Projekt:Podcast/Avsnitt 346
Avsnitt 346
Inspelningsdatum: 31 januari 2026
Publiceringsdatum: 6 februari 2026
Lyssna:
Extern länk: https://wikipediapodden.se/wikimedia-futures-lab-benjamin-mako-hill-346/
Programanteckningar
Programledare är Jan Ainali.
Special episode
This is the fifth episode in a series of ten short interviews recorded at the Wikimedia Futures Lab in Frankfurt. In this episode, recorded on day two, we meet User:Benjamin Mako Hill from Cascadia Wikimedians. Also, check out his talk A Model of Peer-Produced Knowledge Commons Lifecycles and Governance from last Wikimania which is the longer version of his talk on the panel.
Transcript
Welcome to Wikipediapodden and this series of interviews from the Wikimedia Futures Lab in Frankfurt the last weekend of January 2026. My name is Jan Ainali. Here we will meet participants, panelists and organizers to give you an idea of what happened at the lab. The interviews took place over three days with the first one just before it started and the last just after the closing ceremony. So you will get to gauge where the attendees were at each point in time. This is the fifth episode of ten recorded on day two.
I am Benjamin Mako-Hill. That's my name and it's actually also my username and I am associated with the Cascadia Wikimedians user group. I'm a contributor to English Wikipedia and have been for many years. I'm a member of the Product Technology Advisory Council and I am a professor at the University of Washington where a lot of the work that I do involves studying Wikimedia projects.
I think you were invited here because you were on the panels when we talked about contributors. Before you came here what were you looking forward to with this event?
Oh gosh, I was looking forward to a few things. I mean of course I was interested in meeting people I know from the movement and have for many years. It's always great to be able to do that. You know I usually do it once a year at Wikipedia. It's cool to do it in kind of the off season. I think that I was very interested in thinking about and talking about the future of Wikimedia and having some of the conversations that I've had quite a bit in the last year as part of PTAC but with a group of people that includes just like a broader slice of the movement and the different sort of organizations and user groups and projects that are involved. I think that one thing I was really excited about was the fact that this whole event was sort of built around hypothesis generation. I'm a social scientist by training and also sort of by occupation and I was pretty excited about the idea of thinking experimentally and thinking about sort of phrasing a lot of the stuff that we have is sort of knowledge and intuition in ways that are maybe testable or falsifiable. I think that it's a cool opportunity to think about the future in a way that I think allows us to kind of put some of our assumptions really on the line and to think concretely about ways to impact stuff in the future.
And you of course gave us some of the trends and insights about contributors. Was there something about the content or consumers that sort of like was news to you or gave you some new insights along this journey?
I think all of the topics that we've talked about here are actually really quite connected in my mind. I think that when we were talking about impacts related to AI or sort of consumers, I was really thinking constantly about how disintermediation and the fact that people are often sort of consuming Wikipedia content in places other than the Wikimedia has effects on contributors and when we're talking about contributors I'm sort of thinking about things related to AI as well. So I think that for me you know it's useful to split these up into separate topics but I think that they're all really quite closely related. I've learned lots of things both about what I see as some real sort of shifts in terms of people's values and sort of changes in terms of the kinds of things that they think are important but just like a number of people that are sort of not from the movement who I think have brought really interesting different perspectives. So yeah I mean I've learned a lot.
And we're at almost at the end of day two and we have about I think 100 hypotheses on the walls here and you had a chance to already walk through these. How do you feel about us going forward now with all of these hypotheses? Are you excited? Is it overwhelming?
It's definitely overwhelming. I think that there's a lot of different ideas. One thing I thought was pretty exciting was that there were a lot of hypotheses that I think are actually just really actionable and testable and doable right now. There's a bunch that are like we should improve this thing right and I think that that's a great idea but I'm not really sure exactly how to do that. But there's a number of them that I think are things that we could just walk out of here tomorrow and we could you know start putting in motion. So I think that that's pretty exciting to see.
Is there already something that you're bringing home to do that like oh there's things that might slot into your everyday work?
Well it's interesting so as a social scientist I think that part of my work maybe the biggest part of my work is doing research that is hypothesis testing. So definitely I'm looking through there at hypotheses where I'm like hmm that's actually testable. I wonder if that's true. Maybe one thing that I'll do is if some of these things are going to move forward if people are going to try these out I would love to actually test them or work with people to test them as hypotheses. So for example how could we do this as an experiment? How could we identify for example a control group or maybe I can do it on some set of wikis and not on others to actually understand in a sort of hypothesis testing like way in a sort of experimental way whether or not these hypotheses are you know like does the evidence support them or just the evidence not support them?
Perhaps finally the last question which might be the hardest sort of we see all of these ideas what are your hopes that we can actually implement them with the rest of the community or how should we do you have some words on the way to the rest of the community?
So I think that when people talk about experiments or experimenting I think that one thing to keep in mind is that experiments means we're just going to try it out right and I think that I guess my message to anyone who couldn't be here in Frankfurt but who's like seeing some of the stuff that comes out of this is that let's take this with a sense of experimentation. One thing that I've seen very clearly here and which I've seen also at Wikipedia and I think broadly within the movement is this idea that like although we may not know exactly what we need to do and we may not have consensus on what the best way forward is I think that there really is growing recognition that the movement is facing a series of threats including things related to AI but actually also just related to broader trends related to sort of contributors of the fact that like a lot of the most active people in our projects are people that I've known for a really long time and that's maybe a bit of a challenge. I think that there's a sense that a growing sense that we should do something right and I think that approaching things as a set of hypotheses it's a way of framing things that I really like because it doesn't suggest that we know what the answer is and it doesn't suggest that we're going to say great this is the thing that we're going to do it's suggesting that these are the things that we're going to try and maybe we're going to try them in a way that's going to allow us to evaluate whether or not they were true and then we'll decide whether and how much of these things we want to keep in the longer term so I would just say let's approach this. There seems to be a lot of consensus within our movement that we should be doing things differently or at least trying things out and I think that um let's try things out.
Great words on the way. Thank you Mako for joining the podcast.
Yeah it's a pleasure to be here.
This was the fifth interview out of ten. When all are published you will find them on Wikimedia Commons both in the Wikimedia Futures lab and Wikipediapodden categories and of course on Wikipediapodden.se under the Wikimedia Futures lab tag. There you can also find other episodes in English.