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My name's Victoria Leachman, um, I'm a long-term Wikipedian. I've been editing Wikipedia since 2008, which is fairly early into the piece, um, particularly New Zealand. Uh, I started because, um, I'm a museum professional, and I was working [00:00:30]... Shrugged a little bit, and I thought, oh, well, if you guys aren't that interested, maybe I'll go and put it somewhere where other people are interested. And that was really the start of my editing experience with Wikipedia. So it was a biography of, a biography, an article [00:01:00] biography, of a South African philanthropist. And, uh, he... He donated these, not only an artwork to New Zealand, but also to other colonies as well. It was a rather large artwork of, of one of the King Georges. Um, and, uh, yeah, I thought it was fascinating. Um, the interesting thing for me was that, like a lot of new editors, um, even though I thought I'd done quite a scholarly article with using all of my, um, history degree knowledge with good [00:01:30] citations, it got speedily deleted. So, so... I hadn't understood what that meant. I hadn't been playing in the ground of Wikipedia. I didn't understand the background. I didn't understand the community. Um, so I went through that experience, uh, unbowed, however, and rewrote the article completely, not understanding that I can actually revert the speedy deletion. Um, just started from scratch again, and that one cut through. So, um, yeah, it was an interesting but rough start to editing Wikipedia. [00:02:00] So when you started, I mean, that is. Close to when Wikipedia started itself, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was, I think it was about, it's within the first five, six years, yeah, yeah, of it being in existence. And there was still quite a bit, you know, it was, it was growing in reputation and numbers of, and in community as well. And I think you touched on maybe one of the reasons why Wikipedia is so fantastic in that, actually, in a museum setting where you went to curators and they weren't particularly [00:02:30] interested. But there are interested people out there in the world. Yes, yes. And so, is this one of the key things for Wikipedia about just having that kind of global community? Yeah, I think, um, it's, for me, it's all about, uh, ensuring that people can get access to the knowledge that they... I mean it's an encyclopedia, it's something to really remember about Wikipedia. It's authoritative information that is done in the neutral voice with great [00:03:00] citations. I mean if anybody who does, uses research, you know that the first thing you do is not read the article, you go to the bottom of the article and see what the citations say to see how, the quality of the article and how up -to -date it is. Research that people are using to create a Wikipedia entry or an article. So for me um, I like it because it means I can delve into subject areas that may not be covered well elsewhere. [00:03:30] My, I mean I've gone into quite obscure, rabbit -holes that's the other thing you do as an editor, you get obsessive. And you do go down rabbit holes and become quite fixated. I've done, you know, the shipwrecks of the Southern Ocean. I've done about seven or eight articles on that. I've, um, I've done a bit of editing around the natural environment of New Zealand. Um, I kind of, some people have complete themes about what they do as editors. Other people like me drift in and out of topics and are just [00:04:00] interested in making sure that the articles are better quality or improving citations or editing and modernising the entry of the time. So one of the early things I remember about Wikipedia in the early days was people would say, oh, can you trust it? Yeah, that's, that's still a, a, um, it's a bit of propaganda that, that people do still have in their heads about Wikipedia. It's only as good as, um, the people editing it, but what you've got to [00:04:30] realize is that the people editing it are, um, there's a lot of us, there's about 120 ,000, um, edits. I think it's edits a day. Anyway, it's, there's a lot of, there's a high community engagement for making topics accurate. And because of the way it's set up with citations, you have to, um, use authoritative sources. If you're citing, um, somebody's granny's opinion, forget it. That's not the citation you need. You need an [00:05:00] authoritative source. So, you're looking at, um, The type of citations or the type of sources that you'd use for a first year university essay. You know, it's the library books, it's the newspapers, it's, um, something that's got a bit of research. Now, when you write the article, or when you read the article, it should be in a neutral tone. I mean, it's not a place for propaganda, it's not a place for self -promotion, it really is supposed to be an encyclopedia. That whole thing of, [00:05:30] um, At being, um, not an authoritative thing to read or, you know, it's, it's, it's not trustworthy. You will still find articles that haven't been written in the best way, but the community works to improve as we go. And we found that, I mean, studies have shown that it's as accurate as any other encyclopedia. And it's because the wisdom of the crowds have meant that multiple eyes get to look at articles and they get checks. Um, and while [00:06:00] some parts of the site might not get seen for a couple of years and research might advance, you will find that eventually somebody goes back to that area and adds the new citations and then cleans it up a bit. And I actually haven't heard that being said in terms of um, you know, can you trust it. I haven't heard that being said for years. So I mean it has developed incredibly over, over the last 20 years. I think it's more, the more, it's got bigger. I mean, every year you get more articles, you get more edits, it's, it's improving all of the time [00:06:30] because it's a crowd -based, um, information system and because it's a repository of people constantly trying to improve the quality, um, That's becoming less of an issue. And I think it's also connected with the growth in digital awareness of the wider community, the wider world. The fact is, is that everybody does understand that if you want to be sure of what you're reading, the truthfulness of what you're reading, look at where the source of information [00:07:00] is from. So look at the citations, figure out whether you think that they're authoritative or not. Um, So there's a bit of digital literacy that's involved with Wikipedia as well. So we've touched on briefly what Wikipedia is, but