Ep. 4: The History of Ideas | Astrid Carlsen
In this episode of “Speaking of Us”, Kristen and Daniel talk with Astrid Carlsen, Executive Director of Wikimedia Norge, about the languages of Norway, support from cultural institutions, and Wikimedia structures.
This is a transcript of Episode 4 of “Speaking of Us”. To listen to this episode, visit Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or Google Podcasts. If you enjoy it, please leave a review and subscribe for new episodes! Thanks to Ula Adamska and Kristen Tcherneshoff for transcribing this episode.
KRISTEN: Hello, and welcome back to “Speaking of Us,” where we explore what language teaches us about who we are and where we come from. I’m Kristen Tcherneshoff.
DANIEL: And I’m Daniel Bögre Udell.
KRISTEN: And today we have with us Astrid Carlsen, the executive director of Wikimedia Norway, and she also has a background in publishing, where she worked at one of the largest publishing firms in the Nordics — I am not going to mess up that name. And she is here with us today to talk about her work at Wikimedia, language diversity online, and representation within cultural institutions. We’re glad to have you here.
ASTRID: Thank you. I’m glad to be here.
DANIEL: But before we get started, I’d like to take a moment and thank two patrons, Sharon Montano and Ryan Villanueva. Sharon and Ryan, thank you so much for supporting Wikitongues and the work that we do. You make this podcast and all our projects possible. You give us life, thank you for your generosity. Astrid, it’s so exciting to have a Wikimedian on the podcast today.
ASTRID: Thank you, I’m very excited to be here.
DANIEL: Could you tell us a little bit about your mother tongue, Norwegian? What’s your relation — or is it your mother tongue?
ASTRID: Yeah, Norwegian is my mother tongue. In Norway we have two official variations of Norwegian. One called Norwegian Bokmål, which is very much similar to Danish in writing, and also the Norwegian form called Nynorsk. Because my parents are from the western part of Norway and I’m born and raised in Oslo, so I actually speak a mix of the two.
DANIEL: Could you tell us about the two official variations of the language, how do they differ, how are they related, why are there two official variations?
ASTRID: Oh, wow. Very good questions. [Daniel laughs] Do I know the correct answer to all of these? Sorry, I probably don’t. Let me try to answer… I have to start off with saying that this is quite like a touchy subject in Norway, because the two different variations will have two strong groups supporting them. And especially, of course, the smaller, the Norwegian Nynorsk, is used by fewer people and therefore is more threatened. So I’d be afraid to recap the history of how the two variations were established because I can very easily say something wrong.
KRISTEN: Mhmm.
ASTRID: But of course the Norwegian Bokmål is very much a result of the connections between Norway and Denmark. And the Norwegian Nynorsk is pretty much like a project where very many different dialects in Norway were collected and you made, like, one official version and said, this is what we’ll go with. And in the public schools today you can choose what variation you like to use. And even though you choose, for example, the Norwegian Bokmål, you also have to have some classes in Norwegian Nynorsk. And this is under constant debate, like, how to… How should I say that… How much should both languages be used in the schools. Of course, also publicly. For the Norwegian broadcasting company, the national broadcasting company, they are obliged to use both variations. In all government correspondence and forms and so on, the government is obliged to have them accessible in both Norwegian Bokmål and Norwegian Nynorsk.
DANIEL: What is the relationship between Norway and Denmark, since you mentioned that Bokmål is partly a product of that?
ASTRID: I think for Norwegians to understand the Danish language in writing is quite easy. To understand the Danish language when it’s spoken, for Norwegians, are more difficult. I assume that for Danish people to understand Norwegians, in my experience, it seems like it’s even more difficult. Yeah.
KRISTEN: Yeah, Norwegians are often, they’re considered like that. When you hear about how “similar” Scandinavian languages are and how that they are often given as the example that a language is a dialect within language, that kind of example. Norwegians are often classified in the center because they are known for being able to understand the Swedes and the Danes, whereas a lot of Swedes might have trouble understanding someone from Denmark. Like, they can, but it’s not as natural as for someone from Norway.
