Community Hours: Unreliable Resources Report Share Out

4:46PM Jul 21, 2021

Speakers:

Ada Lovelace

Monika Jones

Melissa Tamani

Amber Berson

Kira

Keywords:

wikipedia

people

guidelines

community

reliable source

question

editors

report

academic

page

sources

project

trainers

policies

recommendations

wikimedia

wiki

process

editing

participate

Are we doing live stream Kira. Yep. Okay.

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us. We're so excited for you to be here with us today.

But yeah, we got a lot to get into so we'll go ahead and get started. Thank you again, my name is Kira Wisniewski, my pronouns are she, her, I have the honor and privilege of being executive director of art and feminism.

I also want to name in the moment that a lot of us are not only experiencing screen fatigue but we're also going through some trauma. So just really want to recognize that and express gratitude for you being here, and also just to give yourself the permission to fully be present for the next 60 minutes, you're doing a lot and you deserve this time to be here. Um, the other thing that I wanted to do is just like a quick little zoom tip that you might already know that have been helpful for me, but if you see yourself in the top right of your own picture box, you can click the dot dot dot. And you can hide yourself view, which I always do because I find it distracting to look at myself.

And then another thing as you can see right now they're screen sharing. So if you toggle, if you put your cursor between the screenshare and the panelist, you can kind of adjust that window a little. So those are just two little zoom tips. If you don't already know them. Now you do so. Next I'm just going to go over a little bit more housekeeping, talking about our brave friendly space agreement. So, we want to pull up that slide.

Amber Can you do the next slide. There we go. So the goal of this session is to create an encouraging space for collective learning. This requires intentional behavior, wherein participants are conscious of and accountable for the effects of their statements and actions about others, respect our experiences, and the experience of others, and recognize that we can't do this work without one another. We agreed to hold each other accountable to foster a brave and friendly space. I also want to give a heads up that we are going to record this session, so I am going to give a couple moments, just do a little bit more housekeeping. If you don't want to be recorded, I would encourage you to rename yourself by just anonymous or however you want to name yourself and to turn off your camera, and we'll give everyone just another moment to do that. And then the last bit of little housekeeping I want to do before giving it over to the researchers, that if you do, ne, or you in a region where expenses for private Internet data are prohibitively expensive. We do offer a $5 stipend to offset those costs, and I'm putting the link to that form in the chat right now. So again if you live in a region where expenses for private internet or data costs are prohibitively expensive we are able to offset that cost with $5. Please allow up to 10 business days for that to be processed. All right, so I'm going to go ahead and press record now, uh, one more thing, housekeeping, sorry, we do have closed captioning available so you should be able to click that in your bottom. Also you should see in your upper left, it says live on custom live streaming services. If you click on that it will go directly to a full transcript of today, and that is AI generated so just that caveat for you to know. So I'm gonna press record now.

And thank you again for being here and I'm going to give it over to the authors now.

Hello everyone my name is Melissa Tamani, I am one of the researchers who made this report. I also want to thank you for being here today, and I want to present the project team. Well, first it's Amber. Amber would like to say hi. Amber is based on Canada, and she's part of the ARPA feminism collective money Monica. Hi, everyone. Thank you. She's a. She has a PhD and is a freelance writer and researcher She's based in clo and myself where I am, I have the honor to be part of the Arca feminism collective since 2015 and I am based in Lima, Peru. I also want to thank our advisory board. Some of them are present in this call. They are so some binome, she's a librarian, and an admin in English Wikipedia. Also Mariana Fossati, who is in this call. She's from Hawaii, and she's a member of the project whose knowledge, which you probably know, Gumby lovely way, as I'm sorry, I just afternoon in Spanish, of course. And I just, I just mixed with just Camille everywhere. She's an artist, and our community in residence She's based in Montreal, Canada, one of their Minaya, she's an educator and an admin, in an intervening period, she's basing guidance, imagine what is also present with us today, and how long time she's an academic and she is a member of Wikimedia Canada. She's based in Montreal. So, having said that, I think we can go to the next slide. And the first thing we want to do is to let you know that we're really happy to have been able to present this report in the idea of this session is really to celebrate this work we've done as a collective with you. So, it's the idea is not really to have a workshop or a training is just to be able to share the process of making this work with you and also to hear your questions, and to probably, if we, if, if we're lucky to continue, imagining and and identifying ways to make some positive changes in Wikipedia and media in general. So thank you for being here. I think we can go on to the next slide,