I wonder if you can give me a bit of a snapshot of what Wikipedia is and what it's not. Okay, um, well, I've kind of talked about what it is, which is it's encyclopedic. It's, the whole point is to have a neutral tone of voice [00:07:30] and well referenced. Um, what it's not is it's not puff pieces. It's not, um, in any way a place for marketing. It's not a place for, um, acrimonious debate. Debate is a debate. Um, when you look at Wikipedia, Pada magia, fascinating. So um, so why don't you talk about why it's so important, And that maybe says a lot about because we all as, as we move inwards into this program and that we need [00:08:00] to educate ourselves and be confident that this is a discussion of our, um, and important stories and grants which Fans We want this change. Uh, So that's where, um, Um, If you're a politician and if there is a page on you, because you're significant person. Um, So that's where, um, Your [00:08:30] staff or you can log in and can go to the talk page to say this fact is inaccurate. Here's a better citation for this fact. Can somebody please improve it? And so that talk page is a, is a really good sense check for making sure that the article is, um, is authoritative and agreed. By consensus with the community. Um, It's, it's not a, so it's not a personal essay, place for personal essays. It's not a [00:09:00] genealogy, place for to put your own private family genealogy. It is an encyclopedia, and if you think of it like that, then you're not going to get into strife. How far removed do you have to be from an article before you can contribute? So, I couldn't write an article about myself, nor if I had staff. Yeah, gay staff too, yeah. Imagine having staff, oh my god. Um, they couldn't do it, but how, so how far removed do you have to be? Um, well, the best thing to do is, is read the conflict of interest, because that's the other [00:09:30] thing Wikipedia has. If you, if you're wondering about any roles, just be sure to read the conflict of interest. Pop it into Wikipedia and say, see what Wikipedia says about the Wikipedia rules. Essentially, with with how far away, I mean, I don't edit on myself, my family, or any of my friends, or the significant parents of my friends. And for the, or children for that matter. So um, That's about the scope. I mean, and I won't, I won't edit about, um, the people I work with. So it's, [00:10:00] it's, it's kind of like at least, you've got to be at least two or three degrees separation between you and the person to be able to write about them. They might be part of your community. Um, sometimes it can be, it can be hard. Ngāti, I don't do it, but there is a, there is a way you can contribute an article for somebody you might know. You just have to declare the conflict of interest on your, on the talk page and you go through the article submission. So there's a third party review of your article. [00:10:30] So say you've got a really close friend that is a significant person because they've been written about in newspapers or in textbooks or, um, there's authoritative information online about them and you want to write an article about them because they're particularly significant in a social club you've got or, or an artist or whatever, um, you can submit that article via a checking process to get a third party to look at it to make sure [00:11:00] that there is no conflict of interest, that that is significant enough and it's worthy of and written in the tone of an encyclopedia. Why do you think people should contribute to Wikipedia? Um, I think it's a, for me it's an equity thing and also a sharing of knowledge. It's, it's altruistic. Um, I think it's harder to find free information that's truthful and has, [00:11:30] uh, hasn't, well, tries not to be biased. You know, there's, there's a lot of work that happens in the community to make sure that information is accessible to people for free and able to be reused easily. So it's a, it's, it's an altruistic act to contribute to it. And I think it's also important because It's a way of reflecting society. It's a way of saying these things were significant for us today. And it could be, those things [00:12:00] might be movements, it might be people, it might be native species. Because it's an encyclopedic, it's encyclopedic to subject matter, so it covers everything. Um, and that means you, it's, it's really good for. For the editing community too, because if you're a bit of a train spotter, for instance, like I am, and you're not transporting, but I'm a, I'm a details focused person and I really like diving deep on [00:12:30] a particular subject, um, then it's there for you, you can, you can be altruistic in your subject matter and share your knowledge, um, and the knowledge you've researched. So for me, I think it's, the benefits of it are. That you're providing something for the public good, globally, that It can be read by, it not only can be read by you in the English language, the other thing to remember is that the [00:13:00] Wikipedia isn't just one language. You and I both know the English Wikipedia, but there's actually 360 plus other languages that Wikipedia exists in, including Te Reo. So, um, It's not just our community, our Western community, English -speaking community that it serves, it also serves a whole stack of the world. And if you write an article well in English Wikipedia, the likelihood is, is that somebody will pick it up, translate it in some shape or form, and it'll go into one of those other language, [00:13:30] um, language Wikipedias as well. So you briefly mentioned about The kinds of articles. That's quite interesting. So you talked about movement. So what kinds of articles can be on Wikipedia? Um, all sorts really. I mean, it's, it's everything from, uh, you, you name it, you can, you can put it in there. The things that, you know, so it's, it's politicians, it's sport figures, all sorts of significant people. It's, um, Political movements, it's, uh, natural [00:14:00] environment, natural environment specimens, locations, places to have a holiday, um, you name it, it's got everything in there. It's got medical facts, it's got space, it's got, it's kind of like, um, your quick, I mean, you'll have done a Google research, um, you know, Google search. The likelihood is that some of that information will be coming from Wikipedia, no matter what you're searching on. Um, yeah. I think the thing that the editing [00:14:30] community have to acknowledge is that the quality of the articles depends on the type of people writing them. I mean, I would be terrible at writing a plumbing article about a