(moderator) Alright. Hello everyone, thank you for being here for this session.
We're going to hear from Nicolás and Ivana Giorgetti
on surviving marriage using Wikidata,
I'm sure an applicable topic for all.
I'd also just like to remind everyone before we start,
I know we get excited,
it's the end of the day, it's the end of the conference.
Please do not speak until a microphone comes to you.
If you have something to say, it's not good for the live stream
or anyone who has any hearing complications.
So with that note, I will let you begin.
(Nicolás) Okay. Thank you very much.
Well, thank you for coming, we are Ivana and Nicolás.
We are from Argentina.
So, well, the topic of this talk is a funny way to say this,
surviving marriage, because we are married.
We started our relationship almost in 2005.
I started editing a joke encyclopedia called Uncyclopedia, way, way back.
It's an encyclopedia full of memes right now.
And she started doing a talk about Wikipedia in 2005.
I went to that talk and it started from there.
After a few years, with a couple of friends
we started Wikimedia Argentina, the local chapter,
one of the biggest chapters in Latin America right now.
She's a founding member, I joined a few days later.
And then, we married in 2014.
It's like a very nice relationship
- because... - Is it?
I think... (laughing)
I'd like to think so.
We are not the only married couple in Wikimedia Argentina.
Our current president, Ivana-- she's named exactly like her--
- is also married to a Wikipedian... - But we're the oldest.
...but we are the oldest couple.
So, after a few years we started not only doing events
about using Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons
on public institutions and schools,
like one of the main objectives in our local chapter,
we have started getting this Wikidata,
or Wikidata--depending how you like to identify it--
we started using it and we fell in love with the project.
(Ivana) So, a little context since we come from Argentina,
and it's a big place.
I know that many of you are from Europe.
So, we decided to compare the size of Argentina into Europe.
To give an example, we're in Buenos Aires...
- Something like... - Yeah, like this.
And the second biggest city in Argentina is Córdoba
and it's 700 kilometers away.
It would be like from here, Amsterdam or Brussels,
so it's a lot of territory.
- It's a very big country. - Yeah.
So, mostly our big events happen in Buenos Aires,
and we try to have some events in different provinces,
but maybe they are not that big of an event.
Also, open data is not very open or very data-ish,
because many institutions don't have--they don't use databases,
are mostly paper lists or they don't know how to do this.
Something I remember,
that many institutions do have databases, but they have multiple databases
because one employee got tired of using the same Access database
or the same Excel spreadsheet and they started their own
and there is duplicated content.
So, many employees use one database, many other employees--
or the official one is another altogether completely.
Also, Wikidata is not very known,
Wikipedia is the biggest one and it's not that very known,
and also it's quite a lot of work to--
"Oh, this comes from Wikimedia Argentina." "No, we're not Wikimedia Argentina."
So, imagine the difference between Wikimedia, Wikipedia,
and now Wikidata?
No way.
Also, we are a developing country.
Actually, tomorrow is the presidential election.
We thought this would be a fun thing to say, but then,
see the things happening in Chile and--
(Nicolás) You can see the situation in Latin America...
- is very peaceful right now. - Yeah.
So, other type of context--
it's a very interesting place
to try to understand how the Wikimedia movement
improves and grows very differently in the developing countries
like Argetina, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil even,
or even in Africa,
if we compare with European countries and, especially in GLAM events
or open knowledge situations.
For example, if we're trying to make some event or some agreement,
many institutions may say, "You know what? The government is about to change.
So, why don't we try after the elections have passed?"
Yeah, many things fall apart between elections,
because, okay, the government is about to change,
so a lot of employees move away from their current jobs,
many institutions have become leaderless,
so we have to wait a few years or months to re-institutionalize
and start our negotiations again.
- Okay... - It's very frustrating, yeah.
How can we approach people about Wikidata, Ivana?
(Ivana) It would depend if we are talking about "Editors"
or people that are not editors yet.
Because if people use Wikipedia,
it's much easier, they already know how to work with it
but maybe they don't know about Wikidata yet.
We started with this, what, two years ago.
We started with, "Okay, what is this? It's a database on what, Wikidata?"
and then we fell in love with it.
So, we started with the editors
and we tried to integrate Wikidata in all the events we do.
If we are going to do an edit-a-thon,
we try to have a track where we can edit the Wikidata about the topic.
And, if there is no formal event inside, we tried to start something,
at least something small, just to introduce the topic of Wikidata.
(Nicolás) Yeah.
Thankfully, thanks to the new integrations with Wikidata and Commons like depict
it will become very much easier to do the job because--
Okay, we have many events like edit-a-thons,
like we start with people and edit Wikipedia articles.
