Brenton, do you have the next hangout queued up? Okay, we're on air everyone. Hey, welcome back. How was that break? Was that good? Alright, let's go ahead and find our seats Because we have our next group up. It's a panel presentation. Let me introduce you to Mr. Pete Forsyte. Take it away Pete. Thanks, Rosie, and thank you for your efforts and for the whole team, Britta and Rosie and Steven. It's been a great team to come together to put this event together. So my name is Pete Forsyte. I actually am really delighted to have both Wikipedia's 15th birthday and also my 10th anniversary of editing Wikipedia happening in the same month. And one of the things that always really going back pretty much to the beginning of my efforts with Wikipedia is that I've always been really interested in how people can get involved, how people and organizations can contribute to the idea of Wikipedia. Which really, I think, is a very universal idea without necessarily becoming the daily obsessive Wikipedians that many of us, you know, find ourselves inclined to be. And so what that's led to is I, in 2009, I started a company called Wiki Strategies. And what we do is we help organizations engage ethically and effectively with Wikipedia. So if a company wants to work on their own Wikipedia article and they want to contribute to what Wikipedia is, they don't want to break the rules, they want to be clear about who they are, there's still a whole lot, a lot of help that they need to be able to do that. So I'll advise them on that. I've also had the pleasure of working with foundations and nonprofit organizations to improve general topic areas of Wikipedia as part of their mission fulfillment. So all of that to say that the panelists that I chose today are people with a variety of perspectives on Wikipedia. A couple of them do have a deep background with Wikipedia as you'll find out, but not so much as daily editors, but with sort of a more unique perspective. And then we also have a journalist who's going to join us. It's actually not the journalist who's listed on the page and whose video you might have seen ahead of time. That was Catherine Cheney and she unfortunately isn't able to be here with us today. But Jenny Manrique is going to stand in her place who's also a journalist from Columbia.  He was killed on a BART platform on New Year's Day in 2009. It's been just a tremendously impactful event in Oakland and I think in bringing together the Black community and the social justice community in the East Bay. And Uncle Bobby has been a major figure in helping manage the human side of that and in helping families relate to each other and different stakeholder groups relate to each other. And I feel that there's a strong similarity between the kind of work that he does and what we do with Wikipedia. So we'll get to talk with him about that. So why don't you all come up? So I guess let me do those introductions a little more formally because I only gave you two of the four names. So starting all the way to my right is Cathy Casterly. Cathy Casterly was the CEO of Creative Commons when I first met her or I think was maybe just before you became CEO. So Creative Commons is, for anyone who doesn't know, they are another nonprofit organization that makes the copyright licenses that makes things like Wikipedia possible. They make it easy for people to say in a legal and clear way, I want you to reuse my work. I want you to build on it. I want you to republish it. And so she's, and her background is also very deeply involved with open educational resources which is applying those principles in education so that you don't have teachers everywhere reinventing the wheel every single time they make a lesson plan so that they can build on each other's work and adapt it. To Cathy's left, we have Jenny Manrique having trouble rolling those Rs today for some reason. And so Jenny was kind enough to step in when we found out that Catherine wasn't able to join us and Jenny is a journalist originally from Columbia and who's been in the Bay Area for I think a year and a half. Then we have Uncle Bobby, Cephas Johnson, who I just gave you the intro there. So we'll be hearing a lot from him about social justice and the resonance that he sees with Wikipedia.  Eugene is a longtime member of the Wiki community from actually I think before Wikipedia even existed or at least the early days. So Wiki software being the idea that Wikipedia ended up basing itself on of making it very easy for anyone to change a page on the internet which seems kind of normal now that we have Facebook and YouTube and all these different opportunities to change what's on the web. But back in 96 when Wiki software was invented, it was a pretty novel idea. So that's I think some of the background that Eugene brings and I think the most significant thing he did in the Wikipedia space is he led a process in 2009, 2010 to generate a strategic plan for a five-year strategic plan for the Wikimedia movement. And it was a really in-depth process. It took a year. It involved over a thousand people. So this is really different from how most organizations develop a strategic plan which is usually to take their board or a very small group and lock themselves in a room for a month and develop something and then present it to their staff or their community. So we'll get to hear a bit about that process as well and what it might look like now in 2015 now that that five-year plan has essentially gone full circle. So with all of that I would like to start in the middle here. Uncle Bobby, we had a, so I have videos with three of the four on YouTube. So we had an interview and you told me a bit about your background and about Wikipedia. But where would you like to pick up today? What would you like to dig into a little deeper? Okay. Again, hello everyone and Pete. Thank you for definitely inviting me to sit here and share from the social justice perspective of a family member being affected and then going into Wikipedia to see what it says. You know, initially I didn't think I could contribute anything because like many of families like myself, when we read Wikipedia we see these biases that are portrayed in the story that affects our reality. And so there becomes a disconnect. But I'm here today to bring what I hope a vision to what can help. I believe the authors of those that put stories in Wikipedia to think about their biases that they may put in the story as they share or the language that they use that are reflective of hurting someone when it comes to them reading it, affecting our realities. I hope I'm making myself clear. So I thought about what I can share to help. When I read the Oscar Grant story that's in Wikipedia, it was like he was murdered a third time. He was murdered on a Fruville Bark station. He was murdered by what we call reporters or mass media. And then the aftermath, those that decide to write about this story again uses languages that appears to put Oscar in a real negative state. And for us when we read this it becomes extremely painful. So the first thing that I decided to do was to take a look at who are these people that are part of this community of Wikipedia and writing these stories. And so the little bit that I do know is predominantly white males, some women of course. I didn't really get any inference of a black community that are Wikipedians. So the story then becomes more told from a white perspective that is actually creating the divide that we're trying to resolve in our community. So it becomes extremely important for us that are Wikipedians, and I'm saying us because I'm going to become one and really telling the story as accurately as possible. Thank you. Because that's where the change comes from. There's no need for me to run and not step up and do something to help make it better. And so that's my hope. Thanks. So Jenny maybe we can hear some perspective from you. And please take a moment to introduce yourself a little more thoroughly. We just met about an hour ago. So I did my best, but I don't want to get anything wrong. I'm a Wikipedian, right? So let's have a little original research. