Sue Gardner keynote on why people edit Wikipedia and how to help: transcript

Key points

• Editor videos present editing as an easy invitation: click the edit button, change something and save.
• The Bookshelf project provides tips and guides to recruit more editors.
• She cites Nicholson Baker, Cass Sunstein and Daniel Pink, and Jimmy's restaurant analogy for why Wikipedia works.
• A mathematics professor in Berlin felt morally bound to make Wikipedia's information as good as possible.
• She asks people to donate, write articles, encourage women to edit (87% of editors are male), and run contests.
• She suggests student assignments and media literacy teaching, and releasing material under a free license; an audience member then asks about editors' ages.

Chapters

1. 0:00Editor videos: why people start editing
2. 1:20The Bookshelf project and outreach to new editors
3. 4:03Quotes on why Wikipedia works
4. 6:07Jimmy's restaurant analogy and people's wish to help
5. 8:15Professional obligation of cultural institutions
6. 9:29Ways to help, including gender diversity
7. 10:34Students, media literacy and free licensing
8. 12:52Audience question on editors' ages

Full transcript

0:00It's really made of those who dare taking this invitation. And this is an invitation. Of course you don't have to take an invitation, but there is an invitation out there on an edit button to say, come be part. What you know is as important as what we know. You know, you're giving education to people, and not just any people but the whole of the world. So I feel great by contributing to an Encyclopedia that is accessible to virtually everyone in the whole world. It's just making yourself happy by helping others. That's it. Because I want to be happy, I help others.

0:35You're working together with so many different people from so many different cultures and it's just amazing. The thing about it for me, what it's really about, it's just really sweet people. We've got all these really sweet people who are just, they get online and they're typing and instead of yelling at each other or just having a conversation or reading about gossip or whatever, they're trying to build something that everybody else will find useful. I just think it's really sweet, really nice people. So those two, so that first video that I showed you was just people saying their usernames and then that is a video that I use when I'm talking to people about the editors and trying to introduce them. I have two more which are part of what we call our for a bookshelf project.

1:20The purpose of our Bookshelf project is to provide materials for people who are considering editing. We want to recruit more editors. We want the whole world to edit Wikipedia. So we have a project called The Bookshelf which has, you know, tips and sheet sheets and wiki syntax guides and all sorts of materials like that. And two, the next two videos that I'm going to show you are part of that project. So these are intended to, I think, to sort of just tell people why they should edit and then give them a bit of insight into what editing is like.

1:54There's an edit button. Just click on it, find the place where the test is and edit. And then click save. It's that easy. The cool thing about Wikipedia is that you can change things, you don't need anybody's permission and it's not hard. It looks a little bit daunting at first, but it's really not hard. People don't realize, with some sort of blindness, that people read particles and they don't see the edit button. Click on that button and see what happens. Edit.

2:25When you open yourself to something and you go and start editing, all kinds of other things can happen. And that's a really beautiful, it can be just a starting point. So it's an invitation for more life somehow. Whenever we start an article, we don't like it because we find it ugly. But wait just hours and see how it will be developed to create an article. The edit button. Click it and change something. Save page. You've made a difference to the whole world. Save.

2:56Push the button and save the text. It was exciting. You just changed Wikipedia, you just added your own contribution to Wikipedia. I read an article in The Guardian about this online decyclopedia which everybody can contribute to and I thought, oh, maybe I can contribute too as well.

3:31I edited it the first time and I think I got addicted to it. I don't get paid anything, I just do it for something to do in my free time, that's it. You may start doing it for an idea because you believe in it, But you end up with friends, you end up with lovers, you end up with wonderful discussions, you end up with new ideas, you end up with the new books you're gonna write. You're not writing the article alone. You write a piece and somebody else goes like, hey I have more. And together you can create articles that are pages long which you can't buy yourself.

4:03Then you have success. You always see, okay, what I've done was successful, and this is great. So editing is a great feeling every time you do it. As I say, when I read about Wikipedia, I decided, this is maybe where I would fit in, and I did. Is it a machine? She kills me. and I love the woman I love that I mean like I said the purpose of those was to do outreach to persuade people to help us I love the woman who says and you will find lovers I think like we may be over committing a little so so so those are those are some of the editors just a sampling of editors but they're pretty typical i think of those folks um so i wanted to i wanted to um talk through some of the smartest things that i think that people have said about wikipedia and one of the smartest things i think that people have said is nicholson baker do you folks know who nicholson baker is he's an american

5:06author a novelist he wrote vox which was i think his most popular book possibly um and he's very active in saving card catalogs and so forth, right, in libraries. Nicholson Baker wrote that Wikipedia flourishes because it was a shrine. It is a shrine to altruism, a place for shy, learned people to deposit their trolls. And I just think that's such a lovely notion, right? This idea that there are all these people who know things and who are really, really curious and who want to share their information with other people.

5:37And that's why Wikipedia works. Nicholson Baker actually famously became a person who trolled the articles for deletion pages on Wikipedia and tried to rescue stubs that would otherwise have been deleted because he felt sorry for them. He was so charming. Cass Sunstein, Wikipedia works because people who know the truth are usually more numerous and committed than those who believe in a falsehood. And Daniel Pink, Wikipedia represents a belief in supremacy of reason and goodness of others.