ASTRID: Absolutely. And when I grew up, in my childhood we had a Swedish television, which at the time was like this big thing and we could watch something else than our Norwegian television channel, so a lot of people in my generation, we watched Swedish television and got familiar with the Swedish language. I noticed when I talked, for example, to my nieces and nephews, they find it much more difficult to understand Swedish than my generation do. And maybe it’s connected to this. Yeah, we dived into the Swedish television channels because it was so much cooler than the Norwegian ones. [laughs]
KRISTEN: Yeah, [laughs] The Swedes kind of rule the television here. So I’m really interested by your answer because… It answered it for me, but actually it wasn’t the answer I was expecting because I’ve often read about Norway as being a classic diglossia situation, wherein it means, diglossia, which we talked about in another episode when we were talking about Arabic languages, in that, there’s one variety that’s considered — I hate this terming but it’s what we use in linguistics — one variety is considered the high variety and it’s used in certain settings or is perceived to be of the higher variety. And there’s a variety or more that is considered the L-variety, so “low” variety, and it’s used in other settings.
So that’s actually what I was expecting you to talk about, and I don’t know if that’s how it was in the past perhaps, and that’s where I got this idea from. Or if it’s never been that way and I just read it incorrectly, but the way you described it makes it seem like both of these varieties of Norwegian are getting equal support from the government and recognition in the education system.
ASTRID: Absolutely. And I think people and organizations working to support the Norwegian Nynorsk, this has been very, very strong organization throughout the years. So they’ve done a lot of work to make sure that Nynorsk is prioritized in every setting in the same way as Bokmål. And you have a special theatre in Oslo that do all their performances in Nynorsk. You have publishing companies that will publish literature in Nynorsk. And I think among arts and within the use of language, I think Nynorsk is very, very much recognized. Because it has… how do I describe this in English… the language has a different melody than the Norwegian Bokmål.
DANIEL: For the record, I also had this misconception that Bokmål was the formal variety of the language and the Nynorsk was not. So I think there might be a good bit of misinformation in the English speaking world.
KRISTEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: So I’m happy to burst that bubble here. [all laugh]
ASTRID: Maybe I’m speaking also from my point of view, because I very much appreciate both variations and feel they should be equal. If you ask other Norwegians, you will probably get a lot of answers from people saying the Nynorsk variation should be, get rid of it. Yeah, this is how the world works.
KRISTEN: If you’re Norwegian and listening to this, and you have another opinion and would like to nicely and democratically share it with us, we would love to hear it. [laughs]
ASTRID: Absolutely!
DANIEL: We love opinions. And we would love to hear yours. I have a question about the broader linguistic diversity of Norway. So we’ve touched on the contentiousness of Norwegians to standardizations, but there are other languages in Norway. Indigenous languages that have complicated histories as well. Right?
ASTRID: Absolutely. You have Indigenous languages, the Sami languages, which are also recognized as official languages in Norway. And you have other minority languages in Norway that also are officially recognized.
DANIEL: What are some of those minority languages that aren’t Sami?
ASTRID: Maybe I say them in Norwegian now, I’m not sure. One language is kvensk, or the Kven language in English, I’m not sure. Romani, romanes. And also the Norwegian Sign Language.
DANIEL: Fabulous. And you said all of these languages are officially recognized?
ASTRID: Yes.
KRISTEN: You talked about your relationship with the varieties of Norwegian, what about the other languages of Norway? What was it like growing up in Norway, did you come in contact with Kven or one of the Romani languages or Sami at any point?
ASTRID: There was one song for the Eurovision song contest that had, in the 80s, small part of the song was in Sami. And when I was a kid, then youth, this was like, this song was the biggest presence, I have to say, of the Sami language.
KRISTEN: Mmm.
ASTRID: I’m 43, so if you go back like 20 years ago, I think we’re very much still talking about the time when the people using Sami languages would do so privately.
KRISTEN: Mmm.
ASTRID: Within their families and friends.
DANIEL: So this was still the time when there was social stigma around speaking a language that wasn’t Norwegian.
