Systemic bias kit/Transcripts

Intro to the Systemic Bias Kit

Hi everyone! My name is Emily and I’m so glad you’re interested in using the Systemic Bias Kit to improve Wikipedia and engage your community. I hope that once you’ve seen these videos and read through our materials, you will feel confident and inspired to work on fighting systemic bias on Wikipedia, and join us in writing people back into history

Systemic bias is insidious and affects every area of Wikipedia, though it affects different languages differently. Since my area of expertise is the English Wikipedia, I will be focusing there – I invite you to share your community’s experiences of systemic bias with me, however! On English Wikipedia, systemic bias shows itself as the disproportionate attention paid to white, heterosexual, cisgendered men from the Global North – aka Europe and North America. People of color, LGBTQIA people, and people from the Global South – and their issues and interests – are, on the whole, neglected.

That’s where you come in. By holding biography writing workshops, you can make a huge dent in the systemic bias of Wikipedia. Our experiences and data show that personal engagement, repeated workshops, and the relatively circumscribed task of biography-writing go together to create high impact, high-retention events that build Wikipedia and build community.

In this series of videos, I’m going to walk you through the basics of successful workshop series design, and why you should consider implementing this model instead of one-off edit-a-thons. I will share my best tips and tricks for making things work, and help you learn from your mistakes. I invite you to follow along with the checklist in our booklet, available here. Let’s go!

Before you start

The absolute first thing you need to do is make sure that you are ready to teach others. Your attendees will look to you for guidance and support, and you need to be prepared to answer their questions with confidence! There are a few basic skills you need:

First, you need to be able to create accounts. You will hopefully have more than 6 people present at your workshop and they will want to create accounts, but you will run into the IP limit. Take care of this ahead of time by asking for the AccountCreator right at Requests for Permissions, which will allow you to create unlimited accounts from the same IP address. Alternately, you can have your participants create their account at the time of signup.

Next, you need to be proficient in starting new articles. Knowing how to organize an article, add an infobox, add categories, and create a reference list are all essential. If you need a primer or a refresher – don’t worry! There are plenty of tutorials available at Help:Contents to walk you through.

Another area where you need to be proficient is in using VisualEditor and/or the source editor. Decide ahead of time which one you want to teach, and then stick to it. From my experience, both are about equally easy for younger people to pick up on, but older adults prefer VisualEditor. Make sure you know what all the buttons do – I’ve definitely made that mistake – and make sure that if you choose to use VisualEditor, you walk your participants through the steps of turning it on in their Preferences.

Once you’re sure you’ve got all of these skills, you’re ready to start planning workshops and changing the world!

First Steps

So, you’ve already completed Step One of hosting your very own Wikipedia workshop series by watching these videos! Congratulations! The next thing to do is to decide on a topic. What’s near and dear to your heart or your community that’s ignored on Wikipedia? Who can you just not believe doesn’t have an article?! Those are great places to start. Another thing you can do is browse specialty biography collections, available online and in libraries, to see if people from a certain group have ridiculously few biographies. If you need suggestions, WikiProject Countering Systemic Bias maintains resources on which areas are highly affected by systemic bias.

Once you’ve got a topic set, it’s time to start putting yourself out there: in order for things to run smoothly, you need to start by submitting a grant request to the WMF, around 6 weeks out from your event (or even sooner, if you’re really on top of things!). If you have funding from somewhere else for food and such, then you can just skip ahead to the next video. More detailed instructions are available in the kit, but I’m going to talk you through the process step by step.

You’re going to be applying through the Projects and Events Grants. The first thing to do is to title your request. Ours was called “Loyola Women in Math and Science”, which was a pretty boring but descriptive name. Remember, you can always change the name later, this is just the name for your grant request. You can call your workshop something else entirely! Then, think about how much money you’re going to need. Think about food costs, venue rental, and any other resources you may need. It shouldn’t cost more than $100-$150 to host a workshop. The next thing to do is to pick a start and end date. The start date should be a couple of weeks before the first event and the end date should be a couple of weeks after the last event, just to give yourself some buffer with reporting and handling logistics.

The next part of the grant application is a description of your workshop. It only needs to be a couple sentences long, but it should cover what your topic is, how many people you expect to attend, how many workshops you plan on hosting, and where they will be held. Then you need an impact statement, which shows how you will use these workshops to combat systemic bias on Wikipedia. This should be your clear, concise way of showing the WMF team how you can create awesome impact that they want to fund!

