free knowledge – Jackie Koerner

Reflections on Wikimania 2018

Looking out over the Atlantic and Indian Oceans at Cape Point. Photo by me licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

A couple weeks ago, I started an adventure I never imagined I would. I traveled to Cape Town, South Africa to attend Wikimania 2018. Last month I posted my reflection on Learning Days at Wikimania 2018, so if you haven’t read that, start there and then come back to read my reflection on Wikimania 2018.

To begin Wikimania 2018, the planning committee organized an opening party at Two Oceans Aquarium. I was so excited! I love ocean life, so this made the night amazing from the start. While there I got to meet some new wiki friends and end the night with my oldest of wiki friends. I love that no matter how long it has been since we have seen each other, we start back up like it was no time at all. This community is really what makes all wiki things go – from creation to connection.

African penguin on Boulders Beach. Photo by me licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

While at Wikimania, there was so much to learn from everyone who came. I realized at Wikimania 2017 how open people were with their knowledge, a stark change from the academic conferences I had attended. This only expanded when I attended the Wikimedia Diversity Conference. There I learned so much from broader parts of the world and truly understood in sharp relief how Western-centric our focus is. This experience and observations I made during Learning Days convinced me to make a commitment. I chose during Wikimania 2018 to listen and not take space where other people’s voices should be heard. I am glad I did, because I learned so much from communities and people I had not otherwise met at other Wikimedia events.

The people I met told me stories about what they are doing in their community, what they have accomplished and what their challenges are. There were successes of getting information literacy on the national and college curriculum, and there were challenges of the very real and mortal risks of free speech. These are people in their own countries and communities doing amazing things. Many of the presentations echoed my strong beliefs about the needs of the free knowledge movement to focus more on empowering communities doing the work.

African penguins on Boulders Beach. Photo by me licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

Below I’ll summarize the information from my pictures, notes and tweets that I took during the sessions as well as tidbits of information about the week:

Gaps in Global GLAM Capacity
This session was a panel of people working to collect critical information digitally before it is destroyed by age or other natural factors. They discussed the issues of building relationships and convincing people this is something that is culturally critical.

Centering Knowledge from the Margins
Whose Knowledge hosted a panel of organizers, scholars and allies to discuss knowledge and privilege. Some quotes I have from that session are:

On Wikipedia a lot of people think they’re experts in a lot of different areas, even though they’re not.

Having to create a handle that sounds like a white European man to avoid cultural oppression is not tech equity.

Online is a space we inhabit now. I want people who search for the key words ‘Native American’ to find something more than just statistics about alcoholism.

If you don’t have information about your community, you erode the sense of belonging to that community.

Many of us had to start from scratch. One hundred new editors and 100 articles may seem small, but when you consider the level of illiteracy that we are subject to, these numbers are huge.

We are coming to a conversation about tech equity with immense disparity. We are not on equal footing as the oppressor, which puts us in a disadvantage in this dialogue.

Now that we’re at the table, how are we going to disrupt the whole game?

The act of telling the truth is an act of freedom, but it’s also an act of great risk.

The process of updating and correcting knowledge about your community online often requires you to engage with your oppressor.

Looking out from the lighthouse at Cape Point. Photo by me licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

Creating Knowledge Equity and Spatial Justice on Wikipedia
The first plenary session was a presentation by researcher and data scientist, Dr. Martin Dittus. This session was recorded so do go watch his presentation. I am going to post some pictures I snapped of his slides.

Capture of Dr. Martin Dittus’ presentation

This research proves what many of us already felt. He illustrated how knowledge geography is a huge part of Wikipedia. He compared the region of the knowledge contributor to the region about which they were writing. Culture is an American export. We also feel like we can accurately assess and document any culture with authority. He also said very accurately,

In certain parts of the world it may cost more than your monthly income to go online.

What is happening online right now digitally is of great importance to those of us in the physical world.

Information geography helps us to understand how we build a narrate of the world. Our devices shape how we understand the world, and how we act there, too. The maps has become the territory: the digital is the world now.

After the plenary, I skipped out and headed to dinner with Chris and some of his colleagues. We went to Addis in Cape, an Ethiopian restaurant. This dinner was amazing. I am genuinely sorry you weren’t there. We ate it all – from delicious ciders to injera made from teff to azifa and ended the night with a coffee ceremony.

State of Research in Knowledge Gaps and State of Wikimedia Research
These sessions (1, 2) presented research about all things wiki and where we should go next. There has been a lot on gaps in the past year. There are data sets online for those of you looking deeper into gaps. Check out Research on meta, get involved, and present at OpenSym.

