I have to get through. Yep, let's do this. Welcome, everyone, to the December 2018 Wikimedia Monthly Activities Meeting. My name is Lincoln. I am actually our host for this meeting. So I, as you can see, am a dog. I generally work in the communications then, but I decided to try out something new and be our host. So I hope you enjoy our lovely host experience. Because I'm a dog, I might move around. We're not sure how this is gonna go, but there we go. So there, hi, hi, everyone. My name's Lincoln. Welcome. So we're gonna get started. This month is a little bit different, which is also why we have me hosting. Unlike most of our months, we're actually gonna jump kind of right into our lightning talks. We really wanna hear from folks who have done some great things. I've been hearing about it in the comms then all year long. And so I finally decided I wanted to have my friends share some of their knowledge with others. So we're gonna jump right in and skip past all the movement updates and other things that we normally do because as a dog, I have a very short attention span and don't wanna hear any of those things. So we're gonna jump right into a presentation about special preferences, the special preferences user experience improvements page. So let's jump right over to my friend Volker who's gonna talk about that. And I will be back shortly. Volker, I'm afraid we can't hear you. We're restarting just a moment. So as you can see, sometimes we have technical difficulties and that's okay. Listen, as a dog, I appreciate challenges. I know all about challenges. I know how these things go. I watch you people. I see how hard you work.  Now we're restarting. I don't even know for broadcasting anymore. We are, good. That's great. As a dog, I don't really know what's going on anyway. I just sort of assume technology is moving quickly. You are in the right meeting. Yes, so this is the monthly activities meeting hosted by Lincoln. And we are temporarily experiencing some technical difficulties with our remote setup. We will return shortly, but we hope in the meantime, you're enjoying the view of our lovely guests and our agenda and our host, me, Lincoln. My hobbies include spending time on dog book. Okay, Volker, we are ready to try again if you would like to, there we go. I can hear you, perfect. Wonderful. Hi, my name is Volker. I'm a senior UX engineer and audience's design team and I'm leading views in the face and the station efforts in the foundation. Let me quickly guide, sorry, let me very quickly guide you through the why and what of a successful six plus month team effort to improve and roll out special preferences. Next slide, please. Special preferences is one of the first pages visited by new contributors and has seen uncoordinated additions and changes over several years resulting in a somewhat intimidating piece of software, both for user experience and code. I will focus here mostly on the interface parts while the code has been vastly enhanced as well by changing to our standard library or OUI and removing artifacts. We've rolled out the improved settings page on Wikimedia projects end of September. Have you already checked it out? If not, please do so. It was the biggest interface change for contributors on desktop since page previews and recent changes with close to zero critical feedback ever since. Next slide, please. You've already seen this slide last month. Design team members agreed to show it in every activities meeting from now on to keep you engaged. Those design principles have been guidelines for our work. Click, yes. And we're going to the accomplished house section to the next slide. So how did we accomplish the positive rollout? Speaking to the principle of open collaboration, users got involved early in the design process, bringing them on the same page with us and with our goals. We kept them continuously informed throughout and we quickly integrated volunteer feedback. Quality assurance at the end was an important polishing factor as well. Next slide, please. So what has changed? This is the before. You will see a bit of a minority report representation because such form does not fit in a normal landscape slide. Click, please. Here I have added some nifty red errors for emphasis of different flaws in the user interface. Next slide. What we have now is easy usable. It matches expectations of newcomers and less technical savvy segment of our audience. It's more accessible. It's more inclusive as this is meant for everyone. And the third principle being trustworthy goes hand in hand with the fourth one, design for consistency. Interface consistency is helping users to reduce cognitive load. Reducing complexity to free them up for their important tasks. Our interface is now consistent with different parts of the big media software. And I'm already coming to the next slide. We're not stopping there. This layout by my colleague Pao shows you that we are continuously improving. We aim for a better experience for newly registered users, clear separation of topics. This is around the corner. And the last slide. From the feedback received on a page with 100,000 plus page views per month on English Wikipedia only, there were four tasks created since the rollout with minor UI ideas. Three of them resolved in the meantime. No critical voices on VillageBump. And who else of you gets so many hearts on fabricated tasks? Thank you very much. All right, Volker, thank you so much for getting us served off. That was a great example of how a lightning talk goes. There are two to five minute talks and we have a whole bunch of them. So next we have, and I'm super excited, no greater power than the power of women united in a women tech storm. Let's get going. Hi, I'm Sil. I'm a volunteer at Wikimedia Netherlands. And back in 2017, we got a huge donation that was for the project gender gap and the project nature. And we as a project gender gap decided to do two hackathons aimed especially for women and non-binary people. We had a pilot in May, a small hackathon, a warm and welcoming one, especially for people new to the movement. We had 18 participants out of 12 countries and people worked on Wikidata mainly. Next slide, please. Next slide. But one single event does not create retention. So a successor was planned in May already. And we learned a few things from our main hackathon. We made sure we had enough local mentors available for questions during the tech storm. And so mentors were not working on projects themselves, but were actually available and we wanted to lower the barrier for people to ask their questions. We had a picture wall as well with Polaroids of the mentors up with their names and with their specialties. We communicated more clearly to the participants that are new and encouraged everybody to ask their questions. And we had Fabricator as a collaboration tool and had very easy tasks prepared. So we had a low barrier for them to trust. We had, we aimed for three different groups of people, developers who already were active as developers but not yet within the Wikimedia projects. Second group was Wikimedians who were active within the community but not yet as developers. And in the October tech storm we had employees of Glam institutions who want to learn more about uploads and were working with Wikimedia software. So they could know what we as a movement have to offer. We had 300 applications when we closed and we invited 45 people and decided to include a few males as well this time. The people were, the participants were for 14 countries and four continents actually. People worked on Wikisite, Wikidata and the comments app. Next slide please. Of the 35 participants, 27 people completed our survey and the tech storm overall got an average rating of 4.45 out of five points. We have a follow-up event planned for March the 9th in Utrecht, the one day hackathon at Wikicon.nl which is the new version of the Dutch Wiki Conference. It's on the 8th and 9th of March and we hope to do another Wiki tech storm by the end of 2019. Thank you very much. All right, thank you so much. That was fantastic. So next we have a presentation. We're actually gonna skip this one. This one we're gonna do next month.  I as a dog don't know how to say. So with that, blogs. All right, hi everyone. I'm Trey Jones. I'm a software engineer on the search platform team and today I wanna discuss my efforts this year in non-technical communication about technical topics, particularly through the Wikimedia blog. Next slide please. I think it's important and valuable for us as technical folks to share information and insights from our work in a way that non-specialists can appreciate. So in addition to the technical write-ups I do for most of my work, I sometimes write posts for the Wikimedia blog. I think these posts provide a valuable communication channel to colleagues inside the foundation, to members of various Wiki communities and even further field to those outside the movement. Next slide please. I try to write a blog post every month or so and this year I came pretty close to that with five posts covering general Wikimedia support for languages with multiple writing systems, the difficulties associated with searching for names and the first three parts of a five or six part deep dive into the details of how search works under the hood. Next slide please. So I have some quick advice for those of you who want to try your hand at blogging on technical topics. It definitely can be challenging to find the right balance between including technical details and keeping your writing accessible. But if you pick a topic you know really well and already love talking about, you'll be fine. Try to keep things as simple as you can and think of the digital comms team as beta testers for your blog post. They provide you with an interested and engaged but non-specialist audience and they're willing and able to give you really good feedback and for me it's been really great and very useful to work with Melody and Ned. Also I think