Next, you need to think about goals and measures of success. 7-10 people per event is a good starting point, because you need enough people to work together and collaborate, but not so many that you start to neglect attendees. Your goal is quality, NOT quantity! The more attention you are able to give individual attendees, the better their experience will be and the more likely they will return and need less of your help next time. Another good goal is the number of articles you want to create at each workshop or for the lifetime of the program, or the number of returning attendees. Think about what is important to you and your program and go from there!

The project scope and activities section looks intimidating, but it’s just a continuation of everything that you’ve thought about so far already. You need to explain what you will do when and if you get a grant – what you will use the money for…probably this mostly consists of pizza and associated food items. You can also ask for Wikimedia merchandise to give away, which is another great motivator for attendees! This is also a good place to explain if you’re working with other groups at your institution.

Resources are going to be pretty unique to you and your team. This kit is one of your resources – but think about what skills people on your team have, what experience you have, and what organizations you’re working with. You can also see if there’s a WikiProject focusing on your topic area and talk to them. If there isn’t, WikiProject Countering Systemic Bias is a good place to start, and you can even consider starting your own WikiProject!

The last section is talking about objectives. The objectives you will be meeting include participation and quality, since you’re attempting to create both editors and articles at the same time! Once you’ve finished this section, save your grant application and email grants@wikimedia.org for your next steps. Be prepared to answer some questions from the funding committee. They’re very nice and not trying to stop your project, they just want to make sure they understand your project and your plans. Congratulations, you’re well on your way to hosting amazing workshops!

Organizing a workshop

There are a lot of things to think about when planning a workshop series, and they may seem super overwhelming to you. Let me break it down for you. You need a place, some people, sources, and food.

If you’re on a college campus, this is pretty easy. Ask student organizations if they’d be willing to sponsor you, or ask the student government about how to host an event. You can also see if the library would be willing to host your workshops. If you’re not on a campus, a local library or community center is a great place to start. Make sure the venue has internet available, since this is a Wikipedia event after all! You should also consider arranging child care for each event, or invite people to bring their children, to make it as accessible as possible.

There are a ton of different ways you can go about finding people to participate in your events, and these will depend somewhat on your knowledge of your own community. If you’re on a college campus, reaching out to various student groups and student government is a great place to start. If you’re not on a college campus, community groups and community centers are a good starting point! You should also plan to promote your event on social media, since your social networks can bring in a lot of people who may not necessarily be affiliated with a particular group. Don’t worry about being annoying, you want people to notice you and your event and if you don’t promote your event, no one will come! You can even ask other groups to invite their members and promote your event as well.

Advertising is critical to getting people to come to your event! Posters are another great way to raise awareness – put them in high trafficked areas like student centers or coffeeshops. Many local businesses have a noticeboard you can use as well! Make sure that you emphasize the awesome elements of your workshops. We’ve found that people are highly motivated by social justice, free food, learning about historical people, and free merchandise. Advertise these aspects heavily to attract maximum people who are also in line with your mission!

You’ll need to make a signup sheet, that at the very least, lets people pick what days they would like to attend and has them give an email address so you can remind them before the event. Remind them at the time of sign-up and a few days before to bring a laptop or tablet that they can edit on. You can also ask for preferences about workshops and food preferences as well! Sending reminder emails is really important to make sure that people attend the workshops they are signed up for. Google forms are a great solution for a signup sheet, since it automatically gives you a spreadsheet with easy-to-access data, but if there’s something else that you prefer, go ahead and use that! Just make sure that you get people to sign up for specific dates.

Another critical piece of hosting a workshop series is curating resources. We’ve found that curating resources ahead of time allows participants to jump in much faster and be much better able to create articles without worrying about finding sources that meet the reliable sources guideline. It also streamlines your teaching, since you don’t need to explain this whole swathe of policy. But what this means for you is that you need to find reliable sources ahead of time. Librarians are your best friends when it comes to finding resources. Ask them about databases you can use, biographical dictionaries they have on hand, and any other resources in your topic area. Then, make sure that you have any physical resources reserved ahead of time and digital resources saved to a central location, either on a few flash drives or on public cloud storage, like Google Drive. I recommend you do this at least a week in advance so that you can make use of services like interlibrary loan to have the most resources possible! Once you have resources collected, you can start work on THE LIST. THE LIST is your collection of articles that need to be written. It can be as long or as short as you like, as long as there’s at least one article per expected participant. We’ve found that longer lists are better because they give more options to your participants, and people like to have choices! It’s more enticing for attendees when you give more than just a name and a redlink, and write a short description of the person. Also include on THE LIST the resources that talk about this person so participants can easily find them. You should also make some kind of shortened link that is easy to remember so the list is accessible. You can use a Wikipedia shortcut or a url shortener, whatever works best for you!

