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Why I’m working with Tor and First Look

May 20, 2015 //

So. A year ago I left my position running the Wikimedia Foundation and began the process of figuring out what to do next. (Spoiler: not yet complete.)

I had eaten, slept and breathed nothing but Wikimedia for seven years — in effect, I had embodied it. That may sound unhealthy but it really wasn’t: there was lots of overlap between me and Wikimedia, and I didn’t mind parking the stuff the job didn’t need. But it did mean that afterwards, it made sense for me to do some self-scrutiny and a kind of reset. What had been actually me versus what was just the job, and therefore what did I want to keep doing, to discard, or maybe revive.

The first thing I did was spend a month in Iceland looking at volcanoes and lounging in hot springs. That was glorious and I recommend it to anyone.

I’d guessed by the time I got back I’d be ready to dive into something, but I was wrong. And so I spent many months in a kind of lazy exploratory mode. Making risotto. Playing board games. Collecting together and synthesizing everything that is known about the gender gap in tech. (Yes, for real. It’s here.) Travelling. Reading. Giving talks. Advising friends.

And simultaneously, trying on possible futures like they were hats. Did I want to run an important cultural institution whose influence was starting to wane? No. How about a campus speaking tour? No. A start-up with a difficult business model and some tough marketing challenges? Ha. No.

My goal has always been the same. I want to work on stuff i) that’s aiming to make the world better for ordinary people; ii) that is actually making the world better, not just trying and failing. And iii) where I can personally be most useful. I care about impact and scope and scale and effectiveness. And so the question for me was pretty simple: where were the biggest and most important problems, that need help from someone like me.

Gradually that answer started to come, at least provisionally, into focus. By now we know that the internet shakeout is well underway, with power and money increasingly consolidated among a tiny number of players. As Bruce Schneier has famously said, the internet’s business model is surveillance: most of the industry makes its money by tracking and stockpiling and monetizing information about its users. (Of those who don’t, many have no obvious business model at all, which is .. not reassuring.) That mountain of user data has turned out to be irresistible to state actors and other authorities, who now find themselves able to know vastly more about the habits and activities of ordinary people than was ever previously imaginable.

This all sucks. Initially it looked like the internet would rebalance the scales and empower ordinary people, but what’s actually happening is the opposite.

So here’s what I’m going to do.

Starting now, and supported by the First Look organisation, I’m beginning two projects related to anonymity, privacy, and free speech.

The first is narrowly focused on Tor, where I’ll be developing a strategic plan for and with the Tor Project.

I’m doing that because Tor is important — it’s the most secure and widely-used anonymity-supporting software that we’ve got. Tor is controversial because (like phones and cars and banks) its users include criminals. But what matters more to me is its use by people like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. I want the organisation behind Tor be as strong and effective as possible, and so I am going to put some energy towards helping make that happen.

My second project will be to research the broader state of “freedom tech” — all the tools and technologies that enable free speech, free assembly, and freedom of the press. I want to figure out, from a user-centric perspective, what kinds of freedom-enabling technology products and services people have access to today, what impediments they’re running up against in trying to use them, what functionality is needed that’s entirely missing from the current landscape, and what kinds of interventions would need to be made in order to start getting it built. Do we need easier, faster funding, and/or other forms of support, for individuals and tiny teams? Or bigger, better-funded organisations, with expertise the space currently doesn’t have? What would move the needle? That’ll be my focus.

I’m extremely grateful to Pierre Omidyar and First Look for funding this, and to the Tor Project for being so fabulously welcoming to me. This is important work, and I’m super-pleased to embark upon it.

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Categories internet

How Wikipedia got it wrong on Chelsea Manning, and why

September 4, 2013 //
34

On August 22, the soldier formerly known as Bradley Manning announced she wanted to be called Chelsea, and recognized as female. Within an hour, the English-language Wikipedia had renamed the article and changed its pronouns. That kicked off a week-long often-acrimonious debate among Wikipedia editors, which resulted, over the weekend, in the article title being reverted back to Bradley Manning. (For further context, here’s a news story and some detailed analysis.)

This disappointed me. I think Wikipedia did the right thing in promptly responding to Manning’s announcement, and I feel like reverting the change was, for many reasons, a bad call. And, I’m dismayed by subsequent on-wiki discussions that look like they may result in revisions to editorial policy that would support, in the future, similar bad decisions on trans issues.

The purpose of this blog post though, isn’t to argue why Wikipedia should respect that Chelsea Manning is a woman. (I’ve already done that extensively this past weekend on-wiki, as have others.) The purpose is to talk about the underlying factors that I think led Wikipedia to make a bad decision, and point to where I think solutions might lie.

First, I want to question some of the frames people are currently using to understand what happened here. Some editors have been characterizing the debate as political in a narrow sense — with left-leaning Wikipedians favouring use of Chelsea and right-wing Wikipedians favouring Bradley. Others are framing it as accuracy versus kindness — saying that editors who support using Chelsea are motivated by a desire to not hurt her feelings, and are prioritizing that goal over truth. I think both those frames are wrong. I think what the debate is actually revealing is a blind spot that Wikipedia has about gender.

Last summer I drafted a blog post about Wikipedia’s coverage of rape. I haven’t published it yet, and at this point I think I probably never will: its moment may have passed. But the similarities between what I observed in our discussions about rape, and what I’ve observed over the past few days as we talked about trans issues, are I think instructive. In both cases a non-negligible chunk of our editing community, all of whom ordinarily value accuracy and knowledge and expertise, seem instead to be going on gut feeling and knee-jerk assumptions. We aren’t applying our normal judgement and standards.

On rape and trans issues, the typical editor probably doesn’t have much expertise. That’s not at all unusual — people edit on topics they don’t know much about, all the time. We fix typos, we smooth out writing styles, we dig up and add citations. What’s unusual here is that rather than deferring to people who had read and thought a lot about the article topic, as we normally do, instead a substantial chunk of the community seemed to let itself be swayed by prejudice and unexamined assumptions. (To be clear: I do not mean that a large chunk of Wikipedians are themselves prejudiced. I mean that they let prejudiced ill-informed people establish a tone, an overton window if you will, of what was acceptable to think and say.)

Here’s what’s normal: When Pluto was declared to not be a planet, Wikipedia deferred to the experts, and reflected what they said in the article.

