Wikimedia LGBT+, the Queering Wikipedia team and partners hosted Queering Wikipedia 2023 Conference online on May 12, 14, and 17, with distributed trans-local in-person MeetUp nodes 12–17 May 2023.
With welcome message from WMF chief executive Maryana Iskander (in English; version with Spanish subtitles to come)
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Keynote: Nishant Shah
Dr Nishant Shah is a feminist, humanist, technologist working in digital cultures. He wears many hats as an academic, researcher, educator and annotator, interested in translating research for public discourse and being informed by public discourse to orient his research. Professor of Global Media and Director of the Digital Narratives Studio at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, School of Communication and Journalism
[ English slides to come] · [ Spanish slides to come]
[ English video to come] · [ Spanish video to come]
As a reaction to disillusionment with contemporary feminist groups I envision a post-Guerrilla Girls, post-Pussy Riot and post-FEMEN media actionist movement that critically and playfully reacts on urgent problems with a focus on women. I build on the old but attempt to be radically inclusive. Therefore, I conceptualize the movement as a hashtag that can be appropriated by anybody anywhere. Instead of a website, I want to create a Wikipedia page that can also be edited by anybody anywhere. I want to popularize #RedWomenAreComing by spreading rumors on Twitter, that will ripple into other social media sites like Facebook and Pinterest. This fictional project can transform into live performances featuring costumes, bells and whistles. The #RedWomenAreComing in numbers to public spaces near you dressed in red burqas, red shawls, red hats, red masks or just red lipstick. They will define themselves through interaction with the press and public. Their goal is to occupy your imagination, the news in print and on TV.
This talk will provide tools to build friendly communications with an LGBTT+ audience
The impact of Wikimedia LGBT+ editing work in light of Wikimedia’s usage for AI training data (Dorothy Howard, User:Hexatekin)
[ English slides to come] · [ Spanish slides to come]
[ English video to come] · [ Spanish video to come]
The speaker will discuss the potential impact of editing content about gender and LGBT+ topics on Wikimedia platforms on the output of AI-based technologies. The speaker will explore how editing content on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia platforms has an impact on AI-based technologies, and suggest that there is further room for additional discussion around these issues and how they impact Wikimedia communities. The talk will review what we know about how Wikimedia platforms used to train AIs and the demand for high-quality training data. The speaker will also discuss ethical issues around training data, including the potential impact of Wikimedia content on AI bias and representation, and the invisible labor of Wikimedians who create the training data that is in growing demand by the AI industry.
This panel seeks to share the experience of two independent media organisations close to the Wikimedia Movement. The session will consist of a panel discussion and collaborative strategy-creation to strengthen the relationship between small independent media outlets with the Wikimedia movement, with the objective of reducing the gaps in Internet representation of minority communities.
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Workshop Presentation: Human Rights Amid Rising Anti-LGBTQ Efforts (WMF Human Rights Team) followed by live Q&A with Maggie Dennis, Vice President of Community Resilience & Sustainability, and Cameran Ashraf, Human Rights Lead.
(The live Q&A was not recorded, in order to allow participants to feel more comfortable asking challenging questions.)
Lecture:Unreliable Guidelines: Learnings from Art+Feminism's inaugural report on reliable source guidelines and marginalized communities in English, French, and Spanish Wikipedias (Art+Feminism)
In 2021, three Art+Feminism researchers and co-leads published Unreliable Guidelines, the project's inaugural qualitative research report. The year-long project leveraged an intersectional feminist methodology, including interpretative textual analysis and focus groups with Art+Feminism trainers, to unpack the intersections of reliability, sources from marginalized communities, and editor demographics in English, French, and Spanish Wikipedias. Our presentation describes the research motivations, methodology, critical findings, and implications. For Queering Wikipedia, we will discuss the relevance of enactments of reliability in relation to the inclusion of critical and marginalized sources and editors. Finally, we suggest strategies to mitigate the double-edged cut of editorial gatekeeping about reliability in an age of misinformation.
Rocio Gauna is a filmmaker, analogue photographer and writer in exploration. Her interest lies in poetry and non-fictional chronicles. She was born and lived most of her life in Buenos Aires but, in search of her identity, she found herself in need of establishing outside of the known. She recently moved to Berlin, but the city has already given her a lot to write about.