ASTRID: Yeah. And this is still very much an issue in Norway. And I think also in Sweden and in Finland, when it comes to the Sami languages. There will still be a lot of situations where it will be…what’s the word you used, Daniel?
DANIEL: Social stigma.
ASTRID: Yes. There will be social stigma connected to using the languages, Sami languages.
DANIEL: Right.
KRISTEN: So…the Sami languages are officially recognized in Norway, you mentioned, right?
ASTRID: Yes.
KRISTEN: And… Are they recognized in Sweden as official or minority? I don’t remember. But, so you’re saying the social stigma is still attached, even though they are recognized as official languages. What about in the sense of what the government provides, is there equal access for people who speak Sami languages as opposed to people who speak Norwegian, in the government sector and in the health sector?
ASTRID: To a large degree, there is. This is also like a constant discussion, and maybe also a time of constant battle, to make sure that written government documents and so on are available in the Sami languages. In Norway, we have our own Sami parliaments and we have a number of different Sami institutions that of course are incredibly important for the use of the languages and the awareness of the languages, and also for making sure that they are recognized and used as much as the Norwegian languages.
One interesting example is when it comes to the Sami place names, which the official mapping authority in Norway, they have done a lot of work in collecting the Sami place names in the three different Sami languages in Norway: Northern Sami, Southern Sami, and Lule Sami, and they made these publicly available. And we’re working now together with them on a project to upload them to Wikidata so they are available for use, for example in Wikipedia. But what I wanted to share with you, for example in the northern part of Norway where they have put signs, like by the roads, and they have the signs in Norwegian, so the place name in Norwegian, and the place name in Northern Sami. Unfortunately, many of these signs have been vandalized and destroyed because the Norwegians don’t want Sami place names used or shown publicly.
DANIEL: That’s terrible.
ASTRID: Mmhm.
DANIEL: Do you think this is perhaps changing for the better? You mentioned that over the past 20 years there has been a shift in consciousness amongst speakers of languages that aren’t Norwegian. And that’s a shift toward pride and shift away from shame. Do you think the Norwegian-speaking society is becoming more accepting? Because while these reactionaries are out there vandalizing the signs, there are signs for them to vandalize in the first place, right? So that’s a positive development.
ASTRID: My guess would be that, like within music, within arts, within recognizing the Sami history and Sami craftmanshift — I guess there is more and more recognition. And we have a lot of very, very well-known artists from the Sami communities. But they’re also very visible in the public. But when it comes to, for example, issues connected to natural resources, and maybe the place names and the signs, is somewhat attached to natural resources in an abstract way, I think this will continue to be a very difficult subject.
KRISTEN: One of the recent events, that people outside the Nordics most likely, unless focusing on these issues, probably haven’t heard about. Last year, I think it was, when the railway road was overturned, was it last year, do you remember Astrid? There was a proposed railroad that was going to connect Finland, Sweden, Norway through Lapland.
ASTRID: Mhmm.
KRISTEN: And go through at least 8 different reindeer herding communities, so that would completely destroy the economy, and the nature, and the herding… I don’t know the correct terminology… Do you say farms for reindeer? I don’t know. But it was a really big deal, of course, because that’s infiltrating and abusing Indigenous lands. So a lot of activists teamed together across the Nordics and were able to overturn that last year and it helped bring a lot of awareness to Indigenous land rights in the Nordics, at least. And I know a lot of people, at least in my community, started talking about it and had never thought or even considered that to be an issues before, people of non-Sami heritage.
ASTRID: Mhm. I think there had been several cases like this the past couple of years. Also some really, really big cases in Sweden. I think one very difficult and interesting aspect on this, and I don’t know very much about this, but I know there is a discussion about when you want to find… how do you say it… The environment-friendly… is that the word…?
KRSITEN: Yeah!
ASTRID: … ways of producing power. Often we will think wind power or power you can produce from nature is a very good thing, right? Instead of using oil or gas or something like that. But if this is the way you want to produce power, you will need to use a lot of the lands. Like for example, in northern Norway. And some of these projects would, if they become the reality, they would, like in your example, Kristen, they would have completely destroyed the herding opportunities. The reindeer, the Samis that live from reindeer, I don’t know the correct word here, either, in English… how do we say it…
DANIEL: The reindeer herders.