Here’s what’s not normal: When Dominique Strauss Kahn was accused of having raped a hotel cleaner, and when Todd Akin made pseudo-scientific claims about rape and pregnancy, many Wikipedians’ discussions were (I thought) remarkably ill-informed. Some editors seemed to believe that false accusations of rape were common. Some didn’t seem to realize that rape is seriously underreported. They didn’t recognize that there’s a body of knowledge on rape that’s well-sourced and reliable.

It took me a while to connect this to systemic bias — to realize that rather than Wikipedians being unusually lacking in knowledge about what rape is and how it works, I might better understand it as me being more-knowledgeable-than-the-average-Wikipedian on the topic. Because I’m a woman, and also a journalist, I’ve followed rape issues pretty closely in the media, I’ve talked about it a fair bit with my female friends, and I’ve read a couple of dozen books and studies on it and related topics. It took me a while to realize that that level of interest, and therefore expertise, is unusual on Wikipedia, presumably at least partly because our editor community skews so heavily male.

The same is true for transgender issues. A number of editors have made truly ignorant comments over the past week or so, comparing Chelsea Manning to someone who woke up one morning believing herself to be a dog, a cat, a Vulcan, Jesus Christ, a golden retriever, a genius, a black person, a Martian, a dolphin, Minnie Mouse, a broomstick or a banana. In saying those things, they revealed themselves to be people who’ve never thought seriously about trans issues — who have never read a single first-person account of growing up transgendered, or a scholarly study or medical text, or maybe even the Wikipedia article itself. That in itself is perfectly okay: different things are interesting to different people, and I for one know nothing about trigonometry or antisemitism in the 19th century or how a planet is determined to actually be a planet. But I don’t deny that there is stuff on those topics worth knowing, nor do I mock the knowledge of others, nor accuse them of bias and POV-pushing.

Wikipedians normally don’t either. Wikipedians won’t ordinarily defer to someone just because of their credentials, but we do normally attach extra credibility to people who’ve demonstrated they know more about a topic than we do. In this instance though, Wikipedians are considering sanctioning the two thoughtful and well-informed editors who originally made the change from Bradley to Chelsea. Which to me suggests systemic bias fuelled by groupthink.

So what needs to happen now?

The entire controversy has been referred to Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee, the body of experienced editors who’ve been elected by the community to adjudicate difficult issues.

My hope is that ArbCom will clarify Wikipedia policy, and affirm that we have a responsibility to respect the basic human dignity of article subjects, to not mock or disparage them, and to attempt to avoid doing them harm. That we must not participate in or prolong their victimization.

I also hope ArbCom will weigh in on how Wikipedia handles trans issues in general. I’d be particularly interested in an examination of the role that subject-matter expertise is playing in our current discussions, and an exploration of how editors might choose to conduct themselves in disputes in which they have little expertise, and in which systemic bias risks skewing outcomes. In the Manning situation, for a variety of reasons that almost certainly include systemic bias, discussion didn’t achieve a result consistent with our desire to protect the dignity of an article subject.

So. Here’s the question. Given that Wikipedia makes decisions by consensus, how can majority-culture (male, young, Western, heterosexual, cisgendered) editors best participate in discussions in ways that work towards good decision-making, rather than groupthink?

—

For anybody reading this who doesn’t know: I’m the ED of the Wikimedia Foundation, and I’m also a Wikipedia editor. It’s in my latter, volunteer capacity that I wrote this blog post. What I say here is mostly informed by my experiences editing, but of course my experiences as ED have also shaped my opinions. Also: everything I say here, I say with lots of respect for the Wikipedia community. This is a rare misstep: an unusual and unfortunate blind spot.

Thank you to the people who vetted and gave feedback me on the draft version of this post — I appreciate it :-)

—

Edited to add, as per Aoife’s request in the comments. Here are some of my arguments in favour of titling the article Chelsea Manning. Here are some pages where you can read all the discussions we’ve been having.

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Categories Editors, Wikipedia

The people behind Wikipedia, the encyclopedia anyone can edit

January 14, 2013 //
10
CC-BY-SA

Wikipedia editors in Washington DC at our annual conference (July 2012)

(This post is a very lightly-modified version of a piece that appeared in the L.A. Times this past weekend. I wrote it because at Newfoo I was describing Wikipedians to the Times op ed editor — she found it interesting, and asked me to write it up for her. It’s also in honour of Wikipedia’s 12th anniversary, which is tomorrow.)

Wikipedia is the encyclopedia anyone can edit (yes, even you!), but most people don’t think much about who does the work. With half a billion people around the world relying on Wikipedia for information, we should.

More than 1.5 million people in practically every country have contributed to Wikipedia’s 23 million articles. More than 12,000 new entries are created every day — eight in the last minute. The authors are poets and professors, baristas and busboys, young and old, rich and poor.

It’s crazy. An encyclopedia is one of humankind’s grandest displays of collaborative effort, with contributors from pretty much every ethnicity, nationality, socioeconomic background, political ideology, religion, sexual orientation and gender. The youngest Wikipedian I’ve met was seven, a boy in Tel Aviv who makes small edits to articles about animals and children’s books. The oldest I’ve met was 73, a retired engineer who writes about the history of Philadelphia, where he’s lived for half a century. My most recent cab driver in San Francisco, a middle-aged guy who I think was Eastern European, told me he edits, although I don’t know on what topics. I don’t know of a comparable effort, a more diverse collection of people coming together, in peace, for a single goal.

But beneath that surface diversity is a community built on shared values. The core Wikipedia editing community — those who are very, very active — is about 12,000 people. I’ve met thousands of them personally, and they do share common characteristics.

The first and most defining is that Wikipedians, almost without exception, are ridiculously smart, as you might expect of people who, for fun, write an encyclopedia in their spare time. I have a theory that back in school, Wikipedians were the smartest kids in the class, kids who didn’t care what was trendy or cool but spent their time reading, or with the debate team, or chess club, or in the computer lab. There’s a recurring motif inside Wikipedia of preteen editors who’ve spent their lives so far having their opinions and ideas discounted because of their age, but who have nonetheless worked their way into positions of real authority on Wikipedia. They love Wikipedia fiercely because it’s a meritocracy: the only place in their lives where their age doesn’t matter.

Wikipedians are geeky. They have to be to want to learn the wiki syntax required to edit, and that means most editors are the type of people who find learning technology fun. (It’s also because Wikipedia has its roots in the free software movement, which is a very geeky subculture.) The rise of the dot-com millionaire and the importance of services such as Google, Facebook and Wikipedia have made geekiness more socially acceptable. But geeks are still fundamentally outsiders, tending to be socially awkward, deeply interested in obscure topics, introverted and yet sometimes verbose, blunt, not graceful and less sensorily oriented than other people.