Craig Teatime is a queer poet from Ireland, also living in Berlin. Craig works as a tattooer, and a poet where they create beautiful images through the medium of words. Craig's themes and dreams include: queer love, building socialist utopias (real ones) and romance. Craig has read poetry at the Irish Embassy in Berlin, Postbahnhof with Sascha Waltz and has read poetry at the domicilium event in Berlin. Craig also takes part in the ongoing poetry Sunday workshops. Were locals poets, write hot and sweaty and then chill 🥰🥰
[[|English text to come]] · [[|Spanish text to come]]
[[|English audio to come]] · [[|Spanish audio to come]]
Lecture: Queers Wiki in Nigeria: The journey so far (Ayokanmi Oyeyemi, Kaizenify, Queer Alliance Nigeria)
[ English slides to come] · [ Spanish slides to come]
[ English video to come] · [ Spanish video to come]
In a country with strict measures to LGBT+; queer Nigerians still found a way to contribute and tell their story using Wikipedia. So this lecture will outline how Nigerian queers gathered to contribute to Wikipedia with hundreds of newly created articles in less than 6 months and influence non-queer Nigeria persons to contribute to LGBT related topics.
[ English slides to come] · [ Spanish slides to come]
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Do you feel comfortable here? Or not? Why do you feel comfortable here? Or not comfortable here? If we want to make this place more comfortable, attracting more gay, lesbian, bi, transgender, non-binary, etc, what do we need? Imacat hopes to develop some shared knowledge and awareness on the idea of "friendliness", with skills that we can practice back in our local community.
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Community Engagement / Strategizing: Queering Wikimedia from the archive: anti-colonial, anti-oppression and liberatory practices in Southern Africa (Whose Knowledge?)
[ English slides to come] · [ Spanish slides to come]
[ English video to come] · [ Spanish video to come]
GALA Queer Archive and Iziko Museum from South Africa, in partnership with Whose Knowledge?, invite wikimedians and allies to a conversation space around the possibilities and challenges for African queer memory collectives in the Wikimedia landscape. In a round table, we will discuss together topics like agency, ethics and safety of open sharing practices in wiki platforms. We want to explore the relationship between African queer archives and Wikipedia from a decolonising and anti-racist approach that centers the agency, vibrancy and humanity of the marginalised communities these archives serve. In this roundtable we will explore how archives from marginalised people and Wikipedia can work together in bringing knowledge sources that otherwise are invisible and underrecognized, like oral histories; how Wikimedia platforms can be used for digital archiving (and its limitations); and the specific copyright issues and the ethics of openness that come in with this collaboration, keeping the conversation rooted in the realities of post-apartheid South Africa.
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Workshops (in parallel)
Knowledge Gap Index and the LGBTQ+ communities (Leila Zia, WMF Head of Research & Miriam Redi, WMF Research Manager)
English slides · [ Spanish slides to come]
[ English video to come] · [ Spanish video to come]
In March 2023, the Research team at the Wikimedia Foundation published the first measurements of the Knowledge Gap Index. We expect to offer more measurements for many of the identified knowledge gaps through the index in the coming year. In this workshop we present the Knowledge Gap Index to the community and walk participants over how they can utilize it in their work. We dedicate the second part of this workshop to better understand the needs of the LGBT+ Wikimedia user group from Research.
Wikidata holds data about over 100 Million concepts and the relations between them. The Wikidata Query Service is your power tool to explore all these connections, find new interesting insights and visualize relevant data. In this workshop we will show you some of the cool things you can do with the Wikidata Query Service (e.g. finding gaps in our content, creating work lists for your next editathon or making a beautiful visualisation of the history of a topic you care about), how to write your own SPARQL queries and how to use all this to supercharge your editing on Wikipedia.
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Lecture: Renaissance of diversity on Wikipedia: an analysis of the reactivation of the Spanish-language LGBT WikiProject (MiguelAlanCS)
The LGBT+ WikiProject on the Spanish-language Wikipedia, a project founded in 2007, went through a stage in which its activity dwindled to nothing. After this period of inactivity, a group of users who saw the need to have a space to coordinate different actions and editing projects, reactivated the WikiProject and established an editing community that is maintained through planning common objectives and goals.
