Whose Knowledge?/Reports/2018

This annual report outlines Whose Knowledge? activities supported by the group from September 2017 to September 2018. Whose Knowledge? is not funded as a Wikimedia user group, so no financial reporting is required.

Activities

Marginalized community knowledge pilots

Okvir and the LGBTQIA community in Bosnia that we've been supporting launched their online oral history archive, Kvir Arhiv, in October 2017, and created a small set of Wikipedia articles on queer and feminist knowledge from their community. More about this project and the Dalit History Month 2017 wrapup is in our 2017 project grant report.
Through these pilots, we developed a framework for mapping knowledge, published in December 2017.
The Kumeyaay Wikipedia Initiative grew, with the allyship of University of San Diego tribal liaison. USD students used decolonizing methodologies to write Wikipedia articles about local Kumeyaay people and institutions in the first half of 2018, with input from Kumeyaay community members and advice from Whose Knowledge?.
The Center for Women's Global Leadership launched their Global Feminist Journeys Timeline in June 2018. We provided mapping facilitation and timeline advice starting in mid-2017.
Whose Knowledge? supported AfroCROWD, in partnership with WikiTongues, to bring on an AfroCROWD Oral History Summer Intern. He began in June 2018 to pilot methods for adding marginalized communities' oral knowledge to Wikimedia projects and other online archives.
Whose Knowledge? convened a Booksprint with Dalit, Kumeyaay, Shoshone, and queer Bosnian organizers and scholars in August 2018. The event was hosted by the University of San Diego's office of the tribal liaison. This group wrote a set of resources to share knowledge, learning and experiences adding marginalized community knowledge online. (links to published resources to follow soon!)
We visited Vanderbilt University in September 2018 to support feminist political scientists there in connecting with local Wikipedians and beginning to add their knowledge to Wikipedia.

#VisibleWikiWomen Campaign

Planning began with Wikimedia partners in 2017 for this pilot #VisibleWikiWomen campaign to add more images of women to Commons and Wikipedia.
Señoritaleona and May Hachem joined Whose Knowledge? as #VisibleWikiWomen Coordinators in February 2018 and launched the campaign in March.
The initial goal was to get 100 good quality images donated during this campaign, but by early April participants had added over 800 images to Commons, and by May, over 500 of them were being used across Wikipedia!
The Commons photography community also got into the spirit of the campaign, with a March/April "Portraits of influential women" photo challenge suggested by user group members and allies.
Coordinators created a resource toolkit in English, Spanish and Arabic (and another version on our website) to support participants, which can be grown, remixed and re-used in future years.
VisibleWikiWomen Postcards featuring images of diverse women from around the world have become popular Whose Knowledge? gifts.
We wrote several blog posts from the campaign, and coordinators presented about the project at both Wikimedia Conference in April 2018, and Wikimania in July 2018.
More information and learning from the pilot campaign is compiled in this flipbook.
Big thanks to all the campaign partners who made #VisibleWikiWomen 2018 a success!: Women in Red, Art + Feminism, Mujeres latinoamericanas en Wikimedia, Wikimedia Tunisie, Association CLibre, Wikimedia Israel, The Black Lunch Table, Global Fund for Women, AfroCROWD, Wikimujeres, Wikimedia Community User Group Brazil, Wikimedia Uruguay, Wikimedia Argentina, Wikimedia Bolivia, WikiDonne,O Foundation, and Open Foundation West Africa

Decolonizing the Internet Conference and Wikimania 2018

We supported Wikimedia South Africa to craft and execute on a theme for Wikimania 2018 in Cape Town called Bridging Knowledge Gaps: The Ubuntu Way Forward, which was fully incorporated into the structure and program of this year's Wikimania - huzzah!
Decolonizing the Internet was our biggest 2018 convening, co-located as a pre-conference to Wikimania 2018 in Cape Town this July.
96 participants attended Decolonizing the Internet. The group included community organizers, archivists, artists, activists, Wikimedians, scholars, academics, librarians, funders, technologists and media workers from 28 countries, including very strong African representation. 67% of attendees were women/non-binary/transgender, 68% came from countries from the global south, and 77% were people of color. About half of the participants were funded by Whose Knowledge? to attend, and many of these folks stayed on for their first Wikimania as well :)
Our accompanying “What is Knowledge” art exhibition at Wikimania 2018 showcased artists from marginalized communities around the world to help expand the Wikimedia movement's understanding of knowledge in different contexts.
Other sessions we organized at Wikimania included:
- Whose Knowledge? panel discussion on Centering Knowledge from the Margins featuring scholars, archivists and organizers from marginalized communities
- Workshop with Shuttleworth fellows exploring How can open also be safe and welcoming
- The Visibility Gap report back from #VisibleWikiWomen.
Here is a full report from Decolonizing the Internet, while our blog post has a roundup from both Decolonizing the Internet and other Whose Knowledge? Wikimania 2018 events. Some publications like Deutsche Welle also wrote about our event too, though as usual the media is very confused about whether affiliates and the movement = the Wikimedia Foundation ;)

Communications and outreach

We launched an improved website in February 2018.
Claudia Pozo and Kira Allmann joined Whose Knowledge? as Communications Leads in April 2018.
Whose Knowledge? spoke about centering marginalized communities, knowledge, and Wikipedia at a whole bunch of events, including:
- How to Build an Internet With Us, Not For Us - MozFest featured speakers (and clothes swappers!) in October 2017
- Whose Knowledge is Reliable? - Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion panel at OpenCon in November 2017
- Macaulay’s Monster: A Post-Colonial Manifesto of (Digital) Curation and Preservation - keynote at MIT Grand Challenges summit in March 2018
- Feminism+Knowledge+Politics plenary session - convened with Dalit, Shoshone and queer Bosnian activists at International Feminist Journal of Politics (IFjP) conference in April 2018 (attendee recap)
- Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Scholarly Communication panel - at the ACRL/SPARC forum, American Library Association conference in June 2018
- Who Edits Wikipedia? - BBC Newshour radio interview in July 2018.
Whose Knowledge? also wrote some media pieces, including:
- We’re All Connected Now, So Why Is The Internet So White And Western? - Guardian Op-Ed in October 2017
- Open It Up! A Feminist Approach to Knowledge Building in a Digital Age - Take Back the Tech in December 2017. Publication accompanied a tweet chat on Open Knowledge and Feminist Memory organized by Take Back the Tech, which included several user group participants (chat had 62 contributors, 559 tweets, more than 1.5 million timeline deliveries and a reach of 175,000).

Other Wikimedia movement stuff

Adele Vrana joined the Whose Knowledge? co-director team in November 2017!
Our learning pattern on Centering Marginalised Knowledge was created in December 2017. At the Wikimedia Conference in April 2018 we led a session using these 7 questions that we suggest Wikimedians ask themselves when supporting marginalized communities to add their knowledge online. And we were happy to contribute that pattern as well as other ideas to the 2018 Wikimedia Gender Equity Report.
Whose Knowledge? participated in the 2017 strategic direction process, and is particularly pleased to see "we will focus our efforts on the knowledge and communities that have been left out by structures of power and privilege" as part of the movement's new strategic direction. That's what we're all about!

Multimedia

VisibleWikiWomen on Commons
Decolonizing the Internet 2018 on Commons
What is Knowledge? Art Exhibition on Commons
Whose Knowledge? at Wikimania 2018 on Commons
See activities section above for more links to presentations and other media from the past year!