Hi! This annual report outlines Whose Knowledge? activities supported by the User Group in 2023. Whose Knowledge? will be reporting on its 2022-23 Community Fund grant separately.
The 6th edition of our #VisibleWikiWomen campaign, #BodyPlurality #CuerposPlurales #CorposPlurais: Celebrating the full uniqueness of our plural body sizes, shapes and identities online, surpassed our goal, with +3000 images shared on Commons.
We convened our partners and friends both virtually and in person for insightful conversations and learnings on decolonizing structured data and re-thinking the public domain, including at Wikimania 2013.
We also joined many global and regional gatherings and conferences where we held workshops, panels and reconnected/joined/supported our communities at Wikimania, GLAM Wiki Conference, RightsCon, among others.
We continue to document our stories and those of our communities in multimodal ways from our Whose Voices? podcast which features interviews of our 2022 “Decolonizing the Internet East Africa” convening; to our blog, social media channels and monthly newsletter.
We feature this picture created by user BugWarp, the winner of the photo contest "Unpacking Body Plurality in Sports", which captures a cricket match between Argentina and Chile at the Women's Series, in Buenos Aires.In 2023, we embarked on year 6 of our #VisibleWikiWomen campaign which we launched on 27th, April 2023 under the theme #BodyPlurality #CuerposPlurales #CorposPlurais: Celebrating the full uniqueness of our plural body sizes, shapes and identities online. We convened about 30 of our friends, partners and allies for the launch. By December 2023, more than 3000 images were shared through the campaign, surpassing our goal of 2500 files. Beyond numbers, some usages of the images are very special for us, like in the Spanish Wikipedia article Día Internacional de las Mujeres Rurales, and the Wiki Loves Fashion NL flyer.
For the first time, this year we organized an art and photo contest under the theme, “Unpacking body plurality in sports" as a celebration of the bodies of womxn and non-binary people in sports by centering their voices, images, stories, and experiences in sports in all their diversity, plurality, and glory. We also collaborated with our community in more contests along the year. ¡Alto! Mujeres Trabajando, in collaboration with Wikimedia chapters in LAC, encouraged participants to challenge gender stereotypes in the workplace. Ilustratona Mulheres Visíveis, by Wiki Editoras Lx, invited artists to create illustrations for selected biographies, especially black women of the lusophone world.
Collaborative artwork around memory and the decolonization of knowledge, at GLAM Wiki Conference, Montevideo, 2023.The #VisibleWikiWomen photobooth was part of various events around the world, in Costa Rica, Botswana, Singapore and Brasilia. Based on all these experiences, we have carefully created a consent form model, available as a resource on Wikimedia Commons in English and Spanish.
As a continuation of the Decolonizing the Internet’s Structured Data event in October 2021, over 30 participants from over 15 countries were brought together for lively and insightful conversations on decolonizing the Internet’s structured data in August 2023. The sessions took place online on 8th August, and in-person on 15th August. The discussions were held ahead of Wikimania 2023 in Singapore, and were organized by Whose Knowledge?.
Structured data is a political and pragmatic feminist topic, that's why we continued the conversation in a Wikimania session, where we held a #VisibleWikiWomen structured data workshop during the Wiki Women’s Summit at Wikimania on 16th of August.
As part of the UN #16days annual campaign against gender violence, we partner with Wikimedia Chile and Wikimedistas de Uruguay in an editing challenge to expand and improve content on Wikipedia in Spanish to make visible the critical work that women human rights defenders do, often with scarce resources and under serious threats.
Jessica Horn and the need to center languages of struggle from the African continent, an episode of Whose Voices? Laura Lesmana Wijaya, Deaf Interpreter and ResearcherIn celebration of the International Mother Language Day, we published the International Sign (IS) translation of the State of the Internet's Languages (STIL) summary report on February 21st, 2023. It comprises a series of 19 short videos, signaled by deaf interpreters, researchers, advocates for sign language, and translators Laura Lesmana Wijaya and Razaq Fakir, from Southeast Asia and Africa respectively. The videos are hosted in the STIL website and, as part of our open knowledge practices, they are also available for download via archive.org. As part of the STIL report, the videos are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. We balance openness of content with the dignity and security of marginalized communities, and we chose this license because the STIL report includes work from and with communities who have historically seen their knowledge exploited by others. This is our way to respect all that they generously shared with us and the world.
