Wikimania 2026 community lightning talks on memory, women and data support: transcript

Key points

• A Wikimedia Colombia speaker described a web memorial that structures judicial rulings on 7,837 civilian victims in Wikidata, Commons and Wikipedia.
• The memorial project has been presented at a university symposium in Spain, a museum in Lima and a cinematheque in Bogota.
• Maciej Nadzikiewicz said he has written a new article every day, 491 in a row so far, focusing on the first women in various countries.
• He recommended the Wikimedia Library for sourcing and shared examples such as the first woman born in Antarctica and the first female mayor of Pitcairn Island.
• The Wikimedia Ghana User Group said it spent 11% of its annual budget on data reimbursements for online editors, with turnout of 20-plus editors when support was announced versus five to seven when it was not.
• They argued that without such support Wikipedia editing would become a middle-class activity, while admitting challenges with perceptions of paid editing and fraud.

Chapters

1. 0:00Memorial for victims of Colombia's conflict on Wikidata
2. 2:53Presenting the memorial and preserving Global South knowledge
3. 4:37Around the world in 365 female biographies
4. 7:24Sourcing tips and first-woman biographies
5. 9:01Wikimedia Ghana introduces its data refund programme
6. 11:54Budget, turnout and challenges of data reimbursements
7. 14:19Equity argument and audience poll

Full transcript

0:00I have to start again. Okay. My name is Joana Botero. I come from Colombia, from Wikimedia Colombia. And today I want to pose a question. What happens when memory disappears? Imagine that tomorrow the institution investigating one of the largest human rights violations in your country disappeared. and the 6,402 plus memorial, web memorial.

0:34The problem is that between 1980 and 2008, there were 7,837 victims in Colombia that were killed by our national army. They were presented as guerrilla fighters, but they were civilians, people, most of them from the countryside, for people that our army presented like this because they wanted to make us think that they were in the, with the priest process or the priest treatment, the Special Jurisdiction for Peace started to investigate these crimes.

1:14And there's thousands of pages of judicial rulings appearing from 2016 till now. So there's lots of PDFs. And what we're doing is operating with this Wikimedia workflow. We read the judicial rulings. We structure the information collaboratively in the Historical Memory Collaboratory and Minga de Edad in Commons and in the web memorial itself. This is the memorial. It's a demo that we prepared for you.

1:49so yeah and the idea is not only to to use the technology but also to go to build a community around us we're working with people like artists Wikimedians historians programmers that analyzers to produce these memorial that is data visualization but also stories. Andy Leone is a victim. Every point there is the structured data and wiki data and every biography is connected to a family and it's all it's also published in Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. So So, yeah, the idea is like how we can build this How this open knowledge is not only inside a database or databases or in the Wikimedia ecosystem, but it could be also.

2:53Year was presented also in other places, non-Wikimedia places. For example, in the first symposium of memories in the University of Granada in Spain. also in Lima, in a museum, in the National Museum of Lima, MAC Lima. And in Cinemateca de Bogota also as a project that connects.

3:30To say that, for about, I want to go to this part. In many places in the Global South, knowledge does not begin with official databases. It begins with court rulings, as this is the case, with community archives, with oral histories or stories. And today we're thinking about a new Wikidata policy that is important.

4:01Because what happens when institutions producing today's is the safest place to put this information and this data and to preserve it. So it survives because someone cares about it and today that someone is Wikimedians like us. So I think we should think about it and yeah, that's what I wanted to tell you. This is the QR codes for the memorial and for the data documentation in Spanish.

4:37And that's all. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. So the next presentation will be Natsik. Ready? Hi, welcome, oh, too bright, sorry. Hi, welcome everyone. My name is Maciej Nadzikiewicz, I'm from Poland, and today to, let's say, honor Julius Verne, I'll take you into the travel of around the world in 365 female biographies on Wikimedia projects.

5:50I want to give kudos to Lucy from the United Kingdom and Nellie Bly around the world who were inspirations for me when it came to this project. And I have created the red line ending in 2019 are the articles that made it to the front page of Polish Wikimedia. I'm mostly showing you this to show off but I really care about this project and I really put a lot of work into it this is how this data looks mapped on the map the countries with green are countries which had at least one did you know article and you can see that every country and some territories which are not countries themselves also have one last thing to show off but this also makes me the number one user by the number of continuous article creations of Wikipedia.

6:48With 491 as of today, every day. I don't know if I will stop at 500, but for now I still have something to write about as the gender gap on Wikipedia is quite big. I have focused on the first women. There are quite some important women who are in history of various countries, who are not present, not even only in Polish Wikipedia, but on England, who still do not have a single article about them on any language version of Wikipedia.