same slide but we also want to thank wiki credit directly. They funded a lot of this research. Our goal with the project was to provide insight on how some of the definitions and interpretations of the concept of reliable source impact coverage of marginalized communities on Wikipedia. And this categorization includes but isn't limited to assist and transgender women, non binary people non western communities, LGBTQ plus communities bipoc communities. So we wanted to address some of Wikipedia as information gaps. And we wanted to do so in English, French and Spanish as the languages that we speak. We wanted to also understand how source authority is negotiated among editors involved in these communities. Monica I'm passing it to you.

Thanks, everyone. Yeah,

so the goal behind the effort was to understand the effects of the current set of reliable source guidelines, as they're played out in these three languages, and, and the ways in which they work as kind of rules, knowing that rules can be changed on Wikipedia but keeping in mind how processes happen, and affecting the participation of in content about marginalized communities, and I wanted to talk a little bit about the methodology that guided our work, and we accomplish this report by using an intersectional feminist method, methodology, and I'll just say a little bit about what that means and intersectional feminist research is committed to questions of power, including how differences are created and reproduced. While united and struggles scholars and activists before us have taken diverging analytical lenses to understand and remedy oppressive structures of power. And so we're building on those efforts by acknowledging that knowledge is situated and Knowers have partial perspectives. In other words, there's no such thing as purely objective knowledge, there's not purely objective knowers so we came into this going, there's ways in which people are knowing and understanding reliable source guidelines that may or may not be on the pages themselves there are practices of knowing. And so we had three parts to our project qualitative research of the guidelines, and then community conversations, focused on each of the three languages where we listened to how people were understanding their own experiences guiding new editors to participate. And we reclaimed these off wiki processes and conversational spaces as legitimate spaces to know what reliability and reliable sources on Wikipedia, I mean, and they kind of guided the, the analysis that we did of the guidelines. And this slide here that you're looking at is drawn from our report on that kind of lays out what what we did and how it went. So I think we can move on and now describe to you. Our findings, some of our findings so we laid out, which, what the reliable source guidelines are in each language so I'll talk a little bit about English. This chart here provides a quick summary. In English, the reliable source guideline was created in 2005. And there's a large number of edits that take place early on in the project, and then there's a great number of editorial changes that happened later on in the project. It's a content guideline, it's not one of the three core content policies but it really informs the guidelines as well as other guidelines around the creation of articles such as the general notability guideline the reliable source guideline is it kind of adjacent to that. And one of the things that we noticed in the guideline is that there's no clear definition of reliable within it, and we also noticed that, which we can talk a little bit more about there is a general kind of ambiguity around how source authority is determined, and sometimes this takes place in complementary spaces, such as the reliable source notice board. The top page of the content guideline itself, and then in the list of perennial sources. Now I will pass to me.

Three of the talk about French. And so I want to say that in French, there's a lot of places where you can go and access information on what is a reliable source. You can go to see two selves, you can go to Sofia, which is a direct translation of reliable sources and probably the most invested page. And these again these are recommendations, they're not. They're not authoritative, but they're also contradictory. So, there's no definition of reliability, on any of them. Some of them include certain types of sources as viable and other spaces so for example, observe after all this forces that is a compilation of sources, doesn't it won't include certain types of sources on it. So, looking through this, it felt both contradictory and overwhelming to understand what could be construed as a reliable source. And of course, the translation of the guideline from English prioritizes a knowledge formation that might not be familiar or beneficial to Francophone communities. I'll pass it on to you. Thank you.