We started two research-in-action processes to look at critical language justice issues online: "Accessibility/Languages/Tech: Advancing language justice for persons with visual disabilities" is a research-in-action that bridges the gap between language justice and disability rights—particularly from the South Asian perspective—while it brings to the front the intersections of disability, gender, colonialism, and class. Secondly, our research-in-action process "Advocacy, practice and sovereign language tech for language justice" is about centering community values in designing language technologies, more precisely, Automatic Speech Recognition systems and Automatic translation of content for Wikipedia, in African languages Amharic and Tigrinya.
Razaq Fakir, Deaf Interpreter and TranslatorSuccess for us is embedded in the process of collective work with our communities.This year through the Language Justice work, we have centered and amplified voices from people from the Global Majority, honoring their multiple forms and systems of knowledge. Critically, we have affirmed and advocated for greater leadership of disability rights activists in language justice and internet access/accessibility. We have succeeded in modeling an intersectional approach to language, disability rights and justice that we trust will be adopted by different communities, movements, and sectors committed to human rights, social justice, and internet freedoms.
Mónica Chuji Gualinga, an Indigenous Kichwa Ecuadorian politician and activist, at the III Indigenous Women's March in Brasília, 2023Over the last year, the Guardians have been meeting online regularly - every month or sometimes every 6 weeks. We meet as a bilingual group across multiple time zones; English/Brazilian Portuguese (with simultaneous interpretation) with the Guardians from the Yomba Valley, Turtle Island (United States), the Great Ocean States of the Pacific (Fiji and Aotearoa/New Zealand), and the (Brazilian) Amazon. The space grew out of the need to specifically have Indigenous women from across the world meet to reflect on knowledge and climate justice, from their own place-based work, but also in collective solidarity. We also began to explore the intersections of this work with digital justice, including the possibilities of Indigenous leadership in an ecologically sound internet.
In September, we gathered with Indigenous women from the Pacific Islands and the Brazilian Amazon to reflect on the program, and join the III Indigenous Women's March: Women Biomes in Defense of Biodiversity through Ancestral Roots. The march gathered over 8,000 women from the 247 Indigenous peoples in Brazil, as well as international allies. We were in solidarity with our Brazilian partners — ANMIGA, the National Articulation of Ancestral Warriors Women — against the Marco Temporal bill, which put Indigenous peoples and territories at risk and has since been vetoed.
In the III Indigenous Women's March, we documented the presence of Indigenous womxn for the #VisibleWikiWomen campaign. As a result, important articles have images now, like the biographies of Mónica Chuji Gualinga and Jannie Lasimbang.
Public Domain learning circle sticker.We welcomed Sally Al-Haq to our team as a co-lead for our program Liberatory Archives and Memory (LAM). LAM is a broad container for reimagining “the archive” and “sites of memory” as powerful spaces and acts of resistance, healing, and transformation. It includes the Whose (Digital) Archives? initiative in the United Kingdom and our work globally. Central to the program are the infrastructures of (liberatory) archives and memory in imagining alternatives to Big Knowledge (archives, museums, libraries and other memory institutions such as academic and publishing) and their infrastructures.
We have been building a network of community archivists and historians across the Global Majority, mapping connections in different contexts. In collaboration with Shubra Archives in Cairo, we presented an introductory session on Liberatory Archives in Arabic.
We are expanding our advisory circle for archives globally through exploratory conversations with community-led initiatives across Global Majority World, and we are connecting with a constellation of foundational scholars in the Liberatory Archives field.
We organized 2 learning circles “Re-imagining the Public Domain”. We convened a group of 35 participants with a diverse range of experiences and expertise: activists, community organizers, tech-builders, wikimedians, and other allies - coming together to reimagine new possibilities for a more just and equitable Public Domain. Our learning circles were held online in Spanish, English and Bengali languages, with interpretation and documentation support.
We also participated in different critical spaces, such as the Leipzig conference on “One Day the Future Has Died. Impossible Possibilities of Artificial Intelligence”; Creative Commons roundtable on “Open Culture” in Lisbon; “Towards a Treaty for the Public Domain” workshop organized by Communia; “Cast in Stone” Summer School, Paris, among others.
A collage of images from the "Decolonizing Structured Data" learning circle in Singapore.Materials for a zine making session during the memory making session at the Glam Wiki Conference in UruguayThe Language Justice (from the early conversations that led to the State of the Internet’s Languages report) and Decolonizing the Internet - East Africa podcast series were launched this year, and are available on the Whose Voices? podcast website. We’ve also uploaded transcripts to WikiSource, with the support of volunteers. Both reports were published last year (STIL in February, and DTI-EA in November), and now we explore in more multimodal ways the in-depth conversations held in our convenings and learning spaces.
