnesia you usually repeat what you did yes history repeats itself if we don't remember so saying this I will start a part of this presentation which is a clan project that has to do with this the colonizing we did a clan project in a region in the Amazon in the northern Amazon of Peru it's called the Takiwasi center it's a established center of 54% that's really really big compared to other therapies that try to reduce to cocaine or heroin or other other substances this Takiwasi center has received a lot of researchers and many articles have been published about this center has a lab and a botanical garden and luckily they have a a photographic record so because we knew them we had certain relationships we decided okay let's do a clan project let's liberate your images with a license a Creative Commons license in Wikimedia Commons and this was done with Wicaxon Peru which is the project I am a member I'm a part of and the process was to develop an alliance make some accords do some training in the picture you see a workshop we had about how to upload images then we have to do the revision and then use these images in the Wikipedia the process started in September 2021 and ended the upload in December 2021 so it was like three months so all these images are from this clan project the first one in Peru and I will introduce some concepts of traditional medicine Amazonian traditional medicine with these pictures in Andean and Amazonian traditional medicines there are plants that are sacred visionary teachers but some are very extensive like tobacco tobacco is used not only as a medicine but also as a ritual plant you it's like a microphone you can use tobacco to blow it and to make a prayer because the spirit of the tobacco is a strong one so that's a sacred plant like coca wasca like wilka these plants are very important for many indigenous cultures also coca there is a variety of so teacher plants are plants that teach knowledge to curanderos revisions and dreams I will show how this knowledge is transferred apart from visions and dreams and these knowledges are related to the plants properties, preparation and application so in the process where a curandero-curandera has an initiation that has a lot of years like 20 years or 10 years depending on the path that this person takes so through this initiation he participates in what we call an Amazonian diet an Amazonian diet is a moment where to be curandero-curandera isolates in nature for one year or some months and diets a specific plant he is isolated in a small cabin and only has like a plant we call yuca or yuca in portuguese no salt sugar body herbal baths ayahuasca ceremonies an intake of these teacher plants so in the other slide so in this process of two months, three months the curandero starts dreaming and having visions talking to the spirit or receiving information from the spirit of the plant through the dreams and the visions he has in this picture you see a tambo a tambo is this type of is where these curanderos isolate themselves the food is prepared by someone else actually the teacher of the curandero but the idea is to have a moment in isolation so the person can connect to the plant and to himself and clean his mind his body his emotions and connect to the spirit of the world so this is part of one of the traditions sometimes the tambo is so well constructed as the one you see this is the one that Takiwasi center uses magical songs these are also part, very important part of traditional maze in the Amazon not only in the Amazon but in the Orinoco region too for example in Tarapoto they call them Icaros but the Shippivo call them Besho the Awahun call them Anent the Kokama call them Mariri the Wachipaerik call them Echuva these magical songs have energetic sound and semantic dimensions and through these songs the spirits are invoked and their help and their intervention is requested during the therapies that these curanderos and curanderas have I don't want to use the word shaman because it's a continent in the Amazon they have their names like Paje Paje Seripiari and many others Onania but they have a similar function they mediate between this world and the spirit world and in the picture you see Don Solontejo chant in Anikaro with this Shakapa to a small the Shakapa is this instrument made of leaves and these songs are received in dreams and visions by the curanderos each curanderos has have their own songs another type of these magical songs are the Shuba of the Wachipaerik people and these aren't on the list of UNESCO of the Intane Bucutural Heritage and there are only 12 people that know the songs know how to sing them so they are in danger and most of these traditions most of these knowledges and practices technologies of consciousness are endangered because with modernization in the Amazon with the roads, with the forestation we lose a lot in this picture you see a modern Ayahuasca ceremony in Takiwasi where people gather around the curanderos there are many traditions and inside each tradition of the Shippivo for example a lineage of Shippivos have a different ceremonial structure than their neighbors Ayahuasca nowadays in Latin America and in Europe and North America is very popular many people come to Peru and there are many gringo shamans they call themselves they are called Natwe they learn how to some are doing the right thing but many other they are not following traditions and people are dying people have died in Cusco in Puerto Maldonado in Iquitos because sometimes when these powerful plants are not conducted in the right way people can die so it's important to follow a tradition we have another