ASTRID: Yes! Thank you. The reindeer herders would have no opportunity to continue living off their reindeer herds if these plans come alive. And I think this is very, if we paint the very broad picture, is maybe this idea, people sitting in Oslo, the capital of Norway, thinking about: oh, new ways to make power in a green way… and well, all these places in the northern Norway that are empty, so let’s put them to use. I’m saying it not precise, but, I think, this was the kind of feeling many people in northern part of Norway and others would have about these plans.
DANIEL: In English, and especially in the U.S., we have this phrase, nimbyism, which stands for “not in my backyard” and…
ASTRID: Mhm.
DANIEL: … it’s the tendency of people to want projects but to not want to see those projects. Right? Presumably there are other places in Norway where windmills could go. But people don’t wanna see the windmills so they figured, let’s put them up north, and who cares about the people up there and who actually are using that land for different purpose. That’s not as important as me not having to look at windmills.
ASTRID: Absolutely.
DANIEL: Nimbyism. [laughs]
ASTRID: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
DANIEL: It’s an international phenomenon.
[Daniel laughs]
ASTRID: And I think a lot in these cases very often, there’s a lack of knowledge…
DANIEL: Right.
ASTRID: … of the Sami way of living.
DANIEL: So on that note we’re gonna take a very quick break, and when we come back we’re gonna learn about Astrid’s work toward promoting and amplifying the sum of human knowledge in all its linguistic expression. We’ll be right back.
[Music plays]
KRISTEN: Welcome back to “Speaking of Us” and thanks again for tuning in to this week’s episode. We’re here with Astrid Carlsen, the executive director at Wikimedia Norway, talking about her work sustaining language diversity online. So Astrid, your background is in — you have a master’s degree in the history of ideas. Could you tell us a little more about this?
ASTRID: Yeah. My master degree is, as you said, in history of ideas, which is a subject that is maybe like a mix of history and philosophy. And the main approach in this subject is to basically ask yourself all the time: the history I’m reading, the books I’m reading, or the history we are investigating — why is it written in this way? Where did the author come from? What time was it written in? What was like the political landscape at that time?
So basically is to try to investigate history and what we read in a way that there’s not one truth or just not one story, but most of the time there are like millions of truths and millions of stories. And it will all depend on who wrote it down, at what time, and so on. Yeah.
KRISTEN: Ongoing lesson to take, especially with different ways for us to continue to get news from people, and ideas, and viewpoints. It’s important…
ASTRID: Absolutely.
KRISTEN: Was there a specific era that you were interested in or a geographical region that you’ve been interested in?
ASTRID: Yes! There was! I was and still are, I was very interested in the history of East Germany. So I wrote my master degree on East German dissident and author, called Jürgen Fuchs. I also got to spend one year in Berlin while I was doing my master’s degree. And I was writing about the period of mainly 1970s in East Germany and this author was put in prison by the Stasi I was kind of investigating or looking into how this prison experience affected him and what he was writing later on. And also how his writing turned out to have an effect on other people, or, not have an effect, but how was helpful for other people that were put in prison later on. Because he wrote a very precise diary from his year in prison in East Germany, and then he was brought to West Germany and lived there later on. I can talk about this forever, so I will stop here. [laughs]
DANIEL: I have a vocabulary questions for you.
ASTRID: Yup.
DANIEL: In Norwegian, do you have the word historiography? Versus history?
ASTRID: I….I should know this. When you study in Norway, a lot of the literature you read is in English. So now…
DANIEL: Oh!
ASTRID: So I’m a bit unsure if we have it in Norwegian too, but I think so, yeah.
DANIEL: I um, this is a total tangent, but I’m excited to tell you this. My master’s is in history, too, although not really historiography. But there’s one book that I only skimmed during my master’s that I’ve been rereading slowly and carefully during quarantine. And that’s the Muqaddima which was — did you have to read the Muqaddima?
ASTRID: No.