We supported the Learning Circle methodologies and how they materialized in the Structured Data conversation, ahead of Wikimania in Singapore, and in two discussions about Public Domain that took place virtually ahead of a convening in Berlin.
In an effort to keep consistency in one of our more direct channels with communities, we published 7 newsletters this year so far. We experimented with multilinguality, bringing text in languages like Spanish and Portuguese, and created the new section ‘Learning is our love language’, where we share our internet recommendations.
We coordinated statements in solidarity with Zambian organization Sistah Sistah in the context of rising queerphobic violence and legislation in Zambia and East Africa, and held a panel discussion with activists about the Tigrayan genocide. These statements show our politics in practice.
Throughout the year, we joined efforts with the team to create feminist corners at different conferences and invited feminist photographers to document women and non-binary individuals in these spaces. We hope to consolidate more of the methodology and the learnings on feminist photography and consent practices for next year.
Color code for expressing consent to be photographed and recorded.In 2023 we have advanced in our organizational strengthening journey. We have seen how this has been taken up and given life and shape by a much broader set of brilliant humans that are committed to growing our work (16 in 2023, compared to 6 at the beginning of 2022). The work we have been able to do included setting up various constellations that allowed for greater team efficiency. For example, each of our programs is primarily held by pedagogical pairs, along with the extended support in terms of operations, system design, and strategy.
In a constellation of 16 individuals, 4 programs, and communications work as transversal, we designed our cadence framework based on teams’ pairs, full team participation, and cross-programmatic collaborations. For example, teams’ pairs lead regular weekly worksprints, extended program huddle in a form of bi-weekly check-ins with program convenors and comms, as well as full team updates on a monthly basis in different forms. Cross-team collaborations are facilitated through a number of thematic sessions (practice, strategy, peer learning, wellness, collective design of protocols, etc.).
Knowledge graph activity at the Learning Circle - Deep dive into Decolonizing Structured Data in Singapore.As to nurture peer-level knowledge sharing and skill development, we practice Bonfire learning sessions which are thematic learning circles, hosted by one of the team members, including a guest speaker. In 2023 we organized 5 sessions on topics such as machine translation, large language models and AI, and anti caste resistance histories. In addition to this, our team members have participated in external capacity building sessions on facilitation skills, decision making, intersectionality, different ways of working, etc.
In 2023, we worked on a number of internal processes, including drafting a Practices and Protocols Handbook that serve as the basis for a full update in 2024, as well as streamlining our internal communications. Working remotely with global staff has its challenges, but this year we’ve strengthened our internal communications spaces by landing and designing collective spaces in Mattermost.
We also put in place a model of shared leadership to lay the groundwork for a stronger, more interconnected, vibrant, and agile organizational ecosystem. We are focused on remodeling the foundations, clarifying roles and interconnections, and asking ourselves fundamental questions about who we want to be and how we want to show up as WK? in this next chapter. In this ongoing process, we are reviewing our social contract, and also engaging in strategic and leadership strengthening across the team to consciously cultivate more robust layers of leadership in WK?
Throughout this year, we continued with anchoring our communities in the work we do. A core component of what and how we do our work is based in supporting our communities across movements, co-designing our methodologies and thematic threads within our programs together, and convening programmatic advisory groups. In this process, our work is constantly in dialogue with our communities, where we are guided by the needs, priorities and focus areas on the ground. This year we dived deeper into our accountability practices, and we define our strategy in the following way:
Establishing communication channels, and engaging in a series of exploratory conversations on possibilities of collaboration with different communities across Global Majority world.
Convening with communities of practice and advisors.
Mapping the needs, priorities and thematic areas of work.
Co-designing methodology, and our ways of working that are context-informed and based on feminist principles of accountability, intersectionality, and consent.
Revisiting, assessing, adapting and applying our learnings.
Throughout 2023 and as our work and team continues growing, we have been working on streamlining and systematizing learnings and practices across programs that are demonstrated through our activities and collaborations. While this amplifies the expertise and learnings across WK?, it also fosters exchange of learnings and practices with other collectives within the broader tech and knowledge justice ecosystem. This kind of decentralized approach where we share our learnings, practices, and ways of working, and demonstrate that throughout our activities contributes to challenging imperialist, and colonial infrastructures of labor and care. Some of the examples include:
Being intentional with our invitation process for convenings, activities, etc. (asking questions: who is missing?, introducing community experts as insight offerers during our learning circles).
