Learning from Just For the Record: what experience has there been with these topics?

is it possible to fork Wikipedia? probably not. (why not?)
maybe the fork could take the shape of an alternative narrative/space within wikipedia

how about this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mirrors_and_forks
advising against forking - "not reliability"

if you search for 'fork wikipedia' online, you'll find a lot of wikipedia links about forking, but not necessarily info on how to actually fork wikipedia

What is a fork?

P: think of a tree, and than can branch
Sarah: Making a clone and you have your own path
Sam evolutionary concept - evolving/mutating towards 'best fit' for a context
Femke: critical fork: to make a copy of a project with comments, clarifications and critiques asserted onto the project
it was related to the correlations workshop.
we were working with software packages by the university of antwerp
the code was open source, so we forked it, we then made a copy of the code and reworked it as a critical fork that would be released again
we were doing experiments, and inserting the experiments, but it was more like an annotation

difference between coding, programming and wikipedia

Peter: practical example: Québécois, can be seen as a fork of French
Wikipedia: not just any software
Making a route
Many dialects versions of Wikipedia
you immediately have a hierarchy between 'the original' and 'the fork'

the problem i have with forking
is that you always have to beg the main to merge the fork
there is no incentive for the main to listen and take into account
it is all on your own risk, to make the critique and to make the critique learned

forking : a critical culture even though hard to "hear the voices" of the forks once they have quitted the main branch

simple english:for a complex article comes with a "simple english" version

forking seems like it is there to avoid conflict
but it can still allow the original problem to continue, or to ignore the criticism
Conflict without divorce

The better code wins vs. A-B testing ...
What is most efficient, will become the main ... an efficiency logic.
culture doesn’t work like that

the urgency to for wiipedia would be to provide a space for multiplicity rather than requiring immediate resolution of conflicts... eg rather than locking a contentious article like 'Palestine' we could instead show the conflict around the topic.
perhaps it would be worthwhile to make the 'history' aspect more visible - eg at the same level of importance as 'read' and 'write'.
what is great with the wiki interface, you can access the back office, read/write interface
have everything more visible, on the same page
other narrations
versions, metadata
maybe we could imagine making history and talk around pages much more visible, eg showing comments in code, inline - being able to toggle or hover visibility
Work on the interface / or work on the language, idea
Wikis have mechanism for tracking difference
Culture of Wikipedia: the tools are there, but through the projective idea of neutrality, we don’t pay attention to diverving stories
the fact that there is a history page provides the option for versioning - so the tool provides the opportunity but the culture does not embrace it.
the more you write on an article, the more discussions there are
Why all these discussions don’t create new articles
it would be nice to be able to feed the articles with all the discussions.
the ideal of 'An Encyclopedia' prevents/discourages multiple versions - printed encyclopedia supposedly just show 'the facts'.


they (wikimedia) don't dare to say they are the only source
it is also existing with other sources anywyas
sometimes we think when we want to create an article and there is no source, we have to prepare a source first
some subjects are not represented ever, not even in other encyclopedias
we can do this fork: a version that it exists, so that it is a source in the ecosystem of wikipedia


time: wondering about the versions, editing, the last one wins
there is a sense of a race


place read, write, history on the same level

different versions ,,, make it more visible

Why forking?
forking 
alternative/parallel space?

different purposes -- Simple English


what about time and versions
last = best?

images in different languages versions
US and UK versions, different jurisdictions but same page.
sometimes you need another space just to discuss something in order to then bring it back to the original space
Mechanisms for merging – but how to avoid that the merge becomes normalized, institutionalized
some kind of 'temporary' movement, which can be merged back.
in the history of feminism there was a need for separtism - to find separate space where discussion can happen
reintegrated by institutions – in laws (a kind of merge)

if you are commissioned by the institution to bring your dissinent voices into the project

i am not sure if this is an invitation to bring in dissinence
kind of like consultants?
yeah, they hear a lot of critique so they are willing to hear that
sometimes it is important to get out of the room to dsicuss
but to merge afterwards, i find difficult
you still need to have this consensus
or you need to find other solutions, like a trick

or, like in the engineering circles, find a way of showing that one is the better product

how are these things are brought in relation again

or, put them in relation differently or say it differently
the multiple voices is connected to that


maybe what we need to do is highlight the conflict itself
there is the talk page but not all the conflicts are listed there
it is spread across different pages, it is weird to have a page for all the conflicts
maybe on the page you are, maybe there is some specific work that are conflictual that you could maybe see it and show that this was discussed many times

counter-public (eg dating apps for different populations/religions etc)
can there be different 'filters' on different topics in different spaces (eg post-colonialist view, feminist view)
is there some kind of 'town square' where differetn communities can interact?

the controversy section.

feminism thinks a lot about difference - a diff is about difference

Feminist diff?
Compare: what do you compare?
For whom?