DANIEL: So it’s from the 14th century and it’s considered to be the first work of historiography. And it was written by this jurist from Cairo who wanted to elevate the field of history to more of a philosophical discipline, as opposed to simple chronicling, which is what it had been up until then. And so he took a lot of his legal theory about the rigorous interpretation of facts and how we remember them to write this treatise of how history should be a more philosophical discipline. And it’s really, really interesting to read.
ASTRID: Wow.
DANIEL: I think — yeah, from a history of ideas standpoint, it’s obviously very spatially and temporally far away from East Germany in the 70s, but it’s cool, it’s very interesting.
ASTRID: If I ever have to get back to quarantine, I know what books to read. [laughs]
DANIEL: Yeah it’s long, and very much written in the 1300s, so it’s not like — there’s a reason I skimmed it in grad school.
[laughter]
KRISTEN: And there’s a reason you waited until quarantine to really get through it.
DANIEL: Right, I was like well…alright, let’s do this, instead of…going to bars.
And so, the history of ideas sounds like a direct pathway to your work with the Wikimedia Foundation, right? What was the journey from writing about East German dissidence to stewarding the Norway chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation, and for the uninitiated we’ll talk about what that actually is in a second.
ASTRID: Thank you for asking this question because it actually took me a couple of years in this job to see how my master’s degree was very much relevant for the work at Wikimedia Norway. It may sound strange but it took me some years to see these parallels between the writing of history and the neutrality in history, the neutrality in facts, and how history is constantly rewritten.
DANIEL: Why don’t we zoom out and clarify what Wikimedia is. Because most people are familiar with Wikipedia and I don’t think they’re aware that it’s part of a larger ecosystem.
ASTRID: Yeah. So Wikimedia Norway is one of many Wikimedia chapters that exist around the world. These chapters are recognized by the Wikimedia Foundation, which is based in the United States. And in this Wikimedia family, organizational family, there are also many user groups, Wikimedia user groups. And Wikitongues is also a user group, right? Recognized user group?
DANIEL: Yes, we are.
ASTRID: Yep. Some of the chapters will have staff, some of the chapters are quite big, like Wikimedia Deutschland. Some of the chapters don’t have staff at all. What we do in our work is not to edit Wikipedia, or not to proofread it, or approve any content. We don’t edit Wikipedia as part of our work at all. What our work and task is, is to make it possible for as many as possible to contribute to Wikipedia, volunteers. And also a large part of the work is to make sure that different institutions can contribute to Wikipedia. For example, cultural institutions or educational institutions that often have big, big collections of knowledge in one shape or form or the other. And in Norway these institutions will be state-owned, which means that would want to and they are obliged to share their knowledge with as many as possible. And then, Wikipedia is a good way of making sure you share your collections with many people.
DANIEL: And just to be extra explicitly clear, the Wikimedia Foundation and its constituent chapters, user groups, and other affiliates, is a non-profit ecosystem that maintains Wikipedia. Correct?
ASTRID: Absolutely. Yes, thank you, it is.
DANIEL: Awesome. So, why don’t you tell us about some of the projects that you’re working on as the executive director of Wikimedia Norway?
ASTRID: Yeah, I would like to. So one big project we have been working on since 2017, which we have called Sami Knowledge Online. It’s taken us quite a long time to build this project because none of the employees, we don’t speak Sami, we don’t have a Sami background and of course it was crucial to the project that we found Sami institutions and partners that find interest and value in this project. And there’s Northern Sami Wikipedia, it has about 7,600 articles, which, compared to many other Wikipedias is very, very small. But considering how few users of the Northern Sami language there are, it’s quite a good number. And we started off the project very optimistically, and maybe a bit too narrow-minded on thinking: OK, Northern Sami Wikipedia, how can we attract more editors and increase the number of articles.
And as this project has progressed, we have broadened very much the scope of the project to be also about how can Wikimedia Norway help make sure there is more Sami content available online. There’s actually a way of writing articles for the Northern Sami language. For example, there is more source material available: if it’s books, from the National Library in Sami. Or if it’s images, describing Sami history from the National Archive, and so on. And we realized we had to take one step back and start by also try to support or discuss and make the public aware that the source material is missing. Which I think is very often also a discussion when you work with gender gap projects on Wikipedia.