Dassie on Table Mountain. Photo by me licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

After the research sessions, Chris and I decided to go to Table Mountain. There we hiked around for about 2 hours taking pictures of amazing views and adorable little Dassies.

Dassie calling their buddies. Photo by me licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

After the mountain trip, we went to the mall to shop for some new luggage. Between St. Louis and Cape Town, Delta destroyed my luggage, and I decided a suitcase wrapped in duct tape might look a bit shady to airport security. I am, however, very grateful that received my bag with the contents still inside. Sadly some of my friends didn’t receive their bags or the contents at all.

Besides adulting and shopping for luggage, we bought some gifts and ate dinner right on the water. Living in the Midwestern United States, the seafood I am able to eat is always frozen. Every dinner with seafood in Cape Town was delicious. I even got to try a local fish, Kingklip.

Cape Point. Photo by me licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

Rounding out a wonderful week, the following morning I attended one of my favorite plenary sessions:

The Dangers of Supremely White Data and The Coded Gaze by Joy Buolamwini Do yourself a huge favor and google her. She’s an incredible mind who is changing the world and everyone can learn great things from her. I appreciated Joy speaking to the crowd about how we all must go deeper than the studies and look at the data. We need to ask, “What data are algorithms being trained with? Who is doing this study? How does it work in real world settings?”

I absolutely love how she answered the following question from the audience, “How do you make bias easier for teams to identify?” She replied simply, “Employ diverse teams.” Yes. Yes! YES!

Bluff at Cape Point. Photo by me licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

Following the plenary session, I attended sessions focusing on the gender gap. All these sessions have video recordings, and I encourage you to go watch the videos, read more, and do something about the gender gap:
Research on gender gap in Wikipedia: What do we know so far?
Women leading the way toward gender equity
Building new bridges to close the Wikimedia gendergap
What can we learn from the Feminist movement for knowledge equity?

The first and last sessions on the list actually inspired this post from my husband.

My takeaways from the gender gap sessions are: most if not all gender gap research is completed by the Wikimedia Foundation. Women don’t respond to surveys as often as men do. Women don’t get support from their community when harassed and threatened by male editors. Words convey subtle bias. The quantity of women in leadership roles in the Wikimedia movement is larger than anticipated given the population gender distribution. I personally wonder about how the leaders are being accepted in the community in their leadership roles beyond just being referred to as leaders.

Looking out at the oceans at Cape Point. Photo by me licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

After the gender gap sessions, I dipped into Beyond the meat grinder: building better new editor experiences through research and dialogue to support some fellow qualitative researchers. The big take away from this session was more needs to be done to support communities in their own language and culture.

After a morning full of learning and discussion, I met up with some awesome women. We were planning on attending the Wiki Women’s Lunch, but we ended up having a good chat right outside the room! I always meet the best people at wiki events.

The closing party was amazing for what I saw, as I only stayed for a small portion. I hear it was really incredible. The whole planning committee really went out of their way to make Wikimania 2018 a stellar event. I was so honored to be able to attend this Wikimania and be able to live such an experience. I hope I can meet all my new wiki friends again very soon.

Ostrich seen near Cape Point. Photo by me licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

The Big Takeaway

For those of you who are looking for my overall takeaway from this whole conference, it is listening. I am referring to the listening you do with your best self and from your soul. Listen because you want to hear that other person. Listen because you want to honor their experience. Listen because you want to understand what it is to be where they are.

If we are going to go anywhere in this world, it is together. We cannot put one before the other anymore. It is not an “eat or be eaten” world. It’s collaborative, for “two heads are better than one” really is true. To create something truly representative of the world, we need to work together. This may mean one person talks less in order to serve the goal of equity. In the same vein, it is cultural appropriation of the worst kind to take a piece of a community’s culture and write about it how it makes sense from an outsider’s perspective. No one can know everything, but don’t we want to have the closest truths out there for the knowledge seekers?

Reflections on Learning Days at Wikimania 2018

A couple weeks ago, I started an adventure I never imagined I would. I traveled to Cape Town, South Africa to attend Wikimania 2018.

The past year has been amazing, getting to travel the world for the sake of free knowledge (1, 2, 3, 4). For this trip, I applied for a scholarship early and thankfully, I received a scholarship. This scholarship was for conference attendance and room and board, which made the trip much more attainable.

