Sue Gardner Q&A at GLAM-WIKI UK on free knowledge and experts: transcript

Key points

• New media such as Wikipedia are first filled by people who feel left out of formal culture, while museum knowledge already exists through curators.
• Wikimedia's mission is free knowledge, not a particular website, and free licensing means effort on other platforms is not lost to free culture.
• Local history is important but outside the scope of Wikimedia projects, and the best place to contribute depends on one's goals.
• Experts can have the most effect by reviewing articles and giving feedback to editors, as a mathematician did in Berlin and curators did at the British Museum.
• Paid staff handle legal protection, fundraising, administration, trademarks, servers and bandwidth, while avoiding discouraging volunteers.

Chapters

1. 0:00Museum knowledge and new media
2. 1:17Where to put effort: Wikipedia or other projects
3. 5:01Role of subject experts on Wikipedia
4. 6:30British Museum experience with curator feedback
5. 8:17What Wikimedia Foundation staff do

Full transcript

0:00I think that relative to what I call popular culture, because... There is an industry, a space in society that's government-funded for the preservation of what the society believes to be important, the physical buildings, libraries and archives and so forth. And they're the obvious thing that they're the important things, that a society has deemed necessary to spend taxpayer money on preserving and writing about it.

0:34And so new media, Wikipedia and the internet, as an example of that, are always colonised first by those who feel left out of the existing media. And so video articles are most fleshed out and most detailed in areas in which there is no official representation in formal culture. And so Pokemon is very well established. But those people who particularly care about the things that society deems to be important enough to preserve the museums, those people are already in museums and that knowledge has already been created by museum curators.

1:17And so the question is not so much about... Getting those people interested in sharing and getting those people interested in producing knowledge which they're doing in museums. It's about opening up the digital display cases in a different kind of collaboration with free culture rather than merely editing because they don't know something. Is that what concerns me? Sorry, hijacked your question session. Hi, I'm Dominic Oldman, I'm from the British Museum. I'm not a Wikipedia editor either and this is a related question yet, but I am involved in putting out free information and data and knowledge onto the internet and I guess it's another question about diversity, is where does that fit in?

2:08Should I be putting less effort into what I'm doing at the moment and transferring that to Wikipedia, where do other projects fit in with Wikipedia, and would it be bad if I actually swapped that effort that I was putting into other areas, other diverse areas, and putting it into Wikipedia? Maybe, I don't know. I mean, do you want to answer it? I would say the thing with free licensing and free culture. It's a strict definition of free, rather than merely no cost to access, but no use to put on re-use.

2:44And so, like I said in my video, the thing about Wikimedia, as opposed to Wikipedia, the website, is that our mission is free knowledge of animals in our language. And if that happens on Wikipedia, fantastic. If that happens by clay tablets on the pigeons, fantastic. Just that we found the most efficient way of sharing free knowledge is via a wiki encyclopedia website. Because of the virtue of free licensing and the sharer-like licensing, effort put into sharing knowledge in different fora that aren't necessarily managed by the Wikimedia Foundation is not lost to free culture because it's all about improbability.

3:32And there are many other kinds of moments that an encyclopedia doesn't collect. Local history, for example, isn't notable or doesn't warrant inclusion in a global encyclopedia, but it's nevertheless important. Who used to live down my street? What's the story of my town and the families that came through this town? That's important, but it's completely out of scope for Wikimedia projects at the moment. I would say that it depends on what your goals are, right? And what your work is, you know, because there is a like-minded or aligned organizations and projects and institutions, so it depends on what your contribution is to them, right?

4:24So, you know, there are engineers working on open street maps, there are scientists working on the encyclopedia of life. I think it depends on where your best contribution is. I know that when I got involved with the Wikipedia Foundation, the reason I got involved was because I believed in the work that it was doing. I believed that the work that it was doing was important. And I liked that it was, I hate to say, how can I say this, I liked that it was having a huge impact, right? It mattered to me, personally, it mattered to me to be part of something that was big and affecting lots and lots of real people.

5:01And that's not, honestly, not to marginalise or to say that the other contributions of small things aren't important. Because they are, it's a different kind of importance, right? So different people are motivated by different things. I was motivated by wanting to be part of something that was bigger. Yes, that's something that I'm not sure. Did you find that people are something that I could talk about, the fact that it is that big? Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, for sure, right? Because I mean, well, that's what I mean, right? Like, so if you're involved with something like open street maps, it's small, you can make a huge impact, right? You could actually take a tiny thing and make it immeasurably better. You know, your own contribution can be more significant, right? And on Wikipedia, I mean, there's no role right now, no sort of special role for somebody with a lot of expertise in a particular topic area, right? That's one of the things that we're looking at.

