based around structured data. So this is the query builder, it builds a query for those who aren't super adept that writing their own query. So what I did is I searched instance of Park, located in the administrative territory of Kings County, that would be Brooklyn for those who aren't familiar. So what what I got was this really long alphabetical list here, where on the left or right side, you see the W D, that's the wiki data items. So each park has a wiki data item. So I looked at this list, and then I compare this list back with this, this Parks Department list. So we had both Wikipedia, wiki data and then the parks department, triple cross threat cross referencing anything that didn't have any park that didn't have an item. Then got made one. So here we go. This is the current progress already in this already in this year. We've made a 16% improvement on the wiki data items for parks and Brooklyn. I want to take it I want to take it all the way, you know 100 100% Well, what's keeping me from that? This is this is mainly this here. There's all these parks that are named Park, I'm still figuring out how to like, quantify them. Yeah. And also, this also says to me that there's a lot of opportunities to for new naming of things in Brooklyn, you know, we have over 10 Parks called Park
yes, there should be a Wikipedia page right. I agree. Dr. Text there should be a Wikipedia Park.
Okay. So I'm just gonna wrap this up here, but this is this is the plan. Yeah. We're gonna get every park in Brooklyn on wiki data. And then we're gonna get every park in all five boroughs on wiki data. Then we're gonna get every park in New York State on wiki data. I wish to this popups blocking. Oh, there we go. Yeah, we're gonna get every park in New York. State on wiki data. Okay. And then United States every park in the United States on wiki data. And then No, no that's it. Man. It's up to someone else.
Thank you.
Parks for each of us individually. That's correct.
We want to do maybe we would think it was from the different parts of the panel and so maybe the panels a little bit separated but if people want to be asked some questions to people together for a couple minutes
or stages that are hurt hurts our
people. Come in chat chat a little bit can pass. Does that make sense? Well, I think they're both
representatives of our education and outreach panel, you have any questions? Yeah.
Well, not so much a question but something I hope maybe you can elaborate on will. The fact that you're going to have this stuff in wiki data means that you could compute or at least maybe build a query to estimate how much acreage and area the parks in these various districts. So I'm just wondering if you could talk a little bit more about how having the information wiki data can help people who want to know more about parks versus non Park area in Brooklyn?
That's a really good question. That's a really good question, Bob. And now that the parks are in wiki data, there's a lot of potential to build on that. And I know that the parks department has, they have a lot of data themselves like they have acreage information that's in tables that think there's a lot of potential to now that the parks have a start of an item. There's a potential to just fill it up. And one thing that's nice about wiki data for anyone that's never used it you should it's worth checking out just type in anything you're interested in and it's multilingual. So both show how the article is interacting in different languages and also if you don't speak English there, it will do some translating so you can interact with the site. You don't have to speak English.
Education maybe.
I wanted to ask for the bird contests. I take photos of birds in New York. Will there be another one? Will you run another one? Or will there be a similar thing in the future where I can upload my photos? Not not necessarily to a contest. I will upload some of my photos to Wikimedia. But Will there be another contest or will there be more like collaborations with bird groups in New York? I
sure hope so. There are no immediate plans. This was I think they sort of last year we did one with the Prospect Park Alliance, which is not about birds, but about pictures inside of Prospect Park, including a bird prize. And then this year, the Brooklyn Bird Club. I think it's very likely that we will do more photo contests with nature related organizations. I would love to work with New York City Audubon. I would love to work with the feminist Bird Club with the Queens County Bird Club to see what we can figure out. It is a lot of work like it's time consuming to set up. It's easy for our partners which is why it's like an easy ask to open that door. But to do it properly, like we get to like look for copyright violations and categorize things, which is hard for newbies to do. And so, you know, I would if you want to help organize, then I think that would be making more likely. But yeah, I mean, I think that I would aim for myself to try to maybe organize one thing like this a year. But I'm hesitant to say that because I don't want anybody to save their photos from uploading.
Let's talk about the copyright violation stuff a little bit because people may not know what you mean by that.
Yeah, so he made it asked about the copyright violation. So with photo contests, we haven't had this be a big problem. But within the movement, there are occasionally problems where as soon as you introduce money to the equation, people try to find ways to get that money. And so we'll just Google a nice picture of a bird and then upload it and say it's mine in order to get that, you know, the few bucks so for every entry, I'm categorizing, and then I'm also doing like a reverse Google image search to see if it pops up online. And if it does, because often that's legitimate. Somebody just posted it to like Flickr before they posted to Wikipedia. Then we'd have to get them to go through this process that verifies like I have the right to upload this. But you know, we've been lucky in that it hasn't been an issue for us. But it is something that should it should create a big issue. The Wikimedia and Wikipedia communities are not terribly tolerant of contests that that leads people uploading a lot of copyright violations.
I had a question about about, about genre and writing and education. I mean, it's sort of it's interesting that people you know that having students work on something, it's like an encyclopedia, which is not something they're usually used to working on, and sort of some ways like the museum tries to be like an encyclopedia. People are used to reading things in some ways. And sometimes they're also there's things like, like, if so, the usefulness of going of going toward wiki books rather than encyclopedia to use that as like a as a parallel. So what do you find out of where you found value outside the encyclopedia format? What does it cover? What does it not cover? Maybe mitsumata Go towards and like Wikibooks.
Oh, thank you. I think that's a really great question. After we presented, so well said, I wish we could have done a wiki book and I'm like, we should have done a wiki book, right? Like, I think the way you presented Dr. X as well as your students about the process of calling that documentation and moreso centering the student, their languages, and their experience, I think is really strong. I think, because we had one day we had a one day edit that's on and it was for students who had never ever cultivated entries or edits within Wikipedia. It was a really great introduction to get them to understand. Who are we creating this content for everyone? Right, but also how do you pull sources that support your claims, and find things that are credible? I hope and I'm speaking listen to existence, that we'll get an opportunity to work more with Wikimedia to do a longer and extended program where we can do a wiki book, especially because the end of this combinative project was a zine. Yeah, so I'm like I could totally see us having a zine for Afrofuturism on Wikibooks. So we're dreaming we're dreaming today.
Um, so one of the things the data can show you but there's not that many entries on the books. And the reason for that is there's a lot of reasons but one of them is that I want the students to always volunteer to, you know, contribute to whatever. Not you know, it's not when you're a teacher, you have a lot of power. So they're like, Oh my God, I want to get the a what do I have to do? That's not how it works, right. So, so there's, it's harder when you're doing a wiki books, because the whole page is their work. Like it's, they're supposed to like when I do Wikipedia. I put together teams and they help each other. Right? So it's like a very collaborative sort of thing. Whereas here, this is what I wrote for this class. And so I have to think about whether I want to give it up because I explained to them so one of the good things, one of the many good things about Wikibooks is we have to have a big conversation about copyright. Ownership, all of those things. And I love that because, you know, I'm a writing teacher, so I want them to understand that that is there to decide what to do with, right, I cannot just take it and you know, nobody should blah, blah, blah. Anyway, so so there's a thought so there's only a portion of the students, sometimes three a semester, the various that actually say, Yes, I want to do this, and it usually entails them doing it after the semester is over. So these students are amazing. They go like sure, I will do all of this work, you know, they get their grade, and then they actually wicky fie and they add the images and send the support. So So I think that that's a big important difference in the genre. I think that the more you know, think about the birds, but here are four features of all Yeah, yeah. I mean, like you can totally have parallel projects. You can contribute to Wikipedia. And then Wikibooks allows for you to take stuff from Wikipedia and actually use it in wiki books because you know, so, so you could have a bird birds a Brooklyn book, and Wikibooks totally right. So you could have like, you know, some people doing that and some people that are not so comfortable, say working Wikipedia, working on the wiki books, and so on and so forth, and blah, blah. So I want yeah, like I said, it's more individual, which bothers me a little bit because I want the students to learn how to work collaboratively, but you know, with the pandemic, it's what it is and again, it's only a few students that actually contribute, because they have the time and etc, the willingness as opposed to the whole class.
I have a question for will, too. You talked about wiki data, and not that Wikipedia. And I wondered, do you see any evidence that your work on wiki data, it's stimulating authorship of more articles and if when you do this work, you're you're trying to put together a priority list in to kind of prioritize which parks are most worthy of Wikipedia articles. And one more question, are you capturing geo referencing data longitude and latitude? Thanks.
Yeah, I, I highly recommend. You just go on wiki data and enter the name of a local park and you'll see how a park gets recorded. In terms of that question, it's a bit of like, I might not be the most qualified to answer that. But I was like, the projects are in dialogue. And actually, it's a little hard to explain but a number of the wiki data items, I would both create, but also update like, Oh, this one has, you know, the wrong name like slightly. It's not that so and so triangle, it's the so and so square, so I would change it. And those are some of those articles were actually created by a bot that was referencing a different language Wikipedia project. So those wiki data items came from Wikipedia, about took him from Wikipedia made the wiki data item. And then now I'm adding to them and hypothetically, some a person or could take that information and put them back to a different Wikipedia language project.
That you're referencing it's been asked Ryan You're obviously a avid birder think I'm not, but I like birds. I saw an episode on HBO Sports, about the World Series of birding that takes place every year in New Jersey. And I'm wondering, your thoughts on making a say some feeder contests say in the city, five boroughs cetera,
by feeder you mean Cedral we're not birdfeeders okay, just just I just made sure. Well yeah, so I'm only vaguely aware of that. So there's the people who who like birds. Then there's the people like me who like get a little bit more serious and like want to see them all and take pictures of them. And then there's like the hardcore competitive birders, which is not a world that I'm really a part of. And so that's probably in Cape May New Jersey, which is okay, so New Jersey. It's shorter term. If you're out it may it may it may be I am hesitant to try to overlap the hardcore competitive burning with Wikipedia just I don't know. It's like a level I would I would love it if someone did that. But it's important I can take Yeah, it's kind of hard. You know, you get into like, more levels of data than actually looking at the animals and comparing lists and, and going out for 16 hours and waiters and going through the mud and it's it's serious business. But it's a good tip. I will look at it and see if we can do something. Or different different area.