We take photos and upload them in Commons.
We try to integrate Wikidata with that.
With non users, people that only read Wikidata
or never knew Wikipedia or don't trust Wikipedia at all,
we try to do almost the same approach,
but we try to approach people that already work with databases
or we don't know any yet maybe because
like librarians...
or people that work with maps, teachers, students,
we try to approach those people on their own events
like OpenStreetMap groups doing their events
or free software events.
In Latin America we have something like FLISoL,
these events that you go with your computer
and you get installed free software in your computer.
We have gone to some presentations there
and introduced them about Wikidata on other projects too.
(Ivana) Okay. So, we started by building the small community
because we had some data to start,
but someone had to start uploading it so that's where we came in.
We started making small meetings monthly
like the people in Wikimedia France started on the Atelier,
something like that but in a smaller scale.
We tried to be regular, we sometimes get the same people,
new people, people who don't return, it's a mixed batch of people.
Many people didn't know about Toolforge and any of those tools,
so we started using Mix 'n' Match, OpenRefine...
- Especially, OpenRefine. - Yeah, we did one on depicts.
And sometimes, when we are many and we have many newcomers,
we split in two,
so one of us will go and do a small talk
about, "Okay, this is Wikidata, this is the basics,"
and the other part will do something more advanced.
Yeah. More advanced or more technical
because one thing that--personally,
I want to attract more technical people on Wikidata.
In our local community, the technical people
like developers or people that know how to code is very small,
so I want to attract them and teach them like,
"Okay, do you know Python?
I can teach you about how to use Pywikibot,
how to use then to get to the API for Wikidata
and do some queries there, so you can use it on your program.
Or you want to do a Telegram bot or a Whatsapp bot?
You can do that with the documentation you have.
So, we try to integrate that and some events too.
Bueno.
Well, sorry.
How about institutions? GLAM and beyond.
So this is a very old joke, I know we get that, right, but--
especially in Latin America, GLAM is not just GLAM,
maybe it's Death Metal too and other metal genres.
I really like Black Metal--
but not all databases come from galleries,
libraries, museums--
What does the A stand for?
- Museums. - Archives, sorry.
I just want to say that was a terrible joke.
Yeah. Thank you. (laughing)
So, the data comes in mysterious ways.
We try to locate people
that are not identified by GLAM standard,
like many NGO's or small groups of people
who have a common goal or a common hobby, like--
Latin America have something like friends of the tram,
something like that.
We have archives.
They have all the archive of old books.
Yeah. Let me [explain this].
We haven't had a tram system like for 50 years,
so it's something historical,
and there's a group of people who have a library
about the history of the tram in Buenos Aires,
they even have an old tram that they restored.
Well, once we did articles on there, and it was super useful--
but there wasn't Wikidata back then, or we didn't know obout Wikidata.
Yeah. We had to maybe try to go back for them again,
but many, many institutions--
right now it's in the middle of the elections.
There are many NGO's that track politician information
in our local government, nationally or in provinces,
the open data is not very open.
So, if you want to know when is the birth date of a certain politician,
the first source is Wikipedia, for example.
So, they try to get their own databases,
so we try to talk to them about liberating that database in CC0,
and we can also upload them to Commons, or Wikidata, sorry.
I especially talk to communities about
we share some similar goals like open knowledge,
open and free knowledge.
The simpler way to find things is free software community, maybe,
and OpenStreetMap groups and other examples.
So, what are we hoping to do next?
We have many steps ahead.
We are still a small community
but we want to make more technical events,
more events dedicated to how to use ToolForge.
I already talked to many people in Argentina or in Chile
that didn't know about the existence of many of the tools like,
"Okay, I kind of upload a database using OpenRefine
and maybe use Mix 'n' Match to use some alternative control."
And it was, "Mix 'n' what?"
So many, many tools--
many of the content of the technical documents
about Wikidata and other projects are very hard to find
in some respect to the less technical community,
especially in countries
with English as a non natural language,
like in the Spanish world.
Our country mainly uses Spanish or Portuguese.
It's very hard to find information in our language.
So thankfully, the people in Brazil are doing an excellent job
with the Wikidata labs.
We are going to try to imitate that,
doing it in Spanish for the rest of Latin America.
Doing something like a Women Tech Storm.
Yeah, for those who don't know in the Netherlands,
they have resorted to some kind of smaller events called tech storms.
For just chance, I happened to be in one and I liked the format.
And I think it's something that we can replicate in a smaller scale
because it was an event of 30 or some people.
We have the capacity to do that and maybe we don't need a huge event.
We just need one day or just a weekend.
And I think that would be an important contribution
if we could just gather people.
