Sue Gardner keynote on Wikipedia at GLAM-WIKI UK 2010: transcript

Key points

• Gardner came from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, where she ran its news website, and sees herself as straddling the old and new worlds.
• She polled the room on who had edited Wikipedia, who strongly supported it and who had reservations.
• Her two goals were to overcome reservations about Wikipedia and to equip people to advocate for it.
• She found Wikipedians to be serious and quality-oriented, admiring institutions like PBS and the BBC, though Wikipedia is also a radical, disruptive invention.
• Wikipedia has 17 million articles in 273 languages and is the fifth most popular website, with no spending on advertising.
• The Wikimedia Foundation has 54 employees, supported by about 100,000 active volunteer editors, and she played videos of Wikipedians.

Chapters

1. 0:00Gardner's journalism background at the CBC
2. 1:21Audience poll and goals of the talk
3. 3:16Wikipedians as quality-minded yet radical
4. 5:57Traffic comparison with major news sites
5. 7:41Scale, reach and languages of Wikipedia
6. 8:57Foundation staff and volunteer editors
7. 10:48Videos of Wikipedians introducing themselves

Full transcript

0:00It was actually very, very low, because if it had broken, it wouldn't have gotten actually any worse. It really did have nowhere to go by that. So it played out nicely for everyone. So, I'll talk just a little bit because of who is here today and the purpose of this conference. I'll talk just for a little bit about my own personal background and my connection to your world. So, I come from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. I was a long-time journalist, and I ran CBC.ca, which was the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the equivalent of the BBC, was their website, which was primarily a news website.

0:41Prior to running CBC.ca, I worked at CBC Radio and CBC Television, and I did a little bit of print work. So I come from the world before Wikipedia, and I come from quality journalism. I come from Canada's largest cultural institution. And so I feel a sense that is my history. That is where I come from. So I kind of feel like I straddle two worlds. I'm not a pure product of the Wikipedia, the new world. I have a foot in the old world as well, which makes me feel like I might be able to speak to some of the people here in a language that works for both the old and the new world, if that makes sense.

1:21I hope that turns out to be true. So, I wanted to start by asking a couple questions, just so I can gauge your sort of understanding of Wikipedia, which I think is going to be quite hot. Can you put up your hand if you ever have edited Wikipedia? Okay, that's okay. All right. And can you put up your hand if you would consider yourself a wholehearted supporter, someone who endorses Wikipedia and what it stands for and thinks that it's wonderful and transformative in the world?

1:57Okay. Can you put up your hand if you have any reservations at all about Wikipedia? Any qualms? It's all the Wikipedians. I love you guys. It's all the Wikipedias. That's hilarious. I'm very persuaded the Wikipedians to support it and endorse it. Okay, so my goal with this presentation, I know that later in the day, and also yesterday, I know that you got into lots of nuts and bolts about glam institutions and cultural partnerships and so forth. My goal here is to take a step back from that and to talk sort of big picture, and I have two primary purposes. The first is those of you who have reservations about Wikipedia and supporting it, I'm going to try to overcome those reservations. I'm as much as I have learned to love it.

2:43And then my second goal here is I'm going to try to equip you to evangelize on its behalf if you choose to do that. So I'm going to try and give you some arguments and some information to persuade your colleagues, your friends, to edit, to donate, to get involved, to form partnerships, and so forth. Okay? And I'm also going to play you some videos of Wikipedia. So it's funny that Jimmy introduced me because I stole the slide from Jimmy's presentations. The ideal encyclopedia should be radical and it should stop being safe.

3:16So that was Charles Van Doren who said that back in 1962. And I think about it a lot because when I joined the Wikimedia Foundation about three and a half years ago, I initially thought that my role would be primarily to talk to people like you and persuade you to take Wikipedia seriously. To persuade you that it was credible and responsible and reliable. goal. And I think the reason that that was my goal was because I had come from outside of the Wikipedia world, and my perceptions of Wikipedia were very different from what the reality turned out to be. When I joined the organization, I think I expected that Wikipedians were, or would be, radical people who were trying to tear down old systems and come to question old ways of working and who position themselves as oppositional to the cultural institutions such as the CDC that I had worked for.