Nine of 10 Wikipedians are male. We don’t know exactly why. My theory is that Wikipedia editing is a minority taste, and some of the constellation of characteristics that combine to create a Wikipedian — geeky, tech-centric, intellectually confident, thick-skinned and argumentative, with the willingness and ability to indulge in a solitary hobby — tend to skew male.

Although individual Wikipedians come from a broad range of socioeconomic backgrounds, we tend to live in affluent parts of the world and to be relatively privileged. Most of us have reliable Internet connectivity and access to decent libraries and bookstores; we own laptops and desktops; we’re the product of decent educational systems, and we’ve got the luxury of free time.

Wikipedians skew young and are often students, concentrated at the postsecondary level. That makes sense too: Students spend their reading, thinking, sourcing, evaluating and summarizing what they know, essentially the same skills it takes to write an encyclopedia.

Like librarians and probably all reference professionals, Wikipedians are detail-obsessed pedants. We argue endlessly about stuff like whether Japan’s Tsushima Island is a single island or a trio of islands. Whether the main character in “Grand Theft Auto IV” is Serbian, Slovak, Bosnian, Croatian or Russian. Whether Baltimore has “a couple of” snowstorms a year or “several,” whether the bacon in an Irish breakfast is fried or boiled, whether the shrapnel wound John Kerry suffered in 1968 is better described as minor or left unmodified. None of this makes us fun at parties, but it does make us good at encyclopedia writing.

As befits an encyclopedia that anyone can edit, Wikipedians tend to be iconoclastic, questioning and curious. Wikipedia is a place where debate is a form of play and people are searching in good faith for the most correct answer. We’re credentials-agnostic: We want you to prove what you’re asserting; we take nothing on faith (and the article on “Faith” has ample footnotes). We’re products of the Enlightenment and the children of Spinoza, Locke and Voltaire. We oppose superstition, irrationalism and intolerance; we believe in science and reason and progress.

The most contentious topics on Wikipedia are the same as those in the rest of the world, like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, global warming, intelligent design, the war on terrorism and people such as Adolf Hitler, Ayn Rand and Dick Cheney. We believe it’s not our job to edit Wikipedia so that it reflects our personal opinions; instead, we aim to be fair to all sides. Entries need to be neutrally stated, well-documented and verifiable. Editors are asked to avoid stating opinions, or even seriously contested assertions, as facts; instead, we attribute them to their source. We aim for non-judgmental language: We avoid value-laden words like “legendary” and “racist” and “terrorist.” If we don’t know for sure what’s true, we say so, and we describe what various sides are claiming.

Does this mean Wikipedia’s perfect? Of course not. Our weakest articles are those on obscure topics, where subtle bias and small mistakes can sometimes persist for months or even years. But Wikipedians are fierce guardians of quality, and they tend to challenge and remove bias and inaccuracy as soon as they see it. The article on Barack Obama is a great example of this. Because it’s widely read and frequently edited, over the years it’s become comprehensive, objective and beautifully well sourced. The more eyes on an article, the better it is. That’s the fundamental premise of Wikipedia, and it explains why Wikipedia works.

And it does work. On Dec. 17, 2001, an editor named Ed Poor started an article called “Arab-Israeli conflict” with this single sentence: “The Arab-Israeli conflict is a long-running, seemingly intractable dispute in the Middle East mostly hinging on the status of Israel and its relations with Arab peoples and nations.” Today that article is 10,000 words long, with two maps and six other images and 138 footnotes. It’s been edited more than 5,000 times by 1,800 people in dozens of countries, including Israel, Lebanon, Egypt, Denmark, Germany, Australia, Canada, Britain, the United States and Russia.

Since it was founded 12 years ago this week, Wikipedia has become an indispensable part of the world’s information infrastructure. It’s a kind of public utility: You turn on the faucet and water comes out; you do an Internet search and Wikipedia answers your question. People don’t think much about who creates it, but you should. We do it for you, with love.

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Categories Collaboration, Editors, Wikipedia

How to write a Wikipedia article (it’s easy)

August 15, 2012 //
17

From the collections of the Musée de la chasse et de la nature. Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SALots of Wikipedians are savants, geniuses, boffins. I am not, and I’m a pretty good Wikipedia contributor anyway — and you could be too. The purpose of this post is to show you how.

I usually start writing an article because I stumble across something interesting somewhere and want to find out more about it. If Wikipedia doesn’t already have an article, I’ll start one. That’s how I started the Wikipedia articles on the emo killings in Iraq, American chicklit novelist Laura Zigman, the type of prostitution known as survival sex, the Palestinian journalist Asma al-Ghul, and the healthcare industry practice of balance billing.

Here’s how to do it.

1.  Find a topic that interests you and which has either a bad Wikipedia article, or none at all. This is not hard, particularly if you fall outside the typical Wikipedian demographic (male, youngish, well-educated, and living in North America or Europe). There are lots of weak or missing articles on Wikipedia — here are a few: Handbag. The 17th century English Shoplifting Act. French curator Claude d’Anthenaise. American sociologist Rose Weitz. The hair treatment called marcelling. Sonic.net CEO Dane Jasper. The Marathi “bangle protection” ceremony Doha Jeevan. Mourning jewellery. The article on the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature used to be pretty weak, until I fell in love with the museum on a trip to Paris, and then fixed it up.

2.  Google it. Wikipedia doesn’t care how smart you are, or how knowledgeable — it wants you to provide a reputable source for every statement you make. So if you say The Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature is housed in the Hôtel de Guénégaud, Wikipedia wants to know how you know that. I found that fact in Let’s Go Paris, the student-traveller guidebook published by Harvard, which I found by searching for the museum’s name in Google Books. In this case, I already knew where the museum was located, but I still needed to support it with a published reference.

Normally, when I’m researching a Wikipedia article, I get my best results from Google Books (preview results not snippet results) or Google Scholar. There are guidelines on Wikipedia about what sources are okay and what aren’t, but you don’t need to obsess over this: mostly, if you let common sense be your guide you’ll do fine. And if you mess up, a Wikipedian will likely fix your mistake.

3. Assemble your facts into a decent article. Most people do this in a text editor, and then dump it into the Wikipedia edit window once they’re nearly done. You get an edit window by typing this into the addressbar of your browser: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=*******&action=edit. Replace the asterisks with your title, in mixed case.