DANIEL: Mhm.
ASTRID: You don’t find the source material to write about women that are notable, but very often unfortunately were left out of the history books.
DANIEL: Like, for example, the many women in the US who worked on the Apollo space program were essential to the mathematics of the engineering, but are often, or until recently were pretty much left out of the stories about the space program. As if there were no women involved, even though they were.
ASTRID: Exactly, yeah.
DANIEL: So that’s the global problem.
ASTRID: Absolutely, a global problem. It’s not easy to fix. Wikipedia and what you find on Wikipedia will of course reflect the rest of the world, so it’s not like Wikimedia Norway and Norway Sami partners, we cannot have a goal of oh, let’s write 10,000 articles for the Northern Sami Wikipedia. Because of the source material that is there, the starting point is not there, so we have to go back to who wrote the history and what was included and what was not included. And one way of trying to… I think there are two main ways of trying to address this problem. One way is for us as organization supporting Wikipedia, is to make sure that different institutions are aware of this problem. And to encourage them, too. Ok, when you start digitalizing different collections, do you always want to start with the most famous men, or do you want to, like, maybe start somewhere else. And it’s also a discussion, I think, for the history we’re writing today and Wikipedia articles we’re writing today. I think we still see a lot of examples on Wikipedia that a biography on a woman will often introduce her family relations: She’s the daughter of X… She was married to Y… And you see those a lot more seldomly in biographies about men. So this is also, this example was maybe not the best, but I think this is also very much an awareness discussion of how do we write history TODAY to make sure we’re not repeating and leaving out underrepresented groups as it has been done in the past.
KRISTEN: I’m curious just from a personal standpoint, which language on Wikipedia, when we’re talking about the gender gap, which language has the most biographies written about women? Because I know with English, which is the largest Wikipedia, is less than 20%, I think it’s 15% or 17 or something like that, is written on… From, like, a personal curiosity, I wonder which language has the most. Not, like, the most of others, you know, which ones are crushing over 20%. [laughs]
DANIEL: Which is the greatest gender parity.
KRISTEN: Yeah.
ASTRID: Yeah. There is, of course, there is a tool for this, to check it on Wikipedia.
KRISTEN: Ah! I didn’t know that.
ASTRID: I can check it out and let you know afterwards because I don’t remember which Wikipedia has, like, the most gender balance in biographies. But I do think that, I do know that in Armenia and on the Armenian Wikipedia, there is, among the contributors, the volunteers, they have pretty much, I think this is correct, pretty much a gender balance. Because they have a lot of student program, lots of students contributing, so they have also managed to have very much like a gender balance among the volunteers.
DANIEL: Word. Go Armenia!
ASTRID: So I think Armenia, the numbers there are pretty good. But I think the most gender-balanced Wikipedia is maybe like a really small one, and then you have 2 or 3 editors that will be very, very active. And if they choose to concentrate on women it will of course have a big effect. So the smaller the Wikipedia, I would guess the easier to also… yeah… have equality in the numbers.
KRISTEN: Yeah, there’s a non-profit that Astrid and I were talking about just yesterday, that focuses on both of these issues that we’ve been discussing, actually. Getting more Wikipedia pages translated into languages besides English and also to get more representation of women on Wikipedia pages. So Art&Fem focuses on both of those and they have edit-a-thons and translate-a-thons, where they encourage women from different language communities to translate biographies of women from either English, or French, or Spanish, or one of the most widely spoken languages of the world into other languages so that they’re breaking… what’s the two birds with one stone… There’s the saying I was trying to say… To get language and women represented more on Wikipedia.
ASTRID: Mhm. Yeah, they do great work. And we’re hoping in the future to do a project with them but first we have to see if we can find the funding. Yeah.
DANIEL: Can people donate to this if they’re listening and wanna support such a project?
ASTRID: They can definitely give a donation, if they’re willing, to Wikimedia Norway. We don’t have a way to donate specifically to one project. Any donations to support our work is of course very welcome.
DANIEL: And that can be done where online?