Okay, thanks.
Oh, that's the front. Sorry. Do you need the mic? You
were saying that the Wikibooks because it's a structured less like it's structured more like a straightforward and like a beginning and end that they can be you know, printed and have physical copies to wear. So that where Wikipedia can be accessed as well. You know, can get that information. Is there any sort of program or structure that actually like gets that done? Or is that something that hasn't really been?
Well, all the wikis? I don't know if all the way is but at least Wikipedia. Definitely wiki books right? Which billion wiki books that you can download them as PDFs and put them together? Like you can. There's a program on the left hand side on Wikipedia, so that was
removed. Was that removed? Yeah, like the books function on Wikipedia. Somebody out there might know better. Yeah, I think it's gone.
Oh, but you still can download them as PDFs. Yeah. Right. So any article in Wikipedia you can download this PDF. So you could you know, loosely put a book together of the articles. Right?
I meant I meant like, that one, like a program that like gets wiki books or you know, physical versions of Wikipedia to somewhere where that maybe, you know, more helpful than, or more easily access than Wikipedia.
I think maybe I've seen some examples. Just you know, in general, I've seen some examples people using it for like, physics or biology textbooks or something something like like textbook the textbook anymore, but it's it's something that people have been playing with in different areas.
Yeah, sorry. I didn't know I don't know how to answer your question very well.
I think maybe I want to I was wondering like how has using wiki tools for your projects, either, like further develop, like the reach that you could have with those projects or like your ideas? Like how is that process with working with your wiki tools? impacted your, your your projects?
Just gonna show you just to give you an idea. So I love David Butler, because because you know why?
So over the years, my students have been this article that you see here with her biography, and please, if anybody knows how to get a better photo of her please a beggary. Right, because it's the one thing that we haven't been able to change. A this article was written by my students at LaGuardia, like the whole thing. And of course, as you know, whenever you look at an article, you can actually see the pageviews right. So how many people look at this article? So right there, you can see and you can show that to the students that are working. You can say, look, I read your paper. I don't know maybe your mom reads your paper, the tutor reads your paper here. You can actually make an impact, right? And a big one, right? Even if you just contribute two paragraphs, right that that already you know, along with everybody else is making this accessible to an incredible amount of people. So yeah, so page, the page views guy said you ever teaching you want to show people what the impact is? Yes.
As another example, sure. Yeah. So
yeah. So with the archives work that we've done with Dr. X and and we were fortunate enough, I was fortunate enough to work with one of my students who's actually sitting in the back. We met with some members of the French government at an event and we gave like little lightning talk of our research and he gave us his business card and he was like, Hey, let's work together some time. So we're sets going on into work. So that's one way, you know, doing this kind of impact. Anything really another thing is I've worked with two students from Virginia Tech. Right, and their data scientists so we're planning together of how to use the archive and Wikipedia entries to use that as data entry points. So that's also also in the works. So then it means hijack, but just do is from the archives.
Add one quick thing to that. Just to add one quick thing to that idea of, of increasing impact to a classroom project. There's actually a tool that classes can use called the dashboard, where you input all of your student names. And it keeps track of not just the articles that they're editing, but how many page views had been, had been received by those articles, and how many words have been added to those articles. So you can actually quantify in real time, how much difference your students are making. You can do that for edit events too. It's kind of open to any event would like to people contributing.
Thank you, panel, think well, we're gonna move on to the lightning talks. Thank you so much. If anybody does have any Verizon interested in using Puppet in the classroom when opportunities to use to be affiliate your class with the wiki Education Foundation, it's it's a it's a nonprofit. I'm one of the board members of it. And officially the last day to register your class for the upcoming semester is tomorrow. So if you want to, if you want to go to Wiki edu.org It's free to register your class and they'll they'll provide some remote assistance to your class to see if they can work on on on Wikipedia or wiki data projects. I think we're gonna start a lightning talks. We're going to maybe skip a couple and we're going to start with with with Lego KTM. And speaking about speaking about non billionaire on social media, so that's a topic that's come up recently and maybe there's a wiki solution or wiki wiki online session. Yes, please do. And if anyone else has if anyone else has read is here and ready to give a lightning talk just can you sort of raise your hand a little bit? Yeah. Everyone else ready to give you I got Yeah. So I think we have at least two or three of the people. Great.
I don't know how you know how
to sorry. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Like I was also going to see if we can fix this annoying Smart TV thing. Because the TV does not have to advertise it. It's a smart TV. 24 hours a day.
We believe you.
Business braggadocious TV that keeps things Smart TV.
mode. I was trying to set it to home mode but not to get rid of the pop up
okay, we're gonna, we can fix it before our big presentations. Not that our presentations have so far been pretty big. But be slightly improved the next round
real remote for it.
Does it does it not have batteries or something?
I'm sorry.
Is this being recorded because you're asking that? Yes, again, is there there aren't gluten free pizzas but we can get you some gluten free food but it's it'd be a little bit difficult at this time but but let's let's let me we can order you something.
Let's sorry.
You can. If it's possible, you can you could do yourself something we could we could we could compensate we can reimburse you if you want to if you want to order something and we could reimburse you if that's if that's No, it doesn't look free Sorry. Yeah I'm sorry
okay, we're getting this is appearing.
I'm ready. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Oh, yes.
Okay. You have 60 seconds to stretch.
Good to start. Okay. Hi, Ron. Hi everyone. My name is Lego KTM or Kunal? I'm here to talk about non billionaire controlled social media. Non billionaire controlled social media. So to start out with I have three possibly hot takes. First, when I want to hang out with my friends. I don't ask a billionaire for permission on what I can say info I can hang out with. Second, not everything that people post should remain public forever. And third, individual communities are better at making their own content moderation decisions, then overworked and underpaid contractors who lack context. And so by now I'm sure all of you know that Twitter was bought by Elon Musk. But the problems that he caused are actually not very new. He's really just done a better job of shedding light on some of the arbitrary decisions that giant social media companies make. The same problem existed with you know, Jack Dorsey at Twitter earlier and with Facebook, with Tumblr, and with really all corporate billionaire own social media. So I want to talk to us about an alternative which is called what you've heard of as Macedon or the fediverse. The fediverse is a network, a network of interconnected servers that talk to each other. It's very similar to email. It doesn't matter what email server you use, you can email someone else who's on Gmail, Yahoo, whatever, you know, if you run your own mail server, and they can email you back you don't have to be on the same closed network. Macedon is the most popular software implementation, but people modify it or they fork it to their needs. Macedon is focused on microblogging like Twitter, but there's also pixel fed which is similar to Instagram. But more on photo sharing. There's also write freely, which is more for long form blogs. And there's peer two, which is for videos. But all of these services are interconnected. You can follow people on one of them and their posts will show up on your feed regardless of which software implementation you're using. And so one of the nice things is that people run individual servers for you to be on there some big servers or some small server, some are regionalised. Like there's some for latest one for like San Francisco Bay area. There's another one for Australia. There's one for Canada. There are thematic servers there used to be a general like technology server. There's you know, there's free software servers. And so what I want to talk now is is wikis world, which is the server for people who are interested in wikis run by myself and two other people Tavi and Lucas, who are pretty active comedians and we have about 80 people on the server, who post different things and I'm going to just slowly scroll through some of the different things that people post. It's in a bunch of different languages. It's not just English people talk in their in their native language and you can set it to filter out you know, the language as you speak, or you can be like me and read all of them. And there are some, like chapter and organization accounts and they're also a bunch of individuals that talk about different things. It's a very chill place. It's it's not like people fighting with each other. It's just people talking, having discussions and their disagreements, but it's all it's all pretty respectful. People talk about what is going on in their lives. It tends to focus like free knowledge and free culture, but you know, people will just post about like, they're at the train station and they saw on something cool one of the big distinctions of this is that the timeline is largely chronological based. It's not, you know, some secret proprietary algorithm that boosts you know, hateful things, you know, so to get reaction out of people. And as a result of this is that you tend to engage with more people. I regularly get way more boosts and likes than I would on Twitter. And more importantly I get comments, people are replying to me asking for more details pointing out other things, and then I will boost those people and continue the discussion. Overall, everyone I've spoken with has had the same experience of getting way more traction on Macedon and this adverse than they would on on Twitter or Facebook. And that is, that is pretty much it what I wanted to talk to so if you're interested in joining wikis world and posting your content, come find me either here or online. I can give you an invite code and the other great part about it is that you don't have to be on wikis world to participate in the community. You can join any Macedon or fediverse server and you can follow people on our network or anywhere else. Thank you
next lady talking to us thank you stay here. Our next talk is gonna be remote if you could help us is on YouTube. I just sent you a link on Discord. Yeah. Yeah, sorry.
Sorry to hijack the our previous presenter this audience should I actually give it one machine? Should I give you the link
on the computer, okay, we'll try that. We'll see how it works. Some things it'll work alright. It says got it. It goes to HD as well. They said
it might not have sound working
at the same time. So watch second. Let me send it to you.
Yeah, I'll give you I'll give you a message. I'm just guessing your message. Okay.
Got it. Yes, Facebook messages.