As you’re writing, you can look at other articles on Wikipedia to see how they’re structured (like this or this or this), but you’re free to do it however you like — there are no strict rules, and if you do it badly somebody will usually help make it better. Normally articles will contain some or all of the following sections: Overview, Background or History, the meat of the article which will have a section heading(s) appropriate to the subject-matter, References, Further Reading, and External Links. But an article can be considered complete even if all it contains is a paragraph or two of text, supported by a References section.

When you’re ready, paste your text into the edit window.

4. Add citations. This used to be really fiddly and irritating (and yes, I know, wiki syntax is not at all user-friendly, and yes we are working on it), but recently some lovely person made it easier.

Put your cursor right after the sentence you want to cite, then click cite. That’ll bring up a new set of options. Click templates then select which one you want –- if you’re unsure, choosing “web” is always safe. Fill out the little form that pops up and click insert. That’ll paste the appropriate wiki syntax into your article text. (Here is something I just figured out a few months ago: If you are adding a citation to a book, copy-paste the ISBN into that field first, then click the magnifying glass to its right. The rest of the form will auto-populate, yay!)

5. Make some final tweaks. Bold the first instance of your article title, like this: The Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature is a private museum of hunting and nature located in the IIIe arrondissement at 62, rue des Archives, Paris, France. Add double-square brackets around words you want to link to other pre-existing articles on Wikipedia – usually proper nouns are good candidates for this. Like this: In the Salon of the Dogs, a collection of gold dog collars throughout the ages is displayed alongside 17th-century portraits of [[Louis XIV]]’s pets and a small white version of the Scottie dog sculpture [[Puppy]] by contemporary American ceramic artist [[Jeff Koons]].

Once you’re happy, preview your article by clicking Show Preview at the bottom of the edit window, then fix anything that looks broken.

6. Then hit Save Page. And you’re done!

Here’s some further reading……

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Categories Wikipedia

Nine Reasons Women Don’t Edit Wikipedia (in their own words)

February 19, 2011 //
178

The New York Times piece on Wikipedia’s gender gap has given rise to dozens of great online conversations about why so few women edit Wikipedia. I’ve been reading ALL of it, because I believe we need to understand the origins of our gender gap before we can solve it. And the people talking –on science sites and in online communities and on historian’s blogs— are exactly the ones we should be listening to, because they’re all basically one degree of separation from us already, just by virtue of caring enough to talk about the problem.

So below is a bunch of comments, culled from discussions on many different sites — people talking about experiences on Wikipedia that make them not want to edit. Please note I’ve only included quotes from women, and I’ve aimed to limit the selections to first-person stories more than general speculation and theorizing.

1) Some women don’t edit Wikipedia because the editing interface isn’t sufficiently user-friendly.

“Wikis are not very friendly – that’s for sure! I guess I also in the rare 15% because I have not only edited but created Wikipedia pages in the past! Like you, I wish the interface was nicer but I think the whole wiki-point is “stripped down” or perhaps it’s just “for geeks only”.” [1]

2) Some women don’t edit Wikipedia because they are too busy.

“Want to know why I’m not editing Wikipedia? I’m busy doing science.” [2]

It’s true that study after study after study has found that around the world, women have less free time than men.

But it’s worth also noting though, that a 1992 survey investigating why women didn’t participate much in an academic discussion list found that women were in fact LESS likely to describe themselves as “too busy” to contribute, than men.

“Both men and women,” study author Susan Herring wrote, “said their main reason for not participating was because they were intimidated by the tone of the discussions, though women gave this reason more often than men did. Women were also more negative about the tone of the list. Whereas men tended to say that they found the “slings and arrows” that list members posted “entertaining” (as long as they weren’t directed at them), women reported that the antagonistic exchanges made them want to unsubscribe from the list. One women said it made her want to drop out of the field altogether.” [3]

3) Some women don’t edit Wikipedia because they aren’t sufficiently self-confident, and editing Wikipedia requires a lot of self-confidence.

“I think my experience may explain some of it – I’ve never edited anything because I’ve never felt I had the necessary expertise in a subject. It was always “oh, I’m sure there’s someone who knows a lot more than me! Besides, who am I to go change what the person before me has written?” Which, now that I think about it, is a very socialised-female kind of behaviour. Boys don’t tend to be encouraged to doubt themselves and defer to others nearly as much.” [4]

“I thought I’d do something about [the gender gap], by updating a wikipedia page on an institution I’ve attended (one of the few things I have felt knowledgeable enough about to contribute to in the past). Sure enough, since I last looked (over a year ago) someone has updated the page to say that women are required to wear skirts and dresses. It’s not true, (although it may be wishful thinking on the part of some old-fashioned administrators). Still . . . I hesitated to correct it . . . because . . . because it’s already on the page . . . because I might be wrong . . . because someone more knowledgeable or influential might have written that . . .” [5]

Not everyone feels self-doubting, though: “It’s not that it intimidates me. It’s more than, well, if I spend three hours carefully composing a concise article on something, complete with blasted citations and attention to formatting consistency, the chances of it being poof!gone the next day are still high, and on top of all my work I don’t get anything back apart from the ineffable sensation of contributing to humanity’s knowledge base. I want friends who will excitedly inform me how pleased they were by my penultimate paragraph, dammit. I want a way to team up with someone who knows the markup and can help iron out problems before stuff gets published. I want a social backbone to keep me contributing and caring, one that doesn’t depend on the frequency of my contributions. Contests for “best article about birds in November”. Basically, give me a LJ-flavored wikipedia editors fan community.” [6]

4) Some women don’t edit Wikipedia because they are conflict-averse and don’t like Wikipedia’s sometimes-fighty culture.

There is lots of evidence to suggest this is true.