it's a good idea to let your personality and your passion for your topic show through in your writing. A bit of humor and some brief nerdy tangents for example can liven up a somewhat dry topic and keep your readers reading. Next slide please. If you think blogging isn't yet for you there are certainly other opportunities to communicate and engage with people. For example, I like to write short to medium length blurbs for the did you know section of our weekly status report. They cover interesting linguistic or computational tidbits about language often related to recent work that we've done. Also you can consider recording talks and presentations you do internally when they might be interesting or useful to others. This year for example, I recorded a presentation giving a high level overview of how search works and Guillaume Latteret who is an operations engineer on the search platform team recorded a great presentation on code refactoring. These talks are available on commons and I've been able to point people to my presentation as a way for them to ramp up on the basic internals of search for example. Also if you have a chance to be on a podcast I suggest you take it. It's an easy way to talk about what you do in a more conversational setting. Next slide please. So I found these various kinds of less technical communication help us keep people inside and outside the foundation informed about and engaged with our work. They encourage feedback and questions that can lead to really useful conversations and they can even serve as high level documentation that you can refer people to in the future. On a personal note, I wanna add that it's very rewarding to hear positive feedback on your blogs and other information sharing efforts. So if you see something you'd like on a blog on the Wikimedia blog or somewhere else be sure to let the author know. And finally, here's some links available to some of the stuff I talked about today and these should be available when the slides make it to commons. That's it for me, thanks. All right, round of applause, thank you. As somebody who often takes food from the blog team I can tell you that yes they do indeed love hearing from folks and want to hear from all of you and with that we wanna hear about the next topic which is advancing gender equity conversations with movement leaders and what did we learn this year? Should I stand here over there? Okay, I'm Alex, I work on the community resources team. I'm gonna tell you about a project that we've been working on the last year and a half called advancing gender equity conversations with movement leaders. First, can I get a show of hands to see how many of you think that you can define gender across the Wikimedia movement? Anybody? Nobody, right. So, let's see, here we go. Our traditional notion of addressing the gender gap and what it takes to actually close it is really about getting more women participants in our projects and getting more coverage of women on the projects as well. But this is an incredibly simplistic version of what our local Wikimedians are facing when they're working on projects on the ground. So in 2017, user Rosie Stepp embarked on a series of really interesting conversations across the movement with leaders and volunteers who are working to support more gender equity. She did 65 interviews with folks from 29 countries that speak 26 different languages. And what became increasingly clear, oops, throughout her conversations was that the notions of gender are so culturally imbued and the idea of addressing the gender gap so culturally specific and nuanced, much more than we had even imagined before. So how do you work on gender projects when there are no shared definitions across the movement? Or how do you even talk about it when there are no common terms? But despite these differences, what we did find was that there was a lot of shared reality amongst gender equity leaders in our movement. They are motivated by recording the histories of the marginalized, by expanding what the notion of a participant on our project means, and by building solidarity in allies. They develop community by meeting offline and in-person. They initiate impactful partnerships with experts in gender issues, and they also create inclusionary practices, which includes safe spaces online and offline, as well as recognizing that advancing equity is an intersectional effort that goes much beyond just gender. But they also face very similar challenges. Obviously, poor community health is one. Another is a lack of institutional support and awareness about gender issues. And then the number one issues that they faced across the board, across the movement, across the globe is bias in policies, especially notability policies. So while these leaders came from very diverse contexts, they're facing very similar cultural and structural barriers to their work. They also are doing incredible work in their communities, and they need more support. So if you wanna learn more about what came out of these conversations and what we learned, you can read more about it in the report on META. All right, big round of applause.  So let's hear from the Wikimedia 2030 team on the update for the movement strategy core team. I just like looking at that graphic. There we go. Hi, everyone. My name is Seba Glad Douglas, Information Knowledge Support of the Movement Strategy Core Team. For this December META meeting, we're introducing Agents of Change. Agents of Change are working group members who are behind the scenes in the movement strategy process. Now we are going to know why they joined the groups and what they have been doing in their respective working groups. Mahbaz Salam from the Community Health Working Group has been contributing to Wikimedia project since 2012, working with more than 100,000 edits on more than 100,000 edits in the Arabic Wikipedia and contributing to over 1,400 articles in Arabic. She's an admin in Arabic Wikipedia and co-founder of Wikimedians of the Levant User Group. Handing over to Salam. Hello, everyone. Hello, so being a contributor to the movement strategy, I thought that coming up with a strategy for the next decade is a responsibility for everyone. So I'm proud to be a member of this movement. I want to take a part in the work that we need by everyone, by every participant to come up with the intended strategy. So I chose the Community Health Group to work with them and we have already started the work and we made some progress and I know that the other work groups also are making good progress into defining their scopes and objectives. So for now we have a well-established work group, the Community Health One, and it includes a diversity of Wikimedians and experts. They represent different communities, geographical location, cultures, different genders, and all of them are keen to achieve the major goal of the group and they are all related to the objective we are working towards getting or achieving. For now we have met or we always meet by weekly to work on a specific point, let's say. One of the challenges we always have is that we are in different time zones so gathering all in one meeting is not always possible but we always share our meeting minutes and our thoughts using Google Docs and we always contribute to the thoughts and ideas we summarize in each meeting. One of the major things we have done so far is that we were able to define what community health means. So this was done in a brainstorming session that was controlled and managed by an external facilitator so we were able to put some good ideas about what community health means and from these ideas we are deriving the scope. For now we have summarized everything in a clustered way and everyone is contributing to these ideas, these definitions to come up with a cohesive, let's say, scope for the next steps we are going to work on. So this is I think what we will be working on in the next month doing the scope, defining the critical roles in the communities and providing support to return people within these roles and responsibilities also. We need to agree on the future perspective of the engaging and including of new cameras in a sustainable manner. And I think this can be done by answering a few questions, like how do we as a movement define the term community so we also welcome any contributions from anyone in this context, how can we ensure that our communities are places that people want to be in and participate in and how we can make them stay? And how do we engage and support people that have been left out by structures or power powers and privileges? And we also want to know how we can either prioritize or balance the need to bring new community members into our movement and meet the expectations of existing contributors. What strategies can the movement develop for their constitutions to better balance huge workloads within their personal health as well because this affects the community health in general? We are moving forward with the scoping exercise. This will be done in the coming weeks where we have to document or based on the documented, let's say clusters that we have. We will discuss the following. We will discuss the group culture and behavior, participation, resources and processes, structure and decision making and thinking open-minded. So this is my summary about what we do in one of the work groups that work behind putting on or coming up with the movement strategy. Thank you. Just to sum it all up. Sorry, just to sum it all up. Thank you so much, Marvath, for taking time for us. When you have agents of change like Marvath, I'm sure that recommendations are going to be awesome and we can all be assured of a very, very good strategic thinking. As always, we would love feedback. Please, please tell us, what is it that we are not considering? What is it that we don't know? And please help us in preparing these structural recommendations for the benefit of the entire movement. For more details, you can, the next slide, please. For