4:13And what I found was quite the opposite. I found that Wikipedians were typically very serious-minded, brilliant obviously, completely brilliant people, very serious-minded and very quality-oriented and quality-focused. And so they would ask me questions about PBS, which they loved. They wanted to talk about the BBC, which they also loved. They respected the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Smithsonian, the cultural institutions. And that was a bit of a surprise to me. Perhaps it shouldn't have been, but it was a bit of a surprise to me. So I felt like my first order of business as the executive director was to talk to folks like you and help you understand that the Wikipedians exist in the long tradition of learning and the long tradition of purveying information and making it available to people and that they were believers in quality. Then the more time that I spent as a D, I began to realize that although that is true and that's an important message, it's also true that Wikipedia is a radical invention, it's a disruptive invention.

5:14And we see that when people make efforts to impede people's access to Wikipedia. So I've nuanced my message a little bit, and I'm now talking a little bit more about its radicalism, because I think it's important not to lose sight of that. I think what Wikipedia tries to do should not be radical, right? In the world that we would all want to live in, it should not be radical to provide information for people, but it is in our world sometimes somewhat of a radical act. So that is why I start with this slide. And then I go to this slide, because I think this is really important. I had this custom made. For me, Wikipedia had never presented this image to anybody, nor had it thought about itself in this way. Can you see the – can you read the text? Yeah?

5:57So Wikipedia is the blue line at the top. This is traffic, right? This is audience numbers. It's unique visitors as measured by Comscore Media Metrics, which is the industry standard for internet audience measurement. So Wikipedia is the blue line at top. And you'll see lower down, you'll see the New York Times, CNN, the BBC, the New Britannica, the Wall Street Journal, PBS, NPR, and so forth. The reason I showed this slide is because I had a conversation shortly after I joined the Book Community Foundation with a guy at PBS who was considering commissioning a television program that was somehow a quiz show related to Wikipedia.

6:34And when he and I were talking about whether that was a good idea, did it make sense, was it something that we wanted to do? He told me that he thought one of the motivations for Wikipedia to participate in such a thing with him was that PBS would be able to drive serious traffic to Wikipedia. Right? And I thought, you know, it's so funny because we're all only capable of seeing the world from our chair, right, from our vantage point. And so this wasn't the vantage point that he saw the world from. He saw it from the vantage point of PBS is a really important and serious cultural institution in the United States.

7:09Now, the reason I wanted to be associated with PBS was because it has enormous credibility and it has a mission that we share with it and we should want to do good work together. But the reason I was not interested in being associated with PBS was because it could drive traffic to Wikipedia. So the reason I show this slide is because if you're in the business of purveying knowledge and purveying information and you want to make it available to the maximum possible number of people, Wikipedia should be your point of dissemination.

7:41That's the only purpose of this slide, is to make that visible. So Wikipedia has 17 million articles in 273 languages. I do sometimes say to English audiences that each of those language versions of Wikipedia is a unique cultural product. Some people know that, but some people don't. So the Swedish Wikipedia, the Arabic Wikipedia, the English Wikipedia, they're all completely distinct, right? They're all unique cultural products made by and made for people in that language.

8:16And this is a map which shows where Wikipedia is most popular in the world, where it's most used. And obviously that correlates with technology penetration and internet access and so forth. But you can see that in Canada, Wikipedia is most popular in Canada of any country, which pleases me because I am Canadian. In Europe, that's where we're the most popular. And we are popular and we are the number five most popular website in the entire world despite spending zero dollars on advertising and zero dollars on promotion, which obviously is really rare. I don't think there would be another site in the top 50 that could serve the same.

