Jimmy Wales

“ The thing that I really am happy about this award is that we won in the category of international cooperation, and people often think of Wikipedia as a technology story. Sometimes they get the idea it’s a story about knowledge, but very seldom are we recognized for being a group that really promotes international cooperation which is obviously very, very visible here at Wikimania. ”

“ One of the big issues that faces Wikipedians, something that we all take very seriously, is the issue of freedom of expression. And I want to talk a little bit about freedom of expression and some of the things that the Wikimedia foundation is doing, some of the things we in the community are doing and facing. So one of the first things that I encourage everyone to do is to go and take a look at transparency.wikimedia.org. This is the number of requests from governments to modify or remove content from Wikipedia. As you can see, our legal department is not someone you want to tangle with. ”

“ People outside the movement who who hear this might think Wikipedia never takes anything down. People post horrible things and they refuse. That’s not it at all. One of the reasons this number is so low is that we as a community are so responsible for making sure that we have reliable sources, that crazy stuff doesn’t get put into Wikipedia. So, the best way if somebody’s got a genuine complaint is to come to the community and say, here’s a problem, and we always try really hard to fix it. ”

“ But in some languages, the language is only spoken within one country, so that all of the sources that the community finds easy to use are ...corrupted, basically. And this becomes very difficult. So then it becomes necessary, if the community wants to write good quality material that’s neutral, to use sources from outside the country, which means outside the language. But obviously, for Wikipedians, in some places that’s very, very difficult. Fewer people, you know, a small subset of people, will be able to get the English language press, and so on. ”

“ These are the kinds of problems that some Wikipedia face, and we as the community really need to help people like this in whatever small ways we can. One of the things we need to do is think about security, think about helping people find new user names, all the kinds of things that they are asking us to do, we should try to help if we possibly can. ”

“ But what’s really interesting, is that there’s been a long tradition and it’s very rare, in which the pope, who chooses the cardinals of the church, which are the ultimate body who choose the next pope and so forth—he can make someone a cardinal in a process called in pectore, which means he makes someone a cardinal but he doesn’t tell anyone. He doesn’t name the person. ”

“ He should have come, he might have beat you for the award. He’s been organizing and teaching workshops on university campuses, encouraging his peers to contribute to the Punjabi Wikipedia, which serves one hundred million speakers, so this is a major language. Punjabi Wikipedia was growing very slowly for several years, but Satdeep and his efforts directly and indirectly have made Punjabi Wikipedia the fastest growing Indic Wikipedia in the past year, growing 80 percent in active editors over the last year. It’s amazing. ”

“ Again, five hundred thousand dollars is not enough to fully fund massive legal cases, but it is enough for me to be able to help people find legal resources and to have someone, or two people, who can be full time on trying to assist. ”

“ So, one: in many, many cases all around the world, people contact me sometimes and they say, Oh Jimmy they’re about to pass this terrible law that’s against freedom of expression. It will impact our work as Wikipedians, it will impact bloggers. Can you write an editorial for the newspapers, they’ll print what you say, and it can have some influence on raising awareness of the issue. ”

“ And the other thing is to actually provide assistance, legal assistance, shining a light on, raising awareness, helping coordinate other NGOs who are doing work for people specifically in the digital space, so bloggers who are being persecuted, people who are arrested for something political they said on Twitter, but importantly, and obviously nearest and dearest to my heart is Wikipedians in trouble. ”

“ The five year club and the decade club, so it’s a growing club every year. ‘Cause I’m sure there’s quite a number of people out there who are 8 or 9 years and there’s also will be people who were with us in the early years but missed one here and there, who just will come back pretty soon. ”

“ There are other Wikipedians around the world who face similar types of problems. So this user is an active participant in many protests throughout 2014, 2015, helped to draft the English Wikipedia article on the protests, and began adding articles on Venezuelan political figures from January. ”

“ And then the philosophical problem, which is: if the government controls all the reliable sources in a language, or “reliable” sources, or if some users are excluded, what does that mean for Wikipedia.
China [9:02] So first thing I want to talk about is China. China, of course...we have had long-standing issues with blocking and filtering. We were completely banned in China for about three years, then we were open to China for quite a long time. I visited the minister in China twice. ”