“My research into the gender dynamics of online discussion forums found that men tend to be more adversarial, and to tolerate contentious debate, more than women,” said Susan Herring to a reporter from Discovery News. “Women, in contrast, tend to be more polite and supportive, as well as less assertive … and (they) tend to be turned off by contentiousness, and may avoid online environments that they perceive as contentious.” [7]

This assertion is supported by women themselves — both those who don’t edit Wikipedia, and those who do:

“[E]ven the idea of going on to Wikipedia and trying to edit stuff and getting into fights with dudes makes me too weary to even think about it. I spend enough of my life dealing with pompous men who didn’t get the memo that their penises don’t automatically make them smarter or more mature than any random woman.” [8]

“Wikipedia can be a fighty place, no doubt. To stick around there can require you to be willing to do the virtual equivalent of stomping on someone’s foot when they get in your face, which a lot of women, myself included, find difficult.” [9]

From a commenter on Feministing: “I agree that Wikipedia can seem hostile and cliquish. Quite simply, I am sensitive and the internet is not generally kind to sensitive people. I am not thick-skinned enough for Wikipedia.” [10]

“From the inside,” writes Justine Cassell, professor and director of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, “Wikipedia may feel like a fight to get one’s voice heard. One gets a sense of this insider view from looking at the “talk page” of many articles, which rather than seeming like collaborations around the construction of knowledge, are full of descriptions of “edit-warring” — where successive editors try to cancel each others’ contributions out — and bitter, contentious arguments about the accuracy of conflicting points of view. Flickr users don’t remove each others’ photos. Youtube videos inspire passionate debate, but one’s contributions are not erased. Despite Wikipedia’s stated principle of the need to maintain a neutral point of view, the reality is that it is not enough to “know something” about friendship bracelets or “Sex and the City.” To have one’s words listened to on Wikipedia, often one must have to debate, defend, and insist that one’s point of view is the only valid one.” [11]

“I think [the gender gap] has to do with many Wikipedia editors being bullies. Women tend to take their marbles and go home instead of putting a lot of effort into something where they get slapped around. I work on biographies of obscure women writers, rather under the radar stuff… contribute to more prominent articles makes one paranoid, anyone can come along and undo your work and leave nasty messages and you get very little oversight.” [12]

“I used to contribute to Wikipedia, but finally quit because I grew tired of the “king of the mountain” attitude they have. You work your tail off on an entry for several YEARS only to have some pimply faced college kid knock it off by putting all manner of crazy stuff on there such as need for “reliable” sources when if they’d taken a moment to actually look at the reference they’d see they were perfectly reliable! I’m done with Wikipedia. It’s not only sexist but agist as well.” [13]

5) Some women don’t edit Wikipedia because the information they bring to Wikipedia is too likely to be reverted or deleted.

From a commenter on Pandagon: “When I read about the shortage of women writing for Wikipedia, I immediately thought of this article and the ensuing discussion and the extent to which I do not have the time or emotional energy to fight this fight, over and over.” [14]

Another commenter on the same forum: “Even if I don’t explicitly identify as female in my Wikipedia handle (and I don’t), I still find myself facing attitudes of sexism and gender discrimination, attempts at silencing, “tone” arguments, and an enforced, hegemonic viewpoint that attempts to erase my gender when editing.” [15]

Barbara Fister writes in Inside Higher Ed magazine: “Since the New York Times covered the issue, I’ve heard more stories than I can count of women who gave up contributing because their material was edited out, almost always because it was deemed insufficiently significant. It’s hard to imagine a more insulting rejection, considering the massive amounts of detail provided on gaming, television shows, and arcane bits of military history.” [16]

From a commenter on Feministing: “There was a discussion about [women contributing to Wikipedia] on a violence against women prevention list-serve I am on. The issue was that the Wikipedia entries on the Violence Against Women Movement and Act were very misleading, incorrect in some cases, and slightly sarcastic and minimizing to the work of women rights advocates. Every time an advocate would try to make corrections and update the entries, it would be removed and edited back to it’s original misleading version. I think many advocates felt like it was pointless to try and change it-or didn’t have the same kind of time and energy around it that these majority male editors have to maintain sexist and incorrect posts.” [17]

From a Wikipedia editor at Metafilter: “I can add all kinds of things to male YA authors’ pages with minimal cites and no one says a word. Whereas, every time I try to add a female YA author, or contribute to their pages, I invariably end up with some obnoxious gatekeeper complaining that my cites from Publisher’s Weekly and School Library Journal aren’t NEARLY enough, and besides, this author isn’t SIGNIFICANT enough to have an entry, who cares if she published three books? They’re not NOTEWORTHY. Meanwhile, 1-Book Nobody Dude’s Wikipedia page is 14 printable pages long.” [18]

6) Some women don’t edit Wikipedia because they find its overall atmosphere misogynist.

“One hostile-to-women thing about Wikipedia I have noticed is that if a movie has a rape scene in it, the wiki article will often say it was a sex scene. When people try to change it, editors change it back and note that unlike “sex”, the word “rape” is not neutral, so it should be left out according to NPOV. Example (this one actually ended up changing “sex” to “make love”, which, oh wow.), example. There are probably more but it’s pretty depressing to seek them out. (It’s not true in cases where the movie is explicitly about rape, like the rape revenge genre that’s got its own page, but please don’t tell me that should assuage my concerns.) There are a few other things I’ve found frustrating about Wikipedia, but discovering that feature was really jarring and made me feel unwelcome there.” [19]

A Wikipedia editor commenting at the blog Shiny Ideas: “Any woman identified as a woman who edits Wikipedia and dares to stumble into some territory some male or group of males has staked out will quickly find that the double standard lives and they will be criticized and their words twisted, even when men who say the same things are ignored or cut some slack. If they dare to persist in holding their ground or acting as equals in the conversation the criticism may escalate to insults and off and on wiki harassment. If a woman complains about a man’s incivility in its various complaint forums, her complaints are not as likely to be taken as seriously as when men complain about other men or about the occasional woman who rocks their world with incivility equal to their own.” [20]

7) Some women find Wikipedia culture to be sexual in ways they find off-putting.

From a comment on the Atlantic Monthly site from a female Wikipedia administrator: “Thankfully, I have never been harassed (much) based on my gender. But, for example, an editor with whom I frequently collaborate used to maintain a gallery of hot chicks in bikinis as a subpage of his userpage. It was ultimately deleted after a deletion discussion, but he was totally oblivious to the fact that things like that create an environment where women do not feel welcome.” [21]

“For what it’s worth, I am offended by the existence of pornography, for a variety of reasons none of which involve my being squeamish about sex,” said a female Wikipedian on the Gender Gap mailing list. “I am not offended by including pornographic images on articles about those types of images. Indeed, I expect Wikipedia to have images illustrating articles whenever possible; I don’t see why we should make an exception for articles about sexuality.” [22]

Another female editor: “In my personal experience, when I have come across material I found offensive I was discouraged from editing in the immediate area (or even commenting) and leaving my name in any way associated with the material. I personally would never generalize this discouragement to other areas of the wiki however. It hasn’t always been explicit material that I have found unpalatable. But I have always felt that there is level of material (of many varieties) on the wikis that I cannot not strongly object to as counter-mission that I wish to campaign for it’s deletion, but that I object to enough on a personal level that I will not do anything to help curate it. Certainly my participation in certain topical areas is discouraged by this. But I don’t know that this fact should be seen as problematic. Isn’t necessary that there be some pieces of material on the Wikimedia projects for every single individual to find objectionable and offensive?” [23]

And another: “I do not find sexually explicit images offensive. There is nothing inherently unencyclopedic about an explicit image, and often they do a better job than a line drawing might (see Coital Alignment Technique, for example. If that line drawing actually gives you an idea of what’s going on, you have better x-ray vision than me. A photo would work far better).” [24]

8) Some women whose primary language has grammatical gender find being addressed by Wikipedia as male off-putting.