I left St. Louis midday on a Monday, flying through Atlanta and Paris before arriving in Cape Town late Tuesday night. I was optimistic about my ability to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed (awake and aware) Wednesday morning for the start of Learning Days, but I think I overestimated my abilities.

After a very important hunt for coffee, I arrived 15 minutes late for Learning Days (yikes! Apologies, friends!). Learning days is a pre-conference set for upcoming and emerging leaders in the Wikimedia movement. It gathers us together to learn best practices and collaborate on challenges in the communities. I can personally say I learned loads from the other attendees just during discussions and our conversations between sessions. This is my absolutely favorite part about attending conferences in the Wikimedia movement – the natural way in which you learn so much just by talking to people. For the content that really stuck with me from Learning Days, let’s just say I have pages and pages of notes! I’ll try to keep my summary to just a few things.

Bag I bought while in South Africa with the quote “If you educate a man, you educate an individual but if you educate a woman you educate a nation.” It says it’s an African proverb. Some of my friends from India said it’s from Gandhi. Whoever said it, I like them. 🙂

The first piece that is highly important that I think everyone should continually practice: listening. Listening can be powerful and listening can be dangerous. Let me explain. Through listening, one can learn, build empathy, connection, etc. Through listening, people can also be tricked.

You see, it is a very dangerous thing to listen. If one listens one may be convinced; and a man who allows himself to be convinced by an argument is a thoroughly unreasonable person.

-Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband

Critical listening is, well, critical. Exercise your listening skills by doing the following:

Be present. Don’t think of other things or tinker on your phone while someone else is talking. Give them your attention and show that in your body language (eye contact, turn your body toward them, ignore your phone, etc.)
Don’t be quick to solution. We are creatures who like to solve problems, but maybe now isn’t the time, or the person just wants a sympathetic ear. Just listen.
Ask clarifying questions. Maybe you don’t know a detail or you want to make sure you’re fulling understanding, so ask. It’ll show you’re engaged and want to know more.

There are three types of listening:

Listening to win: listening to find information you can use to aid you in some way.

Listening to fix: listening to develop a solution to the issue at hand.

Listening to learn: listening to know more. This is the most engaging.

We learned about these different types of listening and how to recognize them in ourselves. We did this for the sake of community listening. To practice these we employed them during an exercise with a technique called Collective Problem Solving. We discussed community needs we had and assigned each need to a table. We then got to pick which table we joined. The tables were developed out of the needs we discussed, which included: community health, resources, volunteer retention, and cross-collaboration within the open movement.

During the Collective Problem Solving, we practiced the stages of good listening. First, we were listening to understand, and responding with clarifying questions. Then we asked deeper questions to get deeper understanding. Then we proposed solutions and worked collaboratively to understand the deeper problem and develop a solution. The solution to our table’s problem was so simple, but hugely impactful to the community health and could even reduce volunteer burnout, because the debates required over this topic would thus be reduced! Listening might just be the solution to world peace, or Wiki-peace, but for now, just start small and be a good listener.

We also talked about the differences among the scope of diversity, inclusion and equity. While the definitions above do not encompass the differences among these concepts culturally or linguistically, they do give us a starting point to help us recognize who is here and how they are involved. Diversity is equal participation and is about people. Inclusion is equal experience and about the process. Equity is equal outcomes and about the impact. These concepts were underlying themes during the whole of Wikimania. I’ll go into more detail later.

The next part that really stood out to me was storytelling for projects. This is something everyone needs to do because we want to have people engaged and caring about our projects. This framework tells you how to structure your story to make a good story that is impactful. Follow the ABCD framework:

Attention – get the attention of the audience
Because – tell them why it matters
Content – share the story
Do – call to action

Did you know the use of the word because increases engagement by more than 30%? Make your project stand out by telling the story and why it matters. You know your project, but others don’t. Practice storytelling for your next project and see what impact it has on engagement or acceptance. Even do it on a smaller level in daily communication and see how things change.

Photo of me presenting about survey strategies by Wikimedia Ghana User Group

During Learning Days, I presented about Surveys and how to properly design them to get the most out of them. Learning how to develop surveys is a highly important skill because when done correctly, it can give you the information you need. Note, I said information you need here instead of information you want. That is an issue I see with so many surveys and research studies. People have an idea of what they want to know beforehand and unwittingly ask leading or biased questions. This will not get the clean information and lead you into developing solutions for the community that they don’t really need! Check out my slides and the handout on Commons to get your survey is on the right track, and even to find out if a survey is the right tool for the job. Feel free to share and contact me if you would like some survey or methodological support for your project.

