I was happy to help organize and present WikiConference North America 2018 in Columbus Ohio Thursday 18 – Sunday 21 October 2018. This was the fifth iteration of this annual conference. I had been a core organizer for 2014 in NYC, 2015 in DC, and 2016 in San Diego, and have been happy to have organized special projects including the medical event in 2017 in Montreal and the medical event this year, along with various other NYC engagement in this year’s event.
Each of these conferences have been 3-4 day events targeting and inviting Wikipedia contributors in North America to convene and leverage regional proximity to collaborate in developing the wiki. After every one of this conferences – and every other similar gathering I attend – I always wish I could better document how the conversations and social interactions change how the people who attend interact with the wiki, the world, each other, and themselves.
The conference has a foundation in community organizing. The first conference in NYC was the legacy event of the Students for Free Culture conference, which is now an organization called Free Culture Foundation. I raise this because I want to remember the values of what people from maybe 2007-2015 called “free culture”, and what we now more commonly call the “Open Movement”, and what was then floated and now we are codifying as a commitment to diverse participation with an informed and empowered volunteer participant base making executive decisions about movement values.
Friday
Friday was the hackathon or general workshop day before the three day conference. It was also a day for a culture crawl. I took a tour of the nearby Thurber House and also talked with Jackie Koerner about university engagement with Wikipedia. I describe both of those things in separate posts.
At the hackathon I showed Scholia to David Goodman / user:DGG and to Rob / user:BU Rob13. David suggested that I seek to import the Japanese language academic journals. He said that there is some fork of Open Science Framework which contains exportable metadata of Japanese publications and that if I imported that to Wikidata then I would be making an unusual mix of research available for the first time. I talked with Rob about the social problems which arise as a consequence of disambiguating authors. He is a member of the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee and generally interested in any risks to personal safety which originate in Wikipedia publishing. He encouraged me to continue public discussion and to present when the documentation is more developed.
Saturday
The day started with three keynote talks, Nicole Ebber, Program Manager, Wikimedia 2030 Movement Strategy Process; Mark Graham, Director of the Wayback Machine at Internet Archive; and McKensie Mack, Director of Art + Feminism. The particulars of what they said is less important than what they represented. These three represented focuses of attention of the Wikimedia community. Everyone wants to see the development of big long term goals through the strategy process. It has become apparent that Wikipedia and the Internet Archive should be good friends as nonprofit independent online media platforms. Art+Feminism is the leading voice of advocacy in addressing gender-based criticism of Wikipedia. These three were on show in answer to wiki community concerns.
Jill Horbacewicz and Shira Weiner, my collaborators in the physical therapy program at Touro College, were here from this day. I had been supporting them in running a regular Wikipedia editing program for physical therapy students since 2016 and we were in the process of writing a case study about the experience and outcomes. This conference was their first time seeing their work in context. They would give an audio interview to WikiJabber about their experience and participate in the medicine meetup with me, as well as be good sports in all sorts of wiki programming. We talked a bit on this day but after I oriented them they got around well on their own.
I joined three talks about Wikipedia misconduct. One was by the Wikimedia Foundation Trust and Safety team, one was by Wikimedia NYC president Megan Wacha as she presented the Code of Conduct which that group has intensely developed, and the other talk was my own as I presented the newly starting research Automated Detection of Online Abuse I am facilitating at the University of Virginia. Lots of people find all this exciting and useful.
My colleague Robbie Hott joined me at this conference from the University of Virginia. He develops SNAC, a multi-institution library archiving project. While Robbie is a casual contributor to Wikimedia projects, it happened that he did support the integration of SNAC and Wikidata when the opportunity arose. Neither he nor the SNAC team were so aware of what followed, but I knew that SNAC had become a case study of a model archival collaboration in Wikidata. Consequently, I invited Robbie to join this event as others in the SNAC and Wikidata project were in attendance. To give more context to the culture, I invited Robbie to join me for lunch with the student and librarian team who were attending the conference from LaGuardia Community College. While LaGuardia was not a part of SNAC, they are a long-running college level institutional partner of Wikimedia projects centered at the intersection of their library and English department. We chatted about our various experiences.