more details, you could reach out to any one of us. We would like to meet you across events, across different kinds of community activities and hopefully we would be able to get your feedback from the scoping documents that are in pipeline and also during the Wikimedia Summit in March. So thank you so much. Thank you for your support. That's all from the movement strategy team for the month of December. Thank you. Let's give the core team a round of applause. So just in case you are just joining us, my name is Lincoln. I am a dog. I am hosting our activities meeting this month and let me tell you it's rough work. It's hard work. I'm gonna already need to take a break for the rest of the day. But before I get to my break, I wanna introduce Josh, who's gonna give us a product planning update. I'm gonna sit down and read because of the limited time. I don't, I have a tendency to ramble if I go free form. All right, so I wanted to share an update on our planning, product planning process. Where we're working from our high level strategy, synthesizing research data and trying to create a shared set of understanding so that we can go into medium term planning with a sort of a baseline to build on. For staff in the staff breakfast this morning, you heard about the overall foundation prioritization planning process that's coming up or sort of in progress. Here I'm just gonna be focusing on what the audience department has been doing to prepare for that process, especially given that we're trying to be more far-sighted and more strategically focused in our planning. So next slide. So, all the colors, all right. If you haven't seen this slide before, this is our process in Triforce form. If you're not a part of the Hyrule chapter, you might also know it as a pyramid or triangle. Anyway, this model is basically how we wanna go from the most abstract high level long-term thinking to specific roadmaps and plans and to be able to show our work and how the chain of inference and decision-making goes from one to the other. So we don't have feature plans that are totally disconnected from our high level goals and aspirations. Roughly, as you go up the pyramid, you get from big and abstract, the 15 year time horizon of the movement strategy through to very specific and much shorter time horizons. So a roadmap, for example, would be a few quarters into the future and you would change that on a much faster cycle, whereas hopefully you're not changing the principles every quarter. And the planning that we're working towards right now, the three to five year timeframe is right smack in the middle as you can kind of see if you can read the chart. So next slide. So that's the overall view. Oh, there's a slide missing. Can you go back? That's okay, I'll just do it all off the slide. I'm not on my slides. So I wanted to also kind of give you an update of how we're climbing the pyramid and timelines. So the movement strategy gave us a set of big goals and a ton of research on the current context. We've also been doing a lot of important research projects internally to the audience's department and as cross department programs like new readers and new editors. And so the first step for us was to synthesize all of that into some sort of coherent set of points of view and sort of takes on these issues and try to collect all of that into a sensible set of narratives. That just started with developing our principles which I presented at the September metrics meeting. And then Marguerite who is our head of design research and strategy in parallel has been working through a process to kind of map out the research space and the questions that come in that we need to be able to answer. And she created six key themes. That sort of collection and synthesis on those 16 teams has now been published to Media Wiki. There's a link in the next slide and a QR code but I'll get to that. And we're still working on some of the details and formatting, you know, there's still a little bit of work to do but they're there for you to read and engage with and they're available for anyone, not just staff. And we look forward to having you read those and engage with them. That process was really a very Wikimedian process. We had multiple authors on every document. Everything is hopefully very well cited and based on research and sort of collaboratively written and edited. There was a bit more editorial oversight than there is on some stuff on Wiki but hopefully it reflects that in its format. And please read and ask questions but I also want to say this is really not like an engagement or consultation process. It's really a chance for us to basically communicate, taking in all this information, all this feedback and sort of say taking our turn in the dialogue and saying here's what we think is going on and what we would like to do. And as you can see in the pyramid, now is the time to move from those perspectives which are published on Wiki to generating a set of proposals. So audience of staff have received an invite to basically submit initial proposals. Those four proposals are really short they're in the form of a story and the story is we should build X for our users Y so that we can solve their problem Z and achieve goal A1. So basically you're filling in the blanks and it's very limiting but it's an important way to start our conversation where we're focused on our users on their needs and what we should do for them and then how all of that relates to our bigger goals. This will also as much as possible hopefully give us a set of comparable ideas and there's a little bit more to the proposal format but that kind of gives you a sense of what we're trying to get together. If you're not in audiences, please reach out to a partner within audiences or me and we'll see if we can work with you on submitting a proposal. We don't do this to exclude our peers but because the proposals are gonna go through an evaluation and discussion process within audiences and if you don't have an internal advocate, we're afraid that you might not get a fair hearing or get understood. So again, we're not trying to exclude other people's ideas but if you do have an idea, I really recommend to you to find someone within the audience department can be an engineer, a designer, a product manager, anybody to help you guide you through that process and kind of be your internal advocate. And then the next step with all of this as you can kind of see from the triangle is to move from the proposals to sort of a rich backlog of potential projects and things to work on and to bring those to the organizational level planning process. As the planners kind of talked about this morning, that process will be driven by strategic goals and cross organizational plans and goals but we wanted to have an informed library of ideas to bring to that conversation rather than having to go do a bunch of this stuff sort of as people were trying to put the ideas together into a coherent plan. So that's where we are, next slide. And if you want to engage with either of those things on the left is perspectives which again are available on MediaWiki for anyone to view and read and then on the right is for proposals and that's on OfficeWiki, so you gotta be on staff for that. I think that's it. Great, let's have a round of applause. And during that presentation, I was diligently working on my application for the Doggo's Association. We are trying super hard to get a new grant application in which is great timing because I do want to hear about the impact of our grants and I'm gonna take a rest from the application for just a minute and hear about the impact of Wikimedia Foundation grants beyond the usual metrics. Hello, hi everyone, I'm Sati. I sit on the community resources team with Alex and Community Engagement and I'm gonna tell you a story about impact. So every year in September, volunteers from around the world engage in an international competition, a photo competition called Wikileves Monuments where they go around their country and they photograph monuments. And in September of 2014, our Nepalese volunteers held their local contest and they took this photo of Dharahara Tower in Kathmandu. Now their local contest resulted in about 1,000 photos and the international competition which we funded through a grant resulted in about 300,000 photos uploaded to comments. Now in all of my years at the foundation, these metrics are the ways that we judge success or value of project and ideas. It's the kind of impact that we celebrate the most. But unbeknownst to all of us, seven months later in April of 2015, Nepal would be hit by a magnitude eight earthquake that would devastate the country. And unbeknownst to all of us, this is what would be left of Dharahara Tower at that point. At the Wikimedia conference, a Nepalese volunteer told me this story and he said that in 2014, they thought about the success of their project by those 1,000 photos. And in 2015, when he looked around his country and he realized that all those monuments that they had photographed were gone and he realized that the impact of that competition was that they had preserved their cultural heritage, heritage that was literally there one day and gone the next. And I believe this story is indicative of a blind spot that we've developed as a foundation when we think about impact. We've forgotten that impact spans the transactional to the transformational. It includes those metrics that we know and love but it goes beyond them. It goes beyond the things that we can understand in the short term, even capture. It includes the things like the revitalization of minority languages in a digital age by investing in creating the unicode for a language when it doesn't exist. It includes the restoration of cultural pride or the reconnection with your cultural identity when it's been repressed or oppressed over generations. And it's because of this blind spot that I've spent the last year working with a wonderful woman from Australia named Lindsay to