plumbing fixture, but somebody else will be great at that. I'm better at writing about people, or I know how to do species articles because I've had experience with that. But... You know, don't ask me to talk about a maths concept. Not my forte at [00:15:00] all. So, what you'll find in the community is these people with these subject area expertise who understand and can write, um, easily absorbed, um, information for the, for the encyclopedia. Well, speaking of specific, uh, subjects, I guess. So, uh, the impetus of this interview is looking at, um, How do we uplift and document rainbow communities in Aotearoa, uh, [00:15:30] and add those either as new articles or as add to existing articles, um, as a way of kind of uplifting and sharing our knowledge? So that's kind of like where this interview comes from. And the first question I have... a product, is what kind of skill does somebody need to become a Wikipedia contributor? Um, I think it really depends on what you want to do. If you're doing small edits or adding [00:16:00] citations or spell checking an article for example. Those, that's perfect It's pretty simple, it's like editing a Word document. Um, even with adding a citation in to back up a fact that this templates there that you can just add, you know, title of book, date of publication, publish a name. Um, and it will generate the citation for you, so it's it's not that hard. As you get further into the. Getting experience with editing? You understand what's hard, [00:16:30] what's really hard, and what's fairly easy? Editing existing articles, again quite, as long as you do your research, pretty you know, relatively okay. You start to understand what a, what a simple structure would look like for say a biography. And they're pretty standard. You can compare. Um, I always say to new editors, go and have a look at a really good article of a person like check out what the Elvis, you know, Elvis's article looks like or, [00:17:00] um, just send us just in returns article. Don't have a look at that and see how how well that's been written and then have a look at the article you want to edit and copy some of the formatting and try and figure out how they wrote. So to transfer that skill sets you got a comparison to look at. The one thing I would say for even, um, quite well experienced editors, they tend to stay away from articles of living people.[00:17:30] The, the, if you're doing a new article on a living person, and even, um, um, updating an, an article on a living person, the... The supervision is quite stringent because, um, we want to make sure it's factual, we want to make sure there's nothing defamatory in there. Um, and it's a lot harder because it gets, because it's, it's more sensitive because the person is living. There's a higher bar of [00:18:00] accuracy, there's a higher bar of supervision, there's a higher bar of checking for those particular articles. So I wouldn't ever encourage a newbie artist. Editor to dive straight into a living person's article. You're just cruising for a bruising. It's gonna, it's almost too hard. Um, it's not that the local community wouldn't support you, because we do. It's not that you can't get advice from the editors around you, because you will. It's just, I think it's much [00:18:30] better to start where you can have a positive experience rather than getting challenged about quality. um, Um, when those living person articles are really highly supervised. And when you're writing something like it is somebody And when you're writing something like is somebody virtually looking over your shoulder? I mean, how do they know that you're writing it? Um, no, they, they, what happens is, is that you normally, there's a couple of ways you can do it. Um, one, you can have a draft article and then you take the draft and you submit it for a, [00:19:00] for another volunteer to review it and then post it once they're happy with it. Or you can, um, write it on your, on your own user page and, and, um, test what it looks like and do a lot of editing on your user page so it's sort of a scratch pad um it's not searched by wikipedia it doesn't come as results but it's your little space to do some editing practice and then if that person's a red link or um or an article that's already you know published Um, in existence you [00:19:30] can, You can post it in there and away it goes, But, There's a number of um, Checks and balances As well because there's a community that look at the new articles that these bots that give you Lists. So, um if you're, Uh, if you're. person that really likes checking other people's work and being a copy editor you can join a group of people that Check all the new articles that get posted for the day Um, so once you're new in there, and there's also another group that does the edit [00:20:00] changes now There's there are bots as well. There's a lot of um work that happens automatically on wikipedia where um Ngā mame ngā mauna mātou Ngā tupu hōku Ngā ngā tupu hōku[00:20:30] They're going to rename themselves instead of Richie McCaw did all of this. That was me, Charles Edward. So, um, that does happen. There's, there's, and, and, you know, you just got to take it as read it. That's what you get with crowdsourcing, but there's a whole community and a whole lot of bots that are trying to protect that as well. You mentioned just before about going to example records and example biographies to having a look. I wonder, is something like looking at say, um, uh, a controversial figure, say like Donald Trump. And [00:21:00] looking at his... page to see how they handle kind of bias and things like that. Yes, yeah, that's, that's, I mean, that's a really interesting one to have a look at it. You'll find for some of those more controversial figures that the community, there's, there's administrators within our community that have higher powers than the most general editor, and that's because they're experienced editors and they've been around a while and know their stuff and have gone through a process of getting editor, um, admin, um, Um,[00:21:30] And then the other person changes a device that and then the person changes it again and then Go to war is when one person dies and changes something. Gites. Can especially on the talk page can become quite not that it happens often but can become quite toxic so in order to stop all [00:22:00] of that sometimes they have editing restrictions? Uhm, an it takes awhile to to get those changes through. I think also it is a, agree with you. Looking on tool pages is always really interesting to see the Where the tensions are within the community, because