Speculating Together With Care

Using MediaWiki

The wiki is powered by MediaWiki, which has many tutorials and a User’s Guide with details on using the wiki software. Key pages that are helpful:

• Cheatsheet
• Formatting text

If you run into trouble, or have a specific question, using your favourite search engine and searching “mediawiki”plus your questions generally leads to an answer!

Additional Resources

Video walkthroughs of key actions:

• Media Wiki Training Youtube Playlist, first 5 videos in particular.

Evergreen State College has a great set of tutorials and guides:

• Intro to Wikis
• Getting started with the Visual Editor
• Adding New Pages
• Wiki Syntax Basics
• Working with Images
• Tables

They also cover more advanced wiki topics, including Categories, Citations and References, and Templates.

Speculating together

We are inviting you to speculate on our collective future, which we recognize would be incomplete without a discussion of power dynamics, difference and marginal identities. We want to create a space where we can handle potentially sensitive themes with care rather than avoid them.

We have begun with shared commitments to guide us, which we invite anyone to add to:

• Dig where we stand¹, and write about topics and themes that connect to us, our experience, interests, and region, but that doesn’t mean we will be silent on challenges far away
• In the spirit of building on what others have added, we will say “yes, and” to what others have written, not reverting all their contributions but adding and extending what is already there, or making minor clarifying edits, rather than worrying too much about contributions
• We will approach our contributions with humility (we can make revisions!) and start with a level of trust about what other participants are writing

We have been inspired by the work of speculative fiction writers and historical traditions and how they address creating worlds, handle power dynamics, and focus their attention. Just a few of those resources include:

• N.K. Jemisin interview on Ezra Klein Show: I build a world with fantasy master N.K. Jemisin (transcript), in particular the 40 minute and 55 minute mark
• Additional recommendations for us right now from a future by adrienne maree brown
• Write history from below (or a Peoples’ History or Radical History) by Marcus Rediker references many articles, including The Poetics of History from Below and Working Class Self-Activity

Treating others with care

Our Networks is dedicated to providing a harassment-free environment and have an explicitly-documented code of conduct to communicate our expectations for conduct at the event. Every participant is expected to be familiar with this, please email us at coc@ournetworks.ca with any concerns.

Writing about others

We encourage everyone to reflect and practice along with us as we aim to write characters and stories inclusively without erasing or appropriating the perspectives and identities of marginalized voices. We may add additional notes here throughout the event, but for now we are working from insight from other authors and those shared commitments above.

Writing about real people

We encourage you to focus most of your writing far enough in the future that it can focus on a version of you or other figures who don’t exist (yet!). We ask that you do not write extensively about other real people you know personally without checking with them first.

If you feel strongly that you have to write about current public figures, public in the sense that they are notable and newsworthy, we ask you to avoid defamatory statements or gruesome or violent descriptions. In so-called Canada, the right to free expression is protected by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but in a limited sense. To avoid defamation statements must be within the bounds of “fair comment” which means they are: made without malice, based on proven fact, and related to a matter of public interest.

Notes