understand what are those long term transformational outcomes of grants. We've given out about $40 million in the last five years. So what has happened when we don't look at the short term and we look at the long term, when we engage in trying to investigate those long term ripple effects where causality is a little less important. And one of the things we found was that grants have played a role in enabling humanity to partake in our collective cultural heritage. Now that's very dense and this is a lightning talk so I can't tell you all the details on it. But just to orient you, to use UNESCO's definition of cultural heritage, there are two broad types. One is tangible cultural heritage, the things that we can document. And the other one is intangible cultural heritage, the things that we have to experience. So to give you a very quick example, eating food is very different than seeing a picture of food and so the picture is the tangible cultural heritage but the experience of tasting those flavors, the texture of the food, that's the experiential part that's intangible. And grants have played a role in enabling communities to work on pursuing their cultural heritage and enabling them to preserve it, others to engage with it and it to enter and continue on through generations. But that's not the only thing we found. So if you want to learn more, I would invite you to go look at our space on Metta. It's still a work in progress, obviously, but we've been putting up different stories about the different kinds of outcomes we've found, some around cultural heritage, some around building community, some around diversity and inclusion or the free knowledge ecosystem. So I'd invite you to take a look. It's obviously still a work in progress. But I'm interested to see what you think. Thank you. So as a puppy, I spend a lot of time showing gratitude and giving thanks. For example, I've been very thankful to Joe Sutherland for videoing me and making me look like a dog, as opposed to what I might otherwise look like, which is a terrifying morning beast. Anyway, so with that, we often realize that we don't always give thanks to each other enough and I'm super excited to hear more about this next activity and next project where we gave thanks. So let's hear about giving thanks. Yeah, thanks so much. My name is Leda Zia. I'm a senior research scientist in MacMedia Foundation's research team and the tech lead of the team and I'm here only briefly to introduce Suati Goel to you. She's a third year high school student and returning volunteer researcher to the research team. And she worked with us this past summer on exactly the problem of thanks. Her mentors were myself and also Ashton Anderson from University of Toronto and she's gonna be sharing with you what you learned by studying thanks. Yeah, so hi, we're gonna talk about the Thanks Research Project. So first of all, there are 14 edits per second across Wikipedia and that's a lot. Next slide please. And yeah, so it's a little hard to believe that showing gratitude towards these edits used to be very difficult. Next slide. And then in 2013, the Thanks feature was rolled out and it provided editors a quick and easy way to thank each other for specific revisions without having it be entirely public. Next slide. So as an example of how the Thanks feature works, you can go to the revision history of any page and then click please. And you can click on the thanks for any specific revisions and you will be able to send a thank message to the other user, which they will be able to see. And there will also be a public log of that thank, although not of the specific revision it was for. Next please. All right, so we studied thanks and now I'm gonna talk a little bit about what specifically we learned about them. Next please. Across all projects, only 5% of editors have sent or received thanks. Among all those editors, active editors, the more active editors use thanks more frequently. And interestingly, if you look at the graph of who's thinking who, you'll see that thanks are typically sent upwards. So less experienced editors typically think more experienced editors more often with a few notable interesting exceptions. Next please. And so to talk more about the disparity in thanks, more experienced editors are thanked more often. And in absolute numbers, the top 20% of editors are thanked 260 times more than the bottom 20% of editors. Next please. Also the thanks feature, though it still has a limited scope, as we said, its usage has increased over time. And this upward trend exists even in projects in which the total number of editors has actually decreased. So you see still a small percentage of people that are using thanks, but that percentage is growing. Next please. And so why does this matter? It matters because we studied thanks and we found that thanks significantly increase motivation. So thanked editors consistently have higher edit counts the day after receiving a thank when compared to their unthanked peers. Next please. And so we would leave you to consider making the feature more easily discoverable by editors or if you are an editor giving thanks since it actually does have a lot of impact on editor motivation across all levels of editor engagement. All right, next please. And thank you. And the link to the research pages at the bottom if you would like to see more. All right, round of applause. Thank you. And in the spirit of thanks, look at the person next to you and thank them. And if you are watching remote, take a moment and thank yourself for all of your work this last year, but take a second and thank the person next to you for all of their work this year. It's been a great year. Hi. All right. So actually I'm gonna have a few people to thanks for my presentation. So with that, let the thanks be with you. There's no church goers in the room who got the joke of and also with you, but okay, good, a couple. So with that our last lightning talk before we get into some wiki love. So start thinking about your year end wiki love is performance, perception, survey and research collaboration. All right. Hi. So I work on the performance team and one of the issues we discovered recently is that there's actually very little researched on on how people actually perceive performance. And so we figured we would do some of our own. Next slide please. Yes. So with the help of the community relations team, we identified three wikis originally that would be potentially interested in running a micro survey for us. And so this micro survey, you see some screenshots of it in English and Russian appears at the top right of wikipedia articles. And so initially we asked French wikipedia, Catalan and English wiki voyage if they'd be interested to know all the communities were interested. So it started there. And as we were doing our work, openly on fabricator, a community member of Russian wikipedia, St. John showed up in our discussion and said, hey, why don't you guys run this on Russian wikipedia as well? And with this help, he actually is also the person who translated the messages for the survey. We got it running on Russian wikipedia. And in the end, it was the most useful wiki for the study because it had more traffic than all the other ones we had considered. And so this has been running since June. And we've been doing a lot of research on it, but I can only talk about the simple results at this point. Next slide please. Which is a very good news, which is that 89% of the time when people are asked about the page, they'll just load it, they say that it's vast enough, which is the question we're asking. And that figure has been very stable. It's been very stable through performance incidents, through the data centers we show over, through fundraising campaigns, which are all events that we thought before might affect people's perception of how fast the page load, especially the banners that load late. And that doesn't appear to be the case, which is interesting news. And that's why we had to do more in-depth research about this. So I've found external researchers who are interested in the collaboration and thanks to the support of the legal departments and research teams, which I would like to thank along with community relations that all made that possible. We actually wrote the research paper together, which will be released early next year with a lot of very interesting findings. And that's it. Thank you. Fantastic. So with that, are there questions? Is there some discussion? It doesn't look like there's any questions in IRC, although if you're in IRC and we'll sing to this, now is your time to type it. I'm looking around the room. Do I see anyone in the room? Is there anyone in the room? And you don't see any hands. Looking back in the corner, give you a pause. All right, I'm not seeing any questions or discussion. And then the, James, are we good on IRC? Nothing on IRC, all right. So with that, this is a meeting that, especially moving forward, we very much want people to give presentations. This was a great example this month. Thank you again to everyone who gave a lightning talk. So one more round of applause for that group. And if you would like to give a talk in the future, simply go to this page on Meta and sign up. It is that simple. Your talk can be five minutes, it can be 25 minutes. They don't always go with the lightning talk format, but definitely sign up there. We want to hear about your activities. So with that, let us jump into my favorite part, which is wiki love. And I'm actually gonna start off as giving some wiki love on behalf of all the dogs to our facilities team, as well as our talent and culture team and everyone at the foundation who helps work to make sure that doggos like me can come into the office. If you've never been to the office, it's not unusual to see a dog in the office. And it's thanks to those people's work, both with our building and with each other. So thank you very much. I would like to start that as the first wiki love from