Okay, you want to count? Okay. Anyway, use this briefly. So this is this is a tool that's being done by folks working with NYU, NYU folks at NYU and with Wikimedia Foundation. It's called wiki Atlas. It's combining wikidoc geographic information, which is quite extensive on like things like historical sites with OpenStreetMaps data, which is has greater coverage of things like transportation infrastructure, and sort of trying to mesh those together. To provide thematic Atlas. And it's a really nice tool. It's something that I hope that, you know, we can develop in the New York area. If I could give a half a lightning talk. We have some thoughts about maybe having some developed new york city maps, New York City borough maps, maybe using some of this technology and setting up some public interactive kiosks where you get like a big touchscreen where you could move around see what what's what's in your burrow, the your historic sites encourage people also to edit to add to to add to what's on wiki data and what's an Open Street Map. And hopefully this can be a tool for that and for all sorts of other things too. And if we can get to play properly, that'd be great. Jolly, do you have it in the back? Okay, okay, should we count down 321 Go
but I'm not getting the other cap. We're gonna get some technical help up here. Yeah. Okay, can we have we have another volunteer? See, you're doing right yeah. Sorry. To help with your laptop and get the audio working in the video working Thank you.
Is that a volunteer in the back? Volunteer in the front. Okay, volunteer. Work in the end.
Thank you. Can we get you the best way to message you?
Apologize?
How many techies in a room together?
Okay, I'm sending you they're sending you
the YouTube and just set it up.
Okay. Hello, okay. Okay. Oh, what's
No, we're not ready. We have we've gotten a little bit backward and we're trying again. Okay.
Yeah, write tests.
For this is the joy of hybrid conferences.
I will be presenting to you the wiki Atlas project. We wish you Happy Wikipedia day.
Okay. Now let's just sync the video
okay,
let's count the five. Oh, you don't see on the screen. Is it
okay
yeah, I probably pull this up. We publish it down a little bit. Thanks. Okay. Yeah, we have a whole Hold on a second. Is it not coming on the screen? Okay,
let's Should we try the other way again?
Sorry. Behind you there's a box on the floor behind
okay Okay, thank you.
Okay, we're, we're pulling on the shades a little bit. We're getting a lot more comfortable. And we're gonna have our video.
Yes, thank you. Great. Yeah. I say we're gonna we're gonna jolly we're gonna do in the count of five.
Okay, and we're gonna play and Julie's gonna play the same time. 54321
goes. I'm connecting for from Sofia, Bulgaria and today I will be presenting to you the wiki Atlas project. We wish you Happy wiki DNA. And let's jump straight into the project description because time is short. What is wiki Atlas? Well, not just a visualization project, but really an interactive cartography tool that enables Wikipedia article discovery by direct reference to geography. It's currently accessible through the web, but the aim is to introduce other mediums for content exploration particular mobile and augmented reality mediums. And we believe this exploration will lead to an amazing way to explore the world through Wikipedia, of course. Why would you Atlas? Well, our goal is to fill the gap in knowledge maps, people are using tools like Google Maps to search for food, bars, explore new cities and so on. You have other tools as well, like OpenStreetMaps have the goal of crowdsourcing useful location street network, original information. But there are not many tools out there that are widely used that focus on knowledge and Wikipedia is a perfect perfect platform we believe to realize this. Through wiki Atlas, we want to enable a powerful with a powerful connection between geography and knowledge for educational purposes. Well, history is being taught primarily through reading books. And we would like to see what actually is practice in France education, where history and geography are actually one course to actually manifest through our two as a practice as well. And as the third line of why we want to have wiki Atlas. commonly use is we would like to explore and experiment with new ways to enable information exchange on Wikipedia information crowdsourcing and consumption. This is the first version of the project. We're in Amsterdam. The gray rectangles are Wikipedia articles with geographic information. This is what wiki Atlas is taking those articles on Wikipedia and putting them on the map, and then exploring knowledge through this map medium. As I said, this is the first version. The URL seems the same. You can see the bottom right description of it and you can go and play around with the tool. Initially, we we would have some basic filters to allow people to search through keywords or to enable exploration of different cities by having a search search box like the one that you see on the top right. Or the new version. We took a fresh take on design, much better design process. Of course it wasn't not designed by me but a much more capable UX and web design person we also added some new information about the articles like the categories of those and allow the search by category. You can now search by popularity as well. And you can also create an account and create collections of articles so article playlists in a way. Again, feel free to play out with the tool and give us information about what you like what you don't like what we can improve and new ideas and also you're welcome to contribute as well. So what's next improved? Spatial filtering in terms of accessibility with natural language SQL and AI tools? So a named things like allow people to search for an article by saying, to search for articles by saying so I mean, all museums in New York or another city we would like to allow users to add information through co editing articles and really experiment with new ways to contribute to Wikipedia. And we would like to maybe use wiki Atlas in classroom and educational settings. So let me take a moment to close with reference to the mobile app which you can read more in this archive article here. The idea is a user is exploring the city with their phone, they're pointing their phone at a camera to building and then with an AI system, we're able to retrieve the Wikipedia article related to that building. Last but not least, let me thank all the contributors to these projects and wishing you a great rest of Wikipedia day.
Can I use your laptop? Cool. Everybody has this tradition or behind time on what's next? But that's okay. Here's another tradition that's coming better. me giving a tech demo. So I used to ever since I started going to these like, Boy since 2015. I've been having a script or tool or something. So this year is no exception. I got a little demo. So on Wikipedia, we are all somewhat obsessed with our own edit count. For some reason. We are frequently looking it up. I don't know why maybe it's like, Oh, I've contributed to all these things or whatnot. So it's important that we have like a useful tool for that. Unfortunately with a lot of users with tons of edits, it's a little bit difficult to get an edit count because the tools sort of like die after you've made you know, hundreds of 1000s of edits or whatever. So recently I've been annoyed with this. So I wrote a little thing. Let me type with both hands
see you don't have to. Oh, nice. Yeah, it looks terrible. istyles comes comes later whatever. So let's actually pick a pretty fun example of his username on a post it note because I always forget. So this is the user with the most edits. And until today, you actually haven't been able to put his username into the regular edit counters, because he has too many edits. So let me check that I got that right and hit enter. Yeah, that'll take a while. I have a lot of time. All right. There we go. So check this out 5 million edits. A matter of seconds. This like the other out of counters would just like refuse to give your results. So here if the first time his pie chart, now he's made 4.2 million edits to articles. And over the years, you can actually see he's been speeding up as the years go on. I don't know how he does it. I asked if he's writing it. He's already done 6000 edits in the first few days of January. Don't get it rock on. Here's his monthlies. He makes more. He's made more in last month than I've ever made. But I'm sure that's true for a lot of people. So yeah, this is up. You can see at the top, it's horrifically buggy and all the numbers are a little bit wrong, but that's okay. It exists now. So fun using it, I guess the kinks worked out. That's my lightning talk.
I'll put it on the case for independence.
I'm hooked up
so
hi everybody. Can you hear me loud enough? Yeah. I am use Plex rational on Wikipedia. Kind of do a little of this little of that. I like to call myself a content creator but I do slip into the backend quite a bit more as of late but today I wanted to give a lightning talk about one tool that probably most of you know about, but has quite a few Nish uses on Wikipedia, the lovely Wayback Machine web.archive.org. So, as the name would suggest basically it takes snapshots of old web pages that may no longer be with us. And seeing it as verifiability as a central policy to Wikipedia. And I'm sorry statements can last a lot longer than they ought to in our collective opinion. One of the ways to remedy that is to see if we can find a permanent URL for a web page after it may have gone down. And this is one of the main tools for doing that. There's a whole page about this Wikipedia link that tells all the technical details. I opened up this category articles with dead External links. We see here some 300,000 Plus articles have some statement whose verifiability may be in question now since its original source is good. Thankfully there's a solution. I picked this article randomly from category articles with dead External links as of this month. There are monthly categories of this sort, going back like 2005 or something we see here for example, at the bottom of this page, there's this reference to a Catholic News Service website. That has been flagged as a dead link. What's what's making it do what? The yellow green? That's userscript I use for new page reviewing to assess according to consensus how reliable a source is. Red means unreliable, generally unreliable. Yellow means maybe green means usually considered reliable, but that's just a small subset. So here's how you would copy and paste the URL from whatever source you have turns out this one was saved once March 4 2016. And voila, this is the website as it was. It's not very detailed. I don't know if this is what the author intended but nonetheless, could show quickly how we fix it. I am broadcasting and edit to the world for the first time ever.
Blink Yeah, this one. This one here doesn't use a citation but but thankfully that's a pretty easy fix.
This first comment indicates that the original source website is dead. You could also technically add archive links for live pages you just write live and include a link I'll conveniently note that Internet Archive generally archives a page pretty soon after a link is added to Wikipedia. I don't know exactly how fast if it's hours or days or weeks but it's generally there. Thank you.
Preview now, here the site itself changed now we have by default the archive link. And here is should there ever be a chance that the original site comes back online the original URL and the date at which the snapshot was taken.