we, I mean, the editing community is like any other community. We're going to have discussions. It's not a democracy and it's not, um, it's not chaos either. The editing community is all [00:22:30] about consensus, so everybody's viewpoint is as important as the next editor's viewpoint, at that point and we try and come to a middle ground about where… So what is it all about? So I turned it into a bit of an interesting the heritage of, har invested in, really showing um, like the treason and all that stuff that's, So you shouldn't, There shouldn't be too much issue. Um, yeah, for example, if somebody was saying, um, X person is homophobic, you'd go, well, show me the citation for where that's been said. Show [00:23:00] me the proof. Um, and there should be a citation for that fact. If there's not a citation, then that's somebody's opinion. That's the editor's opinion that's put that in. And we want to stay away from opinion, and we want to have fact. Cited fact. E whanau areloa mai manewiri Donald Trump lack lembah Oh, no Hewan sella Whe mhanau So um, Ko tempiri Ike um Meli Tino Pola Oh, [00:23:30] umm Mi makani anoa o um Ikin um um books or newspapers or, or other authoritative sources to be able to, um, enter information into Wikipedia. And then it's a matter of registering, like, I, uh, it's always good to have a username, get your own username so you can track your contributions, um, and, [00:24:00] yeah. Wikipedia does occasionally block IP addresses, not that it would for a library, but if 15 people decided to use that IP address that day, it may cause a bot to go, oh, that's somebody doing mass editing, we're not sure we like that, and then a block might occur. So, um, the best thing to do is to register for Wikipedia and then, um, to start your editing process. My advice is start with the small things first, you know, go and have a polish of a page, um, do some copy editing, [00:24:30] and find a couple of facts and learn how to do citations. Don't try and do everything at once. Um, it's a, it's a skill set that you grow. Um, and then the other thing I would say is that if you want to, um, I I did editing in my study for 10 years before I spoke to another Wikipedian. Um, you don't have to talk to the community, in fact a lot of people don't talk to other editors, but there are, um, editor meetups around the country and, um, that are great places to go if [00:25:00] you want to meet other people that are doing edits like you, and, uh, to get more information and to ask how to do things. It's always easier to ask somebody and get them to show you in two minutes, rather than try and work through a YouTube video or, um, or work it out yourself. Um, and it's far less confrontational in terms of like, oh, I can't get through this. It's so much easier to just ask somebody and they show you and away you go. And is it quite a diverse community, Wikipedia editors? Yeah, I mean, I think, I would like it to be more diverse. [00:25:30] We've, we've, we've got, um, it does tend to skew older. It does, the groups that, that I'm involved in. And, um, that said, you know, there are, it changes every time we meet. Um, it depends on who's got the problem. Um, and it depends on which part of the country you're in too. I mean, there are obviously small towns won't have, um, Um, editathons or won't have groups of people editing together. But for the main centers you can, I can generally put you in touch with somebody that's, [00:26:00] that's doing similar work. So you've talked about, um, adding to existing articles and we've, we've briefly mentioned about, um, making new articles. In between that, are there stubs? What's a stub? Oh, a stub is a new article, but it's a, it's a, it's a small, it's a small article. So it's a, okay, so there, there's, there's red links, which is, which are links that are underlined and highlighted in red, which is to say this, this person has got, well, this.[00:26:30] Particular line of whatever that fact is or be a person or whatever is considered significant, but there's no page yet. So that's saying we've got some work to do. So a red link you can go and click on a red link and then immediately work on the article and import whatever you've been doing on your user page into that article and. A stub is generally the start of an article and to create a stub you really need three [00:27:00] authoritative sources So as long as you meet that criteria of um, three separate authoritative sources for that particular subject that you're writing about, um, that will create a stub. It's like, uh, I think we've got some still, we've still got some stubs for, um, politicians or for people that are in the, um, biography of New Zealand, um, about I suppose [00:27:30] about 10 years ago, we had somebody go through and create stubs for everybody in the biography, um, that, that entered in that biography, um, portfolio, and, you know, that was written by, um, out of the Ministry for Culture and Heritage. Etcetera. Um, and now they're all in Te Ara online. Um, but some of those aren't full articles. So what he did was he created a name, um, in the article, created a birth and death date, and said they were from Te Ara, plus two more, two [00:28:00] more references. So that gives somebody enough, um, information to go back to, and then go, okay, there are the three sources, what else can I find? What other information, significant information can I get? ..talk about with this, with this particular individual. You're mentioning, uh, significance and notability What are those, what, what is that? Um, okay, so... You can't, the whole thing with an encyclopedia is that it's, [00:28:30] it should be significant enough to be, um, worthwhile putting into an encyclopedia. It's not talking about the value of a person's life, it's not talking about the importance, it's talking about their impact and significance on society as a whole. So, um, That was one of the reasons my South African Philanthropist article got speedily deleted. There was a debate as to whether that person was significant enough to appear [00:29:00] in Wikipedia. There wasn't, one of the things I didn't do was link it to other, um, to other articles throughout Wikipedia, even though there was an opportunity to do that. And that lowered his significance rating, which meant that there was a bit of a debate. Now normally, you've got the limited, the most limited you can do is have three authoritative resources. But if you, the more authoritative sources [00:29:30] you use, and the longer the, the longer you can do it. oarstrihad um um, um, um um the longer the um article you could