Maybe have a speaker from Chile or Brazil or something more regional.
We think it's a good start.
Yeah, especially in countries like Argentina,
where not many people know and don't understand English,
especially because it's not an obligatory second language.
So, if you go into a school that doesn't have a second language,
you are busted.
But we try.
(laughing) We're going to try.
So, how can I start or more exactly can *we* start?
So, the best thing we have is building a community,
maybe building from scrap, maybe the community is already built--
we've got to detect that and formalize in a way about that.
So, about approaching people from other projects.
Again, free software.
Or, just like we have in 2007 started a community
because a bunch of nerds liked to edit Wikipedia.
So, it would be funny to start a non-government organization
to propose to use Wikipedia in schools, for example.
- And now we have an office. - And now we have an office...
- And some staff. - ...and people and staff.
- So it's very-- - It happens.
I'm the treasurer there.
I pay people's salaries. It's crazy.
So then we go to many--
all the events that began, maybe not Wikimedia-related,
maybe like a bunch of librarians
get together to talk about improvements.
We go there and propose, "Okay, you can use Wikidata
or you can use Wikipedia in your day-to-day life."
We go to schools, we go to public institutions,
or the all the GLAM of the public sector,
- like archives... - Libraries.
...museums, libraries, especially.
We go there and say, "Okay, Wikidata exists,
you can improve your life, we can improve our content,
we need to work together on all that."
There are many stones in our way,
especially with the government changes and all that jazz,
but maybe it starts very small,
like a bunch of--
okay, five people have a common goal, like we like to take photos.
In our town, there are ten statues, go there and take photos.
And those photos, you can upload them in Commons,
and you can do the pics about that.
Not exactly because another thing if we don't have freedom of panorama,
- that's another thing. - Ok, that...
- But you get the idea. - We don't talk about that,
but especially in Argentina, we did a very huge event,
like the sum of our small communities in Buenos Aires.
There were many hundreds of small cities or towns
that didn't have their own article or their own Wikidata element
and no multimedia content at all.
We go there, we take pictures,
we talk about people who live in that town,
and start making history in a way,
preserving all that exists in our huge country.
So, on other things that we learned, that we started--
Okay, we maybe started doing discourse servers
or something like that, like the digital community, and it works
until a point.
It's very interesting to have a person face-to-face meeting,
maybe monthly or however you can, to improve the relationships.
(Ivana) I think that was of our first meetup.
- Yeah. - We were a bunch of people.
Yeah. We were a huge bunch.
There are people from the government there too,
that work on the cartographical institution,
who works on all the maps in the country.
It wasn't from the OpenStreetMap community
and they fell in love with Wikidata, so that's a win.
But in person is better than online in many ways.
We try to make...
...make that community a reality in person.
It's a huge gap, it's a huge...
(speaking in spanish)
- ...a challenge. Thank you. - Challenge.
it's a huge challenge because it's a big country,
but we are working on it.
What about funding?
We are many institutions, not many people know how to get funds.
Wikimedia Foundation has ways to make grants about events.
If you have a working group, you can propose to get a small grant to--
"We need to start a organization and we want to do that,
we got to liberate the contents of this library database."
It's going to take work.
I don't mean to say
that I need the Wikimedia Foundation to pay me a salary to do that.
No, that's not the case, I'm against that exactly.
But it's like I need money to go to that town and take pictures.
I need money to create a small event or rent a small space,
to get WiFi and create an event
to talk to 50 people about how to use Wikipedia...
- With food. - ...with food.
- Food is so special. - Very important.
Very important in all events is the food and drinks.
Especially alcoholic drinks, but that comes after.
A lot of people, especially in our countries,
didn't know about--
many people speak about Wikipedia and say Wikipedia Argentina
or Wikipedia Chile, for example, Wikipedia Uruguay,
about that P... just the encyclopedia,
and the Wikimedia Foundation does not exist.
It's like a big mist that shows the money after a few years.
It's really hard to find people to know
that Wikipedia is founded by the Wikimedia Foundation
and several other local institutions,
like local chapters and user groups that promote the use.
We need to evangelize people about that.
The most important thing is that it started slow and steady,
especially steady, like monthly meetups,
it goes a long way.
- Yep. - The perseverance [inaudible].
So, why don't we start?
So, how to survive marriage?
This is the last part, but--
once Johnny Cash said that the secret of a perfect marriage and a long marriage
is separate bathrooms...
- And he was right. - ...and he was totally right,
but maybe too is open data, because we are working
under the same goal like promoting and using open knowledge
like Wikidata and other things and I love her for it.
So, thank you for listening to us.
(applause)
Forgive me in advance for my bad English.