8:57And we're free to use. So that's important. Wikipedia is free for anybody to use around the world for any purpose. Jimmy talked about the Wikimedia Foundation. There's 54 employees of the Wikimedia Foundation. We're supported and we work in partnership with a network of international chapters. There are folks here today from Wikimedia UK. Most of those chapters are volunteers as well. There are some paid staff in Germany, but typically the Wikimedia Foundation is really 55 people.

9:28There are fewer than 100 people paid worldwide to support Wikipedia. And so how is that possible? So that's possible because of the effects of volunteer editors. So there's about 100,000 active Wikipedia editors around the world. We define active as people who've made more than five edits in a given month. I might want to stop just for a second and ask you to put up your hand. I think you're going to be introduced or you're going to introduce yourselves, or possibly that happened yesterday. But can you put up your hand if you're an active Wikipedia editor? So it's thanks to these people.

9:58And I'm happy that you have a number of paid staff in the room here. That is good. So one of the great things about my job is that I get to travel around the world and talk to Wikipedians in many different countries. there's only really one forum for wikipedians to come together and meet each other every year and that's our annual wikimania conference i see wikipedians all the time so i'm in sort of a unique position jimmy is probably the only person who's Who has more exposure to Wikipedians. So one of the things that I like to do is to try and reflect Wikipedians back to themselves. Because I think it's important to understand your own story and see yourself reflected and see who you are. So I used to do that verbally. I used to describe. We've done studies and I used to describe the average Wikipedians' age and what they did for a living and that kind of thing.

10:48But in Gdansk just this past year, for the first time, we brought out a crew and we shot Wikipedians. Have you guys seen these videos? We shot the Wikipedians. Have you guys seen these videos? We just started doing YouTube and so forth. I hope you haven't. And even if you've seen them on YouTube, you haven't seen them at this sort of level of volume. So I'm going to play a couple of videos which are Wikipedians. You'll recognize some of them. I think two of them, at least, are heard of them.

11:20My username is Pisha Duamline. Lila Roja. Y-U-Y-U. Zebra 1023. Twentitunkarpika. My username is Chocho P-Max. Pisha Duamline, this is a small bookworm in German. H-U-P. It's Chomsky 1. Nathit 8891. Not a fish. You're not a fish? T-O-111. My username's Hanna. Misu. My username is Lissy. Witte Lama. It's an anagram with my real name, William Wyatt. Derek Chan.

11:50Vupetu. Rajesh Pandey. My username is Steven Walling, which is my real name. My username is Valdir. My username is Mstislano. Abbas Jr. A-W-B-A-S-J-N-R. My name is J.D. Forrester, and I did Wikipedia. I love it because, I mean, has anybody in this room seen the documentary Truth in Numbers?

12:24Yeah, so a couple of people have seen it. So it's a documentary that was made about Wikipedians and about criticisms of Wikipedia and its history and there's a lot. Jimmy, it essentially follows Jimmy around the world while he talks to Wikipedians. And one of the things that I love about that documentary is to see what I think of the charm and the optimism and the hope and the shining intelligence in the faces of Wikipedians. And I think there's something incredibly charming about it. There's also something just so hopeful about it. These really smart people all over the world, young, smart people coming together to make this thing.

13:03So I love watching the videos. I have three more. They're all quite short. I have three more they want to show you. If you have knowledge, why you must keep it by yourself? You must share it, I think. I liked that the purpose of this website didn't say website, didn't say wiki, didn't say internet, it just said...

Source and licence

Recording: File:GLAMWIKI UK Keynote, Sue Gardner, Part 1.ogv by Giota Alevizou, giotita (2010-11-27), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0. The transcript, summary and chapters on this page are shared under the same licence (CC BY-SA 3.0).

The transcript is machine speech-to-text by the TidyTools Audio & video transcriber; the summary, key points and chapters were written by Claude from that transcript. Both may contain errors: check the recording before quoting it.