Title: #VisibleWikiWomen Lab: fostering multilingual and decolonizing structured data narratives on Wikimedia Commons
Speaker: Whose Knowledge?
Abstract: This workshop will be centered in action and experimentation, while approaching Structured Data on Commons (SDC) critically and creatively. The #VisibleWikiWomen campaign, which has brought to Wikimedia Commons more than 8000 images of women and non-binary people from all over the world in the past five years, will be our lab to experiment and better understand issues around visual and data gender gap, accessibility and multilinguality in structured data.

Structured data is at the core of how the internet works. One important feature of SD on Commons (SDC) is multilinguality, which "allows people to easily translate content and provides labels in over 300 languages which are added automatically”. Most importantly, one of the aims of SDC is to improve image accessibility by providing "alt text, text descriptions and other information that makes content more accessible to users with specific needs". It also has the potential to inform AI systems for image recognition, and this is increasingly relevant, since editors in different Wikimedia projects are starting getting automated suggestions through Structured Data Across Wikimedia.

Tackling access/accessibility issues tends to be one of the most neglected aspects of sociotechnical optimization on the internet, yet it is key to knowledge and language justice. Given that only a fraction of online public knowledge is produced on or by women, Black and Brown people, LGBTQI folks, Indigenous communities, and peoples from the Global South, in languages that are not English or mostly European colonial languages, we ask: how can we build anti-oppressive, multilingual, and decolonizing narratives for digital imagery?

To address this question, we will conduct a participatory workshop centered in action and experimentation, while approaching SDC critically and creatively. The #VisibleWikiWomen campaign, which has brought to Wikimedia Commons more than 8000 images of women and non-binary people from all over the world in the last five years, will be our lab to experiment and better understand issues around accessibility and multilinguality in structured data.

This workshop will be a hand-on session in which participants will add/edit SDC components like alternative text and images descriptions and depictions in English and other languages, followed by a time for sharing reflections around the narratives and points of views from where we describe and portray ourselves and other people from marginalized communities.

We want to explore the possibilities, limitations, and impact of a project that centers the knowledge and experience of women, Black and Brown people, LGBTQI folks, people with disabilities, Indigenous communities, and communities from the Global South/Global Majority as authors of their own image metadata.

Presented at: Suntec Singapore Convention and Exhibition Centre, 2023-08-16 02:35 to 3:15 UTC