picture where this maestro Don Solontejo serves Ayahuasca to another person so in this grand project we have 1200 images liberated by Takiwasi we have rituals, we have plans we have preparation of plants and we have also curanderos of their archives curanderos like Juan Flores that if you google in academic google google scholar he cited there are many articles by National Geographic talking about Juan Flores or Norma Panduro so now we have pictures but not only we have many pictures from curanderos but also from people that are researchers like Jeremy Narvi from Canada and this picture of Jeremy Jeremy Narvi who wrote The Cosmic Serpent is being used in at least four Wikipedia's not in the Spanish Wikipedia yet Santiago Manuel Valera is an environmental defender an indigenous leader he died in 2020 and this picture is being used in the in the Wikipedia article and we have also pictures from people that are not from Peru that also went to Takiwasi like Dr. Yahya Segaya from Uganda and Francisco Sabino from Ecuador that went to Takiwasi so Francisco Sabino is also a very distinguished curandero in Ecuador when his article is going to be created we have this picture Francisco Sabino is from another tradition as well as this doctor from Uganda we also have pictures of plant preparations this is an extract of rosacea which is used in purges sometimes they mix tobacco with rosacea and you drink it and you purge you bobbin so it's very important to make this deputation of plants in the Amazonian traditions also in Western traditions if you see words like break fast means that there is a fast deputates the body like in Spanish des ayuno you break el ayuno also we have pictures of plant remedies preparations herbal baths are very are widely used in in medicinal in traditional medicine and also I'm going to present another image of activation of the plants plants when they are sacked and blown it's very important this process because the curandero sings and talks and prays to spirit of the plant to activate it and call it to make healing so I'm going to I have a couple of slides more but I'm going to the last one of the pictures which has to do the soplata soplata is blowing tobacco also very important for cleaning cleans energetic body around the patients and at the end I ask a question about what can we do to decolonize, recover and root connect our memories how can we do it from Wikimedia activities and I think that these type of projects contribute to them these type of projects bring these practices that are being researched nowadays visibilize them articles of people in memory this is very important we colonization brings loss of memory brings collective amnesia both to the colonizer and the colonized here are two quotes by Italo Calvino in light and the more you clarify your understanding to see what is behind a train station in Europe what has happened in order to have this development and also one from charles memory green to know where are you and where do you come from so that's it thank you I don't know if someone has questions it is too late thanks for listening I hope you enjoyed this presentation and if you have questions please we are at Wicaccion Peru and you can write us about what you are doing and what you learned from this presentation thanks this presentation is titled for everyone methodology hello everyone my name is Carla and today I will present the methodology we use in Wicmeda, Chile to be able to teach Wiccata to the different communities so I will share my screen and here we are the start of the idea is titled for everyone the methodology to teach different communities and that I will present my name is Carla I am in charge of community and new users here in Wicmeda, Chile so where does this topic come from and before I enter I would like to clarify that this methodology that we use we do not want to say use it what we do I am speaking 2-1 hello everyone my name is Carla and today I will present the methodology that we use in Wicmeda, Chile to be able to teach Wiccata to the different communities so I will share my screen and here we are I am Carla from Wicmeda, Chile I am in charge of community and new users in the chapter the idea is Wiccata for everyone methodology to teach different communities and before starting I would like to clarify that this talk is not only recommendations, it is the methodology that has been serving us in our communities and in the different courses that we have been doing with Wiccata but that does not mean that this has to be a completely different community and perhaps what works for us will not necessarily work in their communities but I hope this talk also gives them some guidelines or even give them some ideas to also teach Wicmeda to their communities that is more or less like the role of the talk and the disclaimer that what are the problems that we have at the beginning or more than at the beginning when we see Wiccata or we want to teach Wiccata to the communities the first thing is something that I think we all know and we are clear in this case and the fact that the global south in Wiccata is very underrepresented in fact here in the image that you are seeing we can see that all the dots the majority of the dots are concentrated in the global north and this image is of the project of finding GLAMs which actually means that it is like a map of the GLAM empires or BAM here in Latin America we call it BAM all the empires that are placed in Wiccata if we see Latin America specifically there are many dots in Brazil and Argentina because they have projects or programs in the culture area that they work with Wiccata very strongly