From a female Portuguese Wikipedian: “I have no problem with the male “Usuário” (in portuguese). And sincerely, I don’t think the fact of see a male word will push me out Wikippedia. We are quite used to use a male word in portuguese when we don’t know the gender of someone, but yes, would be nice to see a “Usuária” in my page :D” [25]

And from a female German Wikipedian: “I’m one of those women Wikimedia would like to encourage (I’m interested, but I haven’t edited much more than a few typing errors anonymously). I don’t think male words will push people out of Wikipedia – that is, they won’t push out the women that are already in. But I do think that female words could encourage some of the women who are still hesitating and unsure. It says: “Yes, we’re talking to you!” I don’t feel unwanted if someone doesn’t use the female words. But I don’t feel wanted either. I someone does use female words, it feels like it’s more directed to me.” [26]

9) Some women don’t edit Wikipedia because social relationships and a welcoming tone are important to them, and Wikipedia offers fewer opportunities for that than other sites.

From a commenter at Metafilter: “Although I mostly avoid editing wikipedia because of the rampant jerkwad factor, and partially because I can’t be bothered to learn the markup to my meticulous satisfaction, a large part of my reason for not contributing my highly esoteric knowledge is that I’m busy contributing elsewhere. Fandom stuff keeps me really busy – we have our own ways of archiving and record keeping and spreading knowledge, and it’s all very skewed towards female. The few times I’ve touched wikipedia, I’ve been struck by how isolating it can feel. It’s a very fend for yourself kind of place for me. Anywhere else online, my first impulse is to put out feelers. I make friends, ask for links to FAQs and guides, and inevitably someone takes me under their wing and shows me the ropes of whatever niche culture I’m obsessed with that month. It’s very collaborative, and prioritizes friendships and enjoyment of pre-existing work over results. Wikipedia isn’t like that, as far as I’ve experienced. There’s no reciprocal culture; to just plunge oneself into the thick of things and start adding information can be highly intimidating, and there’s no structure set up to find like-minded people to assist one’s first attempts. Instead I just find lots and lots of links to lots of information-dense pages.” [27]

Edited on Sunday at noon to add: This post is being talked about on Twitter, which is prompting me to add a little more caveating here. First, I want to be clear that some women obviously do in fact edit Wikipedia: 13% of Wikipedia editors are female. I probably should’ve done a better job calling out that this post is quoting mostly women who’ve tried editing and have stopped, who never tried because of various barriers/impediments, and those who edit despite barriers/impediments. I’m grateful to the women who edit Wikipedia today, whatever their motivations or feelings about Wikipedia may be, and the last thing I want to do is make them feel ignored or invisible or like they don’t matter. Second, a couple of people on Twitter are commenting that a lot of the reasons cited here by women also apply to men. That’s absolutely true. I think Wikipedia needs to become more welcoming and accessible to everyone, and I think the quotations from women here point us towards problems that are experienced by lots of people.

[1] Source: A comment left on Mo’s Blog, “Hey gals, let’s all go edit Wikipedia!”
[2] Source: Comment from Katherine on the Discover magazine story “On Friendship Bracelets and Ninja Turtles: Wikipedia’s Gender Gap”
[3] Source: Susan C. Herring, New York Times, A Difference of Communication Styles
[4] Source: Commenter, Feministing, Quick Hit: Only 13% of Wikipedia Contributors Are Women
[5] Source: Commenter, Feministing, Why Are Only 13% of Wikipedia Contributors Women
[6] Source: From a discussion at Metafilter titled Wikipedia, Snips & Snails, Sugar & Spice?
[7] Source: Cristen Conger, Discovery News, Is There a Gender Gap Online
[8] Source: From a discussion at Pandagon titled Chronicling the Abuses
[9] Source: From a discussion at Metafilter titled Wikipedia, Snips & Snails, Sugar & Spice?
[10] Source: Commenter, Feministing, Quick Hit: Only 13% of Wikipedia Contributors Are Women
[11] Source: Justine Cassell, New York Times, Editing Wars Behind the Scenes
[12] Source: A commenter named Joyce at the NPR blog, commenting on the Eyder Peralta post Facing Serious Gender Gap, Wikipedia Vows To Add More Women Contributors
[13] Source: A commenter named Sabrina at the NPR blog, commenting on the Eyder Peralta post Facing Serious Gender Gap, Wikipedia Vows To Add More Women Contributors
[14] Source: From a discussion at Pandagon titled Chronicling the Abuses
[15] Source: From a discussion at Pandagon titled Chronicling the Abuses
[16] Source: Barbara Fister, Inside Higher Ed, Women and Wikipedia
[17] Source: Commenter, Feministing, Quick Hit: Only 13% of Wikipedia Contributors Are Women
[18] Source: From a discussion at Metafilter titled Wikipedia, Snips & Snails, Sugar & Spice?
[19] Source: From a discussion at Metafilter titled Wikipedia, Snips & Snails, Sugar & Spice?
[20] Source: from a discussion at Shiny Ideas blog, Women and Wikipedia
[21] Source: Comment from a female Wikipedia administrator, The Atlantic Monthly, What Makes Wikipedia Special? Ctd.
[22] Source: From a poster at the Wikimedia Foundation’s gender gap mailing list, February 14, 2011
[23] Source: From a poster at the Wikimedia Foundation’s gender gap mailing list, February 14, 2011
[24] Source: From a poster at the Wikimedia Foundation’s gender gap mailing list, February 16, 2011
[25] Source: From a poster at the Wikimedia Foundation’s gender gap mailing list, February 5, 2011
[26] Source: From a poster at the Wikimedia Foundation’s gender gap mailing list, February 5, 2011
[27] Source: From a discussion at Metafilter titled Wikipedia, Snips & Snails, Sugar & Spice?
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Categories Editors, Wikipedia

Some particularly interesting media coverage of Wikipedia’s 10th anniversary

January 14, 2011 //
2

Here’s some of my favourite coverage of Wikipedia’s 10th anniversary.

