Wikimania 2024 Board of Trustees candidate lightning talk: transcript

Key points

• He is a Palestinian Wikimedian, software engineer and father of three who joined the movement in 2005 as an editor on Arabic and English Wikipedias.
• He co-founded the Wikimedians of the Levant User Group, serves on its board, and has run Wikipedia education workshops in Palestine.
• He sits on the regional grants committee and has served on several other Wikimedia committees.
• He is running to increase board diversity and bring underrepresented perspectives.
• He wants the board to lead work on a new charter in consultation with the community.
• He says the foundation should limit disinformation from generative AI and government or media meddling, and join alliances with clear shared human rights values.

Chapters

1. 0:00Background and joining Wikimedia in 2005
2. 0:39User group, workshops and committee work
3. 1:17Why he is running: diversity and a new charter
4. 2:02Disinformation and human rights

Full transcript

0:00So, my name is Farah Jack Mustaklim. I'm a Palestinian Wikimedian, and I'm a free knowledge advocate, and I am a software engineer by profession, a father of three wonderful children, and I advise a few non-profits in the digital rights. So, I joined the Wikimedia movement in 2005, starting out as an editor on Arabic and English Wikipedias, and then I added some photos to Commons and got involved in the different online projects.

0:39I am also a co-founder of the Wikimedians of the Levant User Group, and currently I'm a member of the board of directors of that user group. I've also run workshops and Wikipedia education program in Palestine to try to increase the user base of Wikipedia and other projects. And I am on the regional grants committee right now and have served on several Wikimedia committees in the past.

1:17Yeah, I've also done some work on the Arabic language hub, regional hub. I don't have my glasses on. So, the reasons I'm running, one of the reasons is to increase the diversity of the board and to bring some underrepresented perspectives to the board. But aside from that, I also think that the board should really spearhead the effort to work on a new charter, building upon all the work that's been done over the past few years.

2:02And, yeah, I believe that the board has the responsibility to push that effort in consultation with the community. Another reason is that I believe that the foundation has a responsibility to combat misinformation and disinformation because the Wikipedia and the other projects are so widespread and the information is read by so many people, so it's incumbent on us to...

2:36To limit the spread of disinformation, whether it's created by AI, generative AI, which is on the rise, or whether it's meddling by governments and the media. Finally, we're not a human rights organization, but knowledge is a human right, so we should join alliances and have clear values on human rights that are shared.

Source and licence

Recording: File:Wikimania BoT candidate lightning talk - Fjmustak.webm by Wikimedia Foundation (2024-08-10), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY 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.