Oh, I hinted about bias in the paragraph above. I gave a lightning talk about bias. If you ever go to an event, go to the lightning talks. They’re always great because you can learn so much about the rest of the wiki community in such a short period of time.

The next thing we did during learning days that really stood out to me was the final activity on the second day. It stood out to me because I am an analytical thinker. Analytical thinkers are great at big picture thinking as well as seeing the complexities and nuance in a sea of grey. I cannot think of the name, but the activity was the one where there are two words placed on opposite sides of the room. You have to pick one, or a point in the middle. I dislike these activities because I generally think for the whole and not for myself. This is great because people like me help the NGOs of the world do amazing work, but it’s bad for activities like this because I cannot stop analyzing the situations in which one concept would be more important than the other, and visa versa. The world is less black and white but more grey, and often, ‘it depends’ is an appropriate response for this activity.

With that being said, I highly enjoyed Learning Days and hope to see it continue. I do hope, however, that some sort of cohort model can be developed so attendees can connect over a period of time before the actual Learning Days event and even after. I find the issue with in-person events is there is great momentum and excitement while we’re all together, but then we go back to our lives afterward without a clear plan to continue the enthusiasm.

Speaking of enthusiasm, you can clearly tell I am excited about this event because I have so much to say. The main event hasn’t even started at this point in my narrative, and this post is already pretty long, so I’m going to make it into two parts. Come back tomorrow for my reflections on Wikimania 2018. See you then.

My Experience at Wikimedia Diversity Conference

Wikimedia Diversity Conference 2017 in Stockholm Group Photo, a photo by Jonatan Svensson Glad, <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International</a> — Wikimedia Diversity Conference 2017 in Stockholm Group Photo, a work by Jonatan Svensson Glad, *Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International*

This past weekend I attended the Wikimedia Diversity Conference in Stockholm, Sweden. This conference was hosted by Wikimedia Sverige and was the second conference of its kind. The 80 attendees live in 43 countries and speak a total of 23 various languages. It was humbling to be in such a delegation.

I became interested in attending the conference during Wikimania 2017 in Montréal, Québec. I heard about it from another attendee. The principles of the open knowledge movement speak to my core values: education for all, content created by the masses, and consumed by everyone – for free. Due to my desire for equity in the open knowledge movement, I knew I would really appreciate a conference like this.

Right now, the communities in the open knowledge movement are out of balance. The larger communities, which are connected by language and often geography, dominate the attention and focus of the broader movement. I am not saying one community should be ignored to the detriment of another. I am saying we need to support the developing communities better.

So, going back to August, I read about the conference and signed up to be an ambassador to help spread the word about the conference. I started working on my application. Space was limited, so the organizers were being selective about attendance so we ended up with a well-rounded group from around the world. I applied for a scholarship to attend the conference, and considering I self-funded four trips so far this year on one household income, it was much needed. Unfortunately, in early September, I got notice that I was on a waitlist for the scholarship that would help with travel, lodging, and conference attendance fee. I understood. The response to the conference was overwhelming I am sure!

Moving to the end of September, I was having chats with some gracious Wikimedians about my grant proposal to investigate the impact of implicit bias on Wikipedia. One person asked if I was going to the Wikimedia Diversity Conference. I told her I wasn’t because I was unable to get travel support. She said, “You know, you should really think about going.” Because I respect her a lot, and the rest of the community does as well, I immediately got off the call with her and told my husband the story: about the conference application, not getting a full scholarship, but a partial, how it might fit right in with my grant, and how this person really thinks it’d be a good idea for me to be there.

Without hesitation, he said, “Do it.”

I thought it might be too late. I emailed the people organizing the conference. I explained how I hesitated because I had already self-funded four trips this year, but I would love to accept the scholarship if the opportunity still was open. The organizers expressed regret as the conference was already at capacity. I understood. I hesitated too long.

A month later I get an email on October 25, nine days before the conference. There was a cancellation and I could attend. I really had lost all hope at that point and just thought I would watch the sessions that were recorded. After a very supportive conversation with my husband, I booked my flights and made plans to head to Sweden for a few days of intense conversations.

My flights were uneventful and I slept much of the time. This is always funny since I always load my iPad with articles and movies in case I’m bored. Each flight I woke up as we were touching down in the next city. Since I just packed a carry-on bag, I quickly got off the last plane and went looking for the bus to take me to the Stockholm Central Station. Hilariously enough, ABBA was playing at the airport in Stockholm.