but what happens in the rest of Latin America there is a lack a little and in fact it is very underrepresented both in content and in collaborators and then comes the other problematic which in itself is not a problem because it is fine what happens but the majority of the use that is given in Wiccata in Latin America is focused on file issues in libraries in BAM institutions that are making library files and that is not that it is bad it is very good in fact but Wiccata also has so not necessarily or the focus can also be given to other themes not only in BAM institutions and the other the other problem that we have found when we talk about Wiccata to users for example publishing companies we tell them why you are not in Wiccata why you do not edit in Wiccata well it is that it dies from different users and I would like to say that not only from users that edit other projects but also from community and current people that because it is a project mainly of data and that it uses for searches the Sparkle programming language there is a certain distance with that project and it says well I am from the area of humanity so maybe they are data, programming it is not for me but that is really a myth it is totally wrong because indeed it can be for all people Wiccata is not made for people who are programmers, programmers or science and that is what we want and that is what we aim in our Wiccata course especially that any person not necessarily to know how to program to know how to use data can use Wiccata but that all people can contribute in a way that they can and that is why we take different strategies as for example to check the level of data management that people have to know if it is that we start from what are the data or if we start with a base to say maybe everyone knows a database that can be very banal or very logical to put it that way but many times one does not realize what we did well, ask them directly at the moment of inscription in 2021 and some of the 2021 because it does not yet start our course and it is being inscribed to each person but we see that in the two years if we together the level of experience that are nothing and basic is many people who get to the course almost without knowing anything so we cannot assume that people know what is a specific data or what is a database as we have to start from the most basic even to level people and then go climbing in different knowledge what is the strategy we also use not to focus on Sparkle primarily because in the end is what happens one focuses on Sparkle and I do not say that this is bad but many people when getting close to a programming language they get stuck and they cannot understand or learn beyond that because they are not afraid but this pattern or maybe they are not good then what did we do? well, we do not focus directly on Sparkle because today Wikipedia has tools to make simple consultations that do not necessarily use the code editor of Sparkle but also we give them all the tools in case they need to do another consultation that is a little more specific we give them the tools to know where they can ask for it or even how they can do themselves but always starting from the basis that they do not necessarily need a programming language to use Wikipedia what is the other strategy that we use? formats that are one hour, why? because in fact it is a lot a lot of information that you have to digest and it is necessary that it is short, precise because so people do not lose concentration and in addition to that do proposed exercises that can be useful for the context of any person for example, those that are curious like for example well, they find an element that is not very clear I do that with students too I put them together in a Zoom room I put them together with 5 people for example and I give them a few minutes to find something that is not very clear and many times it takes but when they find it when they find that it is not then that arrives and obviously gives them curiosity and gives them like the jump to be able to add the same element to Wikipedia because they say it is not, how is it not well, let's add it and the most important of all examples show many many many examples of what it is or if you are going to consult data and use the examples that appear in the consultation when consulting or when using the query service of Wikipedia they have many examples and we can go looking it is not necessary to be something too searched but it can be the first one which are the cats that are in Wikipedia and they would be surprised that people really like to see simple things, they love to see how I can use it how I can apply it so what did we do? we started with a transition that is introduction after how the data is structured and here the fact of starting first of how the data is structured and then go to consult the data made many people understand much better one came from one side to another because to be able to consult the data is much better or it makes more sense to know how they are structured to know what I am going to look for so that is something key that we found in this part of the methodology because so people can understand the background of the structure of Wikipedia and then when they know they can look for the data and this year what we are going to do in the course of Wikipedia is that we are not going to focus because the first line is what we followed in 2021 and in 2022 what we did or what we are going to do because the course is for the end of August what we are going to do after the consultation that we are not going to see Sparkle in itself we are going to do an optional