And now that category has one fewer article in it
thank you. I just wanted to then make one final note about another news or two for the Internet Archive. If it's going a lot going back to something that was raised earlier copyright violations. It's a pretty complicated matter. But one thing that you may notice soon enough is that some sources actually copy themselves from Wikipedia. And don't properly attribute it. So something that may be flagged as a copyright violation could in fact, be originated on Wikipedia. Sometimes this tool can be useful in snuffing out for example, if either an original source existed before it was the text was published on Wikipedia or after it like if something as added in 2011 but was thoughts elsewhere on the web since 2005. You're pretty sure that the other website had it first. And the same goes the other way around. For example, one discussion I had online yesterday about a possible copyright violation. But I discovered a published source that was brought up the date of 2013 but the text existed on Wikipedia since 2000. So I'm pretty sure in this case, there's no cause for concern. So if any of you are feeling like detectives, this is one possible line of work
thank you
let's see. Okay, cool. This could be a
happy, happy Wikipedia day. Also happy anniversary of the time. 2.3 million tons of molasses spilled in Boston. So fun fact. I think that the anniversary the 20 year anniversary of my favorite Guardian headline isn't coming up Wikipedia so absorbing, you'll end up reading about greyhounds, Italian greyhounds, which is kind of a diss to Italian crayons. I think my talk is about games. I only have a few minutes so I'm just gonna rapid fire through some games that you can play using Wikipedia. Is Wikipedia all fun and games to me. Um, no but also, yes. So wikipedians wikimedians love games. There's a story of the early days of Wikipedia, people playing chess using the Wikimedia servers that was banned. Some of you are nodding, maybe you were the ones that were playing chess. There's also wiki quizzes which has not been very active for a while. There's a wiki like committee have fun. There's a lot of gamers and the most popular I think is wiki racing. Some of you are nodding you click the links. You start on one article, you click hyperlinks and get to a very disparate article. There is this is not this is not walk racing. Which is a German tradition of bobsledding in a walk. I learned that this morning. That is different. There are many variations of wiki racing, and some people get very competitive about their respective variations. But anyway, it's all related to the idea that you can connect different topics with like these hyperlinks, which has been happening for a very, very long time. Some people play six clicks to Jesus, other people play six clicks to Hitler. The whole idea of speed running by clicking hyperlinks is not unique to Wikipedia. People on the Internet get a lot of traction for speed running IMDb suggestions, speed running Apple TV suggestions, you start at Forrest Gump and you try to click to the dark night. Some people make it harder by not using the United States not using Ctrl F no using the back button. Some people add a fun facts clause once you get to the destination, or share something you learned. And some people click the random article with their friend next to them and then they race to get to each other's article. Dear here's a few years who have gotten a lot of following from speed running Wikipedia, it is unclear if they edit Wikipedia. But in my experience, I have not vandalize Wikipedia. So that's good. And I do think that the one thing about Wikipedia culture that this makes you realize is that there are hundreds of 1000s of orphaned articles, articles that are not linked to by any other article. Which is an impossible destination if your wiki racing. Isn't there are also a lot of websites that have popped up. A variation of getting to philosophy thing if you click the first link in an article after the IPA translation part, often according to this study, 97% of the time, you'll end up at philosophy. That's kind of interesting. There was a game that is in stores called the game about Wikipedia. There are two there are three exciting ways to play each one. The first is trivia The second is guessing which has more pageviews and then the third is they give you a disambiguation and you have to guess all of the different things that could share the same title. redact ITIL is a game that popped on the scene earlier last year after in the world craze. I play this one all the time. It's very fun. And the idea is that you get this massive redacted Wikipedia article, and then you guess word by word. And eventually you'll start having more ideas of the category of article this could be and then hopefully by the end, you get the title and that is the use I think it's like one of the vital article categories so it's not gonna be anything that's crazy obscure. There's wiki tree, Tom Watson, this is one where you you get certain articles. And then you have to put them in order of like chronological order. It gets really really hard. Some are really easy. What happened first the fall of Rome or like the MTV Music Awards of 2013. And it's very obvious, others are really tricky. And so that's fun. And it also if you notice a mistake, which happens a lot you can go in wiki data and fix that yourself and Tom Watson who made the game made it pretty easy for people to do that. So that's a good intro for people. Mahmoud Hashemi, who is the guy who created a bunch of very cool wiki pedia data projects, such as listen to Wikipedia, if you've ever seen that he told me about this new app called landmark GL, which is where you use the wiki Atlas that we saw in the video. And I don't think I have any pictures but it gives you a landmark. You see the picture of the landmark and then you have to scroll in on the map and try to guess where that landmark is. I'm very bad at it. But there's wiki arena and with this game, you get two articles. And you have to guess which one is longer. Or you could guess which one gets more views. And this one I was shocked to discover that the Welsh get Wikipedia gets way more views than this bay and the Amazon golf. Wiki polls is not really a game but it's a very fun way to show page view data. For example. This isn't entirely clear But Rebecca Black who sang the song Friday, her article gets way more views on Fridays and then eggnog gets way more views at the end of the year. Another page that's not really a game but could be this is more just a fun fact for you this this is used for the Cleopatra article. And there's been more attention about this lately, but for a while people were really wondering in early 2021 What is going on here? Are people just obsessed with Cleopatra now, but the answer was that Android phones started suggesting it Try saying show Cleopatra on Wikipedia. So there was that there was a discussion on fabricator. Do we take this out of the rankings is clear. Is it fair that Cleopatra is in the top 10 every single week when Joe Biden got elected on Spanish Wikipedia, the top viewed articles Cleopatra and then Joe Biden, which to me is funny. So it was so for a while I took out Cleopatra from the rankings, but then decided, actually these are real human views so then they put Cleopatra back in. Anyway, that's not really a game. Now we're gonna talk about the games that are not really fun. They're kind of like the game I used to play as a kid with my dad called who can pick up the most toys in 10 minutes. So these are really tools dressed up as games, citation hunt, where you are given a random citation needed paragraph and then you either I got this or next. That's a fun way for like newbies to start editing Wikipedia when they have truly no idea where to start. There's another one that uses the wiki Atlas software, and it's called wiki shoot me a kind of a violent name for a very not violent thing which is that you look at things that are nearby, and the colors correspond to whether or not they have photos. So I noticed that this morning, near my apartment, there's like all these things that don't have photos and so I can go and take photos of them. And that's really cool. And this is a really cool website to show people that haven't edited Wikipedia before because this is so doable. You can add structured data statements, really fun thing to do after a long hard day. You can reference hunt, depict whether the image would decide whether the image depicts the name item, all sorts of things. In the wiki data dash game, part of tool Forge. And so yeah, the question is, is Wikipedia just a game to me like the future of knowledge is at stake. But probably yes, there's a whole internal essay about how Wikipedia really is just a massive multiplayer role playing game and there are 80,000 orphaned articles undiscovered secret areas and there are fully excavated dungeons which are just good articles and legendary dungeons as well. So it really all is just a game to me. Anyway, that's that's my games talk. Thank you so much
yeah, I didn't. The list I had before wasn't complete. So I should put a like a list of the links to the things I talked about. Cool.
leveraging data
right, come on set up. Can you all hear me okay if I just use the this. Alright. Well, thank you so much for having me. I'm an Hahnel Chen I'm an assistant professor at Bard College. And this is my very first Wikipedia day. So thank you so much to Richard for the invitation to be here and share some of my work with you. I am in addition to my kind of pedagogical role at Bard College, I am also the international digital directory robos archive director and that's the work in progress initiative that I'm going to be talking to you about today. So my plan is to first give you kind of a brief overview of the goals of our project and then demonstrate what we see as the promise that our approach holds for cultural heritage sites whose excavation and collection history is entangled in colonialist dynamics, where there's a wealth of dispersed and previously unintegrated legacy data and substantial challenges presented by inconsistent naming traditions. So idea, short name for our project is a digital archival integration and recontextualization efforts centered on the archaeological site or your robos, which is generously funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. In antiquity, Duryea, Robles was located on the changeable cusp between the Greco Roman and Persian territories. excavations at Site began a century ago, when Syria was governed by the French mandate. So French and American institutions funded and manage the work in its early phases, while an Arab workforce carried out the backbreaking physical labor for low wages under what were often dangerous conditions. Famously, Dora is the site of the earliest archaeologically known and documented Christian Church, as well as the most elaborately decorated synagogue from antiquity. Unique presentational circumstances also mean that the site is a unique preserver of the sorts of panic evidence that long ago perished elsewhere in the ancient Mediterranean world, as a site on the border between the Greco Roman and Persian domains, whose evidence tells us that the population was multi linguistic that multiple religions were practiced side by side. It's a site widely regarded across many different disciplines archaeology, art history, classics, religious studies, just to name a few. It's regarded as a key resource for understanding the ancient world and as such, it's important that high quality information pertaining to the site is made as available and readily concert comprehensible as possible. But for a site that is regarded as a singular primary source by so many different communities and disciplines, its particular excavation and collection history, presents a number of difficulties that will likely sound familiar to familiar to others who have worked at sites rich in legacy data content related to the excavation of dura Europos both artifacts and archival materials is physically dispersed into a number of collections across the world. So I'm showing you here a map that marks the distribution just of the dura artifacts. This map would be even more complex if I showed you all of the archival collections that have content related like personal papers and correspondence related to Dora. In our case, the colonialist dynamics at the moment of excavation landed a vast number of artifacts from the site in western collections, some 15,000 Euro artifacts and the all of the paper archives connected to the large scale excavation of the site are physically located in western countries with Yale University Art Gallery known as you ag for short, holding the largest proportion of those. The rest of the artifacts uncovered by the Joint French American excavations in the early 20th century reside in the National Museum in Damascus, as agreed under the terms of the portage at the time of excavation. Recognizing inequalities and access to travel, you egg has been in the vanguard among collections and making its artifacts and archival documents available via Open Access databases online with high quality imagery and other Western collections that hold smaller numbers of during content that followed suit. This has been an important foundational step that allows us now to begin thinking about how to go from availability of online content to increased accessibility and discoverability of the digital content that institutions have now provided. Currently, online institutional databases providing access to digital surrogates for content in an institution's collection usually have to be searched independently, and are usually cataloged in the language of the host institution. Meaning that much of the material related to Dora is searchable only in English, with some of it in French, much of the digitized content that would allow one to draw on the site of Duryea robos for one's research, whether that be for purposes of research on antiquity or to the more recent periods to which the site bears witness has not been discoverable in Arabic. An ethnographic project led by my colleagues at Birkbeck college in the UK has documented local Syrian the local Syrian populations ongoing relationship with the archaeological ruins and is noted frustration among locals. That information generated by scholars in the West has not been shared back with the local community. Part of the difficulty of integrating and making independent databases inter searchable is the problem of inconsistent naming traditions. Both the naming conventions for the site itself and for features within the site have often shifted over time due to chronological changes in naming conventions, linguistic differences in names, or even interpretational conflict about the identification of a particular building. Following on from that each institution or database with content relevant to a given place or specific feature within an archaeological site may use different versions of a place name in their own cataloging practices, which makes it difficult for speakers of any language to be sure that they've located all the content relevant to their area of inquiry, and also to confidently identify where an object was found according to object metadata. Or to be sure which building is referenced by an archival photograph or drawing. Cataloging language and choices regarding what name to call a site by are both important subjectivities and metadata that we don't often talk about as subjectivities cataloguing language and the choice regarding what name to call a site can in turn bias the digital discoverability and therefore the accessibility of that content. So I'm willing to wager that everybody in attendance has had the experience or almost nobody in attendance has had the experience of searching a collection database for content related to a place name, returning zero results. Researching with another language is variation on the spelling of that name. And then returning hits on the second search. That is the problem of discoverability. So how easy is it for someone to find the content related to their topic of inquiry? Now, imagine that an institution holds archives related to a topic of interest and is just made all of those digital surrogates available open access online. In the scenario, however, all the metadata for those archival materials is not only in a language you don't understand, but also in a wholly different script than the one you normally communicate in. How likely is it that a scholar or a member of the educated but non specialist general public would be able to surface the fictional institutions digital content while searching about this topic of interest online? So even with cultural heritage content online, it's not necessarily readily discoverable and easy to understand for all of the stakeholder audiences. So our project idea is therefore trying to bridge some of those gaps using linked open data, and specifically wiki data. Since you're attending this gathering, you probably already have some sense of linked open data or LOD for short, and the basics of how it works, but very quickly, in case you don't, the very simplified idea of linked open data is that structuring metadata according to some shared principles that allow for a lot of flexibility and implementation can ideally allow for data to speak the same computer based language behind the scenes, no matter what human language is used in cataloging. Structuring data according to LOD principles, ideally, allows computers to understand complex information and infer relationships between various topics, people contexts, publications, datasets, and the like. More like humans, thus enabling you to answer more complex questions in much more accurate ways than ever possible before. I've kind of tried to schematize this concept for you here with some of my my slides. So imagine that you've got three separately cataloged and curated sets of digital information managed by three different entities. The two institutions on the left have records for items associated with places marked in blue LOD would allow these two databases not only to talk to one another, but also to talk to the geographic database on the right, ultimately allowing the computer to infer that the objects in the separate institutional databases are in fact associated with the same place.