it's can you prove the significant enough to include in a global encyclopedia that's the question you have to ask yourself. Um usually significance can be related to are they in a collecting institution already no some of you work in a collecting institution already? um what type of Um, so, you know, in the Alexander Tumor Library or in the National Library or, [00:30:00] um, you know, are they published? Are they, do they have artistic works in, uh, Te Papa? Um, so what's their presence? Um, and then also, it's, it might be that they were, they were significant because they were, They were acknowledged by some medal ceremony from, from the New Zealand medal ceremony that we have, you know, once a year, or so what, what has society deemed them to be, and it's that, um, [00:30:30] it's, it's always under debate though because that's changing, like, what the, the, the, The rebels of, of yesteryear are now the, the important people commenting on the day, you know, so it's, it can change through time, does change through time, um, that's, that's a good thing, that just means that, you know, they might not be significant today, but give them another 10 or 15 years of contributing to whatever part of the society they are.[00:31:00] Maybe they'll get there. Um, and it's again one of the reasons why an article on living people, a person, is that more difficult. You know, a Prime Minister? Yep, definitely significant. Had a significant impact on the country. Politician? Probably had a significant impact somewhere in, in how they're doing. Um, a farmer? Yeah. You know, how significant is that? Did they invent refrigeration of meat? [00:31:30] Yeah, that's significant. Um, uh, a knitter? Did, what did they do to, to be significant in their community? So you're almost needing to find an angle as to the significance. Yes, yeah. Right. How then might it work for, say, marginalised communities or, uh, say the rainbow community, where... There may not be those authoritative sources, because it's underrepresented. Yep, exactly, [00:32:00] and that's something that the Wikipedia community struggle with. Um, I, it's, because it's not, I mean, yes, your community is one of the key communities where it's acknowledged. There's, there's what I would consider bias, um, not bias against contribution, but bias within society that they're not reporting on the, the, because we're all talking about the citation and the sources to make the Wikipedia article. If you're not reflected in society and you're being, and you're, um, Um, [00:32:30] your achievements aren't lauded by society. It means that Wikipedia has a harder job, or Wikipedia editor has a much harder job getting you into Wikipedia. So it's finding those, those citations. We know that there's a bias against women. We know there's a bias against the Rayburn community. We know there's a bias against, um, indigenous communities around the world in terms of reflecting their significance in, um, And it's because of colonization, it's because of homophobia, it's [00:33:00] because of, um, sexism. So, it's... At least we acknowledge that, and I think that's where, in terms of fixing it, sometimes the question isn't what you should be doing in terms of editing Wikipedia, but what is out there in terms of the citations. I've had conversations with. Curators here at Te Papa about the importance of their authoritative blog posts, for example, for Pasifika artists, and can you do that, please, [00:33:30] instead of contributing to Wikipedia, because I can then use that as a citation to go and do my, to promote it to my editor friends and get the article written really easily without the curator even touching it, because they've done this great blog post, and that's finally tipped the edge over the other two citations we've managed to collect. Thank you. So there are other examples I can think of where, say, for instance, a politician may mention a Rainbow community member in Parliament, in Hansard, so would that be a... Citation? Yeah, [00:34:00] amazing. Yeah, so it's finding those sources. I mean, I've found a really rich vein in... In thesis of university research thesis, for the most part, they're now put into the research libraries and you can actually find them and access them, um, online. So that for me has been a rich vein for people that I've been writing about where I haven't managed to find any book or, um, And also Papers Past is a great one as well, which is the [00:34:30] online newspapers for New Zealand. And again, it's finding those people and seeing the articles that were written. Papers Past now goes up to the 1980s, so that can be a really deep vein of information and citations for articles. But it's a tough one. It's, it's, you know, there's a, there's a, there's a reason that, um, um, um, um, um. There's communities, there's a global community of editors who are involved in projects called Women in Red, and that's referring to the fact [00:35:00] that, um, there's only 20 percent of biography articles in Wikipedia are about women, and they're trying to get it to 50 -50. Um, and where that, where the issue with that is, is that why they call it Women in Red is that you've got that, um, that red link, where they're saying this person is significant. But they're not, but they haven't had a page written about them yet. So is there a mechanism in Wikipedia to actually lower the threshold for particular communities? So like only having two [00:35:30] references? Um, I would say if you're going to do that, you'd be better off using another, um, Wikimedia Foundation project called Wikidata. So, and I, this one's a bit of an unusual one because It's linked open data, and if you've ever done any data entry, then you'll get it immediately. But if you haven't even worked with data before, it can be a bit of a challenge. So, um, what Wikidata is, is a huge database with, um, [00:36:00] particular facts and the associated linkages between the property of the fact and the value of the fact. So, for example, if you're a person, if you've got an item that is a person, the, um, you'd have first name is Mark, last name is Lawson. So, um, And it's entering those facts. Again, you need to reference it, but the bar of significance for Wikidata is significantly lower than for [00:36:30] Wikipedia. So my, with my workflow, when I'm doing, um, collating, Get the citations for people I might come across people that haven't quite reached the bar of significance for Wikipedia. So I'll enter them into wikidata and add the citations in so that when somebody does come to write that article, they can find those citations really