workshop only of Sparkle so that the people who want can learn and then there is a workshop of Open Reflect and the important thing is that each session has proposed exercises because so people can learn can apply the learning so all these things, all this methodology you are also going to be able to use them because because these streets have screens of some of the things that we were some of the diapositives that we we publish or use in the course and they are very close the recommendations are always super good but for example you can use you can see that in each session we made a final summary as well then for what it is useful for me or even in the part of declarations how do I see the machine how do I see the human the logic behind the consultations to explain them with with some boxes with circles to see how the information is going to be filtered and then what does it mean that there are gaps to all this to be able to recap what we have been reviewing in each session and then you will say well, here I leave you some some comments that they left us at the end of the sessions at the end of the course and it is that one of the things that really help a lot are the examples that I already said, something very important based on examples, the dynamics of teaching based on examples it was very useful to get a better understanding of contents so with that I know that every time I show an example it will not be a good example it will be able to know what it is it will be able to take it to its own area all this they will also be able to download it and with this I want to finish this lightning talk that all these things you will be able to download them here is the link to be able to download the presentations and the document that details the methodology but also leave the guests here any question, consultation or help to implement the course you can write to carlo.tutororawikime.cl for obviously as I tell you we will be talking if you even need someone who does the course or even who helps you to adapt the course to your communities with this we want that the global south begins to be more represented so that's all and I hope your email if you want to implement the course or if you have any questions thank you very much bye bye there is more we can and must do to improve how we build products that can reach and serve more diverse audiences as you may recall the inclusive product development working group who is developing this framework is composed of people from the product and technology departments at the foundation and they represent the full spectrum of functions that are required in software development over the past year the working group has begun to put its new software development on playbook into practice seven of our future teams volunteered to beta test this playbook and incorporate it into their typical processes with the goal of providing feedback on what works what doesn't and why the working group has used this feedback to revise and improve the playbook in our next step we will be rolling it out to all product teams and to beta test it with technology teams interested in learning more about product development at the foundation you will be sharing a link to a more detailed overview in our session information on the Wiganania site so for now I will turn it over to Jasmine Tanner a leader of the working group and product manager for the Android team Jasmine will be speaking to a panel of product managers, designers, product analysts and engineers all of whom participated in the beta test they will be sharing with you some of their experiences in trying to use the playbook in their day to day practices take it away Jasmine since we last presented at Wiganania we have taken the first version of the inclusive product development playbook ahead seven teams tested out for at least one phase in their product development life cycle testing took the form of teams implementing each step or attempting to implement each step in the playbook where they could and sharing their feedback on if the step was helpful or not clear or challenging each month teams testing the playbook met and shared at least one thing that was helpful and one thing that was challenging the challenges that we the working group could help more immediately with we did and the challenges that were a longer term fix were noted for version two of the playbook which will be released next week we had six members from seven teams here to give you a brief idea of what they experienced during the testing process and the first person we'll hear from is Peter is that the handle okay hey everyone my name is Peter Pelberg I work as the product manager for the editing team you must most likely would have encountered our work recently through what we've been doing to evolve talk pages to make them easier for people across experiences experience levels to communicate with one another on wiki and so yeah I'd say that one of the most impactful things that the playbook has had on the editing team is bringing an extra level of rigor and specificity about who we are specifically centering in the work that we're doing so we have a practice in history of thinking about target audiences based on things like edit counts and projects they participate in and I think the playbook has equipped us with both languages and tools to introduce other factors like geography devices that their people are using the type of their connection their race their gender it's not only equipped us with language to talk about and incorporate these different elements into our product development practices but also giving us the tools to actually