the doggos. With that, who else has some wiki love? If you have some in the IRC, just go ahead and say it. And James will repeat it if you're here in the office. Just come on up to the microphone. Great. Hey there. I just wanted to give thanks to the foundation here in SF. We had major air quality issues during the fire. This is the second year and certainly worse. Last year we had the Santa Rosa fires and air masks, particle filters sold out immediately and it was the same this year, but the foundation was prepared and had a ton of them here in the office for people who were commuting in through the smoke. And I really appreciated that. Made me feel like the foundation really cares about us and was prepared. I don't know how Robert got them. Maybe he fought people at ACE hardware, but we got them and that was awesome. So thank you. Hello, Dario here. Some of you know we hosted our third annual event in Berkeley, the wiki site conference. It was the largest, the most awesome so far, but I'm here to thank every single person who's been helping and have a 217 people. So hopefully you'll be patient until I go through this. This was actually a moment of realization when I figured how many people have helped with the event. And yeah, so there we go. Brendan in OIT for helping with live streaming and the network, Pam and Megan and Jenna, Maren and Unita with contracts and reimbursements, Doreen with scholarships and travel, Jim Liana in legal for our surveys and privacy statements, Joe, James and Rachel for your help with a code of conduct, Katelyn and Jonathan for funding, Ben, Jake, Alex and Sandra, as well as the South in a sea for helping out in a variety of tasks, including the keynote and Catherine herself for participating, giving an amazing closing keynote on the first day. All the staffers from Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Deutschland who participated and helped out all the managers who allowed everyone to participate and help out. All the volunteers contributed. We had like I said, 150 people in total who attended this year, the Alfred Stone Foundation for sponsoring the event.  So thank you all. This wouldn't happen without your help. Any other wiki love? Any wiki love on IRC? Anyone else? Oh, great, go ahead. Yes, so I wanted to share some wiki love, sorry, at the last activities meeting, but I didn't get through. So wiki love for the people involved in the changes that I've presented, which has been a powerful work through by Bartosz, Ed Sanders, James Forrester, people on the design team, and also especially because they are so humble. I want to make a shout out to Elena and Romana for the quality assurance that saves so many of our users headaches upfront and us developers and designers, a wonderful polishing ability. So that's great. Thanks for that. Hello, I want to take a break from filming our host today to just thank everybody who's ever translated anything for anyone at the foundation or just translate anything on meta or on media wiki or any of the other websites. We really struggle to get messages out there that aren't in English just because the majority of us speak English. So it's really, really helpful when people step up to translate normally totally on their own volition. So thanks to everybody who's ever done that. From IRC, passing on from Jodi, wiki love to the advancement and fundraising tech teams for all the amazing work they do during the season of giving. I want to give wiki love to my team for different reasons, but we've had a lot of people out during the course of this year, like I got to take a sabbatical, other people got to take sabbaticals and I think our team really stepped in, did things outside of their job to cover people so people could take a break. And I really think that that, I mean, as someone who took a sabbatical, that was amazing. So just like a thank you to my teammates for being a team. Thanks. Anyone else? Great, here we go. All right, so I wanted to give wiki love to three teams. The legal team, the community engagement team as well as the security team and tech. This past six months, they've been battling a number of cyber attacks against our website, quite serious ones. And some of you will have seen some of the impact of that. For example, for a little while there, with Disabled Translate wiki, you will see bits and pieces of the work that they're doing to defend the sites. Folks have been working around the clock, really kind of going above and beyond, meeting on Sundays, late evenings, to try and make progress. And I just wanted to share a big thank you for all the hard work that they've been doing. Our sites are up and people enjoy them, but there is a lot of unseen work and security work is of that variety. I also wanted to thank the administrators and stewards in our communities that have been very patient and collaborating with us, as we've been trying to raise kind of the bar, if you like, on the protections that we have available. I know that sometimes it causes breaks in workflows, but we really appreciate their hard work and collaboration in getting this done. So a big thank you from me. Oh, and a big thank you to Lincoln for moderating today. He should do it more often, right? It's like, it's the best. Another one. Well, thank you. Let's see, Delphine says, I want to send wiki love to all the people who take on emotional labor in our movement, those who support difficult conversations, help untangle complicated relations, offset the lack of empathy of certain situations. They often go unnoticed and unseen. Thank you. So I will pause here, thank you, and see if there's anyone else who wants to give wiki love. Otherwise, in the spirit of the season of giving, I will encourage everyone to give some wiki love to someone by the end of the holiday break, so that's your doggo challenge. So with that, thank you all so much for attending the end of year metrics monthly activities meeting. See if we can get a little greeting. You've all been fantastic. Thank you very much, and we will see you next year.


of the United States. Good evening. I have a statement. We have an important visitor in Washington, Jose Napoleon Duarte, the president-elect of El Salvador. The president-elect and I yesterday issued a joint statement in which we agreed on three major objectives for Central America. The strengthening of democratic institutions, the improvement of living standards, and increased levels of U.S. security assistance to defend against violence from both the extreme left and the extreme right. The election of Jose Napoleon Duarte is the latest chapter in a trend toward democracy throughout Latin America. In Central America, El Salvador now joins Costa Rica and Honduras in having a democratically elected government. Democracy in Central America is a fundamental goal of our policy in that region, but continued progress toward that goal requires our assistance. Most of our aid, three-quarters of it, is economic assistance, but security assistance is essential to help all those who must protect themselves against the expanding export of subversion by the Soviet bloc, Cuba, and Nicaragua. Also, as I said in my speech to the nation on May 9th, we must support the democratic aspirations of the people of Nicaragua and oppose the Sandinista aggression against their neighbors and who seek genuinely democratic elections in Nicaragua as the Sandinistas promised the OAS in 1979. Peace can only be achieved in Central America if the forces of democracy are strong. We strongly support multilateral efforts toward peace, especially the Contadora process. However, no lasting peace settlement through the Contadora process can be achieved unless there is simultaneous implementation of all the Contadora objectives, including genuinely democratic elections in Nicaragua. The freedom fighters in Nicaragua have promised to lay down their arms and to participate in genuinely democratic elections if the Sandinistas will permit them. Our Congress faces some historic decisions this week. Those who struggle for freedom everywhere are watching to see whether America can still be counted upon to support its own ideals. The people of El Salvador are watching. The freedom fighters of Nicaragua are watching. Nicaragua's threatened neighbors are watching and the enemies of freedom are watching as well. Our balanced policy can succeed if the Congress provides the resources for all elements of that policy, as outlined in the bipartisan recommendations of the Kissinger Commission. But if the Congress offers too little support, it'll be worse than doing nothing at all. The success of communism in Central America poses the threat that 100 million people from Panama to the open border on our south could come under the control of pro-Soviet regimes. We could face a massive exodus of refugees to the United States. The Congress has the opportunity to reaffirm our commitment to brave people and risking their lives for the cause of liberty and democracy in Central America. The Congress also has the opportunity to reaffirm our bipartisan tradition, which will tell the world that we're united when our vital interests are at stake. I'm asking the members of the Congress to make that commitment. And now, tonight's first question will be from Maureen Santini. And incidentally, this is a double first for Maureen. Her first, first question in her new role was the AP's Chief White House correspondent. Maureen. Mr. President, it's been reported that you are willing to provide U.S. air power to keep oil tankers moving through the Persian Gulf. Could you tell us what the Saudi response has been to your proposal and under what circumstances the United States could become militarily involved in that region? Well, Maureen, I've seen all the stories and a lot of them based on speculation already. No, what we have kept in touch and are keeping in touch with the Gulf states and with our own allies, but we have not volunteered to intervene nor have we been asked to intervene. And we've