easily. Figure out all this for now. Maybe I can find a 5th right. I've got enough to write an article now, so that's [00:37:00] my workflow. There are people that just working Wikidata. Example of rubbersheds ie. Um, bulk uploading huge data sets and being data gurus managing data on huge, um, uh, using tools and very clever. I don't do that. I'm not that clever. Gareth, that's much more your thing than mine. Um, I'm, I'm very much, I edit. Manually, fact by fact, which sometimes when you go into the Wikidata community, they look at you [00:37:30] like you're crazy because they're saying, why would you do that? Why wouldn't you find a global data set and import it in? And my point is, is that, well, the data set that I'm trying to build doesn't exist yet, you know, these are people that Don't appear in the huge data sets that you're talking about. These are these are edge cases. So, um, for me, that's how I do it. At least that way. They've got a bit of a public presence, because the other thing to realize about wiki data is it's often scraped and used by AI [00:38:00] and including the search bots that are used for Internet searching, whatever platform you're on, the back end will be, you know, Um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, some kind of, you know, the AI presence that you're now seeing in the, in the Google, the Bing. That's, that's pretty much drawn. One of the, one of the underlying data sets as wikidata. Wow. So those kinds of, um, just AI summaries of the top of the search results. One of the things we'll be feeding them as Wikipedia and wikidata. [00:38:30] Well, is the simplest wiki data entry you can make. I mean, to create a record. Is it called a record? It's called an item or a cue item. For me, I've been working on women, early women photographers in New Zealand, thanks to a recent book that's been published by Lisa Mitchell. And, uh, the most I've, I got a friend of mine who does do data manipulation to use OpenFind to put [00:39:00] Lisa's, uh, Lisa released her data set of research about that fed into the book. So I've got the book, the data set that Lisa's made, and I've got a friend that can bulk up, bulk import data. So I got her to bulk import the data for four weeks. ehm, five values, So, it was name, the item name of the person, the description, which is um, you know, early New Zealand woman photographer, um, first name, [00:39:30] last name, and the reference to my project that I've set up, so that's, that's it. And then I'm going through and doing further research, and uploading birth and death dates, where she worked, what, whether, what, you know, She owned a commercial photography studio, did she work at a commercial photography studio, which photography clubs did she belong to? So to try and gather, uh, uh, and at what time she was in these photography clubs. So you're getting an understanding of this person's impact on photography within [00:40:00] New Zealand. How then do you control or manage duplicates? Because that must be quite challenging. Um, um, you're talking about disambiguation, which is one of my favourite words in the world. And it essentially means that um there might be two values for the same person. So two entries, for the same person. And that's really easy there's a merge um, functionality where they take the early earliest um. They merge the two entries together and now [00:40:30] it's one. So the old entry still exists but it pushes you towards the authoritative one. So when you do a search you'll only see the one after you've merged the two together. And that's quite common within Wikidata, because you won't, you might have 50 Mary Smiths, and you won't always know that the third Mary Smith in the queue is also the seventh Mary Smith, because there's been no crossover to prove that they were [00:41:00] in the same place, at the same time, in the same house, and therefore must be the same people. Um, there's, you know. That, but that comes with research. As you build more knowledge about each of those entities, eventually you will see that, oh, hang on, these might be the same people. Let's double check. That said, I've, I've also seen people get merged when they're definitely different people so that you can unmerge as well. And just going back to the, the kind of citations and references, do these need to, do these sources need to be online? [00:41:30] Um, no, you can absolutely create a published, a citation for a pub, for a published book that you might not, that might not be online. Um, For me, I just prefer online citations because I like clicking through. That's just my preference. I prefer that over a book. That said, with Lisa's work, with the, I am referring to a published book. I have got the book in as [00:42:00] a wiki data entry in its own right so that I can link to the book as a wiki data entry. So yeah, that's interesting. I mean, because I think for a lot of people doing searches nowadays that if it's not online, if it doesn't come up in Google or an AI, it just doesn't exist. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's, as a galleries, libraries, archives and museums worker, I mean, I have a tweet ad in my head the entire time, because everybody goes to me, oh, everything's online, and I'm just saying, yeah, [00:42:30] right, no, it's not. No, it's not. There's so much that's not online. And so much gold that's not online. Yes. Yeah, I mean, you didn't get a smartphone to what, 20. So it's just even thinking about that, everything prior to that, it's there's so much information about what we've done and how we've been in the concepts of society, the information that's out there, the history that hasn't really made it [00:43:00] into an online presence and there's so much more to do. You mentioned names in Wikidata, and one of the things particularly important to rainbow communities is the use of the correct names and pronouns, and also people's names at birth, and deadnaming people, and not deadnaming people. How does, how does Wikipedia handle that? Um, on Wikipedia, the preference is not to use dead [00:43:30] names, um, unless something of significance happened under the dead name. So, there may well be times when dead naming occurs, if only to say, This is the identity that did the significant act within Wikidata. It's more clinical because in order to get the disambiguation happening, you can have the the item name as um, I'm [00:44:00] the current name and it's likely that the dead name will be in the other names field. Um, that said, while the perception of that looks good, the fact is is that they're equally weighted. And it's really to