For Inside Higher Ed, librarian and novelist Barbara Fister traces academia’s journey from skepticism about Wikipedia (“Those faculty who weren’t personally familiar with Wikipedia worried it was full of hoaxes and lies; those who used it regularly were nevertheless perturbed that students used it just as often.”) to embracing it (“Like much of scholarship, this is a big thing done not for money, but for its own sake, a project that will never end, that has no purpose other than to gather and share information freely.”). Inside Higher Ed: Happy Birthday, Wikipedia.

In the Guardian, historian Timothy Garton Ash describes his visit to the Wikimedia Foundation’s office in San Francisco, and celebrates “an American invention which, for all its faults, tries to spread around the world a combination of unpaid idealism, knowledge and stubborn civility.” The Guardian: We’ve seen America’s vitriol. Now let’s salute Wikipedia, a US pioneer of global civility. For all its shortcomings Wikipedia, now aged 10, is the internet’s biggest and best example of not-for-profit idealism.

In the Atlantic, NYU professor Clay Shirky argues that Wikipedia has helped our culture redefine authority. “An authority is a person or institution who has a process for lowering the likelihood that they are wrong to acceptably low levels. And over the last ten years, Wikipedia has been passing that test in an increasing number of circumstances,” he writes. The Atlantic: Clay Shirky on Wikipedia’s 10th anniversary. The Atlantic also includes short essays from Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, press critic Jay Rosen, science journalist Mariette Christina, Berkman fellow Ethan Zuckerman, and others.

The Economist praises Wikipedia as “an astonishing success story,” “a useful reference work” that’s also “the most striking example of the idea that volunteers working together online can collectively produce something valuable.” It also raises three concerns: that Wikipedia contains too many inaccuracies; that it’s not financially sustainable; and that it’s lost touch with its founding ideal of being open to all. The Economist: In Praise of Wikipedia: Wiki birthday to you. A celebration of an astonishing achievement, and a few worries.

In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Oxford University Press vice-president Casper Grathwohl describes how his view of Wikipedia has evolved since its early days, and calls it “comprehensive, current, and far and away the most trustworthy Web resource of its kind.” He argues that the key challenge for the scholarly community is to “work actively with Wikipedia to build stronger links from its entries to more advanced resources that have been created and maintained by the academy.” The Chronicle of Higher Education: Wikipedia Comes of Age.

I wrote a column for the Guardian, in which I argue that Wikipedia represents the fulfillment of the original promise of the internet, that the conditions that gave rise to it may be disappearing, and that they are worth defending. The Guardian: Wikipedia at 10: a web pioneer worth defending. The greatest threat to this remarkable collaborative model of non-profit information sharing is not commerce, but censorship.

Agence-France-Press published a good solid overview of how Wikipedia works today, and describes our future plans. AFP: Ten years on, Wikipedia eyes a better world.

Wired UK’s Olivia Solon covers similar terrain in Wired UK, with a special focus on Wikipedia’s efforts to attract more editors: The battle to make Wikipedia more welcoming, part of Wired UK’s Wikipedia Week, which also includes a timeline of important Wikipedia milestones from Duncan Geere, and collects together reflections from people as disparate as Encyclopedia Britannica former editor-in-chief Robert McHenry, to Wikipedia adminstrator WereSpielChequers to Google Summer of Code boss Chris DiBona in Viewpoints: what the world thinks of Wikipedia.

In Lifehacker, Australian journalist and Wikipedian Angus Kidman describes his long-running dispute with a Wikipedia editor named Karen over the article about late-seventies Irish sisters band The Nolans, saying “what’s not always obvious are the social benefits you can derive from actually being a contributor to [Wikipedia],” and “I am not by nature a particularly tolerant or patient person, so I definitely chalk this up as self-improving.” Lifehacker: How Wikipedia Can Make You A More Tolerant Person.

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Categories Wikipedia

Happy 10th anniversary, Wikipedia!

January 14, 2011 //
3

Ten years ago today [1], Jimmy Wales typed Hello World! into a wiki, and Wikipedia was born.

Today, Wikipedia’s the fifth most-popular site on the internet, and the only site in the top 25 that provides a wholly non-commercial public service, backed by a non-profit. It’s the largest collection of information ever assembled in human history: free to use, and free of advertising. If you’re reading it, it’s for you :-)

The anniversary’s an opportunity for us all to reflect on Wikipedia: its social impact, and what we want to accomplish in the next ten years. There’s been a lot of thoughtful media coverage over the past few weeks: you can read a lot of it here.

What makes me happy about the coverage is that it seems like people’s attitudes towards Wikipedia have finally turned an important corner.

In its early years, Wikipedia was one of our culture’s dirty little secrets: everybody used it, but very few were comfortable saying so. For the longest time, the only people who openly admitted loving Wikipedia were early adopters and iconoclasts.

Today though, journalists, educators and culture critics are finally embracing Wikipedia, acknowledging that its strengths vastly outweigh its weaknesses, and that its fundamental premise works. (A reporter told me the other day that mocking Wikipedia is “so 2007.” LOL.)

So today, we celebrate all the people who built this extraordinary thing. The engineers who made the code. The people who write the articles, fix the typos, smooth the text, localize the software, answer readers’ mail, and fight off vandals and POV-pushers. The donors, who pay the bills.

I invite you to check out this page, where there are listed (at last count) 454 Wikipedia anniversary parties, conferences, film screenings and other events. If you can come to one –even if you’ve never edited or even ever met a Wikipedian– please do!

And if you can’t be with us in person, why not do a little celebratory editing? Wikipedia wants your help: here’s a really great place to get started.

Thank you to everyone who’s helped to build Wikipedia. What you’ve done is amazing. Happy anniversary!

[1] It’s the morning of January 15 in southeast Asia, as I write this :-)

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Categories Wikipedia

Wikipedia Pattern: the very young editor

November 26, 2010 //
11

As ED of the Wikimedia Foundation, I get to meet Wikimedians all over the world. It didn’t take me long to see the commonalities among them – after only about six months, I believed –probably mostly wrongly– that I could pick out Wikimedians in airports and coffeeshops. I find the commonalities among Wikimedians fascinating, and also the recurring patterns I see in different Wikimedia communities. One such pattern is the very young editor.

The average Wikipedian is in his or her mid-twenties. Lots are teenagers, particularly editors who function in “wikignome” roles. But every now and I then I run across someone who started editing at an unusually young age – for example, there’s a Korean editor who started at seven, and an Israeli who started at eight.