Setting up protocols around events organizing both for physical in-person events and online events (including events check-lists, metamap of creatives and collaborators, payment and honorarium protocols).
Co-designing protocols and agreements on documentation, interpretation, translation (with core elements around multimodality, multilinguality, storytelling, etc.).
Deepening care practices (improving consent forms, introducing care comrades during events, embedding care through administrative work and payments).
Sunshine Fionah Komusana presenting at the Learning Circle - Deep dive into Decolonizing Structured Data.Using learning circles as a methodology for “Decolonizing the Internet’s structured data” and “Reimagining the public domain” conversations, we’ve learned that we can deepen and advance our collective understanding of complex topics through translocal, peer-level, and cross programmatic learning experiences. Rooted in principles of feminist pedagogy and indigenous ways of knowing, we were able to design processes that connect multiple expertises and lived experiences across a plurality of perspectives, in a non-hierarchical level, while honoring the expertise of participants.
In 2023, we’ve embraced that we develop our practices as we work and learn together. We’ve learned that the protocols, and agreements that reflect our principles and values are open to adaptation based on community needs, contexts, and feedback as we try them out in practice. This dynamic process of reflection, adaptation and iteration is something we recognize as one of the core pieces of our internal learning process. For example, the Decolonizing Wikimedia Program developed a consent practice form for the Decolonizing The Internet 2022 in Lusaka. During 2023 we revisited consent practice through a cross-programmatic lens, and we revised the form and consent framework. We amended the privacy protection section, overall language, expanded feminist framework of consent as ongoing informed practice, included the right of withdrawal process, etc., and adapted it to include consent for multimodal resource sharing.
Decentering social media from our communications work still requires more thinking, as we try to find other meaningful and multimodal ways of staying connected and in conversation with our communities. Bringing in collaging and a zine-making sensibility to our published works helps in making the work more accessible, joyful, and more easily disseminated.
While we are co-designing and seeding meaningful allyships with our partners and communities with care, we are also aware of how difficult it is to build processes that truly honor and center marginalized communities' leaderships and knowledges all the way. Layers of complexity inherent to people’s identities and experiences multiply when we factor in multilinguality and accessibility. We have had to recommit to understanding that the minoritized communities from the Global Majority world to which we both belong and serve, more often than not, hold generational histories of exploitation and pain, along with ongoing structural oppressions. We found that creating multilingual and accessible spaces while holding collaborative, creative processes is intensive, slow, laborious and challenging.
Transversal work across WK? programmatic areas and diversity of allies takes more time, as collaborations and partnerships have their own cadence. Yet, through the actual doing of the process, we've found that radically honest communications, shared commitment, and solidarity are crucial to building trust and making deep connections.
Conversation at the "Claiming Our Memories" session at GLAM Wiki in Montevideo, Uruguay.
The wikiverse (both in content and community) still does not reflect the majority of the world. Inequalities in content, languages and images of black, brown and indigenous people remain glaring and so does the need to continually push for knowledge and language justice.
To launch the 2023 #VisibleWikiWomen campaign, we had the chance to deep dive into the meaning of our theme for the year, “body plurality”, and the importance of making visible the variations and possibilities of womanhood and personhood plus the value of putting this on Commons. We believe that we have not fully exhausted or unpacked the aspects of body plurality and we are considering continuing using this topic as a theme of the year in the 2024 #VisibleWikiWomen campaign.
Today, predominance and hegemony of some languages over others persist on Wikipedia, with the English Wikipedia continuing to be the largest by far. Language disparity has wider implications for knowledge justice. We are committed to continue exploring these implications and addressing their impacts through research-in-action and community building processes.
This work on decolonizing Wikimedia should center the people and communities who are at the margins and be a collaborative effort with individuals, organizations, collectives and movements who are similarly undoing the colonial ways of knowledge creation on Wikipedia such as Black Lunch Table, Art+Feminism, Wiki Editoras Lx, chapters and user groups from the Global Majority World, among others. Knowing who our allies and friends are in the movement and connecting at Wikimania was one of the highlights of the year and we shall continue to nurture those relationships.
Consent practices Wikimedia Commons users in the #VisibleWikiWomen campaign
We have developed a template that Commons photographers and uploaders can use to explicitly obtain the consent of the person portrayed in an image. See the PDF consent form ready to print in English and Spanish, and an editable version in English and Spanish that contributors can copy and adapt to their context.
We have developed a simple speedy deletion tutorial that multimedia creators or portrayed / recorded persons can follow in order to make sure that privacy and personality rights are respected.
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