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about the kind of journalism you're done. And then maybe a little bit about your perspective on a story like Uncle Bobby's. Sure. There is not a Wikipedia page about me anyway. So you won't find much regarding that platform about me. But in general, at large, my war has been mostly in Colombia and other countries in Latin America. I have covered conflict for 10 years now. And then I moved here and just covered immigrant communities at large for different media here in the Bay Area. New American media, Mission Local have written for the Los Angeles Times, and as a freelance, you just happen to be in many publications. That doesn't mean that you public regularly in all of them. But that's the lack of being freelance. And I write about social justice issues a lot and immigration issues. And I also want to clarify that my experience of the kind of journalism that I do is not, you know, like the new era journals and more being fast and just, you know, upload information, 24-7 in a website where you go and have the news right away that happens. So in that sense, also my experience reporting and the gathering information has more time, more analysis in a way. So I just, my way of reporting rely a lot on sources and how credible the sources are. Against like with the fastness of our current days, you know, sometimes demand. So I'm going to speak, you know, way from this kind of journalism that we actually can, you know, like dig a little bit more. In that sense, Wikipedia is another source. It's just another source is just you can, you are not there doing a Google search. You all of you know, obviously. And as a journalist, you just really take a very deep look on who are the sources, who are there, who is writing that, who are they referring to. And you probably will take more serious certain content that is really copying, you know, journals or essays or things, you know, like what we call reliable sources or authoritative sources as a matter. So listening to your experience is very interesting for me to see how much one of some of the issues that are in the national media debate. And then you go to see what people from different perspectives do from that or the kind of conclusion they can get from what they actually see in national media and can come up in a webpage, even with really good intentions of, you know, add something to the story. So I think like as a general rule for journalists is you need to do a lot of fact-checking on everything that is there. Editors are really, if you are working in the long term with certain editors that are really, you know, dedicating the terms of how you use certain sources, obviously you don't quote Wikipedia in an article because Wikipedia is not actually the owner of the information but the people who is fitting Wikipedia. So that's something that is not acceptable within newsrooms. And on the other hand is you need to be very aware of who is building a profile of someone in these pages. So you know that there is a lot of, you know, not interested parties, but also there are people building politicians profiles of, you know, the aides are there or the staffers are there or the family is there. So I think that for us it's a challenge to find all this information so available for us and avoid the temptation of immediately quoted as a fact. So I think that's one of the rules of our job. Okay. All right. Thank you. So Kathy, so I think, you know, just to tie this really briefly in with the previous session that Brita put together, you know, Kathy, when we were talking on the side here, you had a really different kind of early experience with Wikipedia, didn't you? Can you recap that a little bit? I was just commenting to Pete. So 2001 to 2009, I was at the Eulet Foundation and that's when we seeded the field of open educational resources, which is now grown into a movement and we relied on the stories of Wikipedia and the governance and many of the lessons learned during that period. But during that period, I also wanted to fund Wikipedia.  He had come by the foundation a few times. There was a half time, one half time paid employee who lived in Florida. His name was Terry Foote and we were in touch on a regular basis. He actually came to one of the very early OER conferences. And so I was, you know, you didn't have the funding model you now have. It was more of a struggle in the early days and they were trying to figure that out. So I had set aside money in my grant portfolio for Wikipedia and I did it for, I don't know, two, three years. This must have been 2002 to 2005 and Terry was incredibly busy trying to help get this off the ground in the way it was.  What was the community going to ask Wikipedia for funding? And so he told me it's going to be an open process. I'm like, fine, you know, whatever you need to do. But I do need a proposal because I need to obviously support the documentation of how the funds are used. So that story is really my first, very first experience in some ways with Wikipedia. And I think it's so indicative of one of the, one of the kinds of trends that we see so often in the wiki world of like there's this, this genuine and really exciting and worthwhile process where you want to kind of throw something open to everyone adding their ideas. But that kind of process and the way that an organization thinks in terms of deadlines and documents and being concise and being focused on the stuff that's going to have the greatest benefit and everything are like are just two different ways. And I feel like that's something that we really struggle with. Just if I could just speak for myself for a second, I feel like one of my biggest hopes for Wikipedia is that it could become one of the best examples of how like a grassroots driven world can connect with more formal structured institutions. And I think we probably have a ways to go there. Like we maybe made a little progress, but we probably got a ways to go there too. But anyway, I mean, I wanted to I wanted to sort of come off of that to this issue because you were also I mean you what you were trying to fund is education or you were trying to fund changing and increasing the openness of and the collaboration in education. And, you know, that that kind of open collaboration that's what we're hearing about from from Uncle Bobby from all of the people who presented earlier today. So why is that how does that connect with with the world of education and what would you like to see happening in education. I mean, if we think back kind of in many ways to the traditional norms of education and historically education has been initially to the privileged few it was those who were in the monasteries it was those in the one room schoolhouse it was those who had parents who were educated who were taught to read and who were literate. It's also in many places of the world this is still true. But then they became public education and particularly in this country this public education and yet we don't use the resources effectively. We initially teachers, when we think about the K 12 system, they create these great lesson plans but they work in their box, because the educational system is set up like a tailor like Taylorism and industrial position. We moved students from box to box so there's another another whole conversation about the disruption of education, but the