Talk:Wikimania 2012 tackles diversity issues

Reporter's Notes
I'll be uploading the files for the plenary session after an event.Crtew (talk) 21:48, 12 July 2012 (UTC)


 * Audio recording, Pt. 1




 * Audio recording, Pt. 2




 * Audio of Press Conference after the opening keynote and plenary session at 11:20 a.m., 12 July 2012, Lisner Auditorium, George Washington University, Washington, D.C. (Part 1 with intros & Part 2)


 * Part 1




 * Part 2



Wikimania 2012 site [] was used for program details, names, places, times, titles.

Ada Initiative, About, website []

Lede
The lede needs to explain the news focus, and the focus's news significance, for an international audience. We can't assume an international audience knows what a Wikimania is; and the significance of even local stories is to be explained for the international audience.

We may be talking about a handful of well-chosen additional words &mdash; but a few words can make all the difference. --Pi zero (talk) 22:37, 12 July 2012 (UTC)

Mary Gardiner Notes
Trying to understand the situation here. Are you claiming to have taken no notes, but to have written the article directly from witnessing the two hours' worth of stuff that's on these two audio files? (Which would imply that the source-checking part of review must take at bare minimum the two hours necessary to listen to the audio files?) --Pi zero (talk) 09:32, 13 July 2012 (UTC) I'm doing this between events ... Here are the notes:

Mary Gardiner, Fostering diversity: Not a boring chore; a critical opportunity Keynote Thurs, July 12, 2012 Lisner Auditorium George Washington University, Washington, D.C.

Graduate student in Computational Linguistics / research on lexical word choice; is interested in open source technology, women, and (remix) culture.; She is the co-founder of the Ada Initiative.

She begins by introducing how as a 14 year old girl in Australia she was given a reference book that became important in her intellectual development and begins her journey on what she is doing today. Self described awkward. Those same needs she had as a 14 year old are what motivates her passion for Wikipedia.

Society has changed since 1990: Britanica print sales compared then and today. World population with access to internet in past 6 years (growth)

"The good news with Wikipedia. As internet projects go wt is a diverse project": 285 Wikipedias / 112 languages with other 10,000 articles +

Of Wikipedia users, surveys of readers show that over 1/3 of Wikipedia readers are women; Slightly less than a tenth of editors are women. [Later in private give and take I asked for clarification on the numbers and there is a different survey for English and All Wikipedias. English is 10-15 percent. The whole is 8.5.]

Instrumental Diversity: Diverse participation will make the project better because of better representative and will beneft all. It's a PR argument becuase it makes us better and makes the project better. But it's not fair to the people you are inviting to participate.

Difficult concept of Diversity: You can't tell people what they should expect because you've invited them. From disabled literature: "Nothing About Us, Without Us" (slogan)

Western literature: Both cultures benefit. A scholar studied natives and their art and how their art changed with contact but did not become Western even though some elements were integrated but allowed them to continue own traditions. This may also happen in Wikipedia.

Example: "Google Summer of Code" all males but no women / a women's project designed with same purpose but different appeal got almost 300 applications from women. The difference: The image of a guy in front of the computer coding. The outreach for women, promoting women brought out mentors who encouraged their networks to provide opportunity. Outreach to groups.

If you invite a women into a male event, she is "the woman", but at 20 or 30 percent that effect is reduced.

The two identities: woman and a wikipedia editor. "Tendency to believe that these two identities are in conflict." Are they in conflict? "It's a false problem..." You can hold one and the other and it will benefit the latter identity.

"The more you encourage people retain parts of their identity that are important to them, in my case as a women, the more you enhance their other identity as a Wikipedian... You can encourage both identities by acknowledging and embracing that they are a member of a minority." with their own group (subculture).

She talked about two examples: Detroit Digital Justice Coalition (example of organizational outreach using mesh networks for wiki activity) & Gender Links (bring power to the powerless)

"It is the Wikipedia community that has the power that to reach out to the powerless rather than the other way around."

Summarized her key points: Introduced diversity concepts. Outreach out to groups. Wikipedia's role in this project.

"As a project of social change, even if it's not an activist project, the Wikipedia community has a responsibility both to its mission and to the people out there in the world to always be on a journey toward diversity -- to increase the size of the umbrella of the world."

Q&A

Q Who is Ada? Ada Lovelace considered the first programmer.

Q Inspiration. She co-founded it. Val brought the Ada part of the name and Gardiner wanted the initiative part. ADA is about participation of women in open source, not a problem of socialization, but discrimination ("concrete bad things that are happening in communities"). It's a more immediate and easier problem to solve.

Q. Twitter: Why is pintrest hugely popular with women but Wikipedia not so much. A. She says she's a bad person to ask because she doesn't participate in Pintrest or Facebook. She says, Don't ask me what women want from Wikipedia. Ask other women.

Q. How to get women to apply for stereotypical male jobs. Ada will be coming out with some recommendations. Wording and images matter.

Q. Languages as an element of diversity. A. Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: "language forms thoughts." Other school "language influences". What she talked about before: That identification with a subculture/minority doesn't lead to a weakened culture but strengthens both identities. Good will is another motivation.

Q. Should Wikipedia change the world? "Allowing people to access Wikipedia in their own langauges .... is changing the world."

Q. What should average Wikipedians do to foster diversity? A good step is stepping outside of your comfort zone and reading and learning more about other. Read the talk page and don't edit them. Listen to the conversation. Ask questions? It takes a while to come to talking to people. In terms of communication styles: Assume Good Faith. "If someone from an underrepresented group says you are hurting them, then stop. It's very easy to be defensive." "If it's unproductive, try to figure out how to make it productive or withdraw."