communicated with them regarding that, and so far it seems as if the Gulf states want to take care of this themselves, they're concerned as I think we all should be not enlarging the war. Do we have a contingency plan for doing so if they can't take care of themselves? Well, if they ask us for help, we have, obviously, we've thought in terms of what we might do, but I don't think that's something I should talk about. Helen. Senator Burt says that our relations with the Soviet Union have reached the lowest point in 20 years. Did you misjudge the Russians or your hard-line policies responsible for boycott of the Olympics, break up of the arms negotiations, step up offensive in Afghanistan? Norma, this holds off our post. No, Helen, I don't think I'm responsible for any of those things. And if these are the lowest state that we've had for 20 years and not too long ago, just a matter of days ago, I gave to George Shultz one of our very eminent national news magazines for him to see an article on this very subject. And the article, it was an April issue. And the article cited that we had the lowest relations we'd ever had and the President was to blame for that and his vacillation and so forth and so on, except that it was April of 1980 when they were saying that about our relations with Russia. And I have to say that today, no, we didn't walk away from the negotiating table. We made every effort to prove that we were ready to be flexible in trying to negotiate a reduction of weapons. And as for the Olympics, the only thing as a government that we did in the Olympics was ensure them and meet virtually every request that they made with regard to their people there, up to and allowing their cruise ship to anchor, and we were going to spend about a half a million dollars on protection for that ship. There's a heightened validity and six eminent world leaders today said that we're headed for global suicide. What are you going to do about it with this arms race? I don't think we are, and I don't think we're any closer or as close as we might have been in the past to a possible conflict or confrontation that could lead to a nuclear conflagration. I think the very fact that we're stronger, yes, the Soviet Union is unhappy. They're unhappy because, for the first time in a couple of decades, we are preserving our security ability. We're building up our military and we're not unilaterally disarming while they continue their massive arms buildup. And I'm sure this makes them a little unhappy about that, that things aren't as easy as they once were. But when they're ready to come back to the table, it probably or might not be till after the election, I don't know. But I think that the world maybe is a little safer than it has been in the past. Mr. President, on the Persian Gulf again, is it true that you have written to the Saudis saying that should they ask the United States for aid, that we are willing to supply air cover to protect the oil nation? You specified what we would do, but we have told them because I made a statement earlier that neither we nor the western world as such would stand by and see the straits or the Persian Gulf closed to international traffic. Mr. President, and then in your judgment, what is the likelihood of American servicemen being involved in some kind of shooting war shortly or in the near future in the Middle East? I think very slight. I can't foresee that happening. You cannot foresee that happening? Does things stand now? No, I don't think so. Mr. President, you said America's vital interests are at stake in Central America. What will we have to do if the Congress does deny that security assistance to stop the threat of Soviet sponsored regime taking over all of the countries that are up to our southern borders? What do we have to do to... Suppose the Congress does not vote the money that you need for the freedom fighters, as you call them. What then would be required to do to prevent this scenario from developing? We'd be in a very difficult position, and so would they. But I have great hopes that after President Duarte's visit here and meeting with as many of the Congresses he did that there's some reason for optimism. Yeah, Andrea. Mr. President, there are reports that the administration has gone around Congress and continued to increase military and intelligence activities in Central America by channeling money through accounting tactics, tricks of accounting through the Pentagon to the CIA. While you can't discuss covert activities, can you at least assure the American people that you have not had this administration go beyond the will of Congress in increasing the spending for military activities in Central America? Andrea, we followed no procedures that are any different from what has been done in past administrations, nor have we done anything without the knowledge of the Congress. We were told, Congress was told about a month ago that if Congress didn't appropriate the money, the CIA supported Congress would run out of money by now. Now Congress has been told that the CIA has enough money to get through the rest of the summer. How is that possible without the knowledge of Congress? Well, unless they guessed wrong on the first date, but I thought that they were closer to being out of money than they apparently are. But I don't think any... Well, nothing of that kind could take place without the knowledge of Congress. Sam? Sir, interest rates are going up. The stock market is going down, and some economists say we're going to be into a recession perhaps this fall. Do you think we're headed for a recession? No, I don't think we are. And there's always some pessimists out there. But I think all of the indicators show that if anything the economy might be getting ready to level off a little bit from that 8.8% bulge that we had for the first quarter, and which I think was a little out of line, but which was probably based on inventory building. The end sales figures did not keep pace with that level of growth. So a great many businesses were building up inventory which accounted for the 8.8%. We are still estimating that we think for the year the economic growth will be about 5%. But all the other indicators. Last month housing starts at a rate of $1,960,000 a year permits at $1,700,000 personal earnings up and inflation the producer's price index just the other day that came out which is the one that indicates what the cost price index is going to be. That was a zero increase. Sir, a few weeks ago in Dallas you predicted by the end of the summer that interest rates would begin to drop. What was your prediction today? I expressed my belief an optimistic belief that before we were through with warm weather we may have to have a warm September ahead to that but summer isn't over until then. Let me go back here. Two questions on your upcoming trip to Europe. First, are you concerned in any way that the planned demonstrations in Ireland will marvel as supposed to be a friendly homecoming for the television cameras and secondly you have gone to economic summits for four years now and told the allied leaders that American interest rates will be coming down and the deficit will be coming down given the fact that interest rates are going up why should the allied leaders believe you if you sing the same song or say the same things this year? I think that the interest rates one of those things that can be volatile they slid up here and the interest rates they have if you compare them to what they were when we started they are well down so there was a little increase recently which I think represented fear in the marketplace of possible return of inflation I don't think it was necessary and I still hold that those conditions are or they are doing that is really unwarranted the rate of money increase right now is well within the guidelines set by the Federal Reserve and it is commensurate with our increased growth and yet it is not at a point that would add to inflation so I am still optimistic that those interest rates we are going to see them continue to come down to the deficit I am also going to be optimistic and tell you that I think that everyone has been overestimating not that it isn't a serious problem it is but I think that they have been overestimating the amount in the out years and the projections of what the deficit will be are you concerned about the Irish demonstrations? I think that is just Irish hospitality they know that I haven't I haven't gone any place in years that there hasn't been a demonstration at home Charlotte your administration has said that once we build up our military strength the Russians would have an incentive to come to the negotiating table you have said that we have built up our military defenses why have the Russians not returned to the negotiating table? well as I say maybe they are waiting for the election to be over but no we have built up on the other hand they can see for example the modernization of our strategic weapons which are all important the peacekeeper the Mx they can see the contest that is going on as to whether that is going to be built or not and this can't help but be encouraging to them but I think it is true they came to the table and I think they only came to the table because they believed in our determination to continue our military build up and they left because their whole propaganda campaign against the deployment of the Pershings and the cruise missiles in Europe which was agreed to in 1979 by this country when NATO requested it and we are keeping that promise but at all the time that they were negotiating with us they kept on building and adding to their stock of SS-20s now these are triple warhead missiles that are intermediate range targeted on all the targets of Europe but also they have been adding them aimed at targets in Asia and it was for this in response to this that NATO asked for an intermediate range weapon that could be based in Europe targeted on Russia and we have we are providing that it won't in any way match