Horse stables along my route from Stockholm Airport to Stockholm City

I found the spot where the Flygbussarna busses pick up passengers and got onto a bus right away. The underground was a bit cheaper, but I wanted to see more of Stockholm on my short trip. It was pretty cool – I got to see loads of horse stables, and even the amazing horse stables I saw on the Flygbussarna video, which I would totally live in. I also saw a place where you could buy tiny houses. I didn’t get a picture unfortunately. My oldest wants to be an architect and design tiny houses. She would have flipped out if I got a picture.

I arrived at the conference hotel just a few hours before the conference was supposed to start. I headed up to my room to freshen up before meeting everyone for dinner. I was excited, but so sleepy. A nice cup of tea helped greatly!

At 4 pm, I headed down to the lobby to meet everyone and walk to dinner. We all walked to the Royal Armoury. It’s a museum, but unfortunately the halls were closed. I really want to go back someday and just enjoy the museums and libraries in Stockholm. Although the halls were closed, I did enjoy the best news: they’re wiki-friendly. They love getting their documents and pictures of their collections on Wikipedia and Commons. It was really cool to hear how they engage with the community and invite Wikipedians to connect with their collections.

Dinner was great – I’d never had vegetarian lasagna with beans before, but it was good, and exactly what I needed after a long day of travel. The conference organizers set us up with bingo cards as conversation starters, but some of us just jumped right into conversation without the cards. We didn’t realize we were supposed to be playing bingo for about 45 minutes! It was so great to see faces new and old – meeting new friends, meeting others again, and meeting some for the first time in person. After a few hours of fun, food, and conversation, I headed back to get a good night’s sleep. I walked back to the hotel with another person focused on the gender gap. We had a good conversation catching up.

When I got back to my room, I found out my roomie was none other than AfroCROWD‘s Sherry Antoine. I met her in Montréal and really enjoyed hearing about her work with her colleagues. I cannot wait to get something like what they are doing going here in St. Louis! They have such a large gathering of folks and with such diverse skills – people good at writing, people good at finding information, young, old, curious, etc. People can learn so much from their wisdom with organizing events and connecting people.

After a good breakfast, Saturday morning the conference started at 9 am. We all organized into “base camps”, which were intended to mix us up into relatively diverse groups. Everyone had to be from a different country, if possible, and a mix of genders and languages as well. We would have discussions where we would move about the room, but then we would come back to our base camp groups to discuss and debrief. The day started with a talk from Katherine Maher, the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation. In her talk she said:

These conversations are hard. Justice is difficult.

She went on to talk about shared power. Our mission statement implies equity, but it is not our reality. We need to make sure we give people who need to be at the table a seat at the table, and listen. “Nothing about us without us.”

Dominant culture
We need to deconstruct dominant culture. In many discussions on Wiki projects, the edit count is viewed as a measure of a person’s contributions to the movement. This is only a snapshot and a very incorrect view of people’s contributions. Organizing, teaching, advocating, planning, etc. do not produce an edit count. Privilege leads to a high edit count – editing on a computer you own, with electricity and Internet, in a country with free speech – where it’s easier to produce a higher quantity of edits. The edit count is not and should not be considered a representation of a person’s worth in this community.

Cultivating identity
Valuing and realizing the value a diverse group of people and their identities bring to the movement.

Communicating in an accessible language
Speaking in language we understand, and clearly.

Centering the marginalized
Center people who need to be at the table, listen to them, encourage others to listen to them, and be sure to center and share their needs in a way that does not objectify them or their communities.

To close, she said:

Knowledge is a tool of power. Free knowledge is a radical act.

For our next activity, we were to look at our cue card number four. This was about what we wanted to accomplish this weekend. I said:

Listen to the realities of others about their communities and their experiences with their identities in the broader movement.

We discussed these statements in our base camp groups and came up with a few behaviors and actions to make the friendly space policy work:

Listen.

Be curious.

Don’t deny others’ realities.

Wikimedia Diversity Conference 2017 Friendly Space policy, a work by Sara Mörtsell, <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International</a> — Wikimedia Diversity Conference 2017 Friendly Space policy, a work by Sara Mörtsell, *Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International*

Then Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight presented about the Gender Diversity Mapping Project. A few insights I took away: only 7% of the world’s knowledge is in books. This is huge considering the way notability and verifiability standards for English Wikipedia are centered around published sources. We’re excluding nearly 90% of the world’s knowledge due to policy.

I had a hard time keeping my seat when this menti poll came out the way it did.

Implicit bias permeates everything.