So it was very interesting to be able to compare these three languages. And in the case of Spanish Wikipedia, it's, it's the opposite side of French and English Wikipedia in many ways. First of all, the page, as many policies in Spanish Wikipedia, were started as translations from English. And this was also the case of this page in 2008. And it took a year for it to be finalized and approved by by the community. So, another thing that is different is that the reliable sources, a guideline, it's a policy on Spanish Wikipedia does have that, it's, it's higher than a guideline, but it's the case of English Wikipedia, and definitely higher than the essay that there is in French Wikipedia so really this is the main and almost the only place to, to search for guidance about reliable sources for this language, as my colleagues have mentioned that there is really a definition of reliability what I found were some sort of recommendations about how to interpret sources, and there are no complimentary pages. So what we did was to take a close look to the to the policies to the History tab. To all the information we could find about them and then we contrast that with people who are editing in this language. So it was very interesting to see what the policy says and how its interpreted and how it's in many times, use in, in a way that it's makes harder for marginalized community to three to read on Wikipedia. So you can find all the details and the information in report. And I think I'll also mention this. And one of the conclusions we have is that the authority of a source is facilitated by social, social and technical processes, or a decisions made by a small number of sections, self selected editors, and we're going to talk about, about that more in detail in the next slides. And we definitely think this is a problem. In all this through experience, because it's like the inverse structure of Wikipedia, it's the challenge right now to include this kind of information. We like to go to the next line, I'm sure. So, we, we organize a report with a section about findings. And we found three of them. The first one is lack of rigor. And that means that there are, when the policies were built. There weren't use any kind of academic resources to support the claims that were made during that process. So that means, For instance that the fact that academic sources like university level, books, for instance, or peer review articles. The way this kind of academic system works, has left out. Many communities and when the identities. So, that is not being considered in the policy, and what is stated is that these are the most reliable sources that someone should use but he doesn't say why, or what kind of things, and either to tap into consideration. In the case of Spanish pedia for instance, there are. There's a very interesting part of the guideline that mentions that when academic resources are not available for Wikimedia, I'm sorry, my connection is unstable, so I'm going to turn off my camera.

Um. Okay, so that's the case of the three languages English, French, and Spanish. And yes I will pass it to Monica.

Thanks yes

as Mel said We noted that there was a lack of rigor in the way that the guidelines themselves were constructed, sometimes sources were used, that seemed to very vague, and of course it is kind of a snake eating its own tail kind of question like what are the reliable sources that we need to create a reliable source guidelines, but what we did find that we really wanted to call into question or highlight for us, for all of us is that the legitimacy of the guidelines, was then, if not you if not sources, the legitimacy of the guidelines was kind of conferred through this process of consensus. And we find this process really problematic, and let me explain what it is so consensus, according to Wikipedia is on page on the process is defined as the normal and invisible process that naturally happens between editors editors participate in the writing of a page or in the creation of content until they reach a resting point after which, silence is presumed to mean consensus so this really makes participating in something where there's already kind of consensus in the process very rigid, it's difficult to participate to raise problems. And there's the rule around consensus that if you disagree, the onus is on you to say so. So silence as a signal of consent and privileges, those editors who feel comfortable participating in dialogues on the platform, and creates a kind of legitimacy around what was there to begin with a kind of privileging of those who participated in the creation of the project, you know 15 years ago, gives them kind of more legitimacy than those who are participating, more recently, and as well. One must participate in, and wiki processes in order to have their voices heard. So the kind of, kind of knowledge creation that happens in editing, and we have on this slide here, photographs of people who are in person meeting and talking, those kinds of agreements or conversations are not like legitimate in terms of the creation of guidelines and policies, and we really wanted to highlight that as problematic. And now I'll hand it over to Amber.

Yeah and that sort of brings us to our third and final finding, which is the essential work of trainers. So in the ways in which the, the labor on wiki is mostly exclusionary of people doing the work off wiki we wanted to uplift the work of all those folks and so those people are building a buffer between the platform and interests of newcomers to the community, especially those who are prepared to contribute subject area specific content, or add and or strengthen the editorial procedures. So people with lots of knowledge about what they're talking about but are not necessarily participating in discussions, either because of lack of time. Know how access, but who are doing really, really important work on this platform. I'll go to the next slide we wanted to talk about our recommendations, and then get into a conversation so we have a few recommendations, our first is that reliability should not mean exclusion. We, we want to talk about how some of the work that needs to be done, relates to the contents of the reliable source guidelines. So we want to ask that there's funding and resources to redevelop these guidelines and that there should be a taskforce, this should not be necessarily given to the people who are already engaged to be something that's opened up to a larger community. It has to be a broad range of stakeholders and this should obviously include trainers and librarians academics people with community based subject matter, experience, we want to dissenter English. And the definition of reliable sources that are Western centric. We want to improve the guidelines in each language for grounding references to scholarship in a social science and humanities that address the historical and cultural specificities of the concept of reliability, and we think it's important to offer guidelines for editors on how to address ways scholarship and new media can be produced biases. So we feel like a task force is the way to go forward. Mostly because it's a process that many people can collaborate on, we feel like what we've learned is that there, there is no source of authority here and that it's a collaborative process.