I had a brief chat with Yuri Astrakhan, wiki development superstar; Katie Filbert, Wikidata superstar; and Stephen LaPorte, WMF lawyer about Wikimedia Community and Wikimedia Foundation relations. We talked a bit about Wikimedia Portugal’s chapter derecognition. The point of the conversation was not to reconcile any issue, but just to state and exchange feelings and sentiment. My view was that I wished more information about AffCom’s investigation would be public, especially considering that they issued what amounted to a new kind of punishment by taking away previously granted privileges for no published reason. Everyone was sympathetic to the idea that there could be private reasons, and also to the idea that judgement should not be routinely private when large sectors of the public Wikimedia community are stakeholders. We also talked about the upcoming Wikimedia Foundation election for affiliate organizations to appoint trustees. I was a facilitator in 2016 and I expressed an intention to facilitate again. Yuri was a candidate in the last election. I told Stephen that I was anxious about the representative contacts for user groups being confidential information, and therefore, if we wanted user groups to vote in this election then this would be a barrier to their participation. He took it in and I requested no response of him.
We had a medical meetup with good attendance. Interests are diverse and the most striking part of this meetup to me was how so many sectors of health and medicine were present, with our common interest being in health publishing through Wikipedia.
I made a new friend with TJ, who is interested in LGBT+ topics and works in medical information. On wiki he does biographies, which is not my focus, but I am always excited to meet someone with whom I have a lot in common, and who deeply understands Wikipedia, and with whom I had not previously crossed paths. I like that Wikipedia is large enough that very experienced people with common interests might not meet each other for years. Mike Feist and his boyfriend came to the conference, and Another Believer was there, so we had a boys meetup. I like the mutual recognition and it makes me feel safer that even if we are doing different things, we know where the others are and in the frequent LGBT+ danger which appears we all know that we can look to each other and the network for support.
Sunday
I talked with Frank Schulenberg of the Wiki Education Foundation. He said that he wants to make a strong commitment for his organization to promote Wikidata in multiple ways at universities. I explained to him that my appointment at the Data Science Institute at the University of Virginia emphasized just that. I explained that with universities editing Wikipedia, the usual focus was either the content itself or some kind of media studies examining Wikipedia as a quirky platform. In contrast, I told him that editing Wikidata can teach students basic data literacy which is relevant to every academic student regardless of field of study. I said that I thought Wikidata could be more attractive to more schools than Wikipedia editing ever was. He said that he would connect me with people at Wiki Education developing a curriculum.
I met Emery, the student at Ohio State University who is managing their Wikimedia student club, the Wikipedia Connection. He was the primary conference organizer and a hero for all this. User:Superhamster was a founding member and super Wikipedian, but he has graduated into the work force outside Ohio, and the club is now in a second generation.
I met in User:Cyberpower678 in person for the first time. He is a highly experienced Wikipedia editor and tool developer. This is a rare combination, as many developers are unfamiliar with Wikipedia culture. Cyberpower accepted an appointment at the Internet Archive to create the InternetArchivebot. I love this bot because it provides an essential service to Wikipedia and also because it entangles the fates and success of Wikipedia and the Internet Archive with each other. I had heavily criticized an aspect of IAbot in various places on wiki. Although I liked its functionality, its design and Wikimedia culture led Cyberpower to directing it to post on the talk page to inform the Wikimedia community of when it made edits to an article. This practice seems right in the small scale, but this bot was doing this millions of times which was unprecedented. In all this I saw that people can design bots which request human time and attention, and when a bot is screaming like a baby bird to be fed it can be attractive to humans who want to socialize with it. Unfortunately, a bot does not appreciate human interaction like other humans do, so the human intent of socializing is lost. Many people do not quite recognize that they are trying to socialize with a bot, thus it is a black hole of human emotion poured into the void when previously Wikipedia was only a place for humans to socialize with humans. I heard Cyberpower out and I came to believe that he was expert in what he does and that he put a lot of care into the bot design. In talking he raised a lot of issues to me, and I came to understand that bot operation is not just 1 or 2 issues, but lots of complex social issues none of which have names but which we need to culturally understand. I left feeling that he should operate his bot however he felt is useful, and that it should be up to the Wikimedia community to have the broad conversations on the ethics around bot behavior.