So the vision of LOD would ultimately create a web of data that allows interconnections among different ideas, people places, things, events, datasets, such that a human and a computer can kind of crawl through it to understand how data managed by institutions or entities may have points of overlap. Within this ecosystem, data from separately conceived, but tangentially related projects can be easily reused to mutually enrich both original datasets. So integration of duras linguistically, and materially diverse data into the LOD ecosystem, offers a way to digitally Rican reconstitute archaeological assemblages and their contexts, and make those artifacts and assemblages more easily discoverable in a host of World Languages, while also offering up the site's data for open reuse within other projects with different diachronic. Geographic thematic or comparative emphases. So what does that all mean? I'm getting to that. So in developing the idea of project we were particularly concerned to develop a project that could serve multi linguistic users open dura data up for collaborative curation with stakeholder audiences that have not previously had access to it. And we're thinking primarily of Arabic speakers and allow for the integration of the Damascus direct elections at some later date since the civil war in Syria has precluded the possibility for the time being, of working with colleagues at the Damascus Museum. determined primarily by those concerns, then idea has opted to build its back end in wiki data. Wiki data, as many of you will already know is a free low barrier to entry LOD platform used by a growing number of Lam institutions that allows users to access data and contribute edits some hundreds of languages, including Arabic. Wiki data also features a range of built in tools for the annotation of images, as well as on the fly visualizations that can be harnessed and pass through to a user friendly front end that I'll talk about in a moment. So as you can see, here from the wiki data query I'm showing you in partnership with the various host collections, my team and I have created or enriched wiki data items for some 15,000 artifacts excavated at Dora and now in museum collections. In doing this, we've made these $15,000 artifacts held in eight different North American and international institutions searchable together for the very first time. We're now at work on integrating archival photographs and plans from the site. But just creating records for the excavated artifacts in which in the wiki data environment now means that these items are discoverable in hundreds of languages at a basic level, and this is key without us doing any translation work. So I'm showing you here a wiki data record for relief kept in the Yale University Art Gallery, that depicts Hercules wearing the Nemean lion skin. As you can see, not every metadata status statement for this object has as yet been translated into Arabic or into emerald language for that matter. But thanks to the global wiki data editorial community widely shared concepts that are relevant to records from Doria Lobos, like archaeological artifact have been translated into real world languages, as has the concept associated with a god known as Hercules. In practice, this means an Arabic or Japanese speaker for instance, would be able to search in their own native language for the equivalent of archaeological artifact depicting Hercules from dura Europos and turn up the same results as someone searching in English. Thanks to the NEH, we're working on taking this further. We have an Arabic translator with the idea of project that is focused specifically on populating Arabic translations for the euro related content in wiki data. This part of the project is spearheaded by my colleague Adnan al Muhammad, who is a Syrian refugee archaeologist and we're bringing in both members of the Syrian and Middle Eastern diaspora into these translation efforts, as well as working with undergraduate Arabic learners. So I'm happy to share what we've kind of gleaned through that process as we're stumbling through it. If that's of interest anybody we're also making geospatial data within the LOD environment to ease mental challenges around naming traditions that can make it difficult to join up information and resources about when is an actuality the same place. So ensuring that a researcher will turn up all the relevant results when searching for information pertaining to the building known as the Temple of bell at Dori robos. When, over the course of the last 100 years since its excavation, that same building has been known by a variety of different names that I've listed. Just some examples here. This can present a challenge since traditional keyword searching would require a lot of previous knowledge on the part of the user in order to be comprehensive in the realm of data for archaeology and cultural heritage, what are known as digital gazzard Tears play a critical role since the primary and secondary source material around which the disciplines revolve very often makes mention of or is otherwise attributable to places with a fixed geographical location. This includes texts and material discovered at the site. In the course of excavations, archival documents including photographs, and modern books and articles, but it's here that the naming tradition issue comes into play. Digital surrogates for each of these resources could be cataloged in various languages and refer to in the object metadata to dura Europos and or the specific building at Dora by any one of those different naming traditions and different spellings. So it's not realistic nor appropriate to expect that speakers of languages all over the world are going to agree on a single definitive spelling and expression of all cultural heritage. place names, and it's likewise important to maintain differences of name expressions that reflect intellectual and interpretive differences. So this is where digital gadgeteers within the LOD environment can become extraordinarily helpful. Both for practical and ethical purposes. Examples of linked up and data digital gadgeteers that you may have heard of include Pleiades, the world historical Gadgeteer and the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names. There's others out there but these are the ones that came to mind. These are exploring authorities that are backed by scholarly research that disambiguate and geo locate places both ancient and modern. linked open data servers, gather up all the known name variants for a place associate those names with a particular set of geographic coordinates and assign that place a stable nonlinguistic identifier this is important, right because you're not showing preference to any single naming tradition. Within the LOD environment, therefore, data managers and various databases and other resources can essentially tag the resources in their online collection with the stable identifier defined for the place with which the resources associated and thereby the metadata for the objects in their collection is enriched with all of the known naming traditions known to the guests here. This essentially matter the preferred way of referring to dery ROPO says temple of Bell in a particular collections metadata whether that's temple of Bell temple of the pomarine God's temple of the Oriental God's Temple of Zeus, etc, or a name in Arabic script, as long as the digital record is tagged with the appropriate Gadgeteer ID that record belongs to other digital entities associated with the same physical location, no matter how they call that physical location. So briefly as an aside, that our workflow for this portion idea is in the process of systematically defining place entries for all of the buildings and features at door Europos in partnership with Pleiades, and we're publishing these records through Pleiades which is the authority LOD Gadgeteer for the ancient Mediterranean. We're then mirroring the Pleiades records into wiki data, and you're seeing one of those mirrored records here in the example I'm showing you. So, having these mirrored gasm your records in wiki data alongside the records for artifacts excavated at the site, but kept in various collections allows for a place to find within a digital atlas as a tear to serve as a sort of virtual reassembly node. For objects archival materials and publications personally kept in different collections or physical locations, cataloged in different languages, and possibly following any number of different naming conventions given the colonial dynamics of earlier eras that landed so many archaeological artifacts and archival materials in the West, as well as the enduring patterns of inaccessibility among key stakeholders. I hope it's becoming clearer on a more abstract level, at least, how the commitment of cultural heritage collections to not just make their content available online via high quality digital surrogates. But also to integrate those surrogates into wiki data's multilingual corner of the growing linked open data ecosystem can have important implications for more equitable access
the LOD system also features a host of simple tools that can be harnessed to begin counteracting or at least acknowledging archival silences, shaped by the colonialist dynamics at the time of excavation. An image like the one I show you here was originally catalogued in the archive as an archival field photograph from the temple of the palm Irene gods. Remember, that's that temple with all those confusing naming traditions. And there's no mention in the metadata, for instance, that the image contained a human figure, since the man in the image was conceived by the excavators is essentially just a scale right? And to give you a sense of how big the altar was in the in the building, we can do this image annotations tool, for instance, allows users to assert information contained within an image but not necessarily expressed by its original metadata. So I'm demonstrating for you how our project is making use of the wiki data image positions tool. In effect, these kinds of tools allow contributors to make apparent to computers, what might be implicit to human viewer. So namely that an image like this one was taken directly at the I've already clicked through all those things by accident, but namely, that the the the image was taken directly at the entrance to a very specific tower within the temple of the pomarine gods, that there's a human depicted in this photograph, even if we don't currently know his name, and that there is an alter an artifact. In this photograph, we're in the process of determining which specific alter this one is, so that we can annotate the image with the wiki data item that corresponds to that specific artifact. Perhaps someone with a different knowledge base than my own, might be able to add additional annotations about say, the aspects of early 20th century dress in this part of the world because this image bears witness to that but it hasn't been catalogued that way by archaeologists, right. So using image annotation tools in the wiki data context, either by a subject area specialist or by a member of the global lay public. Thereby, human and computer readable metadata statements to the digital research question. So increasing the number of metadata Smith's, on any visual resource multiplies the number of paths by which to discover a resource. We're currently in the process of developing a workflow for the creation of new wiki data items for all of the digitized archival documents related to Dora that are at U Ag, and integrating them with the site's urban level Gadgeteer entities and artifacts as represented in wiki data. So using that image annotations tool quite significantly. So as I alluded to, briefly, as one of our first tasks to bring about this integrative and contextualize and work for Duryea robos, in partnership with Pleiades, my team and I are working to systematically define gases here entities for the whole of dura Europos and its constituent parts. So far, we have something like there was actually a batch that dropped this morning. So I think we actually have something like 364 different entities specifically defined for Duryea Lobos and more on the way they go through and a peer review and will be published, very soon, a new batch. And then all of these are mirrored into wiki data. Citing LOD Gassett your entities to indicate find spots of artifacts via a wiki DATA statement on an object's wiki data item ultimately enables dynamic on the fly map visualizations and data sorting of the type that can communicate at a glance contextualizing information that previously would have required hours of research ability to read in English and access to physical archives and specialized print materials. And the example I'm showing you here, you can see that using this process, we can clearly tether an artifact removed from its original context, but we can tether