5:51Can you craft ways, easy ways, on, you know, scalably for subject matter experts to have some influence proportionate to their knowledge, right? We've experimented, for example, with having, like at the Wikipedia Academy of Berlin that I was at, they had a mathematician review Wikipedia's coverage of math and give feedback to editors so that they could then improve that material, right? So projects like that, you know, it might be like if I were a subject matter expert, I might not want to engage as a Wikipedia editor. I might go in a year or two when there are rules defined for me so that I can have an impact measure with my knowledge.

6:30I'd like to just get Matthew to reply to that briefly from the perspective of the British Museum and stuff that we've done. Exactly, that's exactly what happened here when we had the backstage pass and when there was time here. And that was the most effective use of curators. It wasn't getting curators to edit directly. Their contribution was reviewing and feeding back to the editors. And I think when you say earlier about, you know, it's experts, you know, it's, sorry, it wasn't you who said it, it was a quote you put up about, but it was their job to, you know, to make Wikipedia better.

7:12They don't have to do it as editors, they have to do it by engaging in the writers. And I think that's a successful model that I can see, I mean, I'm not a, I can see that it's quite dangerous trying to formalise that. This expert has some kind of write-over of these articles. That's why I said earlier about Wikipedians being open to expertise.

7:42It was a surprise to me when I started. When I saw, for example, the Wikipedians in Berlin, and this guy gave them three really useful pieces of feedback that they could then take away, and they did afterwards. They took it away and then improved the articles on the basis of what he was able to say. They couldn't have said it because they didn't have the subject matter expertise, they didn't have the breadth, but when someone with that expertise was going to say to them, here are the three ways you can make the work, they were willing to run with it, which was great.

8:17Hi. I'm David Harris with the Global Lives Project. I have actually two questions for you and they're kind of related. The first one is how do you decide what to have your paid employees do? I assume they're not writing articles, right? That's the joke. But how do you decide what they do? And then the second question is have you seen any other organizations, specifically cultural institutions, take the model that that Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia, has pioneered and use it successfully.

8:53And if you can think of any other examples, I'd love to share that. Can you share that with me by the model? Mass volunteer or website or anything? Mass volunteer and the combination of the mass volunteer with some sort of nonprofit infrastructure to meet the goals of a cultural institution or perhaps replace a previous type of cultural institution such as the encyclopedia or, you know, supersede. Okay, so I'll take a crack at the first question, and then I might let Liam take a crack at the second question, because he's more the expert in the cultural institution.

9:29But the first question is, it's a work in progress, right? So the question was, how do you select what the staff do? And it's a work in progress. I mean, it's such a... A delicate, emergent balance, right? Because the last thing that we want to do, the staff at the Wikimedia Foundation, is demotivate and eat the lunch of volunteers, right? The worst thing that we could possibly do would be to, you know, duplicate what Liam does and try to disincentivize people from doing it themselves and, you know, injecting money and more money is not needed and all of that sort of stuff. It works today, right? So we don't want to break things that are working. On the other hand, there are some obvious things that the staff need to do. You need staff to do, right?

10:08So, you know, the staff do the legal protection of the projects, right? You need a lawyer, you need someone on call. If you get the call at 2 in the morning, you need someone who's paid to be there and take the phone call and so forth. So legal protection is an obvious thing. We do the fundraising, we do the administrative support, we do the, you know, the registration for doing their names, and the protection of the trademarks and all that sort of stuff. We pay the bandwidth bill and we bind and install all the servers.

10:39The technical work is supplemented with lots and lots of volunteer activity as well, probably more so on the development front than on the operations front. But you need a certain amount of paid staff just to make sure that operationally, from a technical perspective, you're robust and you're in good shape, right? And that's always been the case for working in the effect. The first hire was the technical hire. So that stuff is obvious, right? And then more tenuously and with less certainty, we're beginning to experiment with working directly with the community, right, with the editorial community. And that's trickier because the closer you get to the editors, the more you run the risk of...

Source and licence

Recording: File:GLAMWIKI UK Keynote, Sue Gardner, Part 4.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.