6:07And sometimes I tell a story that Jimmy used to tell that I really like, which is when Jimmy first started Wikipedia, Nobody believed that it would work, right? He didn't believe that it would work, it was an experiment, but nobody believed that it would become the success that it has become. And there's actually a famous Wikipedia quote about that, which is, I can't remember the name of the editor, but someone who said, Wikipedia cannot work in theory, it can only work in practice. Who is it? No, no, we traced it back earlier. Someone said it in 2004, and it's been repeated many, many times by other people. So, Jimmy said that when he used to start talking about Wikipedia, when he was just sort of floating the notion of doing that project, people would just tell him outright, it can't possibly succeed. There's no way that this could work. How could this possibly work? And over time, he began to make an analogy to the restaurant industry.

7:01So if you imagine that there was no such thing as a restaurant industry, right, and you proposed, I think I'm going to start something that I will call a restaurant, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to invite people into a building and I'm going to cook and serve food to them, and they're going to pay me to come and sit and eat my food. People would have said, you know, that's not possible. Like, that couldn't possibly work, right? If you did that, you would have knives and you would have kitchen implements and you would have hot soup and hot drinks, and there will be fighting and the police will be called every night and people will stab each other with steak knives, right?

7:36Obviously, that doesn't happen, and the same is true with Wikipedia, and what we find from that is that we can learn that people typically want to help, right? There are always going to be people who want to vandalize, they want to cause problems, but those people are outnumbered by people who want to help each other. Wikipedia is validation of that as our restaurants. So, I've added this quote for this audience because I think it's important. If Wikipedia is becoming a family encyclopedia for the 21st century, historians, cultural institutions, people like you, have a professional obligation to make it as good as possible.

8:15I talked to, the first Wikipedia academy that I ever talked to was in Berlin in I think 2007, no 2008, and it was a group of mathematicians, and I asked a guy randomly in the corridor why he had turned up, he was a mathematics professor, and he told me that he felt like his role, his job, was not narrowly focused on teaching mathematics to the kids in his class according to the curriculum prescribed by his institution. He felt like his job was to make sure that people understood mathematics or to try to help people understand mathematics in general.

8:48And so he said that given that German kids, German people, would go into Wikipedia to get that information, he felt that he was honor bound, he had a moral obligation to want to make sure that the information on Wikipedia was as good and rich and complete as possible. So, how can you help? And I think the whole conference really is about how you can help. So I will just restrict myself to skating over a very surface level. A couple quick things. My fundraising team would kill me if I didn't mention that you could donate. We're running our annual campaign this year. It's going really well. Everything is fantastic, but we are a non-profit, so we do rely on people's voluntary contributions to keep Wikipedia going.

9:29You can write articles and I would say specifically too you can encourage your friends to try editing Wikipedia. I particularly have an interest in encouraging more women to edit. 87% of Wikipedia editors are male. I think there are a lot of cultural factors contributing to that. I think we can and we should do a lot to broaden out the gender diversity on Wikipedia. I think it just, to me, coming from a media background, to me, it's a content argument, right?

10:00The encyclopedia is only going to be as rich and broad and diverse and comprehensive and deep and smart as the breadth of the people who contribute to it, right? So I always like to make a small plea specifically to the women in the audience. Please do edit if you don't already because we need you. Any topic that is interesting to you will be helpful. You can stage content improvement activities and contests. I know you're a member of the people in this room who have done that. and you probably know more about it than I do. You can, if you're a professor, assign your students to write articles as a coursework or use Wikipedia to teach media literacy.

10:34They've had particular success using Wikipedia to teach media literacy in Germany, which is where I think it was first done. And I think the reason it works is because Wikipedia provides all kinds of indicators. It's quite modest, right? So it will provide all kinds of disclaimers and indicators to label the quality of particular articles. And it's not defensive about its own quality. So it's a good place, I think, for students to learn markers of quality, markers of credibility.

11:05And we're increasingly seeing professors assign their classes to write articles. We have a project in the United States called the Public Policy Initiative, which is all about that, working with, I think, 14 American universities, where professors are assigning students to write articles on public policy-related topics. It works really, really well. The reason it works is because students are the natural lifeblood, they're the natural engine of Wikipedia, Because they're engaged in the role of ideas, they're thinking, they're reading, they're summarizing and reflecting back information to their professors, that's what they do.

11:40So what Wikipedia offers them that they don't get from their coursework normally is an audience for what they're doing, right? So, you know, writing an essay for your professor has some rewards, right? But writing an essay for millions of people to read has an additional level of interest, it's additionally motivating. And what the professors tell us is that when they assign Wikipedia's coursework... Often, their kids get other benefits out of it that maybe wouldn't have been expected, so they learn some project management skills, they learn some citation skills, some logical thinking skills, and so forth. So everybody benefits from them. Professors themselves, I think, find it quite interesting.

12:21And then the last thing, and also germane with this audience, is you can release your material under a free license so that more people can use it. So if it goes into Wikimedia Commons, it gets used in our projects and in other projects. CC by SA is increasingly the license of sharing, right? And increasingly, people are finding that if there's stuff under that license that's interoperable, it can be used in lots of different projects, more and more. So that was my last slide.

12:52And Liam, I don't know if we have time for questions or if you feel that I'm... We do. Liam, you don't want to help me answer questions. I suppose. I'm Alistair Dine speaking.

13:27One of the things I found slightly worrying, which I hadn't thought about before, was the different ages of Wikipedians. In that video, everyone seemed to be under the age of 40. Well, actually, I think one of the people in the video was New York Times reporter, Naomi Cohen.

Source and licence

Recording: File:GLAMWIKI UK Keynote, Sue Gardner, Part 2.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.