The Wikipedia world and ecosystem
Wikipedia, which is the biggest project of this world, is edited, maintained, by volunteers. So that much is in people mind. So volunteers, just to give a figure, we probably are, we’re not so numerous, we’re probably 100,000 worldwide.
Oh, that’s quite a few people.
That’s quite a few people but when you compare it to the number of readers, that’s actually not much. We are still roughly in the top five of website most visited in the world, so 100,000 is not so much in comparison to the number of readers we have. But it’s quite a few people.
So roughly we have Wikipedia, which is the most well-known project, and we have others slightly less known, but Wikidata might ring a bell to some people. It’s structured data. And Wikimedia Commons for media objects. So altogether, about 15 projects so far represent what we call the Wikimedia projects.
And then we gave a second name, which is the Wikimedia ecosystem that’s a mix of the project, all the volunteers and also a collection of organizations which were created over time to support the movement. And that’s the thing that most people don’t know, don’t realize, is that we have organization in spite of having many as volunteers, they do not come out of the blue. They do not coordinate magically. We have organizations supporting that. And the first organization were created two years after the creation of Wikipedia. So Wikipedia just turned 23 years old.
Country chapters
We also created a few new chapters and there was one in Wikimedia in France called Wikimedia France, and I was one of the founder of Wikimedia France. Little by little we added some more. So usually it’s based by country. So you might have Wikimedia Deutschland, Wikimedia Netherlands and so on.
We have some of them are quite involved with staff and budget and some of them have no staff and a tiny budget. Some of them don’t even have a legal structure. It’s more a group of individual coordinating, doing things in their place. So just to give you a figure, we currently have one big foundation, Wikimedia Foundation. So that’s the mothership. We have 38 chapters and over 140 smaller entities.
Wikipedian in residence
So Wikipedian in residence is something we created over time. Most people are volunteers in that whole frame. And then we have some people, staff of the entities of some of the bigger entities. And then over time we got some increasing number of relationship with, in particular, museum, archives, libraries, university, non-governmental agencies. And those wanted to have a special relationship to some very expert Wikipedian so that they could build partnership, exchange data, understand licenses, what could we do together?
And to do that, they usually recruit, identify people we call Wikipedian in residence. So those people who are going to be sort of a go-between between the Wikipedia community and this partner. They will know both worlds and they will try to create some bonding there. So those people, we call them the Wikipedian in residence because they are in residence in another entity.
I am a Wikipedian in residence at WIPO. That’s the World Intellectual Property Organization. So that’s a UN agency and I have been working with them for the past two years and I’m entering my third year with them to try to get some stuff done together.
Partner of the educational system
We did a lot of teaching, a lot of training conferences. I did that as a lot as well, training teachers to explain them how the system is working. So for example, is certified by the government, by the National Education System.
Certified as what? As an educational-
No, it’s recognized as an order of the French education system.
Enter Africa in the Wikimedia world
So most of the content about Africa was actually written by people from Europe and North America so it was all wrong. A typical example was when you were looking at the pictures, most of the pictures were pictures taken by tourists for the safari. So they brought back some pictures of lions and sunset and such.
So I thought, no, I cannot go on this way. We said we wanted to bring the entire knowledge to the entire humanity, but the entire knowledge we’re missing a lot here. Most of the content about Africa was not yet even on internet. So I decided to make that change and I’ve been focusing on that for the past 10 years now.
WikiChallenge African schools with no internet
When we do a program in a school with primary kids, like participating to a writing drive, which is called WikiChallenge African Schools. The idea is we bring them some tablets, some blackboards, a contest, some tools, and for the first time they are still not connected to the internet, but at least they learn digital stuff. They learn how to type, they learn screens. So it’s an entire different situation from another school where they don’t have this material.
How will that make a difference for these kids to have been confronted to this material maybe two years, three years, four years, than the other kids in the country? Will that make a difference? Will they be better educated, more willing to jump in the big bath? I don’t know. We don’t have really measures of that. That would be awesome.
The new mission for 2030
The new mission statement is so that Wikimedia would become the essential infrastructure to support the open source, the open knowledge movement. So it’s a much larger mission statement where we voluntarily decide to not only support our project, but to support the general ecosystem. So being more involved in advocacy, more supportive of other programs that are not our programs, trying to protect somehow sort of family related area.
People want a fluid short user experience
It was difficult for us to move to the video because working together on a video is much more complicated than working on a text in terms of production, of review, of update, it’s complicated. We started getting slow, delayed on the tech part because we were still on our old interface with the text whilst people were moving to Facebook and all those things which were more fluid in terms of our user experience.
Three minutes is even quite long. So they want something super social just here on their desk. Compare that to reading a long Wikipedia article. We still need that. We need the in-depth information. But for many people, they also want this little thing very quickly.
AI needs Wikipedia but the contrary is a potential problem
Most of the AI are being trained using Wikipedia. So they need our stuff to be there and to be relevant and to be up to date and they have the right to use it to train the model. But as soon as the people consume only from the AI, they will not see that info come actually in big part from Wikipedia and they will not come to the website. It will be less recognized as the source of info so less participants and less visitors, less donors.
Reading and editing are dangerous in some countries
Early 2023, I think it was, we have some offline versions of Wikipedia that people can download on their computer. The highest number of download was in Russia. People were downloading like crazy thinking this is going to be banned or something. Those are short term things, but you can see that they all countries were explicitly creating some sort of closed internet network in that country-
Yes.
… so how do we reach out to these people? How do we resist that? In some countries reading Wikipedia is dangerous. In some countries editing Wikipedia is very, very dangerous because it goes against what is legal in the country.
Help by sharing your data
If I had a recommendation is any organization that has relevant data that they can share and that they can put in the open so that we can reuse them to build up our articles, to build up graphs, to build up images or videos even, think about sharing them.
We’re not necessarily asking for the reports, though available would be nice, but at least if you could share your data so that we could actually write these high impact articles, climate change or any topic of interest for the future. But that’s a collective work.
We do not produce data. We use data produced by others or recorded by others. And if we don’t know this data, if it’s hidden, if it’s not findable, we cannot use that. So please, a plea, help us do our job by making yours, if you have data, share your data with others.
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