teachers have those lesson plans in their file box that was the original and they didn't have a way to easily share them with other teachers. And then now they're on then they began to put them in but they were on their desktop desktop and it wasn't an easy way to share them per se. But there are ways that these this great content that teachers are creating doesn't need to be created again and again. And so in our very early days of thinking about open educational resources about thinking about leveling the playing field about equalizing access for all. We wanted to make sure that funds could be used much more efficiently and that they could be continuous improvement around the education materials that are created. So we create create efficiencies and there's a difference with Wikipedia where we're not saying that there is only one canonical way to teach a lesson plan and algebra, but we don't need every teacher who teaches algebra to create their own lesson plan. And if they have and rely on textbooks they could be openly licensed textbooks that we could easily share. And if you want to print version pay $5 instead of the prices that we all know. So these are some of the lessons and these are some of the visions that we had in the early days. And which is so fascinating to me because my first experience of the idea of open educational resources, which was much later. But my thought and you know the people I was talking to in the early days is actually when I came to originally to work for the Wikipedia Foundation what brought me to the Bay Area was to develop a program where students are doing Wikipedia like stuff. So you know even it's like each of us comes from our own direction and we kind of have a different different kind of focus but it's like, you know the kind of collaboration that you see on Wikipedia where it's possible to see what other people are doing comment on it, criticize question. You know that kind of behavior I think is really important to society it's something that the way the Internet has grown has really allowed us to do it a much bigger scale in the last 10 years or so.  You know it all starts to come together and I think that's going to be a good lead in to I think to Eugene's perspective. Before I get to that I just want to say so this will be my my fourth sort of intro here. And so now that you're getting to know all these people, instead of just like talking and then having a separate Q&A section session. I think we have a mic maybe we have one of the microphones up here do we still have a microphone over here. I just like to invite anyone who has a comment or a question just if you stand over here I'll see you and I'll just bring you into the conversation as we go. So, so, so at about the same time as I did I so I worked here at the Wikimedia Foundation for about a year and a half and also during that time. Eugene was was running this strategic planning session and I wonder you know like based on just just the things that we've been talking about here so far, like, how do you get from those from like from Uncle Bobby, hearing about his nephew and how his story is told, you know, to a journalist who's who's interested in like the, the ethics of telling a story the right way and like what sources are, and you know considerations about education. How can something like strategic planning fit in with that what's the what's the point and what can we hope to achieve through doing stuff like that. Thank you for giving me the softball question to open for my opening remarks here. So I think I think what one of the things that's amazing to me about the Wikimedia community across all the different projects and I think you know we really saw this today in terms of all the talks that that happened beforehand. People come here for their own weird obscure reasons right I mean British British talk like really encapsulated that. And so everybody is passionate about something in the world and Wikimedia offers this space for people who are weirdly passionate about whatever they care about to come in and to share that knowledge, and to suddenly discover that what I care about that seemed weird to me. There are actually all these other weird people who care about it too. And suddenly you've created this amazing resource that's one of the top five websites in the world. And that has like opened up all this opportunity that at the end of the day my interaction with it is like I care about something that's weird and wonderful and that's my interaction right. So I think so a like that's really cool and that resonates with me because like I'm weird and I like that stuff. But then the other amazing thing about Wikipedia and I think this is where we start looping in everything else here. Is that Wikipedia has had this vision for a very long time around what would the world look like if knowledge were freely available to every single individual in the world right what would that mean. And so underlying what people care about when they come in and when they're sharing knowledge about something that they're deeply passionate but might sound obscure and strange is this value around making the world a better place. And so when I was sitting here and I was listening to what you said Uncle Bobby and when I was sitting and listening Jenny and Kathy your passion around education and all of these things like clearly the world has a long way to go. Right there are all these issues that we need to learn how to be better at and some of these things are so fundamental in terms of like how we interact with other people how we incorporate other voices what the impact that that means in terms of our policies. The values around Wikipedia are so amazing what's been accomplished are so amazing it starts with this like free access and all of that but that's actually not enough. Right if we truly care about shifting the world and making the difference that we say we want to make we have to think about like how we can do this better. Right and I think some of these things like we're starting to understand. Right and I think we're starting to see like I thought the talk that that you guys gave about the wiki women's project that was amazing.  Right that's an example of saying here's something that we care about here's a way we've been here before. We've been just like editing and doing like the things that we find weirdly wonderful but actually we care about this bigger problem and we understand what the impact is and if we actually focus our efforts in a way that's more strategic. Right we can make a bigger impact in the world and so I think that's ultimately what strategy is it's saying if we care about this larger vision. If we're completely aligned around this if we're saying how can we make the difference in all these different worlds that we're talking about. What can I do differently what can I do better how can I actually change the world and make it the way I want to make it. And I think that that sort of core way of thinking about it is something that it's the idea that when you started that process was familiar to me in a very in a very deep way through my Wikipedia experience because like when I started editing Wikipedia. You know I started off because it was it was 2006 and I was just getting interested in local politics and and I had moved to Oregon. Years before but I didn't know a lot about local politics local history. And I was really just trying to do something about that and there was an election I was starting to care about the state legislature I wanted to know who was running and all the local primary races. And at that point I really couldn't find a lot of that stuff on the web I went to the Democratic Party's website I went to the Republican Party's website and you'd find