I cannot underestimate the importance of feeding your participants. College students especially love free food, and most people will be much more likely to come to an event if there’s food and caffeine available. Think about events that you have attended and what kind of food they had, and try to think of how you could imitate or improve upon that. A word of caution – catering trays are always much bigger than you think, but it’s better to have too much food than too little. Participants won’t be at all unhappy if there’s a bagel or some pizza left over, but they will be sad if you don’t have promised food. Coffee, soda, juice, and water are all good options for drinks, and make sure that you have vegetarian and caffeine free options to accommodate all comers. Make sure to order the food a couple of days ahead, and save your receipts so that grant reporting goes as smoothly as possible. When ordering your food, use your signup sheets to estimate how many people will be there. We’ve found that about half to two-thirds of people who sign up actually show up, but there’s a little bit of trial and error involved. When in doubt, overestimate a little bit.

Workshop flow

Interacting with participants is one of the biggest keys to workshop success. One-on-one attention and having a conducive space are the main things to keep in mind when setting up on the day of your workshop. Get there early, and make sure you have all your resources available on a table for easy access. Turn on some music if you have a speaker system for ambiance – classical or other quiet music is a good choice if you don’t know what else to do, but we’ve had fun dancing to 90s songs or Bollywood hits too! Try to set up your room with little ‘pods’ or tables, where 3-4 people can sit together and collaborate. Working in isolation is so boring and having people close together helps participants teach each other skills and work together. Win-win! As you’re setting up your room, make sure that you have space for books and space for food that are separate. You don’t want to get on the bad side of the librarians!

When people arrive, greet them and get them settled. We have an open house model so people trickle in, which makes it easier to orient one person at a time. Once people are set up with their laptops, show them how to create an account if they haven’t done so yet. If they have, you can start them off by showing them THE LIST and let them pick a subject. This is a great time to go help the next person set up their account and get to the list! After your participant picks a subject and grabs the resources they need, you need to talk them through the first few sentences of writing a biography. Don’t show them the entire editing interface, just show them how to bold the subject’s name and appropriate statements to establish notability at the beginning. We like the format “So-and-so was an X, known for her work in ABC. She discovered XYZ.” This is easy to mimic and clearly establishes notability, minimizing the chances the article will get deleted. We also tell people not to save until they’re done and we’ve reviewed it. Then, tell people about copyright and how to paraphrase appropriately. Usually people are good with an explanation like “it’s more strict than academia and programs check every article you create”. If someone needs more explanation, of course, you can demonstrate!

The next step is to show people how to create sections and the general outline of the biography. Then you can kind of just….turn them loose and see what happens! People tend to do really well – they’ll pull you aside for questions but you can work on getting everyone oriented one-on-one. Once they’ve written the text, you can show them how to add references and a reflist. This should come last since it can be confusing and people are definitely more confident at the end of the workshop. At the end of the workshop, make sure that everyone takes a survey. This survey should at least [bullet points] ask them for their username and email, what they enjoyed about the workshop, what should be improved, how they heard about the workshop, and why they came. You can use a shortened URL or have people use a designated computer. We use merchandise as an incentive to take the survey – you don’t get a t-shirt unless you write an article and fill out the survey!

Afterwards

After your first event you’re going to have lots of data to analyze! Take a look at your survey responses and see if there’s any trends you can see. Maybe everyone who came totally hates bagels and that’s all the food you had? Maybe there weren’t enough options on the list? Maybe they loved everything! Take this feedback and use it to tweak the next workshop in the series. Scheduling workshops after the first one is a million times easier because you’ve already laid all the groundwork. Every few weeks is a good target to shoot for, every week is way too much work and leads to burnout, but only one every few months doesn’t allow you to have momentum. I hope that with these resources you can set up a series of workshops that will create editors in your community and help to improve Wikipedia!

We welcome your feedback. You can email me at keilanawikIgmail.com or tweet your thoughts keilanawiki on Twitter. Thanks for watching!

This project was funded by a Wikimedia Foundation Individual Engagement Grant. Thanks to Siko Bouterse and the rest of the WMF Grantmaking team for their support. These videos were produced and directed by Hannie Lee. Thanks to Emma Highland, Ashley Iannantone, Leia Asimacopoulos, Ginny Bailey, Liz Bajjalieh, and all of the other lovely Loyola women for their support, advice, and help.