Monica. Thanks, Amber. On that note, yeah, the, the, the, the reworking of this I think and this is one of the reasons why we're here today to present this with you is to think through how might we guide editors to think about how they might assess the reliability or the authority of a source and a task force would be a way to kind of think through that question, and not necessarily have it on us to just go in and edit the page, but to include more stakeholders in the process of doing so. And, and, in doing that we may be it using kind of technical questions to like enabling the visual editor or other technical processes that can make participation in the community pages of Wikipedia, a little easier for folks. So and that's something that we lay out more clearly and in the that we lay out in the, in the document, and now I'll hand it to Mel for the last recommendation.

Thanks, Monica. The last recommendations are about community processes, and we both think that there's a need to revisit the user consensus definition and processes. Sally says, As consensus is problematic. And we suggest that task force is assembled to develop, to develop a user consent

process, user consensus process that is welcoming to all editors and potential editors,

and there was a question from one of the participants about it we had, for instance, if we have tried to edit the page directly, and I think we think it's a very complex issue. And one of the problems is that they're the way it would be their words and in the way discussions work, the users who I consider most authoritative and the ones who have most more editions. And that is not the case of other kind of Wikimedia contributors such as trainers which meet us in residence, and that's related to the second recommendation, and we consider it necessary to celebrate and to love live the work of trainers, I will meet us in Greece in residence, because they are an important part of the community. And right now the way how it works. They really we really can participate in discussions in a very open way. Because we are not considered like we comedians are part of the community, even. So there needs to be more direct support for trainers positions, especially given how concise was work on Wikipedia. And the third recommendation, it's more technical one is related to how the platform works and how participating in top pages, for instance, requires our technical knowledge. That definitely new users don't have. So there's a technical barrier there and we thought that the visual editor was a good way to overcome that we know that there have been some, some projects already that are working on making sub pages more into pitches, and we think that's a good path, and we hope that these can be continued in the future.

So we wanted to hear from our community, because, you know, we have all these recommendations but it's a huge jump to turn it into actions and so this is where we wanted to turn it into more of a conversation and hear from you. Of course if you have questions, this is a great time to jump in and ask them. But otherwise, we have some, some props for the discussion as well. And some questions for for all of you.

I see Evelyn is raising her hand, would you like to unmute and ask your question and then we can go to Pete

Yep, um, well thanks for doing this research, it's actually really interesting. I read it, and I was like, oh yeah, this makes a lot of sense. So I have two questions. Question number one is how so far. How do you feel that the community reaction to the findings on the report has been so far. And then the second question, I mean is the community reacting, how is the community reacting to the report. And then the second question is like in your recommendations you sort of say maybe we need to put together some type of advisory board to do you know some work around this. Do you have any ideas on how do you envision that. How do you see that work moving forward. And whether it's only going to be for this only for the reliable sources or do you see this advisory board sort of trying to take on a little bit more of the other policies that are flaky had the violence to say,

I could answer that. Sure. So for the first part, I'd say that overall the reactions have been have been fairly positive. We have had quite a lot of nice emails from people saying they appreciate the report. It resonated with them. We've had the expected pushback especially on wiki. So when we've posted the report on the guidelines pages themselves in French it was ignored in Spanish, I believe there was no there was no feedback as well but in English there was quite a bit of response, some of it very positive and some of it more critical and the criticality was from the you know the expected, the expected Person. Person persons, you know people who have a lot of privilege on the platform already so people with a lot of administrative privilege may feel that their position of power might be challenged by a report like this. Interestingly, we've had quite a bit of positive feedback from the foundation itself. And I think that leads into the second question about how we would form an advisory board and who might be on it and I'm not saying that we would necessarily be working with the foundation but I would say that there is quite a bit of work being done by the foundation around the 2030 strategy that I think sort of it hopes to think through some of these policies and practices, and I'd say that there's a big divide, as we all know between the community using Wikipedia and what happens with the foundation of what happens with Wikipedia, more generally, and that as long as that divide is So, you know, as, as long as the projects are so close together but also. So at odds with each other, it will be very hard to do this work. And so, clearly there has to be some kind of first step which is to restore trust in the community, and between the two communities.