little bits and pieces of information but there was a lot of stuff. There were facts there were people who are running but it wasn't consistently reported so I started a page and I unlike a lot of people I assumed that I was doing something wrong. I assumed that sooner or later someone was going to come along and say go away you're doing it all wrong this doesn't belong on Wikipedia. I'd be like okay fine I'll try something else or maybe I'll you know go on to some other website you know I didn't have a lot invested. But what I found out was was instead people get like I would go away I'd come back a week or two later and people had added stuff to the page that I'd started. And so as that kind of evolved. I started to meet other people through Wikipedia that it was like a year or two before I ever met in person. But they cared about the same stuff as me and we started thinking about like okay so we've got this nice biography of this one local legislator. But shouldn't we really have at least minimal information about every legislator in Oregon. Why should we focus on this one. So you know that that that nature of trying to think a little bit bigger and you know make plans around around around not just working on the one thing that's right in front of you. But the stuff that's like it. I think it's a natural part in a certain way of the Wikipedia ecosystem. But it's like thinking just a little bit bigger and thinking a whole lot bigger. Are really two different things and I think it's I think it's a hard thing for wikipedia is to do to like kind of make that that jump. So well I didn't really plan on doing a whole monologue here so what are you what do you help me out here. I comment for the panel I'm really grateful to be here congratulations 15 years wikipedia. So I see domain expertise on the stage but there's one piece of domain expertise that I see missing. And that is that we live on a physical earth. The physical earth is is it turns out maybe a little more fragile than we know because of the impact of man and kind of actions on whole system.  So I just want to throw out to the panel I it's a big topic too much information is a problem wikipedia is loved to have right. So here's another one and that is the physical earth and the expression of information about physical earth through wikipedia as a resource. Is there just before you go is there is there a particular like article or sort of like instance of that that comes to mind to you is there a way that you feel like wikipedia fails to capture an area of knowledge or Come bearing gifts so in in I can genuinely say that I'm every day more impressed by resources for maps and mapping that come through mainly the Germans but others. I read a little bit of German I read a little bit of the Russian child with the translate tool and I reading so that's where I live. And there's just remarkable resources in collaboration with OpenStreetMap another global phenomena and I don't know the organization that I represent which is osgo.org is software for maps mapping and spatial data. It would be our humble privilege to help out and collaborate honestly it's been a little difficult to collaborate. We're probably grumpy isolated thinkers and there's probably some grumpy isolated. I think that that difficulty in collaboration is something so many people have and really something we've got to find a way to like if wikipedia is going to do better. It's we got to make it easier for people to five years ago at the 10th anniversary. I approached some board members about some collaboration. A few things happened many more didn't want to give special thanks to the work that Eugene has been doing and his lineage for bringing community together. And I look forward to more in the future. Thank you. I wonder if maybe we could just go down with just a quick answer if you can do it. If you can think about what was the first moment that you got excited about wikipedia or even just excited about online anything that something new was happening online that wouldn't have been possible without the Internet. I mean I'll just go a comment one of our first projects that we funded that the projects that I remember back in 2012 I think CPJ the committee to protect journalists. I started this idea of having a web page about the journalists that were assassinated in Mexico which I participated in that actually has been the only time that I've been editing something in wikipedia. And the great thing in the sense of how people is involved in the content not because of the content itself but it's like just by itself it's been updated this last December right. So at some point the journalists we were working on just covers it. I'm sorry I just want to break in just so I don't know if we're all familiar. Is this like a specific trend of journalists being assassinated in Mexico or is it? Since the start of the war against narco which is kind of dated in 2010 with Felipe Calderon govern. So I think there was a lot of misinformation around about what was happening and you know when you as a journalist kind of are defending freedom of expression outside your community people kind of don't understand if it's true or it just you know I understand that journalists are not the most lovable person everywhere. And you know I myself can defend the entire you know industry because you know I understand why people can not trust in much of the world we do. But in Mexicans or some other countries where you do this sensitive work of covering certain conflicts. So there was a need of having a source or at least a page where we say they are killing journalists. These are name last name day possible responsible send that's where the page is nowadays called the list of journalists killed by narcos. And that was something the project that I started game with the center committed to protect journalists. And now I just seen that it's updated by itself people that is interested probably other journalists probably other citizens but it's updated I think that's that's a really nice result of collaborative projects. Uncle Bobby we talked about lists as well and I think you might have a bit of a different take on the kind of lists you weren't able to find. List of that nature when we last talked. You know I list I'm not sure exactly what you mean by list. When we when we first talked you were you were talking about the many. You know black men that were killed by police that weren't covered in any way in Wikipedia. Right. So so the job can be clear. I go around the country speaking to inspire but also to inform and to bring to reality the realities of what's happening in this world today so that it can hopefully place within you a spark to bring real change. No insistence is Martin Luther King's weekend. He talked as you know about the beloved community. How do we all live in a community in a beloved way. And he said justice is love or love is justice. And so when we share I should say it this way speaking to you those that share stories in Wikipedia. It becomes a question on why is it not the best documentation in the world that will reveal the heinous act of police murders in this country. Wikipedia has what over 27 million subscribers that actually I may be wrong but I'm if I'm reading it right that put information within Wikipedia. And yet we have no documentation that actually reports or keep accurately the amount of murders that take place within this country when it comes to young black and brown men and marginalized people. And so as I researched Wikipedia. One of the first things I do when I hear about a shooting is I see what it says on Wikipedia. And then of course I go and begin to do my own research. There are some cases that are chosen and there are many that are not. So what