help with that disambiguation issue of, you know, how many Georgina buyers are out there in the world. There might be 16 in the whole of the world population through time. How do we disambiguate our... [00:44:30] Georgina Byer the Mayor, as opposed to Georgina Byer the, the spinster in Elizabethan England, you know, so it's, it's That's the one of the reasons you got those multi, the options of having other names in there. I think I've seen, certainly I think in Carmen's Wikipedia entry that the name at the front of the article is the birth name, and then it changes as the article goes down. Well [00:45:00] that's really interesting. Another thing that is not restricted to rainbow communities, but... It's things like homophobia and bigoted views. How does Wikipedia cope with those things and how do you write about it? Okay, so Wikipedia should be written in a neutral, non -judgmental tone. It's an encyclopedia, it is [00:45:30] not a political manifesto. Um, so, The best, the, and because it's in a neutral tone, it should also be factual, and if it's factual, it should be cited. So, when, when you see articles that may have been written, um, That are in a to that's not appropriate. There's a number of things that can and do happen. One people poor run and you can get the community to come in and edit it. You know, Wikipedia [00:46:00] editors are pretty good when when they call to action to have a look at a video. Um, you know, to review articles, that's the whole point of, you know, there's central places where you can lodge a complaint and say can anybody help me with this? There's an article or five articles here that I think are really problematic in terms of tone, can somebody come through and help me edit this? Um, so that's what we do. Then there's, uh, the, the factual, you know, is the, is the source that they're citing [00:46:30] authoritative enough? I mean, because it's quite, it can be quite a high bar, and I think if you took, put those two together, you can generally take some of the, um, of what could be quite toxic, um, articles, and turn them into, uh, Something that's actually reasonable and paced and encyclopedic in the way that Wikipedia is intended to be, because there shouldn't be judgment. It's more about facts and factual information. [00:47:00] And would it also be that rather than saying somebody's a bigot, you could say, uh, this was a bigoted view? I mean, even that's, even that's opinion. So, I mean, this was a book interview, that's, that's an opinion statement. So what you'd say is that in the speech of, um, 1972... Let's say Norman Jones. Yeah, okay. Norman Jones, um, said this, and, um, the newspaper reaction at the time [00:47:30] was, or the reaction of the rainbow community at the time was to, um, call the speech homophobic. Citation, reference to the newspaper article where somebody, you know [00:48:00] ... sources, but, um, so, um, so not from the original, not, not the speech of the original that is used. It's, it's more somebody's judgment. or commentary on the original, um, situation. So using somebody else's, referencing somebody else's research. Um, that said, that's for the most part, but don't get too concerned about it. The fact is with editing this crowdsourced [00:48:30] Wikipedia, you don't need to fret too much about it. I mean, try and have a neutral tone. Try and ensure that, um, you're respecting the community more, as, you know, But get in there and give it a go because somebody will follow you and, and change it up and edit it. The most important thing when you're editing Wikipedia is not to have an ego over your content. The fact is, is that it is, it is as good as it is because we're getting multiple eyes and multiple writers over an article to [00:49:00] get it into a really good quality. So, don't fret too much, don't, you can, you can ask for a sense check, you can ask for peer review, um, and that will be provided. You know, it's, the community's actually really good on that front. Do editors hold grudges? I mean, if, if you've, if you've written an article and, and... People are people, mate. I mean, it's, it is what it is. The fact is, is that I've found, I've found the editor community to be... [00:49:30] Absolutely adorable and lovely and I've had a really great experience with them, but there are points of debate and I think it's being that mature person as you go into it and not taking it personally. I mean, look, it's like any other part of the Internet. If you, there are times when I've had to just go, I'm closing my laptop and moving away and getting into real life for a couple of hours because this is driving me mental. Um, um, But it doesn't often get like that, usually it's a, it's a, what are you doing, what do you think of this, do you think this works out, [00:50:00] can you give me a quick check on this, and it's a really nice community engagement. Um, yeah, I'm sure there are people out there that, that do have grudges, um, I'm sure there are people that are bad actors. It's, everybody, that happens in any part of society. Um, the, the real key is knowing who your mates are. So that you can call for help if that starts to happen to you. Because there are quite strict rules about how people are to engage with each other. There is a recognition that, um, that, [00:50:30] uh, new editors are often, often have a harder time than, than more experienced editors. And that's the last thing the majority of the experienced editors want. They want new editors coming in and helping. So, um, um, To have that support network around you, and this is where I'm going to do a pitch for Wikipedia Aotearoa New Zealand, that, that society represents editors and can help put people, newbies, in touch with experienced editors to get a hand and to have some [00:51:00] support going through, um, learning to edit extensively. If you, I mean, there's all sorts of people. There are people that just want to dive in for five minutes. Here and there. And then there are people that really get addicted to it. So it's how, it's how deep do you want to go as an editor on this? And if you want to do a deep dive and do a lot of it in your personal time, there's definitely a community out there to help. If you just want to skate on the surface and have a bit of fun, come and get a piece of cake with us. We have edit -a -thons [00:51:30] where it's catered and you'll get a lovely cinnamon scroll to meet really cool people, have a great coffee and do some editing on the fly. 2026, the year, we can't do an interview in 2026 without saying artificial intelligence and, yeah, so where are we at with AI and wikipedia