Katherine Maher

“ Identify the people who are not here yet, the people that you want to work with. And go and talk to them, listen to them--more importantly than talk. You have to understand why they are not working with you yet, what are their objections, what are they—why aren’t they here, and not dismiss those objections because this is the way that we work and this is the way that our communities work and our cultures work, but actually reflect on them, and think about where we need to make changes. ”

“ You need to be clear within your community on how to welcome people, engage people, and make space for people to participate. For us, this means friendly spaces and codes of conduct, and much more, but it also means clarifying our values, so that they’re not just about open, but they’re about diverse and inclusive, so that we as a community can make decisions about the culture that we want, and reject the culture that we don’t want, that is unhealthy. ”

“ They reminded me how meaningful it is for the world to be able to turn to Wikipedia right now, and what a powerful symbol it is for this critical resource to remain online and available to all. Your work makes this possible, whether you keep the sites stay up or our colleagues paid or our communities safe. The world needs the information that Wikipedia provides, now more than ever. ”

“ Wikimedia was born in the early internet, and we still believe in that magic; we believe in freedom of expression and freedom of information, and the ability to share our knowledge, thoughts, and desires for the future, freely with the world. Harassment threatens that sharing.
[7:07] Many of us here are advocates for the open web, and as Wikimedians, advocates of collaboration and openness, we are fiercely committed to protecting that. But if we protect the open web for it to simply become a place of hatred and of fear, then what are we protecting it for? ”

“ People may intuitively understand that Wikipedia is a perennial work in progress. Computers, on the other hand, simply process the data they’re given. If women account for only 17.82% of the data, we may find ourselves with software that thinks women are only 17.82% of what matters in the world. ”

“ If you want to work, we support you. Many people use work as a way of channeling their stress with the world around us. If that’s you, great! What we do can be incredibly rewarding, especially during times like this. ”

“ To fix Wikipedia’s gender imbalance, we need our contributors and editors to pay more attention to the accomplishments of women. This is true across all under-represented groups: people of color, people with disabilities, LGBTQ people, indigenous communities.
Although we don’t believe that only women editors should write pages about other women, or writers of color about people of color, we do think that a broader base of contributors and editors—one that included more women and people of color, among others—would naturally help broaden our content. ”

“ But if you start from a place with understanding around belonging and understanding about community norms and behavior, then you can actually start to bring people back into those community behaviors. And so I’m hopeful that, based on the fact that we have a sense of commitment to norms and behaviors around what we want in the community, it’s about strengthening them, and seeing them succeed. ”

“ In a 2012 evaluation, by the Oxford Internet Institute, they found that more than half of the articles on Wikipedia are about places, events, and people, that only represent 2.5% of the world’s land area. And of all the geo-tagged articles on Wikipedia, only 2.6% actually represent anything on the continent of Africa, which holds 14% of the world’s population. At the Wikimedia Foundation we know that representation and quality of articles improve when more people contribute, and when more diverse people contribute. ”

“ However, the world is unpredictable right now, and whether you need to care for loved ones, get groceries, or go to the doctor, your well-being is our priority. We are not tracking your time. We trust you. If you are sick, do not work. ”

“ It is true that Wikipedia has a problem if Donna Strickland, an accomplished physicist, is considered worthy of a page only when she receives the highest possible recognition in her field. But this problem reflects a far more consequential and intractable problem in the real world. ”

“ For us to have all knowledge, we require the participation of all people. We need all voices together so that we can create something greater than the sum of our individual parts. Which brings me back to Molly. ”

“ If journalists, book publishers, scientific researchers, curators, academics, grant-makers and prize-awarding committees don’t recognize the work of women, Wikipedia’s editors have little foundation on which to build. ”

“ No sick days or PTO required - just tell your manager and help your team revise calendars and schedules to make sure key areas of work are covered. (If you are diagnosed positive for COVID-19, please let Bryan within T&C Ops know so T&C can help with support and make sure your situation gets appropriate attention from management) . Hourly folks will be fully paid. We have already said, and are recommitting to honor our commitments to our contractors and hourly staff colleagues. Everyone will be paid on the basis of their usual hours worked during normal circumstances. ”

“ So everything on Wikipedia is openly licensed. We very rarely find for example violations of that because community members are very good at identifying issues when they arise and addressing them right away. One of the things that we’d like to move towards is a community culture where there’s this same attention to toxic behavior and harassment in the communities, as there is, for example, to licensing violations. ”

“ To adjust to our new reality and daily working hour expectations, we intend to adjust the timeline for the delivery of our 2020-2021 Annual Plan. Our intention is to propose an extension of our 2019-2020 plan that allows more time for budgeting to allow employees to prioritize critical work, self-care, and care for loved ones while accommodating those who need or wish to work a reduced schedule over the next few weeks. ”