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Parallel sessions:
Community Engagement / Strategizing: Proposed scope of services for Wikimedia LGBT+ (Lane Rasberry, bluerasberry)
[ English slides · [ Spanish slides to come]
[ English video to come] · [ Spanish video to come]
As Wikimedia LGBT+ transitions from a volunteer organization to one with paid administrative staff, we present a list of services which the staff may offer. Services considered include support for the following: writing annual reports, hosting meetups, organizational documentation, giving thanks to contributors, publishing the budget, being the central point of contact, responding to harassment, maintaining the membership list, practicing democracy, checking diversity, keeping relationships with the press, doing partner communications, organizing position statements, hiring other staff and consultants, and writing grants.
This talk will explore creative approaches to social justice advocacy in the GCC which defer to the region’s unique cultural contexts, and the role of new technology in forging these efforts. Repressive sociopolitical climates present both obstacles and opportunities for progressive discourse, requiring novel ways of circumventing censorship and preserving anonymity while expressing dissent through subversive, often artistic, means. In particular the talk will focus on navigating often hostile online spaces and building alternative and safer platforms for queer communities in the GCC to effectively engage without compromising their security or anonymity.
This session was not recorded, in order to protect Esra'a and her team; likewise some slides have been removed from the version that was presented live.
As the Wikimedia movement returns to in-person gatherings, how do we balance the desire to meet equitably around the world with the need to ensure Wikimedians feel safe. Please join panelists from Singapore and Poland, the host cities of Wikimania in 2023 and 2024, and Wikimedia organizers from Ecuador and Rwanda for an important discussion about safety and our community in a changing world.
Due to technical problems, this session is not included in the YouTube stream.
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Lecture: Making Queer Faces and Voices Visible and Audible Online: The role of Wikipedia and Wikidata (John Samuel)
Queer history is complex. Over the centuries, the LGBTIQ+ community has gone through several ups and downs. From distinguished places in royal courts to being forced to hide their true identities and live their complete selves, the queer community around the world is still undergoing countless hardships. In certain places, queer individuals due to a lack of openly out and visible individuals in media often ask themselves, “Why am I different? Am I the only one?” Undoubtedly, progress in LGBTIQ+ rights around the world is not uniform, yet the solidarity among the queer community is unique. This strong sense of community has helped many of us to stay strong in difficult times. Wikipedia and Wikidata can play an important role in making queer faces and voices visible and audible online, even in remote places, where queer rights are still wishful dreams. The factual information on Wikipedia may help queer individuals to find strength, solace, and powerful lessons from the numerous historical narratives. When queer individuals search for information online, we, as a community, must ensure that online users come across relevant and empowering content capable of opening doors to other LGBTQ+ communities and stories around them. This talk explains how Wikipedia and Wikidata community document local queer histories from around the world and explores how this can be improved further.
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Lectures and conversation on LGBTQ+ biographies
Norena's slides: English · Spanish
Vic's slides: English · Spanish
[ English video to come] · [ Spanish video to come]
Tricky Terminology (Norena Shopland): As modern society becomes more aware of diversity within sexual orientations and gender identity, how do we avoid inflicting terminology on individuals from the past who would have had no knowledge of what these terms meant, and who may not have chosen those terms for themselves. This session provides advice on how editors and writers can incorporate more nuanced ways of using terminology.
Lecture: Queering Wikidata: Early Insights from the Wikidata Gender Diversity Project (Daniele Metilli, Beatrice Melis, Marta Fioravanti, Chiara Paolini)
English slides ·
[ English video to come] · [ Spanish video to come]
Wikidata Gender Diversity (WiGeDi) is a one-year project funded through the Wikimedia Research Fund, aiming to study gender diversity in Wikidata in a wide and comprehensive way. In the project, we adopt an intersectional feminist and queer approach, viewing gender as a social construct and centering marginalized gender identities such as trans and non-binary people. To study gender diversity in Wikidata, we are adopting three complementary perspectives: model, data, and community. First, we are investigating how the current Wikidata ontology model represents gender, attempting to understand the extent to which this representation is fair and inclusive, and looking at how the Wikidata ontology has evolved over time to support the representation of a wider spectrum of identities. We are analysing the data stored in the knowledge base in a quantitative way, to gather insights and identify gaps. Finally, we are looking at how the community has handled the move towards the inclusion of a wider spectrum of gender identities, by analysing user discussions about the topic with computational linguistics methods; indeed, gender representation is often intrinsically connected to language, and this is especially relevant in a multilingual project such as Wikidata. We believe that only by answering all three questions it will be possible to obtain a comprehensive overview of gender diversity in Wikidata. In the presentation, we will discuss early results from the project and show a preview of the tools that we are building to explore and analyze the data.