do wikipedians know/feel/understand the benefit of diversity?



and what about alt-right
some conflict
if we want to 'show' the conflict, what happens if racists (eg) swamp the discussion?

different objectives, who do you want to talk to?
- making different histories visible, intervening into main page
- off line meetings for community building
- and the meta-track: rethinking how it works

the meeting page: it is in wikipedia, but another zone. 

who to fork for

"The opposite of archiving for so many reasons. For, ordinary life can be and is made into art, not artifacts, sometimes by loving communities in the living of it, and sometimes by later communities in the lasting of it. Archive’s opposite because the Fae Richards Archive was a carefully, lovingly researched and rendered fake, made by many, because we believed in the telling of the story of someone (Fae Richards, the Watermelon Woman) who must have been true but couldn’t benefit in her time from today’s most obvious, irresistible right and activity: living a life available to the photographic record and its lasting home in an archive. The opposite of archiving because, thankfully, real people, our lived lives and luscious loves, our full-tilt embrace of experience in community and history and art, will never be fully available to any archive’s or the internet’s quest for total picture control. Rather, we enter ourselves into history and its many archives here again, and as Zoe does and has done before, by celebrating the photograph’s partial, artistic, personal hold on people, truth, and life."
https://aljean.wordpress.com/2016/10/03/the-opposite-of-archiving-zoe-leonard-fae-richards-and-the-watermelon-woman/

JFTR has to write reports (for Wikimedia) and want to find ways of writing more meaningful reports, not just 'how many attendants? how many women?'
JFTR an offline room -> offline narratives how to bring this back /share on Wikipedia
it's difficult to work within the institution because it's hard to challenge core principles eg statements of 'neutrality'
ref: separatism

feminisms diffs

what it takes for the forks to accept that each of the forks are forks (and not the main narrative)
protocole

Maybe we need fiction.
That archive article, 
About the fact that there are no archives that contain the history of black lesbian women

Wikipedia fork – through fiction
Things happen there
Invite different people to tell and code/decode
The costs/labour/…
Citation needed

How should it be different from Wikipedia
Maybe it should be different from Wikipedia now, on a different time
Let’s have a look, there are so much projection on how it was
Not so diversified
But felt like a potential

do we make a difference, between versions as modifications, and the existence of several versions in a distributied space/parallel versions?
When I look for an articel, a square appears with different possible connection points. Points for connection.
Not meaning it to be a datavisualisation, but somehow showing its points of divergence/convergence --- a feminist diff would be:
- not based on machines seeing difference only
- contextualised difference
- a more complex way to see difference

think about the article on climate change ...

rewriting, versioning, and (sometimes) different articles.
wikipedia working definition of consensus is the invisibility of conflict.

how to use measuring for highlighthing conflicts

can it be that on wikipedia you already have some tools
if femke is writing an article and i want to change some stuff
the stuff i change i want to relate to specific words: i cannot write with those words (sorry!)
it is a choice in the end

because different points may present, the different points may be some issues
97 % are saying one thing, and 3% another
the consensus on climate change is about 97%, but on bbc they will have one person that is a climate deniar and one scientists, presented equally

visualization of wikipedia edits:
http://scienceblogs.com/revminds/2009/10/23/docuinformatics-revisited/
    oh wait, it is an ibm project now: https://www.research.ibm.com/visual/projects/history_flow/

other examples of dataviz : 
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/01/15/15-years-data-visualization/
   http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/wikipedia-lamest-edit-wars/
https://www.research.ibm.com/visual/projects/history_flow/explanation.htm

points de convergence/de divergence entre plusieurs articles

"wikipedia is not political"

Fake news -- "Trump would never have been elected if not for fake news"

What does it mean to call for "real news"?
but: what do we put into place of that. 

neutrality = ethics?
neutrality vs situated 

optimisation vs ethics
an encyclopedia which only reports conflicts

what happens if we remove neutrality? what do we put in its place?
first saying: the neutrality is not easy
to add nuance: it is almost impossible to reach it
to question it rather than remove it, to make the question visible
whenever we talk about neutrality, we talk about how impossible it is
if you remove it completely, it is also negating somehow
i would be curious to find a way to get away from the processes of negating
it would be interesting to say: wow, how hard it is to write this article
how many questions we have and to say this is normal

intersubjectivity:
    try to find a viewpoint of a small community


negation of the work, to hide the complexity is a problem

interesting to think about: erasing neutrality, what misses and what are the things that would be highlighted


if we accept that there is no norm, we might have a very different interface

spectralisation of (di)versions
the claim for neutrality is making a norm.

(in wikipedia difference is far away, but it is still there)

wikipedia as a norm itself
english as a norm

maybe we can see systems that can co-exist, that highlight critique/conflicts


look at previous work on wikis, that came before wikipedia


founding nephews