ASTRID: Yeah. That can be done on our homepage: Wikimedia.no. And there’s a link there, both in Norwegian, English, and Northern Sami for donations.
KRISTEN: Mhm. We’ll add that into this description and the accompanying blog post.
ASTRID: Perfect!
DANIEL: So I remember hearing that Asturian language Wikipedia had the highest gender parity. Which, I guess, would conform to your point, Astrid, that the smaller languages actually might have easier time doing this, ’cause they have fewer editors and more direction.
ASTRID: Yeah.
DANIEL: So Kristen had a question about GLAM… Kristen, do you wanna…?
ASTRID: Yeah!
KRISTEN: I did. So, I saw and we discussed and you mentioned in the first part of the episode, you discussed a bit about cultural institutions, I forget why we mentioned it, but we’ve been talking about it now in the sense of the Norwegian institutions and asking for their materials. And I was hoping that you could talk more, talk a bit about GLAM, and explain to people what that is, and the ways in which those programs help support language sustainability.
ASTRID: Ok, I’ll try. So a lot of the different volunteers and Wikimedia chapters user groups and other affiliates, very often they would have a GLAM program, or a GLAM project. And GLAM stands for, let’s see, Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums. And I think that working with these kinds of institutions is a very good match between Wikimedia organization and a GLAM institution, because often we will have the same gold. Goal, sorry, not gold. [laughs]
KRISTEN: That would be helpful though, right? [laughs]
ASTRID: Yeah, yeah, let’s have some gold as well
DANIEL: Yeahhh
KRISTEN: We will take that.
ASTRID: Ah sorry, I am getting a bit tired. Often, the Wikimedia organization and the GLAM institutions, we will have the same goal. Which is to, of course, share as much knowledge as possible, with everyone. I think especially for us in Norway, working with libraries and archives is very, very helpful and we see that they are, even on like the national level, like the National Library, the National Archive, they really see and recognize the value of Wikipedia.
This has of course been very important for building the Wikimedia Norway organization, that they have opened their doors and we have partnerships with them to do different kinds of work. The different kinds of work can be events, it can be that they will take in what is called “Wikipedian in residence”, like a Wikipedian working, a person, sorry, with a lot of knowledge about Wikipedia will work with the institutions for a time period to make sure collections are shared on Wikipedia or the other Wikimedia projects. The work is often about mass uploads to Wikimedia Commons, for example images or manuscripts. And the work is also more and more about collaborations on Wikidata. For example, what I was mentioning earlier about the place names from the Norwegian mapping authority, this is a project we’re doing on Wikidata.
KRISTEN: Could you explain how Wikidata differs from the Wikipedia sites that people are most common with?
ASTRID: Yeah. I’m no Wikidata expert, this is my colleague Jon, he is the expert. But Wikidata is structured data that are used on Wikipedia, but of course can be used by anyone because it’s under a free license. By making sure, for example, the place names are available in the Sami languages on the Wikidata, it makes it a lot more easier for a volunteer editor to write the article about the place names. If we say it very simple, if you’re writing a Wikipedia article, you can, kind of, collect facts from Wikidata that are used in your Wikipedia article. And one example is maybe, how many inhabitants do Helsinki have, and this number will be on Wikidata so you don’t have to update every language version of Wikipedia about the number of inhabitants, it’s done automatically.
KRISTEN: Oh, nice!
ASTRID: And everyone who works a lot with Wikidata, they will probably explain this better.
DANIEL: [laughs]
So it’s effectively the data architecture of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Commons, which, for those who are uninitiated, is the platform that stores all of Wikipedia’s multimedia.
ASTRID: Yes.
DANIEL: So, one really common activity in the Wikipedia movement that, I understand, you organize quite a lot of, is the edit-a-thon and the translate-a-thon, right? These are ways that Wikimedia chapters and affiliates structure mass contributions to Wikipedia. Could you tell us a little bit about edit-a-thons and translate-a-thons?
ASTRID: Our edit-a-thons are mainly in collaboration with universities and higher education institutions, and one very good thing about this is that we will work with universities and editing Wikipedia will be part of the curriculum the students have. So they will…
DANIEL: Hmm.