Lecture: Ethical and Inclusive Data Modeling for Gender Representation in Wikidata: Lessons and Recommendations from the Personal Pronouns Project (Arielle Rodriguez, Crystal Yragui, Alex Jung)
This presentation will provide a brief overview of a proposed model for personal pronouns and an exploration of issues related to privacy and consent of living people, problematic or missing policies, and issues regarding bot overreach as they relate to P21. Presenters will identify areas of concern, outline potential best practices, and share plans for implementing changes. While there are general policies in place regarding the privacy of living people and resource types that may be used to record personal demographic information, these policies are generally very loose and do not always apply to demographic information such as pronouns, sex, or gender, even though these pieces of information may violate consent and privacy of living people. Lack of firm policy and documented best practices can lead to harm toward living people through deadnaming and mislabeling of a person’s pronouns and sex or gender. At the end of the presentation, viewers will have a solid understanding of ongoing work in pronouns in Wikidata, and of recommendations for tackling ethical issues surrounding P21, and be prepared to collaborate in this work if they choose. This presentation will also set the stage for a 90-minute Roundtable discussion on P21 in which viewers are invited to participate.
Community Engagement / Strategizing: “But what about representation?”: Finding Ethical Solutions and Best Practices for Gender Information in Wikidata (Arielle Rodriguez, Crystal Yragui)
While data recorded in Wikidata using the P21 property may serve some benefit, such as contributing to increased representation in underrepresented gender communities, recording sex or gender in P21 can also harm living individuals in a myriad of ways. This roundtable will serve as a means to outline issues presented by P21 in relation to living humans, ethical implications of recording of sex or gender in P21, and Wikidata policies about personal demographic information particularly with respect to consent and privacy of individuals. Facilitators will talk through and crowdsource ideas for best practices for and changes to P21 rooted in the ethical treatment of living people and respect for their personal demographic information. Due to linguistic and cultural differences within the global Wikidata community, a one size fits all approach is not likely to be proposed as a solution. It is our hope that we might activate diverse groups of editors to consider issues regarding P21 in their respective languages with the goal of cooperative international implementation of harm-reducing solutions.
Unconference, in parallel
Lightning talk: Thank You! Now, You're Dead (Jake Orlowitz)
As part of the QW2023 conference, this set of AI created artistic postcards has been published to illustrate "The queer history of Bagoas the Younger". Produced along with descriptive prose in iambic pentameter created by AI. Apart from starting prompts, there is only weak influence of human choice of variations, so this also helps as a case study of the biases built in to the current versions of public AI tools.
Content warning! References to being enslaved and the role of eunuchs. However there are no images of excessive violence or “gore”.
Bagoas is most famous for being the slave and lover of Alexander the Great and as a eunuch lover has been reframed in modern LGBTQ and artistic contexts as a historical transgender or non-binary figure.
Images created by Midjourney version 5 AI in mostly “Caravaggio” style. Text created by Google Bard version 1 AI in mostly iambic pentameter style. Neither Midjourney, nor Google retain any copyright in these images or texts.
Untouched by human creativity. Prompt engineering by Anonymous. Warning: this AI created framing of the history of Alexander the Great and the Bagoas the Younger has little, and sometimes no connection to published research.
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Lecture: Diversity and Collaboration: an account of the actions of the Portuguese-language project "Projeto Mais Teoria da História na Wiki" (Bruna Grando, Projeto Mais+)
[ English slides to come] · [ Spanish slides to come]
[ English video to come] · [ Spanish video to come]
People who participate in the presentation will be able to learn a little more about the strategies of the Portuguese-language project "Projeto Mais Teoria da História na Wiki" ('More Theory of History on Wiki') to encourage the engagement of a specific audience — composed of academics, activists and sympathizers — in the event "Mais LGBTQIAP+ em Teoria da História na Wiki" ('More LGBTQIAP+ in Theory of History on Wiki'). In 2022, this event promoted activities related to the themes of gender, sexuality and epistemologies of the Global South on Wikipedia, Wikidata, Commons and Wikiquote. Our focus will be on the strategy of building a safe dialogue environment on WhatsApp and on training workshops through Google Meet. In addition, based on the results of these experiments, we will talk about what has changed for the event "Mais Diversidade em Teoria da História na Wiki" ('More Diversity in Theory of History on Wiki'), with a similar scope to Mais LGBTQIAP+ and which will take place in October 2023.