I'm bringing you those that are Wikipedians. How important it is that we keep our biases out of the story or biases and being in late in informing the world about this particular person. So that the family don't incur harm and create a greater divide within the community because of what you wrote down. Because the whole idea behind what's happening today is trying to bring the community together to bring real change. But in many ways unconsciously and some consciously because I heard a story about it could have been a conscious move about a young man. I guess it was the biggest story Wikipedia had that said he was part of the Kennedy assassination. John Seganthaler. Right. Okay. And just to tie this. The reason this came up is Catherine Cheney who was who was going to be on this panel. If you look at her video she her story was that the first time she heard about Wikipedia. She was a high school student and she was in a she was in a fellowship program in Washington DC for young journalists. And the person who was presenting to them was John Seganthaler and he he told them about how Wikipedia was this thing that they maybe should be a bit skeptical of. She didn't remember him as being you know strongly anti Wikipedia but he definitely was speaking from deep personal experience of having basically a lie published on Wikipedia about himself for a couple of years. It's one of the main issues. Exactly. And that's the story that I'm saying.  So we have to look at the essence of when we tell these stories how we're telling them and from what perspective are we telling them. When I talk about we talked about collaboration not all of us is going to agree on the best method to get to bring in a beloved community into existence. But we almost learned to work together and maintain our ideologies and making that happen but not tearing down something because it's not the same as my or the same as your belief. So as my hope as I am this right that I create within you those that are always on Wikipedia whether you're you know back checking or however the process go which I will be learning soon. Consider doing the right thing and making sure it's right and ultimate goal is again to create a beloved community where no one feel they've been slighted or infected or wrongfully disrespected. I think I mean Eugene I don't know what you were planning to talk about but I do think that's potentially a really great jumping off point because I feel like that's something you were really trying to do in that process. In the strategy process. What exactly were we trying to do as far as instilling respect and a sense of wanting to do the right thing and using that to feed into how are we going to think about the bigger picture. Got it. But if you I'm going to really give you your choice. You know what I asked originally is when's the first time that you were excited or inspired by something you saw in Wikipedia or online collaboration so right start with either one. Well let me try and combine those two questions. Kathy you said something interesting. When when you were talking about trends and what you think are different and what needs to happen and you said collaboration can can be really slow. And so so the reason the reason I'm in this business in the first place the reason I first got interested in Wikis and and basically what my career path and my life passion has been for the past. I don't want to count actually for a long time now is is centered around collaboration. And I want to propose a slight amendment to what you said about collaboration being slow collaboration is only slow when we don't trust each other. When you have trust Uncle Bobby you're talking about love in communities and I think love is tied with trust when we have love we develop trust with each other. When you have trust you have speed you have efficiency you have opportunity right. And so when we talk about high performance collaboration when we talk about what is possible and why we want to be good at collaboration in the first place. The optimal way to do that is to have trust in your group. Trust is hard. I think developing trust like that is a slow process that's something that you have to invest in you have to take time you have to do all these things. And so in terms of like my origin story in terms of Wikipedia and where I see sort of the opportunity and the impact and how this ties with what the other panelists have said. As you pointed out Pete my first exposure to this world was actually Wikis not Wikipedia. This was in the early 2000s and the remarkable thing about Wikipedia was scale.  In the early 2000s I was editing Wikipedia anonymously and my first edits to Wikipedia were vandalism. Right I was vandalizing Wikipedia and I was doing it. You got to go. And the reason I was vandalizing Wikipedia was that people were just like people saw it as a resource and it was already starting to become an amazing resource like almost right off the bat. And people were wondering how it worked and no one realized that they were just a bunch of passionate people underlying Wikipedia and some bots too which were pretty important. And one of the things I wanted to demonstrate in terms of Wikipedia and how quickly it worked was that I could be sitting in front of a group like this and we could edit the article live. And we could make the change and we could talk for a minute or two and then we could reload the page and we could see that page was fixed. Right. And so that was what I was doing with Wikipedia I wasn't sitting down and writing articles I was going and I was giving talks about collaboration and opportunities and I was editing Wikipedia and I was vandalizing it and then. And undercutting trust and undercut I was I was showing how not to build trust in the community. But in fact what what it was demonstrating was the resilience of a community that is actually built on trust because Wikipedia. Inherently is a system that says I trust you any kind of system where it says come edit me I don't care who you are. I don't care what you're doing that you can click on this button and you can make a change and my guess is like 80 to 90 to 95% of the time depending on how cynical you are about humanity. You're actually going to make a contribution that's going to make us better and if you're part of the 1% or 5% or 10% that is actively trying to hurt me. All the other people are stronger than you and we're going to fix that right that's the basis of Wikipedia and that's why Wikipedia is so amazing right. That being said so we have this accessibility right now and our ability to connect with people and to just change information that's like unprecedented in society. And I have always been struck like in my business when I'm working with groups one of my early experiences around collaboration would be coming into an organization and then saying we have a knowledge problem. We're trying to work more effectively with each other we're not sharing stuff with each other is there a tool that we could use that might help us access some of our knowledge better you know is there something we could do. And one of the things I would often see is like we'd be sitting in a group and maybe I'd be working with a group of like 10 to 15 people and they start raising like these are the kinds of things that we're trying to understand. And people would start talking about things they want to know and I see someone in the group start to squirm squirming the chair and they were squirming because they knew the answer to the to the question that one person was raising in the group. These are people who are working in the same space side by side who presumably had a relationship trust between them and yet weren't sharing the information right. And so I think about