A few days ago at the Wikipedia Academy in Stockholm, I met another: User:Calandrella [1], who started editing Wikipedia at the age of 10. He’s now 15. He told me that when he began, the thing he liked most about Wikipedia was that it took him seriously despite his age. He was able to make whatever contributions he was capable of, and they were judged on their merits.

Today, Calandrella’s made more than 10,000 edits. He’s been active on Wikipedia, Commons, Wikinews and Wiktionary, in Swedish, English, German, Norwegian and Spanish. He’s written about Pokemon, Harry Potter, anime, manga, computer games, and lots of other topics.

We know quite a bit about why people edit Wikipedia. They have an altruistic desire to share information with other people, they like learning new things themselves, and they are fussy types who are irritated by errors and feel compelled to fix them. We know that people like Calandrella appreciate that Wikipedia’s a meritocracy.

But I think there’s something else going on for the very young editors. It used to be that unusually smart kids were typically kind of isolated and lonely, until they met others as smart as them, either in university or later. I think that one of the unsung benefits of the internet, and Wikipedia in particular, is that it makes it possible for smart kids to connect with other people who are equally curious, who share their intellectual interests, and take them seriously, in a way that would’ve been completely unavailable to them 10 years earlier. I think that’s really good for them – it opens up the world for them and makes it possible for them to start making an intellectual contribution, much earlier than they would have been able to otherwise.

[1] Calandrella, Wikipedia tells me, is a genus of lark in the Alaudidae family. Swedish Wikipedians are very very proud of their coverage of birds: they say it’s better than that of the English Wikipedia :-)

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Categories Editors, Patterns

People trust Wikipedia because we tell them not to

October 7, 2010 //
4

Tonight I went to see historian Timothy Garton Ash talk with his friend Tobias Wolff at Stanford. The occasion was the publication of Timothy’s newest book, a collection of essays and reportage loosely built around the idea that “facts are subversive.”  Timothy’s premise seems to be –roughly, loosely– that people in power are often trying to construct narratives in support of a particular economic, political or culture agenda, and that facts –even very small ones– can sometimes trip that up.

One thing they talked about was about honesty in memoirs — for example, Mary McCarthy’s 1957 autobiography Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, in which McCarthy disarmingly confesses that “the temptation to invent has been very strong,” and “there are cases when I am not sure myself whether I am making something up.” And about George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, in which Orwell wrote:

“I have tried to write objectively about the Barcelona fighting, though, obviously, no one can be completely objective on a question of this kind. One is practically obliged to take sides, and it must be clear enough which side I am on. Again, I must inevitably have made mistakes of fact, not only here but in other parts of this narrative. It is very difficult to write accurately about the Spanish war, because of the lack of non-propagandist documents. I warn everyone against my bias, and I warn everyone against my mistakes. Still, I have done my best to be honest.” (1)

This brought into focus for me something I’ve long half-recognized — both in my own experiences of reading Wikipedia, and the stories people tell me about how they use it themselves. Article after article after article on Wikipedia is studded with warnings to the reader. “This article needs references that appear in reliable third-party sources.” “This article needs attention from an expert on the subject.” “This article may be too technical for most readers to understand.”  On this page, you can see 24 common warning notices — and there are many, many more.

And I think that’s one of the reasons people trust Wikipedia, and why some feel such fondness for it. Wikipedia contains mistakes and vandalism: it is sometimes wrong. But people know they can trust it not to be aiming to manipulate them — to sell them something, either a product or a position. Wikipedia is just aiming to tell people the truth, and it’s refreshingly honest about its own limitations.

Tobias Wolff said tonight that sometimes such disclaimers are used manipulatively, as corroborating detail to add versimilitude to text that might otherwise be unpersuasive. I think that’s true. But in the case of Wikipedia, which is written by multitudes, disclaimers are added to pages by honest editors who are trying to help. They may not themselves be able to fix an article, but at the very least, they want to help readers know what they’re getting into. I like that.

(1) I looked that up on Google Books when I got home. Yay, Google Books!

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Categories Editors, Wikipedia

Four short videos featuring real Wikipedians!

September 28, 2010 //
2

Jay Walsh already wrote about these new videos on the Wikimedia Foundation blog, and I want to write about them as well. I really, really love them :-)

One of my main functions is to be a face and voice for Wikipedia — telling our story to all kinds of people, including potential partners, donors, critics, and so forth. And the least-visible part of our story has always been the editors — the people who write the encyclopedia. That’s because most readers don’t actually think much about how Wikipedia gets produced: they tend instead to imagine it as a kind of utility, like their web browser or ISP or hydro-electric service. (Like, “I turn on the faucet and information comes out.”) So from the beginning, I’ve aimed to tell that untold story — to, in effect, take readers backstage.

Why?

Partly it just seems fair: when people are reading something, they deserve to know who wrote it and why. But also, I want people to use Wikipedia, to trust it and support it. And the more they know about our editors, the likelier they are to do that.

Wikipedia’s written by smart people, 99% of whom have no motivation other than a love of knowledge and sharing. They’re not trying to sell anything, or make readers vote a particular way or believe a particular idea, nor are they trying to enrich or benefit themselves. As Jimmy said once long ago, they’re just smart geeks – the kind of people who think writing an encyclopedia is a fun way to spend their free time.

So, up until a few weeks ago, I used to tell the stories of Wikipedians by running a little slideshow of photos that I pulled off Wikimedia Commons, in decks like this one. I’d talk over them, giving the basic info – that the average Wikipedia editor’s male, in his mid-twenties, typically a graduate student, and so forth.

But now, Wikimedia’s Head of Communications Jay Walsh has made four lovely videos in which Wikipedians speak for themselves.

This first is just a kind of teaser / proof of concept — it was strung together in the edit suite to see what it would look like.

“Nice People” is intended to introduce viewers to typical Wikipedians.

“Edit Button” is part of a set of outreach materials the Wikimedia Foundation’s creating, aimed at encouraging readers to try editing.

“Great Feeling” is I think most people’s favourite — definitely, it’s mine :-)

I think these videos are really lovely. Many thanks to Jay for commissioning them, and to Jelly Helm for directing them. Jelly’s talent is shiningly, thrillingly obvious here — I’m really happy that Jelly loves Wikipedia, and that he wanted to help its editors tell their stories :-)

All four videos are on Wikimedia Commons and YouTube. They’re all CC-BY-SA. For the YouTube version, please consider supporting the open web by opting into YouTube’s HTML5 beta. And many thanks to the people who are currently translating the videos for subtitling and closed-captioning. The translated text is linked to from these pages on Commons.

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Categories Wikipedia
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