If I can jump on that I think your question is really interesting because you asked what kind of responses from the community and it's like we have community in quotation marks here. And this is something that we've called into question by saying there are people who want to contribute to this project, Who do contribute, but who are somehow considered less legitimate members of this community, for different reasons. And so we, we are involved in Wikipedia and care about the kind of knowledge is that are represented, and shared out and the processes by which this happens, and, and the CIO so we're also here today to ask what kind of feedback do you have, as members of the Wikimedia community who may not be reading responses on wiki. So thank you for that and for kind of helping us think through that tension and for your response to Ember, um, we, let's see I think we, we attended to the your two questions so now we can take, Pete, you had a question and if you wanted to ask a question you can throw it in chat or raise your hand. Go ahead, Pete. Sure.

I think actually first, just kind of in response to that pre the previous point, did I was there coverage, did I miss coverage in the signpost of the report

that we cannot know if it's been in signpost.

I think I would, I would. I mean I'm you know I'm speaking as a former editor of the of the signpost, but I would I would very highly recommend that someone write it up for that, and I'm, I'm potentially willing to to work with someone on that I'm not sure that I really have the capacity to, to go back through the report in the kind of depth to like write a review all by myself. But if there's someone who wanted to work with me on that I could do it, but I think that is like you know I think many longtime Wikipedia Ian's kind of regard that as like sort of the or one of the sort of most central places for like the consideration of big ideas, you know that that, that if something is presented there like people will see that that aren't actively monitoring the top pages for the policies that you're talking about and things like they might have it on their watch list, but they might have 2000 pages in their wealth, watch list, but the signpost they might actually read every month. And, and they might actually get into discussion there so I think that's sort of an opportunity not to be missed when you're, when you're looking to kind of get the broad attention of the community. And it's and you know it's not hard to get something in there if you if you know obviously it would be, I think, ideal if you have people independent of your research, writing a review of it, but that doesn't always happen so I think just, you know, sort of writing up your findings in a format that's more, you know, sort of, of the, of the signpost is a way that you'll get more people paying attention to it then would actually download and read a 50 page report. And I guess that's somewhat related to the other, the other point I was going to bring up, which is, And this, this I think is probably a hole, I, you know, we might kind of want more time, or to go into more depth on this, but I think as as a longtime Wikipedia editor, myself, who you know and I very much appreciate and agree with sort of the general approach that your that your research takes and and the kinds of recommendations you know especially the idea that there should be rigor and, you know and and a solid foundation for everything and the reliability, policies and guidelines, etc. But I think there's, there's kind of a, there's a subtle danger in sort of, like, Are there sort of the, like the ways that that, that you talk about it can be disrespectful in ways that aren't necessarily entirely can be seen as disrespectful to the people who have sort of done the work that came before. So just to sort of like broad stroke it like if I had been I wasn't but if I was one of the people who, you know 15 or 20 years ago wrote up the first reliable sources guideline and sort of did the best that I could without having a detailed back, you know, academic background in it, you know, not being a woman not you know being a being a white man and all you know everything that goes along with that, but sort of did the best that I could and maybe it's flawed. You know I might have the perspective that it would be a sensible next step that people with an academic background or people with more demographic variety would be improving on that over time, but to hear my work described as the problem or a problem without a lot of qualification around it would be a little hard to take. So I just I just kind of want to caution you around that kind of language, and I know it can be. I mean I feel like there's sort of a lot of, I don't want you to tone down the substance of what you're saying because I think that what what you're generally saying in this report is important, but I just think it's something to be aware of. So, that's, that's all I have. Thanks Pete, I made you put a question in the chat, I don't know if you want to turn your mic on.

Hi everyone. Yeah, um, one of the questions that really came into my mind, as was triggering the report is would it be helpful to actually either, you know, realize that people contributed to the town halls or recruit other volunteers to go and really attack, not attack but really add to the reliable sources guidelines themselves with some of the recommendations and create direct conversation with the people who, you know the editors who created these rules, see their direct feedback. What do you think about that.