bring those people in and so a very tangible way that this has showed up in our work is in developing a series of design concepts for the design changes that we're making to talk pages something that we did that was different in the past is translated all of the designs that we were making into seven different languages excuse me running central notice campaigns across a variety of work is to make sure that the people were showing up and reviewing the designs were from a widely representative you know widely representative group so I think that was a really tremendous impact that the playbook has had and then in terms of challenges I think it's kind of the flip side I just shared is that that process required a lot of kind of manual work to start and that makes total sense considering it was really the first time we were doing this kind of work at that scale and so I think in version two we're going to see a lot of these kind of common things that different teams needed to do on their own probably like codified or centralized in a way that makes us like really gives us as teams a new capacity to involve a whole new range of people inside of our product development practices not just folks speaking languages that were most comfortable in thanks you know Peter a lot of what you shared about editing as their product manager was helpful to hear about segmentation of different languages so maybe shaking you drill down on that point a little bit more thanks Jez I'm the data scientist for the Android and iOS mobile app teams and the Android team has been working using the playbook and so I get direct insight all the time about working with the playbook and working without it the Android team relies on data from users to determine success for new features and help decide where we will focus our design and engineering efforts in the future the apps generate 2% of all page views on Wikipedia so the data is perfectly sized for us but tiny in comparison to the rest of Wikipedia it's been a great test bed I think for following the playbook the biggest advantage of using the playbook has given us the impetus to look deeper and it gives us many more dimensions of data from our users we found that in comparison analyzing all user data together for specific user activity was limiting our insight and leading us to miss important nuances that affected app usability so we started segmenting users by region and language and one of the challenges was determining how we were going to break out those segments and Jasmine led a lot of that research based on user feedback, research from papers written about wiki communities the potential size of our audience where our users are with criteria needs we may be overlooking and from there we determined our first set of user segments and I can share a slide from our presentation on building with not for case study the primary challenge for working with this data has been maintaining foundation standards for privacy and data protection all the data is anonymized but it means we have to just be very careful in tracking users especially from smaller regional groups additionally we only store 90 days of data so we have to be very thorough about collecting our baseline data while preserving foundation data privacy we have to plan our OKRs at the start of each project explicitly because we learned going along that if we didn't map that out exactly we would end up of the development cycle without all the data that we needed to compare from start to finish but we've learned a lot and I think it's been really helpful in our planning and development of what we're going to analyze the other challenge just applies to any segmented data analysis it's maintaining data cleanliness and clear delineation across multiple data sets one of the other advantages as segmentation has revealed bugs and data anomalies that we would never have seen if we weren't breaking the data out into smaller groups I included some examples of inclusive data utilization that we use we have been analyzing a bunch of different feature developments across six user groups and one of the tests we conducted was an ABC test for a notification bell and it was very edifying because we saw different results across these groups when we first started we weren't sure if we were going to see any differences in these groups but we definitely did and it helped drive our development further into what we were going to use that most users would adopt most readily and easily and I am a quantitative analysis but I have also been conducting qualitative data analysis using a quite thorough user survey and that has been interesting as well we are currently collating all the results from that survey but we are getting a lot of extra insight that we just never would have gotten if we didn't break out this data into these smaller user groups Thanks Shay, that's really helpful and I know that the community tech team which Natalia is the product manager for they have been doing the work without a data analyst so it would be really or a data scientist rather and so it would be really interesting to hear their application of the playbook while not having the luxury that the Android team has of having someone great like Shay. Hi everyone my name is Natalia Rodriguez and I am a network manager with the community tech team and indeed we did have challenges. I'll start with this first and then I'll talk about the benefits that the playbook afforded our team so the challenge we had as Jasmine said is that we had no data analysts in our team and for those of you who eventually get to read the playbook and go through the steps, you'll see