7:24When it comes to sourcing, I would recommend to all of you here, Wikimedia library. This is a project run by the Wikimedia Foundation where you can log in with your Wikimedia account and you have access to at this point I believe hundreds of thousands of different pieces of media that usually cost up to tens of hundreds of dollars a year but you could you get access to it for free if i would share with you a few interesting biographies as well and some of them were required to be very creative with sources i know you cannot treat polish but marisa de la nieves delgado is the first female that was born on antarctica in an argentinian base Argentines Put a few pregnant women on Antarctica because they thought that if there would be people born there that it will strengthen their Antarctic claim.

8:23This is a transcript with proper punctuation. Such Batarin Janjma, she became an interim president of Mongolia when it was still a communist state in Korean in Chinese history. Carol Warren, first female mayor of a very small island, Pitcairn Island, it's a very small British territory of just 50 people and the administrator of the French, Antarctic and Southern territories also in the middle of the ocean and she just became it in 2022.

9:01So there are many many places that are still only getting their first women in power. Thank you all very much. I'm user Nadzik Maciej Nadzikiewicz. I'm happy to talk with you a bit more about that and show you some interesting things. Thank you all. Thank you very much Nadzik. Sano will come on stage, Justice and Sano. This is Justice. My colleague here is Sandista. We are from the Wikimedia Ghana User Group.

10:10Our topic today is supporting participation or creating transactional engagement, retaking internet data refunds as volunteer support. So Wikimedia Ghana User Group started in 2012. We've been conducting outreaches at the Tartans across 16 regions in Ghana. One of the things that we wanted to do was to make sure that in our activity, so we wanted to make sure that equity among the various participation, enabling those approaches to volunteer participation.

10:53So the virtual participation stories. So in 2012, in 2020, we all know, COVID happened, and so we're all home. And so one of the ways in which we wanted to make sure that participation of our online editor terms was to give data reimbursements to volunteers who are attending. But then I think this is how actually it works. So every week we have two online events, an artificial call where we participate in achieving the event goals so we have a set of editing tasks for every participant and then we ask them for those who want data stipends to fill out a form so that our programs team will verify if indeed they edited and then we reimburse them we used to send them um so in

11:54In 2024, 2025 year, we spent 11% of our annual budget on reimbursement, roughly paying between four to six dollars for five gigabytes of data. It varies from the network that you are using. So what we have learned or what we are learning about giving this internet data bundle support to volunteers when they are editing is that.

12:28On a particular court, we have, like, 20-plus editors joining that call to edit, but then when we don't publicize or announce that we're giving data reimbursements, we get, like, five to seven participants showing up to edit. As much as that sounds positive, this particular initiative has come with a lot of challenges because when we talk to external audiences or people who do not belong to our communities or very new contributors, they think that actual internet isn't some kind of paid editing.

13:08So we have always had to try and explain to people that we are not trying to pay you for your edits. What we are saying is, if you do not have the means to join a Google Meet or a Zoom edit-a-thon, then you request for that kind of support and we give it to you. So it's our own equity measure because we all know that Ghanaians are not equal. Not everybody can afford to join an edit-a-thon online. and then also sometimes it's it can get fraudulent in the sense that people show I'm support so we have had to check that and make sure that people who are actually supporting event goals The edits are getting that kind of support. And then generally, we have to keep reinforcing and telling volunteers that please do not feel entitled. This is just some kind of support we're giving you and not that we need to pay you for your edits. All around the world, volunteers edit freely. They don't ask for payments. We're just saying if you can't afford something, then we support you with that measure.

14:19this since 2020 and i personally i started this initiative sometimes i ask myself is this right is it wrong is this right and then we we keep going back and forth but what informs what we are doing is that wikipedia if we are not careful would become a middle class activity like a Ghanaian middle class activity people who fall beyond sorry below a setting income margin will not be able to edit wikipedia because why we can't edit alone we are new virtual calls to be able to get support so if not then it means people who can't afford data will not be able to join the call so we have had to find and asking them to come for events is even more expensive because it involves transport costs. So what would we want to pay for? So we are here to talk to you but because there's no time we have a mentimeter We have a mentimeter slide up. Please, you can scan, you can keep the code, and later you can leave us a message. What do you think about supporting people with data?

15:31That will be. Thank you very much.

Source and licence

Recording: File:Wikimania 2026 – Community Lightning talk series II.webm by Bawolff, AmiGueko, Justice Okai-Allotey, Maciej Nadzikiewicz / User:Nadzik (2026-07-25), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0. The transcript, summary and chapters on this page are shared under the same licence (CC BY-SA 4.0).

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.