it back to its physical fine spot on the site. The specific wall from which this object came. And we're doing that by sliding this gas into your entity. The same principle also allows one to visualize artifacts that were found together in association with a single building or archaeological feature, no matter which collection holds the various objects today so we can use this process to effectively digitally recreate archaeological assemblages. At this point, if you're new to wiki data, or sparkle queries, you might think that this looks a little intimidating, and I get it. And so one of the things that we're doing is that we are working with a team of talented programmers, and shout out to the stories team to create a web application with a user friendly interface that basically shields users from having to work with or work in wiki data directly. But the web application acts as a skin that kind of calls out to wiki data to perform dynamic searches and to pull in relevant wiki data generated visualizations and related content. The applications base code is open source and available already on GitHub. I'll show you that. Link in a moment. The durable stories interface is functional, but it's still a work in progress. So this is just kind of a sneak preview. And in particular, as part of the grant from NIH, we are working in the coming years to put to pull in wiki data map functions of the sort that I just showed you via the sparkle queries. But from the Browse page as it functions so far, you can search in real time for direct content, regardless of its home institution. And if you click into a specific object, the application pulls information from wiki data and other open sources into convenient tabs. Such that users can browse auto generated map content and timelines relevant to the chosen object as well as 3d models, open access publications, annotated triple if imagery and related records like those for the building fine spot or other records. or other objects found in the same assemblage. Hopefully, I'll be back at Wikipedia de NYC with an update on the interfaces maturation in the coming years. So stay tuned. And with that, I'll come to a close. My contact information is here, as is our webpage and the code repo for GitHub the stories interface and documentation for the project is in progress via the wiki project idea and we invite anyone who is interested to sign on to the wiki project and to participate or follow our development. Thank you.
What's up? Excuse me?
Yes, triple F is essentially like the LOD format of of images, or the metadata travels with it, no matter where it's reused and Internet. And so the annotations are essentially these kinds of boxes that you draw around the, the individual sections of a photograph in order to attest more or contribute more specific metadata to the image.
would be very, very helpful for things that have if you have a bunch of different objects with different names and different languages, but how do you deal with situations where different languages make different distinctions so if say a distinction that exists in one language that doesn't exist in English, or vice versa? Yeah. Do you deal with that? Odd?
We're just collecting the names right? And we're not making any distinctions. We just are collecting them all in one place and let other people squabble about, you know, which is the authority or I think that there shouldn't be an authority. I can give you a specific example actually. So this ethnographic work that I mentioned on site, our colleagues have found that in the absence of the the Western literature flowing into the site, there are oral traditions that are completely unrelated. To any of the Western, you know, attested facts right about these buildings. But and sometimes that goes along with a wholly different naming tradition for the building. And we feel strongly that that name should be searchable, so that folks in that local community, you know, if they call the site by the wall, right, the equivalent the Arabic equivalent of the wall, they should be able to search that way, and also find a path to to this content. So I'm not sure if that quite texted at what you were.
My question was more like, if there isn't a translation for something at all like if it's something that we would consider two buildings has a specific name that just doesn't exist in English, or are more conceptual distinctions, anything along those lines just where you can't translate? It should describe it? Maybe but you can't translate it because it's not a concept that's commonly used.
I think there's a lot of work to be done in this area. And so I invite you to look for concrete examples of that and to to explore that because I think that's exactly the kind of work that needs to be done. I mean, I'm also thinking in in these local communities, right where maybe the the identification of like where the name is associated with doesn't map directly to buildings in the way that like in the Western tradition we're used to. These are these are questions that I think it's going to take all of us to, to figure out how we, you know, map that more accurately or do justice to bringing up different ways of thinking or experiencing a site, you know, in parity, I think that's one of the things that the guys here can accomplish. And it's already a step that we're just trying to, like integrate the the local naming traditions, right. So I think I mean, you seem young and I hope that you're enthusiastic and we'll keep moving in this direction.
presentation
I see we didn't see weird television problem. Figure it goes into the other side. We're at what sir? Regular regular HDMI, not magical HDMI, next generation HDMI. Hello, everybody. How are we all doing? Oh, I have great pulling up to figure out how to plug it in
with this mic. All this a handheld, the handheld as
it is, okay. I'm not I mean, either people in the store across the street can hear my voice. This is not my it's not my hair. Why don't you tell me wherever you see it. We're using we're using the other one
PC connection.
I'm excited.
It must have worked for work again. Great Faith. I heard that this is a better one. There we go. Oh, absolutely. Fantastic. All the technology I love that the television is completely committed to over helping you all the time. Constantly. Another attack vector to bring into our homes. Alright, hello. I once again want to thank the pharaohs for once again rolling the dice with regards to me. I am an unknown quantity and the fact that he would have the bravery to put me up in front of you and all the people online is once again always appreciated. I always recognize bravery as it goes to talk is called a series of unbroken links. It could be called anything but thematically what I'm talking about here is an unbroken chain. And we tend to have a habit of thinking of things in terms of singular events that we could have never accounted for before. But in fact, they all meet to each other. I'm also very pleased to see that we are in the Jefferson Marquette library. Beautiful metaphor a building that was built for for different things quickly turned into other things partially demolished, partially rebuilt, turned finally recognized as a historic landmark late in life during which it is now had over six major renovations attempting to keep it going. It is it is a perfect metaphor for Wikipedia. All right. So my name is Jason Scott. Some of that brings a feeling of terror others a feeling of joy and elation, and others complete neutrality. I agree. I am a troublemaker. I am a Wikipedia critic. I am a free range archivist. So people go wait a minute what the heck is going on Wikipedia critic Okay, let's just answer that very quickly. I joined Wikipedia in around 2003 2004 At which point in today's modern parlance, they docks to me my attempts to get them to stop that because I had had been receiving death threats since my teenage years was met with rules lawyering, which is the term that people use now. It's your real name. There. Was nothing you can do with that awesome experience. I said, as I said about on the organization discussing its flaws. Its positivity, not with a personal agenda, not from payment, but just watching what went on. So over the years, I did that I think about two or three years. I was one of the preeminent Wikipedia critics. Mostly bringing up the concern I had that in its attempt to disrupt research, news and the storehouse of knowledge. It was as part of its business having to disparage before as being flawed, broken and in need of fixing a cycle we've seen played a couple other times with other disruptive technologies. At this point in time, I am not so much a Wikipedia critic as a reformed Wikipedia critic. That just means that around 2006 I realized that I could keep going and it was fun. tearing things down is a lot of fun. But at the end of the day, you go to bed and all you've left are a few more broken hearts a few more hurt feelings, and you're waking up trying to figure out where the next point is. That's no way to live your life. I just don't see the advantage in it. I'd rather say take my ball and go home. And luckily I found a ball factory. I started focusing more again in Wikipedia parlance, on primary sources concerning myself with things that may or may not be lost. If people don't pay attention to it. I had made a documentary by that point. I made a couple other documentaries and on all of those it was a constant aggressive surprise to find out that what we always think of as being here always here. Wasn't there. Stories that were completely expected to be real. Were real folks who had historical materials were dying because standing in front of a glowing radioactive box for 19 hours a day doesn't really encourage a long and prosperous life, although a fun one. And it was just a matter of just coming in and doing that. So I did that for bulletin board systems text adventures, the DEF CON documentary and a bunch of other ranges in between. So now when I think of Wikipedia, Wikipedia, mostly for me is where I go to read the plot summaries of horror films because I don't watch horror films. But we each and this is part of the point derived from it whatever amount of value meaning and personality we want to from it's not devised for a single thing. It is a ever spinning faceted diamond, from which we see either the reflections of ourselves or the world behind us. Troublemaker well. Obviously, I don't have any problem with filters. I also don't really have any problem asking questions causing things to fall into a disarray. I like to think of what I do as positive chaos. But that you know, isn't always the case for people who feel the chaos. What it means though, is that I I really tried to pour my energy into enjoying the moments of life for Wikipedia, kind of watching my play out over the years watching what makes an article good versus not good watching where things nestled themselves in the unusual realities that it attracts. And also, of course, the reflection of humanity's dark mirror which is also very enjoyable. I'm also free range archivist free range archivist is a title I gave myself when I was hired by the Internet Archive in California, a project founded in 1996, by Brewster Calle not as I will now say, by Taylor Lorenz is uncle, which is believe it or not, what's going on the Internet, now founded by Brewster Calle, who made a lot of money making something called the wide area Information Service, which is just think of it as a search engine for gopher space and of which only 50% of that sentence kept living. And then taking those millions started a second company called Alexa Internet, which was bought by Amazon for many, many millions. of Amazon stock in 1997. So suddenly, he didn't have to pad his pockets when he was at the show, face down with millions, many, many millions. Brewster kale made a decision and the decision was not to build a secret island. Nobody can get to where endangered species could fight to the death and he could eat the winner not to insect insert himself into civic or governmental or personal life, telling them that his money solves everything. Instead, he sat down and said finally, I get to be a librarian. This is a guy who named his eldest son, his first born after his favorite books bought this was a man who loved books and he loved the feel of them the mystery the wonder, the way that it expresses ideas, libraries, and library books are in his blood. And for the last 25 years, he has done that and along with that. So isn't the best image of the Internet Archive this Is it burning? Let's go with this one for the the last few years, he's been working inside of this building archive at 300 Funston Avenue in San Francisco, a Christian Science Church, the fourth Church of Christ scientist, which was down to about 27 parishioners when it was purchased. It is probably one of the only data centers with a working pipe organ.
