Wikipedia: A Multigenerational Pursuit
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- This article is an adapted version of a speech given at WikiConference North America in November 2023.
Hello everyone, my name is Selena Deckelmann. I'm the Chief Product and Technology Officer at the Wikimedia Foundation.
As many of you know, I started my role at the Foundation a little over a year ago, in August 2022. I want to start by sharing a little bit about what this role means to me: it's very much connected to how I learned about sharing knowledge as a kid.
I grew up in Montana, in the western half of the United States, but I also grew up on the road. My stepfather was part of a pipefitter-welder union, and we traveled to where the work was. We traveled so much that the places that stand out were all shared spaces.
I especially loved the shared space at the public library in downtown Kalispell, Montana. It was an incredible place. I truly looked forward to the time I spent there, which was pretty often after school until one of my parents got off work.
I was lucky enough to have a wonderful children's librarian who spent a ton of time with me, recommending books based on what I liked, talking with me about school and explaining how libraries worked. He explained the card catalog and the Dewey Decimal System. He showed me all the books in the kids section by Roald Dahl, and showed me an Oxford English Dictionary that was available on a lectern as a reference. I got lots of nerd points when I went to university for aspiring to own an OED myself.
It makes me incredibly proud that Wikipedia and all Wikimedia projects contribute to the sharing of knowledge, and that we play as special a role in many people's lives as the Kalispell library played in mine. What Wikipedia has accomplished is the creation of a public space meant for everyone to experience the joy that comes from learning.
Not only that, but Wikipedia also makes it possible to share knowledge at a new and unprecedented scope and scale. We work together to protect these public spaces, and we stand against censorship everywhere. I think it's incredible that we get to do both of those things as a result of the contributions of hundreds of thousands of volunteers worldwide, every month.
Being here builds on my experiences with the many beautiful and useful public spaces I enjoyed as a child.