I can reply thanks for that on it, I think, thinking through your question with respect to what Pete just mentioned, we want to be really cautious, because there are people, and some of whom are still around, some of whom like we were in touch with slim virgin who has since passed away, and there's people who have been involved in this project for some time. And there is a lot of turnover in a way on Wikipedia and there we have respect for, and I have participated in this project since 2012, as an editor, and for the work that goes on. It's a lot of work, but we're also we want to respect that but we're also noticing there's ways that people are having conversations that aren't happening on Wikipedia. There's conversations around for example, like catalogs that are in art galleries or for for presentations and these are not these are edited, and they present biographical and conceptual information, but according to the ways in which they're interpreted by other editors who people are not in the room who are in the room of Wikipedia, they're not considered reliable so it's difficult to kind of work through trying to think through ways to reconcile these ways in which community is formed. And, and so, going in and just jumping in and editing the page. While it seems like it would be an attractive way to go where we, we want to be really cautious and thoughtful, and so it's, it's, it's not a, we want to involve people more than ourselves, we can, as critics, this is like a critique of love, right, we can be like we want to participate in this project and we want more voices involved. We want more people involved, how can we do this in a way that is like a gesture of love, and going in and editing the page may find us in situations where we're misunderstood, where not everybody who should be involved is involved, we're not everybody can be in the room at the same time. And so that's why we're suggesting we take it slow. And one of the things that we're doing with this report here is highlighting like what makes this hard to begin with. I hope that helps, Amber Mel, do you want to jump in with anything.

Yeah, I would also just say that my, my experience in with Wikipedia since 2014 is that, you know, there's so much gatekeeping that happens on the platform and I would be hesitant to throw people into that without all the events planning that Monica was describing and P dice I use it yes that is why as an AI, I feel like that's really important. There's a lot of gatekeeping, there's a, I don't think we have to like, you know, avoid the elephant in the room, there's a lot of harassment on Wikipedia that harassment is often directed towards people who might be invested in doing this type of editing work. And so, being careful and cautious is important. You know there is the Be bold mentality which is fantastic but it's it's a privileged position to be bold on Wikipedia. Does that answer your question. Yeah, absolutely. Not that you want to add.

No, not really. There are two people who have raised their hands, I think, a EJ Gertz and also Francesca klikly Yeah, thank you. I think we can go with EJ.

Hi, thank you. I'm Emily Gertz, I'm a journalist based in New York and I'm one of the co founders of the women do news project to increase the quality and number of buyers of Women Journalists on Wikipedia and, you know, there are parts of our projects that have been very directly inspired by art plus feminism's approach. So, thanks for having this event. I wondered if in your research, you looked at the factor of time. In addition to silence versus being outspoken on Wikipedia. Because one thing I've observed as I, I've gotten more actively involved in editing on the site. Despite I've been an editor for a long time but hadn't done very much until joining this project is that part of the phenomenon of challenging a, what a post, a bio of a woman journalists say is that people want to reach a decision, very quickly. And there is this sort of, you know stampede approach that happens, where the critics of the page have been inevitably touched off the finger. They sit. They don't rest until until someone makes a decision, and that can really work against us because we are, we don't necessarily have time to monitor all these discussions in the moment. So do your recommendations look at whether there needs to be like a certain framework for time, in addition to feedback.

I mean, that's huge. And I think you're you're emphasizing something that we've all experienced as editors on participants and trainers where you're in there you're creating an article, and the next thing you know you're hardly finished with it and it's already been flagged for speedy deletion, For some reason that you don't even understand and then it just hits you in the gut and you're like oh my god, but I'm not even done yet like what happened. And we have a, we have the recommendation to support trainers, and I think trainers, perform a very essential and important labor, But when people are volunteers and all of us like our funding ran out we're volunteers in some capacity to, to fit to do this work that we're doing here and the kind of labor that we're asking people to participate in to even update the guidelines will require a massive amount of time. And, and so like I think we're looking for collaborators in that sense to continue what we're doing. We also have Francesca Tripodi here with us and she put out a report or a peer reviewed journal article recently that discusses. Um, hi, thank you for coming. I think what what your point, raising here, which is that often women are articles about women are more likely to require this kind of labor than articles about biographies of men. And that's something that's beyond the scope of our research here. I think we can. We've experienced it anecdotally, and we're focusing on the guidelines themselves in the process of consensus but it's, it's, it's for sure real, and I think Francesca, you are next. So if you wanted to pick up here.

