Lessons from an editing course for autistic people [1]
Shortened (max 1h teaching + 30min interaction
Max group size 15
Clear course structure. It's nice to have a course contract (which could scare some allistic people but autistic participants tend to like the structure)
Set communication boundaries, both for the course and for onwiki interactions
You can't please everyone. It's fine to have some participants dislike the course but hopefully more participants like your course and you can improve with feedback
Audience interaction. What is your experience with AI? What are your concerns? What are the concerns specifically for Wikimedia?
Hallucination
New editors posting unchecked machine-generated content (even though we want to give editors some support to start an article, to get over the "tyranny of the blank page")
Tiered access to knowledge
Intellectual property rights
Contributor motivation to create content for Wikimedia - What will potential editors think, knowing that their altruistically contributed content is being exploited by major corporations for commercial gain? (There's no attribution so it violates CC licences)
Attribution can be reputational damage, if a chatbot says it's trained on Wikipedia but serves incorrectly interpreted content
Lorenzo Losa, HJ Mitchell, and Michal led a facilitated session with a debate about unfunded community vs funded WMF & affiliates.
Participants positioned themselves along an axis from Michal's position to HJ's position
Participants are invited to express how the position makes oneself feel, not just the argument itself
Coalescence towards the middle
Feedback - male participants tend to speak up more and get closer to the main axis. However, it would be wrong to consider gender segregated spaces. Facilitators should continue to work on inclusivity.
"Don't try this if you don't know what you're doing" - facilitators warning