(moderator) Oh, we got two minutes left.
How about we have a couple of very small questions for...
- Just tiny questions, tiny questions. - Anyone has questions?
(moderator) Yeah. Just a moment.
(person 1) Thank you a lot for your talk.
One thing I noticed is-- in the Netherlands
I started out with GLAM volunteer work as well 15 years ago--
I feel very old now--
and one thing I really noticed is,
to make sure that you get many GLAMs on board,
it really helps if you get one that's pretty big.
So, I could maybe give it as a kind of suggestion
that if you try to find like a very prestigious museum--
I mean, it's probably harder to do that--
but if you get one museum with one person
who is sympathetic to the cause,
and you get them over and like--
we did one project in Netherlands called Wiki Loves Art
that we started out with maybe two or three museums
and then suddenly, the Van Gogh Museum participated
and then, also that we got like 30 calls from museums like,
"I want to be part of this too."
Yeah, the domino effect of...
- The domino effect, yeah. - Yeah. We are starting to go into museums
talking about, "Do you know about what the Met does with Wikidata?
Here's a few links."
So after that, the people are like,
"Oh, we can start doing something similar,
and you can come here and teach me how to do it?"
It's like, "Yes, if you give me the data, that sweet, sweet data."
But it's a very interesting topic because not only in the GLAMS,
in public institutions too,
like many public institutions have a dream
about getting all the data in one place and in a structured way.
It's a long project, but many people are starting
to go, okay, using Wikibase as a start-up, we can--
okay, local governments, then talk with the nation about--
Okay, or cadastre, like city information is in a database that is open
to the public and to the government.
We are starting to teach them about these tools too,
but the domino effect is very important.
But thank you.
(person 2) Hello, I was just going to say that it's a good thing in your case
is that the government did not think that this data will be sold
and they gave it to them.
Because, in my case, I think they will hold on onto the data
until they find some commercial way to get profit out of it.
(person 3) Hi, it's [inaudible], from Palestine.
Thank you for your session and your presentation.
- The subject is cool - Thank you.
I just want to say that we are in the Levant area.
As you know, the Levant area consists of four countries,
Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.
We face the same problems that you face.
We are far apart--I know some users from more than five years,
but I saw them one time.
Also, a lot of Wikimedians in Palestine do not use Wikidata and that's a problem.
I just want to say the difference between Wikimedia and Wikipedia.
When I traveled into this conference,
the Palestinian police stopped me and arrested me for 40 minutes.
They asked me where I'm going to travel and who gave me the scholarship.
I answered all these questions in one minute
and I spent the rest 39 minutes
just explaining the difference between Wikimedia and Wikipedia.
They didn't understand; they just got bored and told me just go.
And I face these problems too.
Thank you for your presentation and I wish you the best.
Thank you.
(person 4) Just a quick note on that.
It happened to me kind of twice at the U.S. customs.
Yeah, we got attacked in Kuwait, the local chapter...
- Oh, yeah. - ...about a few days ago by the media,
about how Wikipedia Argentina is a political statement
about the opposition, the current opposition.
The current relation is like our current government and the opposition.
Like the Kirchnerismo and Wikipedia is written with a K,
so we are the opposition.
And we got to talking about it
and in a 25-minute sermon in prime time
talking about how our local chapter works to promote and define
the current government in Argentina.
And especially that Wikipedia with a P, Argentina like...
We are not Wikipedia. We're going to tattoo this like...
I need a T-shirt with that.
(moderator) Any other questions?
So we run into it.
(person 5) Yeah, I'll be quick, it's not really a question is just a--
First of all, thank you so much.
I'm [Han], I'm the conference grant program officer for the foundations.
So, I just wanted to use this platform, as you just mentioned,
that we provide grants, all kinds of grants.
So I really encourage you to submit a proposal for small grants,
rapid grants, projects,
but I specifically support conference grants,
and I just wanted to say that we're very much looking
to fund Wikidata conferences, especially in emerging communities,
but in general--
So, I really encourage you,
everyone here going back to their local communities.
A conference doesn't have to be like this huge conference.
A conference can be smaller
with 20, 30, whatever, participants, just as long as it has an impact,
and I know that gathering around such an issue
has a lot of impact.
So, I'm really encouraging you to submit and to talk to me
if you have any questions.
Not only the money is part of things.
You go and they know how to organize an event.
Like, we hope to rent a place or to set up the audio, the video...
- WiFi is very important. - ...WiFi is very important.
(laughter)
(moderator) I think we should close,
- so thank you very much for attending... - Thank you.
...and thank you for presenting your speech,
you did it well,
and enjoy the break!
(applause) Thank you.