“ Part of our model is community grants. In the last two years we’ve set aside half a million dollars to fund resources for increasing gender diversity and addressing tools and initiatives to support healthy culture. We’re working with our community members in order to understand what the issues are that they see and give them training and tools so they can identify toxic behavior and take effective action on their own. ”

“ A 2015 study found that, on English Wikipedia, the word “divorced” appears more than four times as often in biographies of women than in biographies of men. We don’t fully know why, but it’s likely a multitude of factors, including the widespread tendency throughout history to describe the lives of women through their relationships with men. ”

“ You know, from our perspective, it is actually about bad, it’s that we believe that most people who participate in our community and in the open web are generally there because they are appreciative of the good parts about it, the creativity, the innovation, the connection. ”

“ For all staff, contractors, and contract workers: our daily working expectations will be about 4 hours a day, or 20 hours a week until further notice. We’re not declaring a holiday - if you are able to work more normal hours, the mission can use you. ”

“ Secondly, one thing I hear a lot is that when people talk about the importance of an open internet, these negative examples of harassment are shown sometimes in such a light so as to say, Oh look this is what happens when you have a completely open community, we can’t have that. ”

“ And one of the things that we have found is that we actually think that addressing some of these issues, for us, is possible---I think there’s a feeling that these are really pernicious issues and they could be impossible to address, but one of the things that we found is that by starting in a place where we have a culture around expectations, around what the things are that the community actually wants and what the, sort of, guidelines are for participation, it’s around clarifying within that culture that expectations, and building and strengthening and reinforcing it. ”

“ We’ll begin a process with all departments to assess current objectives and shift our focus to supporting what’s essential for our mission. There’s plenty to do for all of us, we just will all focus on the most essential projects. ”

“ So we have a support and safety team that works with individuals who experience issues of harassment, and those individuals are deeply involved in the communities, they work alongside community members, and what our goals are over... right now...what we’re working to do, and what we’re anticipating doing in the future, is actually building resources for community leaders, so that they can identify some of these issues from the beginning. ”

“ The building is employing its own duty-of-care protocol utilizing products that support the safety of their tenants. We feel comfortable that the office will be well-prepared for when we decide to return. ”

“ Respectful, diverse, inclusive communities don’t just happen because you want them to. You actually have to resource it. We used to do this thing, where we sat around and we talked about having a more welcoming community for women and people of color and people from the global south. ”

“ Our planned work will be there waiting for us when the time comes. For now, it is time to support one another and create space for the important work that will be coming in the weeks and potentially months ahead. ”

“ People have dug into her relatives’ Facebook pages with fewer privacy settings than hers. They’ve shared photos of Molly to various websites, photoshopping her face onto lewd images, and they’ve taken a photo of her with her baby niece, and captioned it with racial slurs. They’ve added data to these images, to make sure that they’re some of the first results you see when you search for her name or user name. A slew of Twitter accounts have been created to harass her, commenting on her physical appearance, her weight, her family, her sexual preferences. ”

“ Some work is considered essential. There are some things that we must keep doing. The SRE, HR Ops, Trust & Safety, and Fundraising teams (among others) do critical work that may need additional support. ”

“ In addition to letting people know that you want them to join your community, it has to come from the community as to what the rules of engagement actually are, so that you can identify when people are acting outside of those barriers and of those rules. ”

“ Send an email to tech support if you need a comfortable headset. Use your wellness reimbursement for snacks. Join the #remoties channel in Slack to talk with your colleagues about distributed work The HR Operations team is looking into webinar-based ergonomics guidance to support the increase in distributed work across the Foundation. ”

“ I think that if you start from zero it becomes very difficult, and we’ve seen that in the number of communities on the web in general, is that if you have no rules and you have no expectations about how to participate, it becomes very difficult to then later set them. ”

“ Wikimedians have spent millions of hours building one of humanity’s most remarkable resources, forty million articles, three hundred languages, used by half a billion people every month, from every corner of the planet, from McMurdo Station in Antarctica to here in London. ”

“ Woman’s voice: Hi, thank you for speaking, In which ways are you supporting the people who are contributing and administrators and editors for coming with you with concerns about being harassed in life? ”

“ I think that, I mean, that was a bit of a leading question, but I actually think that this is an issue, right, that people who don’t have any direct experience of what it means to be vulnerable or to be marginalized have a very difficult time understanding what it means to be vulnerable or be marginalized and then actually investing in those issues. ”

“ She’s also the target of repeated harassment because of her involvement with Wikipedia. She’s been targeted by people who disagree with the calls she’s made as an administrator. She’s been targeted for her physical appearance. ”

“ So now, we actually have dedicated budget, resources, and staff, who actually work with our emerging communities, to help these groups participate, and grow, and understand what their needs and barriers are. ”