User:MargaretRDonald/Sandbox/ReportWOW2019

Report on WOW2019 and the Wikimedia Australia community conferences. WOW2019 (Worlds of Wikimedia conference: communicating and collaborating across language & culture) and 2019 Wikimedia Australia Community Conference

Program WOW2019

June 12

• Knowledge equity and digital maps - Dr Martin Dittus, Oxford Internet Institute.

Martin has published the slides for his talk on twitter and on Google Docs.
There is an imbalance of representation, and an imbalance of participation. Key messages were:

1. whole regions of the earth (in particular much of Africa) are neglected as topics for wikipedia articles
   1. And locals in the neglected areas are not the majority of those writing the articles about the neglected areas
   2. Local participation requires connectivity
   3. The most detailed representations are not always written in a local language
   4. Who has the capacity to tell their own story?
   5. Local contributors need local-language references which are not always available.
   6. Dittus & Graham proposed in an article in Wired Opinion that to reduce inequality Wikipedia should consider paying editors.
   7. Economic imbalances can bring about unintentional processes of exclusion
   8. The online encyclopedia is a lopsided representation of the world. Should it break its non-profit taboo?
   9. Some of these issues are driven by systemic inequalities and processes of exclusion.
      

Who creates, shapes and controls these digital representations of the world?

Equal treatment vs. equal opportunity Category:WikiProjects relevant for countering systemic bias

Apart from lack/cost of internet for individuals, these areas generally lack the local language support services common to better covered areas. (Not everyone has access to

knowledge about the world in their own language) See also Sen et al. (2015). Another issue is that unlike the West where Wikipedians can contribute with no payment and still eat and live, editing wikipedia for nothing is an option for many fewer people. See Wired Opinion

As a free, crowdsourced, online multilingual encyclopedia, Wikipedia has turned previously paid labour into a spare-time activity. Its reliance on self-motivated volunteers works exceedingly well in certain parts of the world; but, in other regions, this model has become an economic barrier to entry. Maybe as a consequence, Wikipedia is surprisingly imbalanced in its coverage of global knowledge.

Martin then moved on to discuss the differences in finding a restaurant (using Google Maps) when using different languages (results in entirely different sets of restaurants...)

June 13

• ​Welcome to country with Uncle Alan, a Gadigal man from the Eora nation.
• Professor Jaky Troy (who discussed her collaborations on Torwali language, and aboriginal languages)
• Sufi performance by Adnan Bhatti (one of Jaky's collaborators on Torwali)
• Bunty Avieson - Minority language Wikipedias for cultural resilience (discussed her work in Bhutan. See Bunty Avieson.
• Adrian Estevez Iglesias - Galician Literature in Wikipedias: from Middle-Age lyric to contemporaneous crime fiction
• Ivonne Kristiani - Encouraging Knowledge Production by Women in Arts & Culture in Indonesia
• Carwil Bjork-James

• ​Frances Di Lauro - Wikipedia and languages ​
• ​ Liam Wyatt, founder and coordinator for GLAMwiki Europeana.
• Kerry Raymond - Creating Wikipedia articles from CC-BY content; how hard can it be?
• Toby Hudson - Wikidata and how it is helping to overcome language biases

June 14

• Keynote Ingrid Cumming, Noongarpedia

• ​Caddie Brain and Joel Liddle - Developing Indigemoji
• Carrol Quadrio - How digital technology enables literacy for Indigenous peoples
• Jacinta Sutton - Libraries, Wikipedia and the yield of knowledge
• Jedidiah Evans - Wikiprisons: Carceral education and the limits of knowledge
• ​Keynote Liam Wyatt - Wikipedia as Palimpsest ​​
• Roundtable

Program: Wikimedia Australia Community conference (15 June)

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