Everyone deserves to feel safe on social media. LGBTQ people are disproportionately targeted with hate and harassment on social media — acts which have very real offline impacts and harms. We are also vulnerable to censorship and disproportionate limitations of free expression related to our identities. As the major platforms continue to fail to adequately protect LGBTQ users from anti-LGBTQ hate, while also continuing to too often suppress our legitimate speech and engagement, what new strategic approaches can we enlist to try to advocate for change? Join GLAAD Senior Director of Social Media Safety, Jenni Olson; Meedan Digital Health Lab Program Manager, Kat Lo; Kairos Program Director of Campaigns, Jelani Drew-Davi for a panel discussion moderated by GLAAD Social Media Safety Program Manager, Leanna Garfield.
Panelists will discuss:
Key findings from the 2022 GLAAD Social Media Safety Index (SMSI) report — and a sneak peek at the new report to be released in June 2023
Thought leadership in the field of tech and platform advocacy, including current approaches to platform accountability and new strategies for change and advocacy such as the Kairos campaign, The Facebook Logout
Ways that individual LGBTQ users can report violative content as a strategy for activism, while also staying mindful of self-care (and remembering that this burden — of mitigating harmful content and maintaining safe products — rightfully belongs with the platforms).
Strategies for coalition-building, and what everyday users can do to help move toward safer online spaces.
Challenging Gender Hegemonies in Wiktionary Example Sentences (Loren Koenig, User:BlaueBlüte)
In Wiktionary entries, example sentences illustrate usage of the word in context. They should sound natural, but that makes them liable to reproducing gender stereotypes. And if they are in foreign languages with a translation, that translation is liable to cross-cultural misconceptions, particularly as to how gender interacts with either language. Queering example sentences should thus address at least two aspects: representation of gender and sexuality as well as cultural hegemony.
Words Athwart: Saying and/or Meaning Gender from Wikidata to Wikipedias (Loren Koenig, User:BlaueBlüte)
Infoboxes and other aspects of Wikipedia articles in many languages are increasingly not hand-written, but automatically filled with content from Wikidata, a repository of supposedly language-independent structured data. However, languages vary in how and how deeply gender is inscribed into their grammars: In some languages, to say anything (about a person), one must talk about (their) gender, and think about it in a specific way, even if one doesn’t mean to. In other languages, mentioning and thinking about someone’s gender is more or less by choice. But whose way of talking about gender gets represented in Wikidata, which is to say, for whom and in which Wikipedia will infoboxes read correctly? And what happens to everyone else and all the other Wikipedias? In a global context (such as Wikidata), ‘queering’ can’t limit itself to challenging hegemonies of gender and sexuality in a given place; a critical cross-cultural perspective is needed as well. We will thus look at infoboxes as a global use-case of Wikidata’s structured data, at how to queer without a ‘here’, and at how to get that meaning into words and across to a ‘there’.
Queer Wikipedia youth camps — past and future (Thomas Schallhart, Shikeishu)
Wikimedia Austria has organised and supported queer and feminist Wikipedia editing camps for the past few years as part of the initiative Wikipedia for Peace. In August 2022, we organised an international editing camp for queer youth close to Vienna. This session will tell you a bit about the atmosphere and the results of the project, talk a bit about our future plans for queer youth editing in Europe and invite you to start your own editing camps.
Lightning Talk: Collective approaches to the Pride March from the university experience (Johnattan Rupire, Txolo & Keen Quispe, QM Keen)
As part of the Introduction to Science course at the Faculty of Law and Political Science of the National University of San Marcos, we carried out an ethnographic approach to the LGBTQ+ Pride march in Lima and other cities in Peru. For several students, this was the first experience of social mobilizations and LGBTQ+ citizen movements, which meant a new experience for many participants from which we could gather graphic and multimedia records, allowing us to learn more about the movement in Peru.