that a lot of the steps that are part of the best practices for inclusive product development require you to use data to check your assumptions and check your biases against so we were faced with this playbook that had a set of best practices but we didn't have an analyst and I think a benefit that the playbook afforded us and all the efforts of having better inclusive practices afforded us was we were able to take our time so it created space for us to move timelines around and to use our engineers and to use our product managers to step up to the role of analyzing the data and I'm part of the community tech team and we're the wish list team so for those of you who may not be familiar it's a wish list that we run every year where engaged contributors to the platforms can come and propose ideas and we saw through analyzing the data that for the past six years there's been an underrepresentation of EngagedContributors.com from Spanish speaking communities and from Chinese speaking Mandarin speaking communities so the time that it afforded us gave us the space to go through the data combed through all the surveys in the past and then switch our strategy based on that so we can use those users. Just to connect and switch it over just a little bit let's go over next to Gergo who also works on a team that hears a lot of feedback from the community specifically thinking about newcomers but can give us the perspective from an engineer point of view. Hi, I'm Gergo, I'm a software engineer on the growth team our team works on helping the editor communities grow. We focus on the first few weeks of people's experience when they sign up to be a Wikipedia editor and we try to give them a good user experience and try to help them find their footing and get familiar with the policies of the site which means that we need to we need both a lot of feedback from the new users point of view because they aren't familiar at all with Wikipedia yet and then we also need a lot of feedback from experienced users because we help the new users make edits and we need to make sure that these edits do not cause a burden on the established community and the playbook has been very helpful for us as a generic guide currently it contains I think something like 50 items which is way more than we could keep in our head so it helps to make sure that you do not forget anything and it helps to make sure that you can be disciplined like for example we did think about accessibility before we had the playbook but we usually started thinking about it in the development phase which is often too late and now with the help of the playbook we can make sure that it's integrated from the start and we consider accessibility during planning and during the design phase and it also helps to focus efforts because everyone is doing the same thing so for example the playbook is recommending a pre-mortem a pre-mortem is a way of thinking in a structured way at the start of how things could go wrong and there are a number of practical questions of how you structure such a discussion and because every team is doing a pre-mortem now it's a lot easier for each separate team to figure this out in terms of challenges the playbook has a lot of different items so they are necessarily very short in how they are defined it wasn't always easy to figure out what when we should consider something done whether we have done enough to check it out and a more specific challenge was around multilinguality so the playbook recommends multilingual usability testing which is something we found very helpful because sometimes we get different feedback from different language communities but it also brought up a lot of practical challenges because that means you need to write mocks in multiple languages you need to maintain those in parallel you need to translate the usability testing documentation to other languages you need to find speakers for every language who can conduct the test and the interviews you need to translate everything back so it's it's pretty involved and in practice what we did is we relied on multilingual speakers in the design team which is not a really scalable approach so that's something we still need to figure out thanks Gergo that's really helpful and to dig even more into the technical point of view we did have one team that was a back-end team that originally had a product manager and was able to connect the teams work to some front-end user thinking and then through some shifts that changed and so Desiree has stepped in on that team and to help the platform engineering team know how to do the application of the paybook and we'll talk more about that experience great thank you so much Jasmine so thanks Desiree Baud I'm the director of platform product management here at the Wikimedia Foundation and I work with a lot of different teams across technology and product in what I call our foundational technologies back-end is another way of putting it but essentially these technologies are what power our sites Wikipedia keeping it up and running commons et cetera and so without a lot of the work that teams like the platform engineering team the sites won't run so often historically we never really thought of these technologies as products and so that's been a real challenge trying to then say well okay let's plug in some product management to this which we started for the first time and now let's adopt this concept of this playbook about how to build these products in a diverse equitable and inclusive way when we're just starting to think of them as products so we had a few key challenges as a team kind of rolled through this the first was