I think about what you're saying Uncle Bobby about like the makeup of Wikipedia editors right now. The fact that we know the majority of them are white men primarily in Europe and North America still college educated college educated is right tech focused. We have this resource that anyone can click and yet not everybody is clicking it right and I think there's just something so fundamental in human nature. I mean you know where we're sitting in a room of I'm sure everyone here has incredible knowledge how much are we going and tapping into each other's knowledge how much are we finding about what what we need. Like just the opportunity in this room alone I think is really incredible. And so I think that next step is understanding that access is not enough right the value of openness is not enough. We have to understand that structural and cultural bias actually prevents us from making progress on all these issues. And we have to understand how we can start overcoming them. And if we can learn how to overcome those at scale we're going to start seeing massive shifts. The good news is that I think that knowledge is already out there right. I think there are people out there in the world who are bridging divide who are communicating with other people who are understanding like at a micro level what inclusiveness means. That it's not just about like oh it's an open system you can come in and change it. But reaching out to people building trust like creating opportunity overcoming structural bias. So I think the answers are there but we need to start incorporating that in our work. Excellent. All right well I I can see so many jumping off points in all of in all of these answers. You know one thing that really comes to me from Uncle Bobby's most recent answer here is is about that idea of trying to build trust and compassion in a community. And you know I I'm not going to ask that question right here because I think we're running out of time and I see questioners. But I do want to point out there are videos of well of three of the four here and Jenny I hope you'll do one with me afterwards it'll be on YouTube. So you'll find links to those those on the on the event page. So we have dug into some of these issues a little more. And also you know I really hope that this panel creates some opportunities for discussion both here as we move to the cake and pizza mode. You know like hopefully you can come up and talk to people if we don't have time for your questions and also online. So we've got Twitter handles and Wikipedia user pages on the on the program. So please you know if you have questions ideas thoughts let's carry it forward. Let's keep thinking about these things. But for now let's let me let's go to our next question up here. My question is so my question is about in terms of like the future of Wikipedia where you guys see it going in but more in terms of you guys are talking about the openness and the freedom of information and not trying to redo something that's already been done. So I mean there's a lot of information that's already there in terms of news articles and in terms of let's say Khan Academy videos. So how do you what where do you see the future of Wikipedia going in terms of incorporating maybe a lot of resources that are already there into something that Wikipedia can use or if that's possible or what do you put your thoughts are on those ideas. I'll just jump in quick. I mean that was one of the things I commented to Pete on the video was that the article is the construct around which the conversation happens. The tension is ironed out. People come to an agreement you cite sources and I think the world has changed from 15 years ago. So now we're consuming a lot of video obviously and there's a lot of other assets that could be part of the Wikipedia page. But that shifts things in different ways and I don't know what the community thinks about that or how it might be combined but I think the world has shifted video consumption is how we get a lot of our content now. And so for me I think that's a really interesting question and I think it'll be something that Wikipedia will have to grapple with. Yeah and I think I'd like to respond briefly to that because it is it's an idea that that that comes up from time to time. It is possible to put video on Wikipedia pages and it is you know there are some some great examples of it out there but it is very very rare. I think Andrew Lee at the last panel I did said it was something like I think it was less than one in a thousand I think it was like one in 10,000 articles has video on it. So there are technical reasons for that but I think that the important thing to keep in mind so that we don't sort of lose touch with the thing that has allowed us to be as successful as we are with Wikipedia is that text you know as boring as it might be is fundamentally really predisposed to collaboration. If I see a sentence and it's got a grammatical problem in it or if it's written wrong you know and I want to fix it in text all I got to do is click on it and change the letter and hit save. Boom I can be done in you know in seconds like if I know what I'm doing I'm it's like seconds and with with video if a whole video was recorded and you realize that you got a fact wrong in the fifth minute. Well now you got to know about video editing you got to have software you got to be willing to take the time to download it and find the right spot and leave it in and now maybe you have a different voice than the person who wrote it. So now it sounds discontinuous so a lot of those problems they're not just technology like they're real problems about the difference between text and video that we'll have to wrestle with. So a quick add on to that is also in terms of articles and academy videos and also there's such is introducing the idea of companies or other entities instead of having specific individual users edit articles because then you if you're you know bring in BBC News or Fox News and they have very complex views. So how would that maybe affect the future of media like if that's something that you think is a future possibility. I'm not I'm not sure I caught what the piece of it that is the future possibility. So like in terms of if not not trying to read you stuff that's already been like I try not to reinvent what was already there. Yeah I understand the question of articles that have already been written. Yeah so like basically if if someone wrote something and then we want to reuse it or we want to heavily base things on that but it turns out that there was bias in that because it came from it then. Instead of having users trying to create something maybe unbiased or maybe biased you have set of users you have entities that are creating content on Wikipedia bias can definitely come from individuals from organizations. So I see there's a couple other people with with questions. If there's anyone who's who's who wants who really wants to answer that question go ahead and do it but otherwise I think let's move on to the next comment. It is an important point and I'm glad you brought it up. So just want to comment on text in the dark side of obsessiveness. Most people who are been around Wikipedia know that it's a pretty pretty poisonous place. It's a pretty pretty dark place in a lot of times. There's a there's a large number of very large percentage of people who have been active at the blocked band. There's a whack-a-mole process where they come back a sock puppets and you have to block them periodically. I'd say maybe half the times I've collaborated collaborated on Wikipedia. It's probably been like battled. And you know my favorite Wikipedia actually the most articulate person I maybe I've ever met and it's only been through