ASTRID: — they will learn how to edit as part of their education. Often it will also be with an angle of, ok, writing your master’s degree, take one subject from the master’s degree and write the Wikipedia article. But also not just write it but also follow how it develops through the semester. Because, as most people probably know very well, a Wikipedia article is not like it’s written by one person and then it’s done. Most of the times there are a lot of people editing the same article and it will be updated, it will be changed, it will be discussed. And yeah, have a life of its own over the years. This has been very important for us to teach to students that this way of creating, and writing, and sharing knowledge is not done by one person alone but in a collaborative kind of way. Which is very much a contrast to the academic way of producing knowledge, where you have the professor writing her or his article, putting the name on the bottom, and then it’s done and it’s the truth forever. [laughs]
DANIEL: Unless you co-author articles, like Kristen and I have done.
[all laugh]
ASTRID: Of course. Which is a very good idea. [laughs]
KRISTEN: And then it’s the truth by two people. [laughs]
DANIEL: Right. That is, we are collaboratively authoring the absolute truth.
[Kristen laughs]
DANIEL: But in translate-a-thons… [laughs] When you structure the translation of articles in one Wikipedia edition into another. For example, you can get a bunch of people in a room and translate already written articles from Norwegian Wikipedia into Sami. Right?
ASTRID: Yes. And so far…
DANIEL: Did you do any of that?
ASTRID: So far, we have never done translate-a-thon yet, but we’re starting a program with the Sami University in Northern Norway, and this program is funded by the Sami Parliament. It was supposed to start now in May but we have to postpone it.
DANIEL: Mhm.
ASTRID: And one of the things we will do is this translate-a-thon.
DANIEL: Cool!
ASTRID: And make sure that the tools and the descriptions on how you do this, how you use the translation tool, make sure we have good translations to explain it in Northern Sami. Because it’s probably a very good way to… We’re hoping it’s a good way to introduce Wikipedia to the students, instead of writing an article from scratch.
DANIEL: That’s extraordinary. There’s one other type of event that we piloted last year with AfroCrowd, actually…
ASTRID: Hmhm.
DANIEL: … and Whose Knowledge. Which, for the uninitiated, for those who are not familiar with Wikimedia, are two other Wikimedia either affiliates or chapters, I’m not sure what their official status is. What we did with them for the record-a-thon, we structured mass oral history recording for the Wikimedia Commons. Because right now in the Wikimedia movement there is an ongoing debate about how we should treat oral citation and oral knowledge, as, you know, an anthropologist or a sociologist or even a historian might. Right now, of course, Wikipedia has a very strict adherence to only accepting written data as citable, right? And we should totally organize a record-a-thon for the languages of Norway at one point, I think that would be terrific.
ASTRID: That would be so cool if we could make it happen, yeah!
DANIEL: But in the meantime, I think we need to close this book. Do we have any other final thoughts or questions for Astrid today?
KRISTEN: Not for me. Is there anything you’d like to add, Astrid? That we didn’t get around to or you’d like to share?
ASTRID: No… I’m looking through some notes and I think we covered a lot.
DANIEL: Alright, great job everybody. Astrid, how do you say thank you in Norwegian?
ASTRID: You say: Takk.
DANIEL: Takk…
ASTRID: Yes!
DANIEL: … or in other words: Thank you!
[all laugh]
DANIEL: This has been “Speaking of Us” with Astrid Carlsen, executing director at Wikimedia Norway. If you want to find out more about her work and support her work you can do so at Wikimedia.no.
ASTRID: Yes.
DANIEL: If you wanna learn more about Wikitongues and some of the languages that we talked about today, you can head over to this episode at Wikitongues.org/podcast for associated media. [closing music begins]
And, of course, whenever you get your podcast, if you like what we’re doing, please subscribe and leave a review, because it helps the podcasts grow. We’ll see you next time!
If you would like to donate to support the work of Wikitongues or if you would like to get to know our work, please visit wikitongues.org. To watch our oral histories, subscribe to our YouTube channel or visit wikitongues.org to submit a video.