Yes. Bias is a sneaky bitch. Find out more about bias on Wikipedia from my Wikimania 2017 session Birth of Bias: implicit bias’ permanence on Wikipedia and my grant proposal to investigate the impact of implicit bias on Wikipedia.

After an intense morning, we all gathered for lunch. The lunch was great, but not very allergy friendly. Foods were not labeled, so I just ate what I was pretty sure about. Another tip for all future conferences with an international attendance: label foods with information about the food and how one would eat it. It was assumed that everyone knew what each food was and how one would eat it. Not so!

After lunch, it was a discussion about the Wikimedia movement strategic direction. We first gathered in our base camp groups, then mixed around the room. I stayed at our base camp table as a conversation host.

These statements stuck with me the most from these conversations:

“Why does this matter to me?”

“This is something so beyond where we are. We are still struggling with getting the computers and reliable/affordable Internet.”

“This was up for discussion? In our culture, when we see ‘direction’ we think that is what we are doing and there is no discussion.”

“We don’t know how to organize to implement this. We need facilitators to help us with this.”

“What strategic direction? This was not communicated to my community.”

We used Menti a lot to do polls with the whole group, particularly during our discussion about the strategic direction. This allowed us to easily share our ideas and the fruits of our discussions with the bigger group without talking to everyone individually. Here is an example:

After the session ended for the day on Saturday, I went to walk around the town a bit. It was funny, because we started our days before the sun came up, and ended them after the sun had set for the day. The only time I saw Stockholm in the daylight was going to and from the airport. I took a few pictures walking around town, up and down Drottningsgatan Street, and in old town Stockholm.

Lions are big around Stockholm. Here is one of the lions on Drottningsgatan Street. These were sculptured by artist Anders Årfelt. Further lions will be placed as barriers for the pedestrian street to help prevent further vehicular attacks, as that has become a common method of terrorist attack in Europe.

I also got to see the holiday decorations in store fronts around town.

This is a photo of the well on the Big Square. Behind it to the right is the Stock Exchange building, which houses the Nobel Library and Museum.

During my photo walk I bumped into loads of people from the conference. One of my gender gap partners-in-crime and I bumped into each other. We ended up walking around taking photos and chatting before dinner. It was a well-deserved chat. In this work, it can be hard, and it’s always nice to have someone with whom you can vent!

After enjoying the brisk air, we went back to the hotel for dinner. It was a nice well-deserved break after a long day of deep conversations. More on that later.

The next day, we reviewed day one with our base camp groups, listened to lightning talks, and tried to listen to a presentation about Hosting Inclusive Events. I do feel bad for the person hosting the presentation, who was from the Wikimedia Foundation’s Support and Safety team. She received a lot of anger and critique due to history of harassment not being addressed in the community.

On Harassment
Here is what I am going to say and summarize the harassment dialogue from the conference. Although it was not an official topic, it was a topic that dominated dialogue in my base camp group the entire weekend. One person felt the Wikimedia Foundation did not do enough to represent her in her lawsuit with her harasser. Others do not like the idea of having other people report the harassment they witness, for fear it might become problematic for the victim. Others still thought putting the responsibility on the victim to report the harassment was inappropriate. Basically, it’s complicated, but here are several key things the WMF could do:

Define what harassment is. There is real confusion about what harassment is and what it isn’t.
Respond to the harassment in the space where it happens. Don’t wait until after the event. Address the behavior where it is occurring.
Openly publish the actions victims and the rest of the community can expect from the WMF.
Relatedly, openly publish the actions victims and the rest of the community cannot expect from the WMF.
Follow up and follow through.
Stand up firmly to harassment. Yes, we rely on volunteers, but at what point is the harasser more valuable than the victim, the community in which they are perpetuating hostility, and the potential volunteers they are keeping from the community? Administrators and other volunteers did not sign up to respond to harassment. They are also not equipped to do so. This responsibility falls on the WMF. Something needs to be done.

After this session, we broke out into three possible tracks. I chose Accessing Resources to Increase Diversity. It was a really great session, especially after the discussions I had in the roaming discussions on Saturday which yielded lots about access to resources being issues in developing regions. There was one particular exercise I really liked in the session. It was about focusing not on what you want, but what you have, in the event/project planning process. Wikimedia Foundation’s grant program officer, Marti Johnson, had us all set aside what we need and brainstorm about what we have.