the 1350 or so warheads SS-20s but we believe it will be enough for a deterrent the use of a deterrent is to have the enemy know that if he is contemplating some rash action the cost to him might be more than he cares to bear so we are going forward with this they had waged such a campaign to stop it and I think they made this other move to hopefully hope that the our allies in Europe might change their mind and cancel out their request well the allies stood firm I don't think the alliance has ever been more solidly together than it is right now Mr. President, given the coolness of our relationship right now do you think the Russians have a problem of saving face perhaps and returning to the negotiations if so would you be prepared to offer some overture to make some overture that would be that positive sign that they ask for in order to come to the table without a loss of face Charlotte I don't think it would be proper for us to do something some concession that would make it look that we rewarded their intransigence and their walking out of the meetings but we have pursued and we took the lead in this negotiations on a number of other matters between our two countries that have nothing to do with strategic weapons and we have been making some progress in a number of those negotiations so I don't think things are as bad as they are being painted let me switch around a little bit here Mr. President the Civil Rights Act of 1984 is expected to go to House committees tomorrow because of the Supreme Court's decision in the Grove City College case the bill restores all inclusive prohibitions against sex, race, handicap or age discrimination at institutions with federally assisted programs do you support this measure? there is some lawyer watching this legislation very closely the court decision was based on the way Article 9 was written by Congress and it was the way we interpreted it also there is legislation to reverse the court decision with regard to Title 9 that will prevent discrimination against women in educational institutions that are getting funds from the government we support that there is legislation that has been proposed and I don't know just which they're going to take up tomorrow there is legislation which is so broad that actually it would open the door to federal intrusion in local and state governments and in any manner of ways beyond anything that has ever been intended by the Civil Rights Act that kind of legislation we would oppose Mr. President, you said earlier that if asked the United States would assist the Persian Gulf States in keeping straight up when moves open are there any circumstances where American interest could be so threatened that the United States would act unilaterally or without a request from those states? Well again, I can't foresee that we probably would be among all the importing of oil nations we would be the least hurt by any shutdown it is our allies, it is Japan it is our friends in western Europe who would really be in trouble if there was any stop to the Middle East oil actually only 3% of our oil supply now thanks to decontrolling oil and increasing domestic production only 3% is involved in the Persian Gulf for us and we have increased our stockpile of oil to four times what it was when we came here so I can't see a kind of emergency that would do this but also remember we are in consultation also with our allies with those nations that would be affected because we're not contemplating anything unilaterally here this problem is one that affects all of us what would the United States do to help its allies in the event of an oil cutoff would we give them oil from the strategic reserve? we have had people in consultations with our allies and they've been holding meetings on discussing contingencies of this kind we would not hold back on immediately turning to our reserve but I'm not prepared to say we've made any specific plans Gary Mr. President some of your top government's advisors suggest the interest rate question could be the cutting edge in November for the election with some of your people saying that the Federal Reserve Board has had too much control of the interest rates other saying that they haven't had but they've been too harsh the criticism has been too harsh to the Fed what is your position do you think the Fed should loosen up on the money supply? as I indicated earlier Gary we're right on target with it now it is true but a short time ago there was a dip below their regular line and I think this was one of the things that caused some panic out there in the money markets because usually or in the past on a number of occasions such as background 79 and 80 such a dip was then followed by a real loosening of the strings we went to 21.5% interest rates and double digit inflation for two years and so forth but it is possible that's not an exact tool the money supply sometimes and judging on a weekly basis the way they do sometimes there can be an inadvertent dip or an inadvertent splurge so I don't know whether the time when they got below their line was inadvertent or not but they are back up on target and where they should be with a normal rate of increase tied to the increase in economy Mr. President the White House and the Pentagon worked very hard yesterday to tell people they shouldn't really worry about the new nuclear missile submarines the Soviet Union says they placed off the American coast can you tell the American people that these new missile subs are not any cause for concern is there anything the US must do to respond to the Soviets if I thought there was some reason to be concerned about them I wouldn't be sleeping in this house tonight the no this isn't really anything new they're announcing and they're publicizing but those submarines off both our coasts they've had submarines in and out and paroling or patrolling there for extended periods of time maybe there's one or two more than have been there at one time in the past but I think it's I think again it is in keeping with their talk about putting the Pershings in Europe and that they're now going to show us that they can do something in return if we do that so they have the submarines offshore but they're aren't they pose any particular threat at all Jerry Mr. President for any consolation to you I've written all my relations in County Kerry not to demonstrate seriously until you and I are safely out of the country but I wanted to ask you if you have any message for the Soviet government or for the Sakharovs about the possibility of getting them out of the country so that there's any deal or any trade that can be made that would save their lives I just on this one I have to say we're as concerned as anyone deeply concerned Mrs. Bonner has a very serious heart condition she is a physician herself she's a war hero also she was wounded three times in World War II she was permitted to leave Russia once and had medical treatment for her problem outside the country and I think it's only natural that someone would want to go back to the person that had treated them before but I can't go further than that because this is a little bit like when I put a moratorium on myself before I was here and talking about the our people in the embassy in Iran I just have a feeling that anything I might say publicly could be injurious to her chances I just hope and pray that the Soviet Union will do the humane thing and let her go Mr. President, after the bailout of Continental Illinois Bank some experts are concerned about the soundness of America's banking system you have pushed for deregulation but are you now concerned that your administration will have to bail out more big banks because like public utilities for example they cannot be permitted to fail no, these this particular bank and the so-called bailout is maybe is by the banking system itself and it's been done before the protection has been offered to the depositors and obviously everyone would like to hope that the bank won't fail but if it does the people who would be injured would be the stockholders and no I do not see that this is any threat to the banking system much, this is one bank that needs some help Mr. President, the other day Treasury Secretary Reagan raised the possibility that your administration may push Congress for passage of two separate tax bills in 1985 one to simplify the current tax code and the second to raise new revenues in order to shrink the budget deficit if you're re-elected are higher taxes a good possibility next year I have to feel I haven't had a chance to talk to Don about this I have a feeling that he started probably trying to clarify and make it ever plain that if we have a reform plan and a simplification of the tax structure it won't be a gimmick in order to raise revenues so he was divorcing any tax increase from that now speaking of a tax increase in addition to that the only thing I could think is that he was possibly feeling that if we get to the absolute bottom of where we can get government spending and it still would then turn out to be a higher percentage of the gross national product then our tax structure provides then you would have to review the tax structure to see if you knew that you could not get any more cuts reductions in the cost of government to make the tax structure match that I have said that myself but we're not anywhere near that and I'm not looking for any tax increase that soon we've got a long way to go in cutting government spending government is taking too big a chunk out of the gross national product out of the private economy Mr. President you have said in the past that you have no intention of sending US troops into combat in El Salvador and President Elec Duarte said yesterday that he has no intention of asking for US troops to go there but despite these denials who doubts linger while Ramondale insists that your policy will lead to US involvement down there can you say unequivocally tonight that you would not send troops down to El Salvador even if it appears