text is this guy named Mass Cell on Wikipedia. He has this thing called the cynics guide to Wikipedia. I'm just going to quote a few that are more like funny or illustrative illustrative. If you hand it all branch to a Wikipedia and you likely try to beat you to death with it. The more of viewpoint is the most challenging nuance problems facing Wikipedia tend to attract the editor's least capable of handling complexity or nuance. Yeah I mean each one of these is really good but you kind of get the point and I think it's improved somewhat. I mean there's probably nothing in the world I've found that makes me angry as much as going to this place called administrators notice cord slash incidents. I just I avoided these days I just like stick to these really remote articles because I just can't handle and actually the remote articles might be the most important articles because nobody wants to deal with important articles. It's only like you know if you start talking about climate change or any political article or anything like that. So if could I use this as a jumping off point because I think this really connects back with what I was what I was saying earlier and I like just to just to try to look at this sort of thing from a broader perspective. I mean I hear this all the time Wikipedia has really nasty stuff going on and it's it's true but the other thing that's true is that the world has nasty stuff going on all the time. So you know as as someone who's who's who's like organized protests that involve really contentious issues you know there are people who I'm sure do not want your voice to be heard there like you know or the people that you're associated with. What does that sound like to you like to me that sounds like the kind of conflict that exists not just on Wikipedia but in the world we live in. Can you hear me. Yeah. And that's so true. I mean in the activist world in seeking justice. There's many different views on how we get there. Some say burned down a building. Some say we need a revolution. Some say get on your knees and pray. Some say stay in a house and watch TV and let them do their thing. You know what I'm saying. But in the real world we have to work through those nuances and those issues so that we can all get to that ultimate point which is justice. So how do we get there. We have to set aside again as I was saying earlier these these biases that we may carry about a particular group or individual or an organization that is involved in the movement because if we begin to fight among each other. We're really not accomplishing anything. And in other words if those behind the scene in that dark place in Wikipedia is constantly fighting one another the ultimate goal to getting real information out real truth out will be far fetched. In other words we're probably never get there. So at some point we have to again make some adjustments in ourselves and moving forward. And that again I say entails putting those biases aside. Send the ultimate goal is truth and accuracy in this text and how do we get there. And I think it was Eugene said we have to trust one another. I mean if we say anybody can come in and edit. I mean you just open the doors for the world and you're hoping that those that do edit are editing with truth in their heart. So so I am. I think we are now running over time. I know we have both food on the way and I know we have someone else who wants to address us from Seattle. So we have two more people who are up for questions. Brendan are you in touch with with Pine in Seattle. You think we got about like maybe a minute for each of the questions before we turn it over. OK so really try to keep this short. I'm sorry we don't have more time. I'd love to talk about this stuff all day. That's fine. And I just want to make an observation that that it's there. There's a lot of problem that with the Wikipedia is not really dealing with adequately. And that's that there's you know that yes there's this systemic bias this accidental collaborative bias but there is also a collusive bias. And it's increasing rapidly as Wikipedia becomes a more important resource. There are groups of people collaborating offline with the specific goal of the opposite of you know truth and and and justice to warp content to suit specific agendas. And Wikipedia has to deal deal with this and deal with it really firmly very soon because it's getting worse and worse. I think that you know I don't know what the answer is. Any any thoughts from the panel on that one tough problem. I'll jump in really quick. And then that's my wife actually just going to ask this next question. But anyway that's that's that's a hell of a point that you raised. Concerning that you know and that exists in the real world. And it's as I can hear and understand Wikipedia. It exists there too. And so we have some real serious issues we have to deal with in order to bring real truth and accuracy to this world to create that beloved community. So again it's my hope that as we have these conversations and we'd be unfiltered about these issues that then and only then will you be able to eradicate those type of issues. Okay last question. Yeah. First I just wanted to say that Uncle Bobby didn't say this but in every organization even at the movement they have hope or until. So you must understand and all this that I'm hope or until. Yeah. So I know in the movement and when I'm here and here I just think it's agents and would appear. I mean I think there's agents there and it's agents in every agency that's trying to bring the world and the community together. And we have to remember that and the only thing I want to say we got like when we have a community where I don't know an actual number but it seems to me and maybe there's a researcher in the room that knows better than me seems like maybe 70 80% of wikipedia are anonymous which is that it deeply held value but when that happens right it's it's very easy for someone to say to go in and pretend to be someone that they're not. Well I just have an action plan because we don't like to come to these kind of meetings and then don't move out on something that's an action plan so I was just thinking that as you all were talking that how you could do this because this is the young people's fight their world. It's their future how that you Pete maybe would love not blood and Kim and some other people get together and see how you can have town hall meetings in the community. So that you can inspire these young people because they'll be the future people who right now in here right and to inspire truth in them so they can move forward and maybe would have taken one day. Can be truthful because that's one of the biggest issues about having actual facts. And so we in our community tell our community don't go to with it unless you have some more information that you're going to add. And so that needs to be fixed because it's I like I'll go to with a pic here but you know what when I when I go and read and I go and research because it's not trustworthy and it has to be trustworthy because it's such an asset. So that's what I want to say. Thank you. All right well I think we're going to have to move on but but I do if if any of you have something that you've been itching to say for a little while here. Why don't you why don't you let me know because I'd love to close it out with a voice other than mine. I just want to add like as I said that for instance the journals were taking you know every piece of information with a little bit of care let's say. I think as a reader of Wikipedia as a reader of the Internet at large we should also educate readers in the type of information they are consuming in websites that are based on crowdsourcing. And I know that Wikipedia has