In fact, the first time they plugged on the pipe organ in a few years, we blew up the transformer on the corner, which makes it the first pipe organ related data center outage. But this particular data center contains some amount of what we think of as archive.org and the Wayback Machine. And the Wayback Machine, of course turned out to be the killer app. But it was part of a monopoly of experiments tries attempts by Brewster kale and the rest of the folks who have worked for him to do something to try things. Everything from the Internet Archive is a profound bizarre experiment stumbling blindly into areas both established and completely unknown. For example, one day a series of deadheads said we would love to store our recordings of old shows somewhere and Brewster said, Well, I have disk space and that is why we have the Live Music Archive, a film preservationist named Rick Prelinger decided to digitize some of his government films he'd acquired, but at that size MPEG two who was going to possibly store it, the Internet Archive came in the Prelinger archives are both offline and are online, but they're existing on the Internet Archive. Everything after that has been that way. Again, I was hired in 2011. So I am a late stage addition to the archive. Some people think I founded it, that's just because I'm loud, brash and have a top hat. The curly haired guy next to me founded it. So when they hired me, they said, What do you want to do? Because I demanded a job there. That's how I got a job there which I do not recommend as a you know, career approach. It's not going to work for everyone, but sure, go into a building and demand they hire you until they hire you. And they said, what what do you want? I said, I want to be a free range archivist. I want to go where I'm needed, learn what I need to do, and go there and so I did. So for the past 13 years or 12 years, I've been at the archive, doing what I think needs to be done that includes archiving software, working on emulation of that software in the browser, collecting ephemera. I'm a very big fan of ephemera, hip hop mixtapes, collections of, you know, hacker con, conference, recording, and so on. And there's there's just literally petabytes of data that I've brought down into that place as a free range. archivist. When a free range archivist thinks about something, he gets to do it, and if he ignores it, somebody else will probably do it as well. So everything kind of works out. The inbox of the Internet Archive is important for me and what I've been focusing a lot of effort on. We pull in roughly about 74 to 78 terabytes of data a day. That includes everything from websites to uploads to partner organizations, sand books, scan, 78 RPM records, scan 33, and a third records CDs and of course, whatever people think we need to have, which is variant at best on the on the I'll go into this in a moment, but as part of the conspiracy theories that have now winded its way around every single thing existing everywhere, all the time, there's a belief that somehow the Internet Archive is actually capable of executing some sort of editorial control on our inflow such that only our personal blank here, politics approach is allowed through our Pearly Gates, watching 78 billion URLs, enter in every few weeks watching 11,000 radio recordings go in a day, grabbing every podcast that gets put up onto Apple podcasts and other sources every day. I can tell you that a staff of less than 100 is not going to do that. It's just absorbing everything digital that it possibly can in the hope that some portion of it will represent something of meaning to later generations of humanity. It is literally when I describe it as going down then it and done in the hope that 1000 years someone will go Denton and we don't know if that's going to be there. It's purely a faith based initiative in that way. The Wayback Machine continues to be the stunning killer app to the point that a lot of people don't know we do anything else. Millions of people visit the Internet Archive through the Wayback Machine for research for verification for misery for polarity, to find old versions of malware to embarrass someone to show a liar that they are a liar to verify that a truth teller may have changed their truth over time, whatever they want from it, again, a multifaceted jewel of a place it has so many pages going in so many directions. It dates back to about 96 or 97 to give you an idea of how arbitrary this all is. It was started simply because Alexa Internet was I say this to Americans, Nielsen ratings for websites a way of keeping track of what are the hot websites, what is this website done, and without a memory, you couldn't detect trends? So we're starting to grab the text contents later the image contents of websites, so it wasn't done out of a planned sense of this needs to be done. Let's work it out. Let's have a committee to have a meeting to have a memo to have another meeting to have a committee to do this. This was well we've just got all this data. Let's just keep it in the back and it was only through Brewster saying what if we replayed it back to people? That'd be pretty funny. In 2001, that we even have a Wayback Machine. It's not a government institution. It's not owned by anybody except for a nonprofit. It is maintained simply because it was neat. And now it's become critical infrastructure to the memory of a humanity that is quickly eating itself. So that's how arbitrary it is. If you're looking for lessons if you're trying to dig for some gold out of me, I will tell you that you should definitely never buy into the situation that the project you're working on needs some sort of individual with a starting gun standing next to the starting line to tell you that it's about to go off and you've got to run. You should have been running already. You should always be running the overlapping Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine and Wikipedia has probably been most successful with the turning all links blue project which some people may know or others may not. I'm just going to say it explicitly. I also want to stress with all my heart I have not a weight of a jar of an atom of personal stake in it. I haven't done anything. This has been done by the team of the way back and many volunteers and many coordinators at Wikipedia. Wikipedia depends utterly on references, except it's referring to a dying ink blotter of an Internet that is showing that nothing is sacred. When it comes to plowing things down. So a project was put together and in coordination with a bot. If you link a reference to a website at Wikipedia, the Wayback Machine is immediately told and it immediately takes a full grab of that citation. At that exact moment and maintains it. Then a bot constantly watches so when that reference inevitably dies, it reverses it immediately into the wayback copy. In doing that, the nightmare of a consistent present where people who can claim that that never happened that's not a real link that was made can link to it. It's subject to all the usual declarations of conspiracy concerned and whatever. I will tell you that the Internet Archive is not going to change the history. We don't change the history. I don't believe me, you know the guy in a top hat told you I don't know what that's gonna do for you. But point of fact is, is that we don't change it. But the but the main effect of this excellent, excellent project is that 1000s Literally 1000s of web pages are being preserved using the wayback as an indicator of society and education and individuals need for certain pages to represent Oh answer another conspiracy theory. So you'll have something something terrible, let's just put it that way. And they have a webpage and they are arrested and their web pages up. At that point and individual goes to the Internet Archive and clicks on what's known as save page now button, which is a function we have which is currently running which many people use to say please preserve this immediately in the Wayback Machine. Think of it as like a pulled emergency cable please archive now. If you're in a good mood, you can say oh that is fantastic.