Shared a response from her Ada Camp right before Wikimania 2012.

Wales
Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia

State of the Wiki 2012

He shared that he and his partner named their daughter after Ada Lovelace.

He asked people in the audience who has been to different Wikimania's (list of places) and then by year of editing from 2012 and sits down one by one from most recent to past. Big round of applause for the four who still remained as around since 2001.

Humor: Misconceptions about Wikipedia: The Credible Hulk.

Mission statement (applause)

Spent a large block of time on Africa:

The mobile phone has been transforming the world as costs have come down. He has an 80 dollar mobile phone.

The growth of population with Internet access in Nigeria by year. 2000: .1 percent/ 2006: 3.1 percent / 2009: 16.1 percent and 2011: 29 percent.

Total bandwidth growth as undersea cables have been laid down. Compares Lagos with his internet speed in D.C.

People in Africa do exactly what we do on the Internet. It's a myth that they use the Internet to check crop prices; "... misses something really important". This means they are going to be using Wikipedia as it's the 5th top site on the Internet.

Mission to provide access to the sum of human knowledge to every person on the planet.

Compares the growth of Yoruba to Swahili and Afrikaans. Yoruba: 30,034 / Swahili: 24,073 / Afrikaans 23,338 articles. Early on English had a bot that created an article based on Census data that included all cities, towns and villages. "A sensible idea" is a good idea and not cheating if culturally appropriate.

Wales: "The story about Africa and the Internet is a story about normalization and joining the global conversation. They are doing normal things and everything that we are doing."

Jimbo Awards given to User:Demmy for his work June 2011 to July 2011 on the Yoruba site.

User:Demmy has no idea he has won this award. Jimbo asks people to update his talk page.

Staff awards

Q&A

Q. Internet balkanization A. Three major events of political activism: The activism began with Italians who went on strike against a proposed law by Berlusconi. Then the English Wikipedia did it. And this week the Russians went dark for a day. They did get press coverage.

Wales: "I hope we never have to do it again. I don't want us to become a site that goes on strike every six months. I want us to ... restrict this to activity that effects our work in some fashion." We need policy and preserve our neutrality. Striking against a war, for example, sounds like a "bad idea."

Q: Mobile platform. Yes, Wikipedia has plans for a mobile initiative. "Mobile editing is problematic" for practical purposes. But a huge proportion of people from developing countries will be coming online through the mobile and he appreciates the role the mobile will play in making wikipedia available to them.

Q: Women's interest: Make up is part of YouTube but not at all on Wikipedia. How do we support them?

He asks of audience: "For us to examine our premises and rethink things." Example: Kate Middleton's dress. Immediate post of deletion as triva. Jimbo thinks about examples of fashion that are socially and culturally significant. He actually went into the deletion page (rarely does): "We have 100+ articles on Linux distribution, why not the top 100 most famous dresses? They can be culturally important." Asks us to check "Our attitudes about what is encyclopedic." He said he noticed that early childhood development articles are weaker. If it's not in our interest, the articles aren't as developed. So people go elsewhere as the case with fashion.

He says his father doesn't feel comfortable editing Wikipedia with the markup language: The Visual Editor will be important for introducing a whole number of "geeks who are not necessarily technical geeks." Wouldn't it be nice if young mothers would be sharing their knowledge about early childhood development, which is quite sophisticated. We need to go through out work flow: If I were not technically sophisticated, could I do this? Is it necessarily.

Q: Someone requests that people who edited in 2012 stand up and be applauded.

Sue Gardner
These comments were taken from the press conference held immediately after the plenary session:

Sue Gardner repeated and then expanded upon Jimmy Wales comments on The Visual Editor. She said it was currently being beta tested in one wiki environment now for some future release.

"Editing is unnecessarily difficult," Gardner said. "We're using an older technology. And it's an open-source environment and developers of that kind of software are not typically dedicated to design and usability issues" but solving technical problems.

Other
Nicholas Bashour, local media contact (I asked the question off tape of how many countries and participants were at the conference.): He said that over 1000 people were in attendance although the final number is not yet fixed and that participants came from 87 different countries.

Talked to Valerie Aurora, executive director, of Ada Initiative. She verified information about contributing the name "Ada" in the organization name from Mary Gardiner's talk.

Wikinews' previous article on Gardiner said that she was the first woman to give the keynote and so I also repeated this point and linked to the article for continuity and appropriateness to the focus.

Wales did rattle off the names of past places Wikimania was held but it's also on the Wikimania website.

Stability, reviewability, and submission for review
I'm skittish about the state of this article. Consider how all this looks from a potential reviewer's perspective. It appears that materials needed for review were not added until half a day after it was submitted for review &mdash; which should never have happened, one shouldn't be submitting something for review until it's actually ready for review. Since then, stuff continues to be added, to the notes and to the article. If this isn't stable, or if it doesn't have adequate notes yet, please remove it from the queue until it is and does. If submission for review isn't a sign that the article is complete, that's a disincentive to risk attempting a review; and lack of stability further discourages hope about completion. --Pi zero (talk) 17:57, 13 July 2012 (UTC)

It's ready now. All notes are up.Crtew (talk) 18:33, 13 July 2012 (UTC)

Status
I'd really hoped to complete review of this tonight. Alas, not. Were I able to push on now, I'd next start the source-check. --Pi zero (talk) 03:36, 14 July 2012 (UTC)