like is is full disclosure of how it's a bill so people know that this this could be you know anonymous et cetera et cetera. But I think like educate the readers also help to you know kind of filter the information out of beating what what I'm making of these facts that somebody else is exposing as a reader. I think that that's also helpful to build you know better understanding society. I just like to say that Wikipedia is phenomenal and a lot of people did not believe in it in its earliest days. So if you believe in sharing if you believe in openness there are a lot of groups publishers I speak to other groups who still believe the quality cannot be on par. We know it can happen a lot so what I'm saying is this too much at stake for Wikipedia to not to continue to excel like it has it's been too much work that's been done. And it's phenomenal and yet we know the undercurrents and a lot of it came out in the conversations today. And so I think it goes back to some of the comments from Eugene around collaboration around trust. Fundamentally for this community to succeed. It has to deal with these trust trust issues. And it's every person including everyone who reads it who has to figure out how to participate. So I mean I think that's the biggest challenge maybe it's not the challenge about what kind of content happens next because the community has built something incredible and it's phenomenal. And so if this trust issue which reflects the world and reflects lots of challenges we know in the world. But this beyond being a content share and a share of knowledge can actually be a reflector of the greater good. And so maybe that's fundamentally what Wikipedia is about. And so I really just encourage all of us to figure out how to resolve that for the community and for the world and what you do. If I can really quick and it's my hope that we all join this movement within in the in the social justice world we call it a movement right bringing about change. We need a movement within Wikipedia and part of that movement my wife just alleged to was that we have to start with these young people these babies you know and also people that look like me need to become much more involved. But they also have to know that they are welcome to become involved by being introduced to it through someone that looks like you that becomes critical because without us being a part of it it can never become a beloved community. Well thank you Kathy for the general you know we need to focus on trust I can't think of a better closing note and thank you so much Uncle Bobby for adding some dimension to that and some specifics. Jenny Eugene you guys have been a phenomenal panel I really wish we had another hour or two.


Now let's discuss the character of Elizabeth in Frankenstein. Now Elizabeth is essentially Frankenstein's love interest. Initially she is raised alongside him, she was an orphan girl who was basically raised as his sister, however she is portrayed as being very beautiful, very angelic in appearance and also she really seems to fit the model Victorian woman who's very angelic, very passive, very trusting and quite loyal. Now of course Elizabeth is then married to Victor Frankenstein, however on her wedding night with him she is murdered by the creature. Now bear in mind that Elizabeth is basically used as the archetype of the very passive Elizabethan or rather Victorian woman, the type of woman who's meant to be very beautiful to look at but also doesn't necessarily have very strong opinions and also the very full bearing, very forgiving okay. Now when it comes to key quotations to remember for Elizabeth's character the first quote is to do with how she is described as quite angelic in appearance. She's described as a creature who seemed to shed radiance. Now here the main thing you want to focus on is how her beauty is described and how she's almost described as really really angelic, almost otherworldly. Firstly the metaphor creature refers to her almost as this celestial being, this heavenly being. Also the other word level analysis you want to do here when it comes to her character is the sibilance and seemed and shed. Again this is illustrating how Elizabeth almost has this very positive, vibrant influence on everyone around her hence why her murder is such a tragic ending for her. The second quotation for Elizabeth's character is again this emphasizes her angelic, her beauty and she's described as having a loveliness surpassing the beauty of her childish years. So she's quite a young lady, she's not very old and hence she is described as being somewhat childish in appearance but she still has this really radiant beauty. Now the world level analysis you want to do here and of course this is focusing in more on how she embodies that angelic appearance is firstly the adjective loveliness and of course also beauty which describes her outward appearance and of course this is in contrast to the creature who's described as very monstrous in appearance and what this illustrates again is how society really relies heavily especially at the time on the outward appearance of others and that is what dictates the treatment of these people. So of course Elizabeth is quite beautiful hence people treat her and look to her quite kindly. The third quotation for Elizabeth's character is of course relating to her murder so the murderous mark of the fiend's grasp was on her neck and of course this is what Victor Frankenstein notices when he sees her dead body. Now of course she is killed on her wedding night and the word level analysis you want to do here is the alliteration of M in murderous and mark and also the creature is described as a fiend. Bear in mind that fiend basically means devil so of course here in contrast to Elizabeth who's depicted as very angelic the creature is depicted as devilish he destroys anything that is good and positive including Elizabeth. The final quotation to remember for Elizabeth's character is how she's described kind of laid out on the bed after being strangled she's described as she was there lifeless and inanimate thrown across the bed her head hanging down now of course this is a very vivid depiction of her appearance when she is dead. Now the word level analysis you want to do here is firstly focusing on the adjectives lifeless and inanimate obviously showing that she is completely dead because she she's just been murdered however of course given that this is her wedding night there are also some striking parallels of what perhaps one could imagine of someone laying out in bed about to consummate their marriage. The second word level analysis you want to do is of course the verb thrown again this is tying in it has connotations of essentially having sex basically consummating a marriage however of course in this instance the marriage is consummated by her death. The final word level analysis you want to do here is of course the alliteration of her head hanging again this presents a really horrifying image of how Elizabeth appears with completely she's dead and obviously she's been strangled and how she's draped across the body. Once more Victor Frankenstein has done the opposite of consummating the marriage he's caused her death okay so do bear in mind when it comes to Elizabeth's character she's presented as a very typical passive woman one who the Victorians would really look to and use as a model of beauty radiance but also passivity okay and of course when it comes to her key character she is meant to embody these virtues that women are supposed to have during the Victorian era but of course these virtues and her you know her life is taken away by the creature okay so the creature obviously killing her shows the creature's rejection of all that Elizabeth stands for