Sure, I actually I had a question related to your research, we can talk about this other stuff too if that's where community wants to go but I joined to talk about your awesome work so one I'm sad. It was an hour before I could cite it because this is a really cool project that you were working on. I have two questions for you. One is about this idea of academic sources because I feel like in my research. There's like contention around whether or not an academic source is reliable or not specifically about, if an academic have written has a written said source, and there's been a lot of really interesting work looking at how hard it is for academics to establish Wikipedia articles, because a lot of their work is journal articles that they write, but that according to Wikipedia guidelines that doesn't establish like Notability. And so I wonder how you all consider this like, I mean, I guess I just like to think of your thoughts on this, on how academics could establish themselves as having Wikipedia pages because I think that helps people find us right when we want to get out our research, but also some of that research is like cited in third party sources and it seems weird like should we be citing the news that citing the research or citing our research and I think that's like super confusing, so I was just, I would love your thoughts on that. And then the second question I was having was like around compensation for trainers, you know, I know there's a real culture and value of volunteerism on Wikipedia and I think that's super important. But how might we get trainers who, as you identify are such a clear part of helping make Wikipedia a more equitable place like I couldn't tell like are you advocating for that being paid labor, if so, would that complicate, like the editorial process, how do you think people could get paid doing that kind of questions around compensating that that labor. Mel, do you want to take it if not I can. Now please go ahead.

Alright so I think the first last part. The second part of the compensation. First of all, I think people should be paid for their work, but I also recognize that there's not necessarily going to be the resources to pay everybody for their labor here, and I think that one of the beautiful things about this project is that it is volunteer run and it's huge, and it's a global project, or it has the potential to be a global project. I don't think that having volunteer labor excludes people from getting paid when and where they can, nor do I think that it discredits the labor that they've done in context where they have been paid as trainers or as Wikipedian in residence positions. So, yeah, I think it'd be fantastic if people got paid but I don't expect that one day somebody is just going to hand all this money over, and then it's going to be distributed equitably I don't think that's a realistic goal. But I do think that, like, in the context where people are doing meaningful change making it would be productive, to offer compensation. And I don't know if I ever answer now how that could be done. I would also say that, like, in terms, in terms of the citations around academics, as I'm going to speak like from a, from a trainers position right now. You can't cite the material about that a person has created, because that's, you know what makes them notable. And so it can't be cited, but there's really nothing that talks about our labor as academics in any meaningful way that's recognized so of course those are reliable resource, they're reliable sources when it comes to speaking about the subject matter. So, I'm an art historian, if I write about a local artist, and then I try it, or somebody tries to create a page for them, then yes, that's a reliable source but it's not a reliable source for me and you know this is a separate issue. But what's considered notable or what makes somebody notable those academic contributions aren't necessarily enough to make me notable I'd have to have a more visible public presence because of the way that it's been set up, but I would say that the notability guidelines which are separate, but like related to reliable sources. They're not equal across disciplines. So they're obviously going to be more stringent for academics for people in the sciences than they are for people working in for example cinema. If you're a pop star, even have like very minor contribution, you will probably have a page and that's fascinating and then the amount of reliable sources written about that person might be fewer and also might not be relevant. So the example I often train with, is what's his name that that hot man who played Aquaman. Jason Momoa Jason Momoa claims. Indigenous ancestry, and the citation for many many years was 21 cool facts about Jason momoa.com. And that was the reliable source that was given weight on Wikipedia, but of course if I tried to read an article about academics that was like the website was 21 cool facts about Francesca Tripodi right away, out the door, you know. So I think that there's some work to do on these policies and practices that, you know, there's some significant work that needs to be done but from a trainers perspective I understand how our labor is not the secondary source that can create the article for us or that can make us notable, what, yeah,

what I hear in your question is kind of something that we're trying to tap into when we talk about consensus, which is are the communities and people and knowledges that are being represented involved in the creation of processes about this representational process, and often they're not right, we have, there is a guideline about the notability of academics, how involved were the candidate communities, was there a peer review process that happened where academics went yeah, this is how we decide whether or not someone that you know is legitimate in our community, and maybe that happened maybe it didn't, and and this is where we're going, how is it that if we don't participate in this, then we're simply like condoning what's already taking place, and we think this is, this is a problem about about with sourcing that happens yeah as you said, beyond this is about beyond biographies, it's about any content, you know, and thank you for that question. Thank you.