that without them El Salvador might fall to the communists First of all Mr. President Duarte made it very plain that they would never request American troops we have never had any consideration of doing that or any thought of doing that at all the I don't know how I can convince anyone that but all you'd have to do is look at all our friends and neighbors in Latin America and probably as a hold over from the past we'd lose all those friends and neighbors if we did that they want our help they know they have to have our help and in the manner in which we're giving it in military support by training and supplies and equipment and so forth but they don't want American manpower but if El Salvador clearly were going to fall to the communists would you feel it's in the US interest to send our troops in there and stop that or would you allow the country to go communist well you're asking me for a hypothetical question I think that I would be very foolish to try and answer Sir, as people on your staff and people in the justice department are well aware of some of the shenanigans of the Betz contractors are referred to general dynamics and some of their staple mates if you want specific names I can give them but I wonder if you are going to leave this curtain down on this national scandal are you going to see that it's brought out and that the 650 billion tax money that was allowed to go in settlement from the Navy to general dynamics a while back if you'll see if that's collected Sarah, I have to tell you that all of this about defense spending and the spare parts high prices and all of that I have said this before I will say it again this has been a past practice but it's our administration it's under cap Weinberger because we're the ones who found out these things were going on that you haven't come out and told us all about it yet and we are waiting to hear I have told you and there's been a report from the defense department there have been hundreds there have been hundreds of indictments there have been convictions for fraud there have been rebates from companies of all kinds but what? Sarah, you've been here longer than I I haven't been here long enough to call $600 million Piki Yun I want you to collect it I want you to get it back President, I was wondering sir if you could give us your definition of holding firm answer to Charlotte's question you said our allies in Europe are holding firm and accepting missiles yet the Dutch government here is going through a little rain dance here because there are people that want to take the new missiles you should sort of tell me how that is holding firm well the decision must be made by the Dutch cabinet cabinet of the Netherlands and the parliament and they have not yet taken up that issue or made a decision on it they are slated to get some cruise missiles there but in the other countries basically Italy, Germany the other NATO countries are all going forward the bases are being erected for the missiles including the Pershings and as I say not just on that issue alone but I have to tell you that some time ago when we came here we found there was disarray in the NATO alliance and that no longer holds true today I think we're closer than we've probably ever been well the Dutch government reverses and changes their mind are you fearful that will set off a chain reaction among the other allies where the situation is at best tenuous no, I doubt that they would there might be another country or so among some of the smaller allies that might follow suit but the rest rest assured wouldn't Mr. President you said a little while ago that you felt that the world was a little more secure place since you've been in power how do you count for the fact that so many people so many countries think that during the last three and a half years the world has moved closer to war rather than closer to peace I would say that that is because that's all that most of the people have been hearing in political dialogue from one side since we've been here in the three and a half years that I somehow have an itchy finger and I'm going to blow up the world and that has all been duly reported by so many of you that that is the tone that the people have been getting and it doesn't do me any good to tell you that having seen four wars in my lifetime I don't know of anyone in or out of government that is more determinedly seeking peace than I am and my goal is the total elimination of nuclear weapons if we can get those fellows back to the table and get them to start down that road of mutual reduction then they might find out what common sense it would mean to eliminate them but I would also point out that if we're that dangerous in three and a half years why is it that while the Soviets are still carrying on in Afghanistan and backing the forces in Campochilla the North Vietnamese forces there but all those gains that they were making in the few years before we came here Ethiopia South Yemen and Gola all of those things they haven't taken another inch of territory since we've been here I think Mr. President what the ordinary person is seeing is that the United States is rearming heavily the Russians are rearming heavily and the ordinary person says what is going to be the outcome of this arms race nobody is at any table No it is as simple as this the Soviets this is new for them they're up at full pitch I doubt if they could expand their military production any place beyond where it is right now or the rate that it is on the other hand they know that when for the first time in as I say decades they see us determined to refurbish our defenses they know that they can't match us if there is such a race which means that the only alternative for them is to watch us catch up or to sit down at the table with us and work out something in which they won't have to run the risk of someone being superior to them militarily Helens told me I'm all through in the wrong set ok thank you I'd like to answer his question


Good morning, Hank. It's Tuesday. Little bit of a stressful day around here. 31 years after having their stadium taken away from them, AFC Wimbledon are back home at last, playing their first game today at the new Plow Lane Stadium. It's an incredible accomplishment, a stadium built and owned by the fans. I'm so excited. There's also an election. If you're eligible to vote in the United States, please do. You can find your polling place in more at vote.org. Okay, I'm gonna make a video about something else. Okay, so back in March, we did a live show fundraiser that I did not at the time realize was going to be my last experience of the old normal. And after the show, someone whose name, unfortunately, I do not remember, came up to me and handed me this, an art project called Alaska for Looking. This is the entire text of my first novel, Looking for Alaska, but rearranged into alphabetical order. So it begins with all the numbers in the book and then quite a lot of A's, because apparently I love an indefinite article. And so just before the world I thought I knew turned into a strange, dizzying uncanny version of itself, someone handed me a novel I thought I knew turned into a strange, dizzying uncanny version of itself. I last read Looking for Alaska in 2004, when I was 26 years old. I do not enjoy reading my work after it has been published, partly because it's very frustrating not to be able to change anything, and partly because, you know, there are lots of other books I would like to read. And so 16 years later, I don't really feel qualified to comment on Looking for Alaska, but Alaska for Looking is fascinating. Like for example, here at the end of the letter H, it reads Hygienic Hyperventilating Hypothetical Hysteria, I, I, I, I, which would not be a bad title for my autobiography. Like Hygienic Hyperventilating Hypothetical Hysteria is my overwhelming response to 2020. It's just such a good line. It's one of those lines that you wish you had written until you realized that you did write it, just not in the right order. In fact, reading a book alphabetized leads to all kinds of wonderful combinations, how again leads into against or wrong into wrote or lonely into long. Seeing the book this way, it's a story of huddled hugs and smirking smoke. And then there are the little things I was reminded of. Like when writing Alaska, I was obsessed with symmetry. The number of days in the first part of the book had to be exactly equal to the number of days in the second part of the book and so on. But I also did all these silly little things to please this weird worship of symmetry, like having the word remember to appear exactly one more time than the word forgotten. And it was nice to be reminded of that, if only because 16 years later I can celebrate not being quite so beholden to symmetrical obsession. To read a book alphabetically is to understand its preoccupations, but not its narrative. Like in Alaska for looking, I have no idea who anyone is or what happens to them, but I can tell the story is about school and before and after and labyrinths. And that's actually not so different from how stories survive in my head. Like I don't remember the plot of most of the books I've read, only how they made me feel and why they mattered to me. Now of course an alphabetized book doesn't tell you the whole story, but reading through this, I did feel like it was telling me a story, a story about me and me and me and you and you and you and time and time and time. The end of Alaska for looking will not make sense to people who haven't read the book, but if you have, you'll know how strangely lovely and wrenching it is. The alphabetized book ends like this. Zen, zero, zipped, zoo, zoo, zoo, zoo. Which is not such a bad way of saying goodbye to that story. Hank, I now return to my hygienic hyperventilating hypothetical hysteria. I will see you on Friday. This video contains a clue, just like all my recent videos do. The clue leads to a secret live stream and was repeated four times toward the end of this video.