The built the ability to serve history as it goes for people who run on four cylinders out of eight. They look at the fact that the first round of the page is the moment after the bad thing happened and simply come to the fully logical conclusion that after a very deep meeting with people with dark sunglasses and a variety of television shows we decided to completely make up their webpage to serve quote unquote, the narrative. That's going to be you know, this sort of mind virus is fascinating, but I can tell you again, no. We are meant to be the archive of the Internet meant to be online experience part of the way that memories stories and parts of culture are preserved to some extent, using both the archive as a Wayback Machine the playback version of web archives work files, but also as a generalized repository of culture books, or audio movie software. In that film Tality which we've been doing now for well over 25 years. It's been a wild success. However, as time has gone on in the world has become more of a blender in terms of these things we are often being used in and that is a deep and difficult tension. Wikipedia has to deal with it and we have to deal with it. It's one thing to be the repository of things that once were it's another one to be utilized as an attack vector to maintain material that has been pulled off every other part of the Internet because it has caused pain, heartache and is down for very, very, very good reasons. This is a tension that we have not yet resolved, we will continue to work on it. But archives and mirrors are two very different things. Wikipedia being used in its own sly way as the same thing represents that same problem. So please keep an eye on that. Please don't look for conspiracy. When there is not. One of the things I've been doing this I've been looking forward. You know, part of what I do the Internet Archive as a free range archivist is focused on events, indications stuff that's happening and a few years ago I not so much worn but excitedly chattered about my concept of the oncoming blob, and the Lord was being built. What I did not expect was how soon I would discover the second half of the blurb which is the glory and the glory is now here and people are flipping out and that's fine. So let's just go into these things. The blurb to me is the sum totality of digitized and textual human knowledge information and record everything that we've created. Up to this point the billions of people who have left written digitized or audio or other record of what we once were what is going on what is here, both fictional and real created, you know, not in a gruesome, conspiratorial way but simply as a matter of our facts that we tell stories and lore and legends and we want to preserve those, we want to keep a record of what was there. There is a strong urge, especially within certain personality types to find them. Tick meaning in recorded history that you want uation where for example, we had we had nothing like this we had sort of a thing like this, then the next person looked at the thing and made a better one than we made a better one than Google made it now it's everywhere. And that is a series of unbroken links to people. It is also a false narrative. It is almost always a false narrative. Everything is a series of interrelated wave patterns that sometimes interact and sometimes don't. Somebody will, right now creating their own version of something that will be quote unquote, discovered in about two years but this person is in an apartment. This person is in a startup, and that happens with anytime you try to tell everything as a story. It's really fascinating. They're wonderful, but it does lead to that. Well. The blurb is just simply the natural outcropping of what happens if you digitize preserve and keep this library is a blogger, but it's got piles of books and texts. It also has architecture furniture and human beings. So I was excited about us digitizing how much we do we digitize 3500 books a day. We digitize hundreds and hundreds of reels of microfilm a week which means we are digitizing literally millions of pages every week of microfilm, microfiche everything out there making it OCR, making it readable, making it viewable. And the result of that, of course, is that things are being found quicker and more effectively and people are able to back things up with the so you know the previously referenced references and Wikipedia articles and so on. You know, we now live in a world where the archive can provide you with this page this magazine OCR and linked to show its exact case in this way I was able recently for example, to find the true history of the dongle, which is the little piece of hardware that goes into some computers to make their run their software. Found the actual first article with it the first story with it the first time it's used. We could have been away we could have just I mean, the world didn't shift that much when I find that story. Let's not fool ourselves. But I was I went to bed happy I found the dongle. I could cite the dongle. And I did that because of the blurb and I was able to research the board but beyond that, That's level one a one with the board let's go to the board is not just digitizing books. It's digitizing what makes a book it digitizes how text is created. It's digitizing what artifacts there are in photographs, what artifacts there are ink stains, how different geographical geographical entities are arranged how human beings create, framing how they create pieces of history or look through the world through a human lends. Anybody who knows the deep dark secret of exactly how the filtering works on a later tube television in terms of which colors were allowed to see and which are not know that everything is a series of filter choices. The blog is giving that information along with it. So now we come to the globe. The glow up is everything we are now going to make out of the blue orb. And we are now in the history to vote to 2022 was an excellent coming out party wasn't it for the for the for the dawn of the Gorp the dawn
reasonably shaky, confused weird digital creations that are utilizing already created material to synthesize functions of new ones. Whether or not that is a fine, blended juice or as it currently kind of feels somewhat low mixed beef stew of discernible previous parts is just the first step. We're certainly going to see that get better. Anybody who is seeing mid journey version one versus mid journey version four and thinks that in that four month period we're done. I think it's going to get very, very interesting very fast. It also of course, is betraying different kinds of personalities. Chat GPT has been a really unwelcome clown at the dinner party for many people's lives, but it is in other ways fascinating to watch is its approach to tact, discerned. The fact that some people immediately look at it as a labor saving device or immediately look at it as a way to weigh down and destroy whatever human creativity there is. It's just a reflection of their own personalities. These are the same people who are more than happy to, you know, grab an article that clearly has a credit and put it into their curriculum vitae and figure it all out later, might even get you elected. So we are absolutely you know, to me not betraying some brand new revolution in humanity. We've just optimized it, but the glory is worth watching. My hope is that you know, again, that what comes out of the glory can be that a kind of smell chrome of the human experience and creativity, but it can also be used as an assistive material an exoskeleton for our scholar. Or a thinker, the ability to say, I would really like to know which stories of the past 100 years took place in this location or took place in ways that feel like this location. What are all the stories in which the women had the upper hand and in which a dog was in there and did not die at the end? I don't want to see any dead dog stories anymore. I only want dog stories where every dog lives and everything and it will provide you with those looks or the ability to see a term and be able to ask a reasonable case of other terms arise near this term. Trusting it is miserable. Just trust Google. When you check for a small patch of problem on your shoulder and ask Google Google says well, it's nothing cancer or death. You just have to derive from that your own steps beyond people make that mistake of just trusting it utterly. They've always been here will be here. They should be treated as they are which is people who are looking to fix and they will always look for an easy fix. So Wikipedia experienced a lot of this for a short period of time it was considered to be some magical funnel by which the best of us came out. It turned out no it was like I said a dark mirror and humanity it turned out to be catnip for government agents and from that, of course came you know, radar detector detectors the ability to see when the nearest police department edits a Wikipedia article and to find out what your you know, we will continue to stay vigilant in the same way that this building is that like I said five renovations in the last 20 years. You will maintain I hope the same vigilance as the archive maintains fixity, which is our ability to verify every week that disks are functioning like they're supposed to in their various places that bits haven't flipped that cosmic rays haven't changed things. So it is I'm I'm sad to say not a second year it is waving over us and the blurb grows every day as well. These are not static things. Absolutely. It feels like the whole world has fallen apart. We are now to the point of people literally dying, claiming that they're not dying of what they're dying of. That is some hard core misreading of the room. That is that is pretty amazing to watch that. But if you do your research, you find out that there were people during the blitz of London who are resilient and angry at the loss of their freedom and having to keep their lights down and quiet. had parties on roofs loud with full brass bands, blasting lights to let you know that if they were going to go they were going to go without cowering. You can find citations going back all the time. People saying you're going to die of stubbornness and the other person going No I won't. That's just the functional to me, reflection of humanity. What you can't do, even what you perceive as constantly changing brand new, interesting, unique times is fall down and believe that we are in a world that can't be saved that we are in a group of people who are beyond worth our time or effort that what we work on has no future. I have had one heart attack. I've had multiple stents put in I'm quite aware how everything changed is very very quickly from Hmm What's that too? Oh, no. It's just to me, like where we where life functions, right. And so Wikipedia or an Internet archive that exists today is not a certificate of promise of one existing tomorrow. But hopefully the people who are part of these entities, these enterprises, feel the need feel it necessary to continue the work to continue to improve to continue to find flaws, the auditing the work, you know, the endless maintenance that keeps things alive, which a lot of people you know, they think you put a stone somewhere and the stone is there forever. And then rain gravity vandals and parking garages come for that stone. And and you can have two choices either sit by the stone and defend it. Ignore the fact that the stone is disappearing and claim it's always going to be here or you know, you can take a part of life and and building more stones upon it to protect it. You know, I am an functionally strange entity to be doing what I am doing which is the preservation of of humanity. People one person for the record one person called me the most toxic personality still paid attention to on Twitter, which I honestly do not think is a accurate I think I've been usurped. I don't know I think I'm like seventh eighth easily. One also called me the gay can dressed as the gay conductor to the fairy land of Oz. And also again, I'll take that one actually, that one's mine. That one's all mine. You can't have it. So this contract wants to let you know that where he comes from when people say like, Well what's your philosophy about people? So I use it for that I call the tiger at a tea party. And that is if you're at a Tea Party, and there's a tiger sitting, sitting having tea and crumpets. multiple things should come to you. First, you should really appreciate you're seeing a tiger that's eating crumpets and drinking tea. You should also fundamentally be aware this can't last that Tiger is going to kill somebody. But for the moment. It's having tea and crumpets. That's pretty sweet and you should enjoy that moment. Now just replace the tiger with humanity and that's basically where I am. I don't think of humanity as the greatest thing that's ever happened. But I do appreciate some of the stuff. It's done. It's got a pretty good gig. It's got some beautiful buildings, some wonderful art. It's called moments of joy that are unparalleled for anything else I can find. There are moments that the animal kingdom and the stones in the world have created that are great, but I have also been through multi hour creations of humanity that really impressed me. And then I can also if I wish to focus on just just the terrible things it's doing right now or there and decide that it all goes into a bucket. But I focus at this point on the tea and crumpets I think the fundamental wavering flicker of a flame of hope continues Wikipedia to me that a entity that's it's like the moment in Avatar, different people respond when they see the floating rocks and Avatar, right? They either go Why are the rocks floating? Or they go cool, floating rocks. I like to think that we're gonna think you know, every day the anti gravity of the floating rocks of wiki will inspire like I said, I have had to, I hate horror movies. I hate them more than anything. I don't like the objectification of death. But I want to know what happened. So I can figure it out. And Wikipedia you've done it for me every time. Thank you.
Again, I really want to because for those of you who didn't know about five years ago, I spoke about another there was a wonderful individual who a number of years previous asked me to keynote over a media conference. So Wikipedia conference in DC and I said, Well, they're going to tell you no, but you were working on this other project and I want to work on you in that project. He said, Oh no, they're open. minded. It'll be fascinating. Don't love it. May so well. Okay, but when they say no, you know, can we work this week before the conference, I mailed them just to go, am I you know, how's it going? And I got back this 14 paragraph. Oh my god, the sadness of the spheres just coming out. I could see he was crying during it. If an email could be tear stained, it was this one. But I said, You know what, look, it's an unreasonable risk. This person is full of profanity and misery and weirdness and his metaphors are dangerous and bizarre. Of course, anybody who wants to play it safe, whoever wants to have a celebration would do that. So he understood, but that didn't stop pharaohs and Pharaohs brought me in. I gave a talk. And I've given another talk. So the fact that he wouldn't do it just once but twice tells me that this is a person with the kind of open mind I like to see in the world. And I'm really appreciative of that. So thank you so much.
And I don't have a mic. And sorry. Yes, Ryan thank you to Ryan for lending me this laptop.
I don't think that one should leave life with GTA. You should leave life with people aware of the folks who helped you along the way. So that's the way I come from. I don't think you need you need questions from you don't want questions. If there's somebody let's put it this way. If you have a question that doesn't, that actually is not about you. And is actually like you think this audience here this souls need to be held in this hot room a little longer to get clarification from the maniac. I would love to. So if there is anything like that, anybody because again, you've been I mean, believe me, I've been walking in and out of this room and the heat differential is amazing. This room was not designed for this. And so you just want to quit you're just taking a picture. Just taking a picture. So I'm Jason at Tech. Oh, is that oh can you take I am fascinated that you would look at me and go does he need to cry? You got to stay in the habit I guess. Yes. A grande is Asia. This particular behavior is always welcome. It's how I it's how my power it's how my power literally grows. Was nothing quick