Sue Gardner Q&A on Wikimedia's role at GLAM-WIKI UK 2010: transcript

Key points

• Mass volunteer projects are not new; the Oxford English Dictionary gathered words and quotations from readers on slips of paper, much as Wikipedia works today.
• Wikipedia is described as a social movement and a community-curated work, unlike user-generated sites such as Facebook, YouTube or Flickr.
• Individual Wikimedians cover the full range of views, chapters act as a buffer between outside institutions and the movement, and the Foundation must hold firm to its values, for example in dealing with China.
• A discussion is under way about how to draw an organigram of the movement's roles, such as a pyramid or a hub.
• A questioner gives three reasons to contribute to Wikimedia projects: visibility in search results, avoiding duplicated effort, and long-term maintenance by a critical mass of contributors.

Chapters

1. 0:00Volunteer projects like the Oxford English Dictionary
2. 1:33Wikipedia as a social movement, not a social network
3. 3:14Question on diversity and the Foundation's role
4. 3:46Roles of Wikimedians, chapters and the Foundation
5. 6:10Debate over an organigram of the movement
6. 7:26Three reasons to contribute to Wikimedia projects

Full transcript

0:00When I'm taking this model, the concept of the mass volunteer generated thing is not at all new. The Red Cross, Red Peace, Amnesty, Oxfam, any kind of go and volunteer in a poor country to build worlds. OED! OED, Oxford Infrastructure. Thank you. Obviously, the Oxford Institute famously was founded on the basis of, here's an editorial staff based in a shack at the side of one of the colleges in Oxford University, that was extremely cold, and they would ask readers around the world, the English language, with a little slip of paper that was stuck inside the cover page of every single book printed for a couple of years in around the world, the English-speaking world, to submit words.

0:55And page references under a standard formation of half a piece of paper, torn sideways, the lemma, definition, page reference, quote in which it was used and so forth. And when this was proposed, the Royal Philological Society of the UK, as the, this is how we will do the official history of the English language, the society said, you could possibly ask the public those wrong words. And it's almost exactly analogous to the way, thank you for reminding me, to the way that Wikipedia works in the 21st century.

1:33Does that actually answer your question? I was thinking more about since Wikipedia began. OpenStreetMap, I would suggest, is the best example of that. It's Google Maps version of Wikipedia. LibreOffice, they're just forming a non-profit, formerly known as OpenOffice. They're just forming a non-profit to run that. We're from originally, I suppose, the free software movement, working in education, as opposed to being merely free license software.

2:10That's quite a different kind of thing. So it's a social movement, not a social network. It's a socially constructed educational tool which makes it fundamentally different from other user-generated content websites like Facebook or YouTube or Flickr. That's meaning a whole bunch of individuals uploading stuff, generating content. I would suggest that we're a community-curated work. There was a question, yeah. Hi, can you hear me? Yeah, okay. I'm Bastien from Wikimedia France and I have one reaction about radicality and one question about diversity and the reaction drives to be questioned because I had the same feeling that you have about the surprise. I expected an environment of people being very radical and but that's maybe because I'm coming from a free software background what is different and so my question is about diversity because now that you're

3:14so big there is some kind of inside diversity of the community and outside diversity of the actors you are speaking to the Wikimedia Foundation is speaking to but the free culture movement is larger than just Wikimedia there is Alton Street, all the others, the free software movement. Etelard, do you think that, how would you describe the role of the Wikimedia Foundation in this diversity, and do you think the money you raise will change this role?

3:46It's such an interesting question, and again, I will try to restrain this up because I could talk about it forever, really. But yeah, I look at all the different players involved in the Wikimedia movement and I'm interested to see them sharpen up their own sense of themselves and how they fit in, right? So everybody is crafting, all the different players are crafting unique roles relative to, because of the work that they end up doing, right? So what I've seen shake out over time, and Liam, I'd like to hear what you think too. What I have seen shake out is individual Wikimedians run the gamut, right? They represent all viewpoints. They're very, very broad. I'm talking ideologically, right? In terms of radicalism to conservatism.

4:30So I think that individual ricomedians will remain or will continue to sort of house the most radical elements of the community, by definition, because they're individuals, right? I've seen the chapters take on roles because the chapters are the front lines of talking to, for example, cultural institutions, right? I see the chapters much more influenced by and influencing of outside groups because the chapters deal with institutions, right?

5:05And so their roles, I think, are in some ways buffering between external institutions and then the internal Wikimedia movement, right? So they're sort of the front line people. And the Wikimedia Foundation has a role that's somewhere in the middle, which I find really interesting. At the end of the day, the Wikimedia Foundation has to stand for certain values and it needs to be uncompromising. So for example, with China, we aren't going to compromise with China the way that Google experimented with doing. We just can't.

5:35So at the end of the day, we need to be really quite strict and quite firm and quite understanding of where our values begin and end, what they are, how to interpret them in the world and so forth. So I actually think that the whole ecosystem of players inside the Wikimedia movement is self-correcting and mutually helping to understand each other, right? information passes through, I think it's all useful and it's all good. I think people correctly play different, but complementary roles.

6:10But I'm very interested to see how they play out, because I think people are sharpening up their understanding of what their job is inside the movement. Do you want to add anything to that? Just briefly, I find it instructive that currently there is an ongoing discussion with the first, there was an organigram drawn under various movement roles. And there's an elaborate discussion going on of the layout of that. Should it be a pyramid? Should it be an inverse pyramid? Should it be hub and smooth? Should it be three areas that refer to each other?

6:51and merely that discussion, it of course affects the practicality of the community in their work, not one iota, but it's constructive for the community and the various parties involved to be talking about, trying to visualise the way they relate to each other, because no one really knows. And it's quite confusing and complicated and obscure, but interesting to see that we're actually trying to work that out. There's one final question here.

7:26Yes. Okay. Dario Tarabonelli with the University of Surrey and soon with the Wikimedia Foundation. So I'd like to follow up on one of the questions before about the issue whether to contribute to Wikimedia projects or smaller projects in the open knowledge ecosystem. I don't want to give a shameless plug in favor of Wikimedia. I think there are three key reasons why people should contribute to Wikimedia projects when they can.

8:00Obviously, the local history example is a very good example. Wikimedia currently isn't covering local history, so obviously that's not an option. But in many cases in which you have an option to contribute to Wikimedia projects or other projects, I think there are three reasons why you should opt for Wikimedia. The first one is visibility. So that goes back to Sue's argument. Even when you create a stub, so a page with one paragraph, it immediately goes to the top results in search engines.

8:34So basically your contribution is going to have a huge impact on readers as opposed to content is much harder to find. point. The second key issue is redundancy. You don't want to duplicate effort and there's so much content out there, there's just a duplicate of what you can find elsewhere. And ideally you want to find, you want to put all the information about the topic in the place where people will be most likely to find it. And that's to me the second key issue why Wikimedia is probably the best option in this case.

9:12And the third one, which is possibly the most crucial, is maintenance. So there are brilliant projects out there that die after a couple of years because there isn't a critical mass of contributors who are able to make sure that this content will be maintained and updated after a couple of years. And those projects will just disappear if there's no institutional effort to keep them alive. And this is where I think the critical mass of contributors in Wikimedia projects is key to make sure that your effort will just survive.

9:45So that's it. I think we have to thank you very much.

Source and licence

Recording: File:GLAMWIKI UK Keynote, Sue Gardner, Part 6.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.