um i know that there is discussions within wikimedia foundation which is the Government, [00:52:00] I'm sorry, the, the not -for -profit, um, American, um, charity that administers the platforms on which this content is provided. They obviously have, have some problems with AI because they're getting, um, scraped a lot by AI. I providers, they are also getting, um, understanding that I is becoming more prevalent in content provision. So they're doing a lot of strategic work in the space [00:52:30] in terms of others. The standard editor on the ground. I'm sure there's editors out there that are using AI to help them write articles and to find authoritative sources for their articles. Nothing wrong with that. The real question is, is. Is, is the article well written and have you got an authoritative source that's not an imagination slash hallucination from the AI? So [00:53:00] it's, it's using it as a tool but since checking everything you do. So there's no um, issue with actually either doing research using AI and then actually creating an article with AI actually kind of writing it as long as you check it yourself? Yeah, you can do it. I mean, I'm, I'm... I'm a little bit old school about it because I prefer my own writing style and that's the pleasure I get out of it. I'm also I found that I haven't had the best results. I don't know whether it's my prompt or I'm probably [00:53:30] is but but I've also thought think that there's a certain creativity that I don't think a eyes. Really great picnic. Um, that see this really good it a simply information, but you don't have to watch that those hallucinations and make sure that what you're talking about is factually correct so. So yeah, it's all I think it would all be in your point. There's nothing there's nothing wrong with it. It's just you have to be very careful with what you're [00:54:00] putting up. I mean, if you, if you're putting up fighters... The whole point is that you're dealing with facts, nā zurohe whitei e whe to It's supposed to be [00:54:30] commercially reusable. So everything the content that I provide or editors provide and write and put up should be your contributions to Wikipedia are automatically licensed under a Creative Commons attribution share alike license. Anybody that doesn't know Creative Commons licensing. It's a you will retain copyright in your the things you contribute, but the Creative Commons license is saying. [00:55:30] Yeah, Yeah. Yeah, Yeah. Yeah, Yeah. Overall ,ola Overall, the other agent Tēnā koe! You can't stop. The whole point is that it's a crowdsourced encyclopedia, so you [00:56:00] have to check your ego at the door and realize that what you contribute could be completely reworked the next day and not worry about it because the likelihood is that by somebody else or another three people reworking your article that you've put up is likely to be improved. So it's a very different mindset from the academic mindset where you are providing new research for a peer -reviewed journal and your name's associated with [00:56:30] that particular new piece of research. No, you're checking your privilege and you're checking your ego at the door and you're doing it to be collaborative. It sounds like a very, uh, kind of liberating approach. mind to be in Yeah, I find it is It's nice to know that I can do a little bit here and there and I can make a mistake, and that's okay somebody can fix it And I don't have to worry somebody will fix it Yeah As long as I, as long as I'm happy with my own quality, [00:57:00] then, and I reach the minimum standard of quality required, I don't have to worry about being completely perfect. I don't have to worry about all of the intricacies of categories or, or noting things or, um, highlighting, you know, other links. Somebody else will come in and do that. Even spellchecks. You know, there's a bot that does spellchecking the entire time, which is great for me because I'm a terrible speller. Oh, this is so lovely to hear because I heard you earlier on today, because we're working in the same office, I heard you earlier today saying that you're a perfectionist, [00:57:30] so that you have a space to actually not be perfect. Yep. Isn't that amazing? It's lovely. So what is your best Wiki experience to date? Um, I think... You know what? It was, in addition to, um, just editing in my study, which I really enjoy just to share information, I think my favourite experience was going to Wikimania Singapore. Um, Wikimedia Foundation [00:58:00] puts together an annual global conference of Wikipedians, and I have never been around, um, There's like 1 ,500 mad people from around the world that love doing Wikipedia articles and Wikidata and supporting the tech because there's coders that support the platforms, um, and the 14 other projects that Wikimedia Foundation support. They're all out there and they're crazy people. So it was so nice being in a [00:58:30] city and in a huge conference hall meeting a lot of like -minded people of all ages, all races, at all different parts of the world. Um, even, you know, from, um, people from, um, Um, Uganda that was having trouble even getting access in their village to the internet and having, um, that was amazing because they were doing, they were contributing through, um, walking hard disk drives from one village to the city centre to the uploads at the city centre and then walking [00:59:00] back to their village to do the next eight months worth of editing. It's just phenomenal some of the things that are happening. There was, um, a woman in, um, in Southeast Asia who's. Tongata is dying and so she her thing is she sits there. He the chickens in here From her house in the background that she records The sound of her language, she's doing a sound dictionary and she's uploading it. And it's just it blows my mind It blows your mind, the type of people you run into at these, [00:59:30] at these events, and it was so much fun. Um, and even better, there's, you know, once you're an editor and you've got some experience and you've, you've been doing it a while, you can apply for scholarships to go. So I didn't have to pay to go to Singapore to do this. They paid for my, they paid for my flights, they paid for my accommodation, and they paid for a daily stipend for food. So I just got to go and had this amazing time with these amazing people. Um, yeah, that was the best. I, it was [01:00:00] incredible. It was amazing. Just so many cool people all doing this stuff for free in their bedrooms or in their study or in their lounge. Just great. Loved it.
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