So, for me, the list of what I have for my proposed project would be:

Space to hold events (with computers and Internet) at local libraries
Knowledge of Wikipedia/Wikimedia projects and their guiding principles
Knowledge of how to facilitate discussions
Grant writing skills
Event organization skills
Information literacy
Computers
Internet
Software
Knowledge of how to use computers
Access to information
Volunteers
Time

It can go on an on. It just gets us out of the mindset of what we don’t have and away from the fixation on funding. I really loved it! It is a positive exercise to get us thinking creatively when it doesn’t seem like there are resources.

After the individual sessions it was time for lunch and the final session of the day: the Way Forward. This session I think needed a little more structure, as I don’t feel many action items were developed from this time, as I think was intended. I did have a good conversation with several people about leadership needs. I didn’t have any particular needs, but wanted to express what I had heard as needs during the discussions.

The conference was very informative, and I do hope we continue to work as a cohort. I want to thank Wikimedia Sverige for all their hard work and the opportunity to attend the conference. Thank you for making many of the sessions streaming! Attending was a privilege and I wish more could have attended as well.

After the closing session, some people organized karaoke and a dance party. A big group of us stole the leftovers from the last Fika and pulled chairs together in the conference center hallway. I think in conferences where the conversations are so intense, activities to just let loose should be part of the options in the day or evening.

I was glad to talk more to people about the implicit bias study I hope to do. I found some wonderful people who would be interested in replicating the study in their own communities. This is wonderful news considering bias is complicated by culture and language, expertise I only have in English. I really want this study to continue in all of the Wikimedia communities. That is when the impact will be truly complete.

We wound down the day talking about implicit bias, harassment, societal pressures, gender expectations, cartoons, and insects. The hotel staff closed the conference level on us, so we had to take our conversation elsewhere. We all headed to a vegetarian buffet in Old Town Stockholm. Funny enough, we kept running into other Wikipedians and others joined us! I think this restaurant never expected such a crowd on a Sunday evening. We ended up talking until they closed and kicked us out. We moved to the hotel lobby. On the walk back to the hotel, I had a meaningful conversation about harassment with another attendee. She shared some blatant harassment she experienced, and also some of the challenges of the politics in serving higher capacities within the movement. Both issues are fueled by individual lust for power, but the actions exclude those wanting to volunteer for the greater good.

Wikimedia Diversity Conference 2017 – Group Pic, a work by AbhiSuryawanshi, *Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International*

To close, we need to stop being tolerant of the poor behaviors of others. We need to enlighten those who need it. We need the WMF to step in to support marginalized communities and victimized groups, and not be scared by certain parts of the community crying out with “overreach!” because this is only serving their power and privilege further. We need to listen more, think about others more, and communicate more. Then we will have a chance at equity.

Stuck between a paywall and equality

When I graduated with my PhD in 2016, I received offers to publish in various journals and I even have a book I’m writing. I am not completely committed to any of it.

What?!

I know.

Believe me, in this world of academic “publish or perish” I am not ungrateful and recognize my privilege in this. Anyone would jump at this, unless they think like me. I don’t create knowledge to sell journals, magazines, or subscriptions for some publishing house. I create for my fellow humans.

I am not a religious person, so this is not in a religious sense, but I have been privileged with circumstances, biological and societal, that led to experiences that nurtured my critical thinking and intelligence. I don’t wish to capitalize on that. None of this is what I truly earned so it wouldn’t be right for me to make knowledge that is not for everyone to receive.

I am committed to publishing my full dissertation and any writings of mine on my website, or in ways where they are openly accessible to others. Granted, this might be a delayed release so I can publish additional material off of my findings, but ultimately I don’t want my creations to be behind paywalls. My work is so personal to me. This is my art. This is my activism.

I did publish one article in a CASE magazine, but was insistent on this part of the contract:

“CASE agrees to identify Author/Assignor as the author of Work, and also to grant Assignor in perpetuity a non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce by any means Work or parts of it solely for Assignor’s own personal use or as workshop handouts if the following copyright notice is placed on Work by Assignor: Copyright © 2015 Council for Advancement and Support of Education. All rights reserved. Used by permission.”

It wasn’t as perfect of a distribution option as I’d preferred, but better than many publishers include.

So, how do you all do it? How do you publish and still stand for free knowledge?

Education is a human right denied to many. That statement of mine was an unpopular one with faculty members at my private, Jesuit graduate school. I was rather surprised, but I shouldn’t have been.

Free knowledge is a radical act. It is political. It is absolutely political to believe in free knowledge.

-Katherine Maher (Source Code Berlin)

This is why I spend much of my time editing Wikipedia. Education equality is my passion, my activism.

