User:Doctor 17

Hi, I'm an Australian researcher interested in all things Wikipedia.

In 2019 I co-hosted a conference with Fransplace and Wikimedia Australia at University of Sydney. WOW2019: The worlds of Wikimedia: communicating and collaborating across languages and cultures and in 2022, WOW2022 Diversity, Diasporas and Digitality: The Worlds of Wikimedia.

I was a member of the Affiliations Committee from 2020-2022; am currently Vice President of Wikimedia Australia; and a member of Women Who Write Wiki; Women In Red and WikiProject Bhutan.

What I find most interesting about Wikipedia - both the site and the Wikimedia movement that drives it - is its skill in accommodating multiple points of view. Jimmy Wales said that was why he created the Neutral Point of View rule: ‘The whole concept of Neutral Point of View, as I originally envisioned it, was this idea of a social concept, for helping people get along: to avoid or sidestep a lot of philosophical debates. Someone who believes that truth is socially constructed, and somebody who believes that truth is a correspondence to the facts in reality, they can still work together’ (Wales cited in Reagle, 2010, p. 53).

As Wikipedia scholar Nathaniel Tkacz observed, this has been highly successful in allowing different and, indeed, often conflicting views, to be absorbed into a single frame (2015, p. 49).

In a diverse (and often divided) world that's worth celebrating!

I attended Wikimania South Africa in 2019 and Singapore 2023. Both were fabulous. Big shoutout to the dedicated ESEAP tribe.