making sure we had the right roles and functions and building the connections into the community and thinking of our work as products so many engineers for example struggled to think about how would something like an API which we're building for many different internal teams and the movement and the community and tools be thought of as a product and so we were trying to go through the playbook and we're not a feature team so often times the typical things that you would think of for features usability testing etc we had to translate them a little bit in order to make them relevant and digestible to the team and so some of that included shifting the way we were thinking about the products and so this was a real benefit in the team where we started to say what are the dominant languages that people are using how do we make APIs language agnostic how do we think about service and performance for different users across the world and how do you guarantee that how do you build so that everyone has equitable access and so it was a really different way of thinking that we had to start looking through the work instead of just saying we built an API and it's done and it meets a specific use case and so we had the balloon out our thinking quite a bit to think about how do we make this that we can use for many different use cases and that the movement consumed more readily and more easily instead of just for a specific product or feature that we're trying to develop and so it's a muscle that we've been building and we've had ups and downs through the process some of it a lot of it has been this translation and I think we're going to keep going with equity how do we think about applying the playbook and the scope of our technical and technology products Thanks Desiree that's really helpful and definitely something we'll continue to work on and I'm excited for us to all continue to partner to move that forward and so the last person that we'll hear from here is Alex who will share the perspective from standpoint and who has been working on a really big project and also applying the playbook at the same time which I think is a really big feat so Alex can you share what that has been like Yes Hello everyone and thank you Jasmine I'm Alex the designer on the web team and as Jasmine mentioned for the past two or so years we've been working on Vector 2022 which some of you are probably familiar with so yeah I'm excited about the playbook I'm proud to say that prior to the playbook our team was already somewhat focused on testing in multiple languages testing with people in multiple parts of the world and also focused on accessibility to a certain extent however these focuses weren't particularly formalized in terms of process they were sort of things that were important to individual members of the team not necessarily something we would formally plan around or have kind of a systematized approach to so I think those are two clear areas that stand out to me that the playbook has helped us with prior to using the playbook we were testing things in maybe like three languages on average and our most recent feature we tested in six or seven different languages and part of that has enabled us to do that again is the playbook and then planning ahead of time which has allowed us to build sort of tools specifically in terms of how we build prototypes and make those prototypes available in multiple languages to streamline some of that process as Gargo was talking about it can be overwhelming to prepare mockups in so many different languages so we've actually switched to using prototypes that use the wikimedia apis and allow us to do that a little bit more easily and then on the accessibility front Bernard who is an engineer on our team has kind of taken the cues from the playbook and started to set up some automated accessibility tests and I know he's also working to get a sort of consultant or expert reviewer to come in and work with us on accessibility stuff again these things have been prompted by the playbook so yeah it's been exciting and interesting for sure in terms of open questions and potential improvements for the future things that came up in our team review recently is actually that there are a lot of different accessibility standards available online and even within accessibility standards there are various degrees like AA, AAA, etc that you can adhere to so I think we wanted to clarify what the sort of exact guidelines are that we want to be following and then the second thing we talked about is potentially having better integration with the knowledge gaps which is coming from the research team specifically the technical fluency knowledge gap we have found in our user testing that there's quite a range of technical fluency and that sort of variation leads to different needs that people have and so we're wondering how to better build that as a dimension into the playbook and have it be something that we explicitly call out when we are developing and testing features thank you Thanks Alex, that's really helpful now that you have heard from us we would like to hear from you please share with us in the etherpad which has also some helpful links based on some of the things that the panelists have shared here what barriers you have had to overcome when engaging with our projects and what tools would have been helpful to you to overcome those barriers we're hoping to take those use cases and apply it to the playbook before sharing version 2 of the playbook next week for all of the teams in product and technology to test against thanks again for joining the panel and thank you to all of our panelists