I’m an academic and I use Wikipedia

Ok, friends, let’s talk about the elephant in the room. It’s time to move on. Everybody does it. I’ve seen colleagues do much worse. We all secretly do it, but are sure our colleagues will judge us for it.

I am an academic and I read and contribute to Wikipedia.

No one has unfriended me. I don’t have to wear a scarlet W around campus. I have kept my honors. Heck, I even am a visiting scholar because I contribute to Wikipedia.

Why am I saying this?

Because tonight I read a study about a study completed at two public Spanish universities (Aibar, E., Lladós-Masllorens, J., Meseguer-Artola, A., Minguillón, J., & Lerga, M. (2014). Wikipedia at university: what faculty think and do about it. The Electronic Library. 33(4). 668-683. doi: 10.1108/EL-12-2-2013-0217) – both relatively new and one of them was online only. The faculty used Wikipedia but only for subjects that were not in their primary field. Academics in STEM fields were more comfortable using Wikipedia for their scholarship and teaching. “So-called soft-science academics” were more skeptical.

Oh, my fellow social scientists, own up to it. You use Wikipedia. If you don’t, you should. What does this say about your bias? Go on. Go reflect on your actions and if your actions of judging Wikipedia/cloaking your true feelings are 1. valid and 2. really working toward the Truth we seek on the daily.

Did you know your students could learn in a collaborative environment where you don’t have to force inorganic collaboration? Pedagogical application is receiving mixed reviews in the literature. Why? Because many of those respondents are simply theorizing on how teaching with Wikipedia would be based on their assumptions about what Wikipedia is.

Wikipedia is “a new and powerful channel for the public communication of science.” Isn’t that what we want? Someone to read our work and to further scholarship? What are you waiting for? Give contributing to Wikipedia a chance, and what do you know, you might even let your hair down and teach with it next semester!

I’ll even volunteer to get you started.

I’m a visiting scholar!

I am very excited to announce I was selected to be a visiting scholar with San Francisco State University. The goal of my position is to use the library resources available to me through SFSU to improve content on Wikipedia regarding disability. This includes art, culture, history, and so much more. The directors at the Longmore Institute already created a list of potential topics for me to examine.

Here’s the information about the role:

Historian and activist Paul K. Longmore founded the Institute on Disability at SFSU in 1996. When he passed away in 2010, the university created an endowment for the Institute and renamed it in his honor. It undertakes projects that work to challenge prevailing notions and stereotypes of disability by showcasing disabled people’s strength, ingenuity, and originality. Its public education and cultural events connect the Bay Area’s vibrant disability communities and the general public with faculty and students at SF State to fight disability stigma with disability culture.

Already I have so much to add! I am using my old pal, Scrivener, to collect the information before I make edits. I love Scrivener’s functions, which allow me to search my literature research notes, which will ultimately allow me to improve numerous articles with each source I find.

Oh! Did you know you can edit Wikipedia too? It not only helps build and improve the free, quality knowledge available on the Internet, it’s a great free time activity too – addictive, and habit-forming, but [generally] not harmful to your health. 🙂 Feel free to see what I’m up to on Wikipedia.

Locked out by paywalls

As a lifelong university student, I have never been without scholarly articles and quality information. I remember starting college when the World Wide Web was still young and reading articles online for the first time. Forget homework! I had my nose in some research article or op-ed piece about the desperate state of something. I love learning.

But so do many other people. They just don’t have equal access to information as I do…or did. Now I’m locked out. My guilty pleasure of swiftly replacing citations on Wikipedia with more valid sources is now more challenging.

What is the difference between a valid source and what I can find just by googling it? Well, published articles in journals have hefty weight. Most are peer reviewed and some are juried, so the content cannot be too ‘creative’ or far from the ‘truth’. On the other hand, people can say anything on the Internet. I can say I’m a dog, and you’d have to believe me. I could also say I have purple spots and ride a pineapple. Or take some of the election 2016 content. You get the point.

Being that anyone on the Internet can say anything, providing free, quality knowledge to people can be a challenge. This hits me right at my core beliefs: education and equity.

We are insanely privileged. We all may fuss about our clothes, our houses, or our cars, but we have access to quality knowledge. We have books in our homes. We have libraries. We have Internet access. Education is a human right, but only accessible to the privileged.

I am trying to change that. I hope you do too. Instead of just reading Wikipedia from now on, make an edit each time you read. Together we are greater than the sum of our parts. We can provide a free, quality education through Wikipedia.

If you can’t edit, keep me editing! Consider donating to help me purchase remote access to my alma maters’s databases so I can keep updating those citations. I greatly appreciate it!