She has offered to talk quickly about funding and like funding for trainers and I wonder, yeah, Yeah, we can make a moment for that.

Yeah, um, let's see, I'm not. Not sure what I can really say that would be useful in a short amount of time. The, you know, that certainly there have been many questions around, around, paid editing and various kinds of payment around Wikipedia work over the years, I think the I think the important simple thing to keep in mind is that just because someone has pushed back against something at some time doesn't necessarily mean that it's controversial I think often things happen in the Wikipedia space where you know someone makes a comment and nobody pushes back on it and it feels like it's coming from that community. And that's not always necessarily true. So, and and even if something is controversial doesn't mean that it can't be that it can't be pursued. So you know one of the things that I've done over the course of the Wikipedia and resonance program is really tried to, to kind of push to develop sort of codes of ethics around that because there are or, you know, things along those lines, because there are really ways that someone in a paid position can, can, can do a lot of harm, whether they mean to or not. And, and so I think having, having like sort of, you know, clear guidelines on how you approach your work, that are sort of published and that there are ways that you hold yourself accountable to that can really go a long way towards like those are the things that make you more accepted by the community. If you're sort of upfront about like, these are the ways in which I'm honoring Wikipedia and its ethos and its and its goals. Those are the kinds of like, I think the kinds of things that are done in this report and in this work, if properly expressed are the kinds of things that will make it naturally well accepted by people in the Wikipedia community maybe not every single person, but, you know, I think, you know like relying like that, there's a lot of strength in a project that has proceeded on in a rigorous way itself. And, like, at a kind of a basic level that's the sort of approach that the Wikipedia community values. Yeah, I feel like I've rambled a bit there but I'm happy to get into it more, I feel a little constrained because I don't want to, you know, sort of take it off into too much into that direction but if we want to have a follow up discussion I'm

seeing people asking questions about paid positions and I've been in a paid position before as a Wikipedia and and residents someone mentioned Lane ambras been a Wikipedia no residents. There's a whole network, the wren network of people who have been paid living wage or have been doing Wikipedia work part of their job on this isn't necessarily recognized on wiki, but many Wikipedia ins and residents will create a separate username that identifies the work they do as a Wikipedia and residents from their volunteer account. And, you know, transparency, having reports about what the work that they're doing some of this has been funded by the Wikimedia Foundation, some of its been funded by like the Consumer Reports position that lien razberry had was funded by Consumer Reports So, and there's MIT numerous examples of this. And, and a lot of it has been really fantastic work, I think that showcases how important it is to have people who are kind of bridging Wikipedia with other communities, and it enables that kind of invisible work to happen for a person to be paid for it to do it because otherwise you often have to prioritize other work, and so it would be great to see, like an extension of the work that's been done here taken up in a way where it can, it's sustainable. And often that means like having somebody like do it in a way where they're earning a living wage. But that's not the only way that it needs to happen either, so. So we're raising ideas here. And we have gone over the hour so thank you all for staying. Is there any other outstanding points that I missed that we missed. Amber Mel,

I think we're, we're good, but I do want to mention that we'll be at brickmania Yes, so if you want to continue this conversation with us or no others interested come hang out with us there.

Yeah, and we will be taking like the next few months to do our best to share this out so we've as we did the report we're celebrating, and we're working on like getting the word out that this is what we've done, and, and kind of sharing our critique of love to slowly, think about what might be next steps and will be at Wikimedia I think we'll aim to be at wiki conference North America as well and so thank you all. Thank you to wiki crud, as well for supporting our efforts and to art and feminism and melon Amber.

Thank you. Thank you all. Thank you for being here it will be

recorded and I think Kira will follow up with accessing all of that. So

I think there's some fun oh, it's been ages question about time. And shout out. Yeah, there's just no time.

Thank you so much. It's been a wonderful insight. I've learned so much and I hope that we'll see more of this coming from the community. Thank you. Thanks. Mariana. Thanks everyone.