Wikipedia:Wikimedia Deutschland/Wikimedium/Fragen an Victor Grigas

Die jährliche Spendenkampagne handelt nicht von Spenden. Sie handelt von Geschichten. Geschichten von Menschen, denen Wikipedia und Freies Wissen wichtig sind. Persönliche Geschichten, die eine interessante Perspektive auf die Bedeutung von Wikipedia werfen. Doch warum sind Geschichten für unsere Kampagne so wichtig? Menschen spenden für Menschen. Und ein Mensch wirkt dann überzeugend, wenn er seine Geschichte erzählt. Doch wie bekommt man eine Geschichte? Wie schafft man es eine spannende persönliche Geschichte zu schreiben? Till Mletzko, Fundraiser bei Wikmedia Deutschland, sprach mit Victor Grigas, hauptamtlicher Storyteller bei der Wikimedia Foundation.

Kurzporträt

Victor Grigas wurde in Chicago geboren und verbrachte dort auch den größten Teil seines bisherigen Lebens. Seine beruflichen Wurzeln liegen im Bereich Film, Video und Audio. Als Freiberufler hat Victor vor allem in der Filmproduktion Erfahrungen gesammelt und in ganz verschiedenen Projekten mitgearbeitet: von Unternehmenskommunikation bis zu Independent Kurzfilmen. Sein Lieblingsprojekt hieß „I AM CHICAGO“ und führte ihn in die unterschiedlichsten Ecken von Chicago. Dort führten er und drei Freunde Interviews mit einigen Anwohnern und erstellten in einem umgebauten Van kostenlose Ganzkörperporträts von ihnen.
Nach einer kurzen Station in Berlin lebt und arbeitet er seit einem Jahr bei der Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco.

Can you give me a short introduction of yourself. Who are you, what is your work background and how did you come to the WMF?

Victor Grigas interviewing Dr. Sengai Podhuvan as part of the Wikimedia 2011 fundraising campaign

The Kids Off The Block memorial in Chicago featuring hundreds of simple stone blocks, one for each child killed by violence in Chicago

Graffiti in San Francisco

East Side Gallery in Berlin

I was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, USA. My mother was born and raised in Texas during segregation, worked as librarian and is currently a schoolteacher. My father was born to illegal Lithuanian immigrants and grew up in a bar during American prohibition. He was also a World War II veteran, a photographer and currently an apartment renovator and landlord. I grew up in the apartment rental business. That'll give you a little bit of a frame work about the people who raised me. I have lived in Chicago my whole life aside from 3 months in Berlin and this last year in San Francisco. As a teenager and in my early twenties I was a candlemaker. That was fun because at the end of the workday you smell amazing.

My professional background and education is in film, video and audio. Most of my professional career has been as a freelancer doing whatever I could to help with any motion image production that I was capable of helping with. Anything from corporate public service announcements to indy short films. My favorite project was called 'I AM CHICAGO' - basically four of us rented a moving truck with a translucent roof and set up a camera with a neutral background in the truck to shoot full body portraits. We'd go to every type of neighborhood in the city of Chicago, roll out a red carpet and kind of hang out on the corner for a day giving people free full body portrait prints on the spot. Most of my job on that shoot was shooting behind-the-scenes video and interviews with locals about who they are and where they were from. We'd meet all kinds of characters. I mean Chicago is the 5th most diverse city on the planet and it has some very wealthy, safe neighborhoods and very poor and violent neighborhoods and we shot it all, something like 40 neighborhoods. Just about every neighborhood had some drunk who would show up and bug us all day. Everyone who was poor loved getting a free portrait, and it was always hard to get the people in business suits to sign the consent waiver.

I have been a Wikipedia editor since 2005, I stumbled on the site after doing some Google searches and actually thought that it was kind of annoying when I first found it. In those days English Wikipedia was all red links and stubs and the results weren't great when you did a search for something. I saw the edit button and tried editing and got hooked -- I could write an encyclopedia. I wrote mostly about Chicago and graffiti, and found myself becoming something of a photo uploader. I loved the inclusivity of Wikipedia. I would get in arguments with friends at parties about how it would over time beat every other form of encyclopedia because the model includes all the old encyclopedia writers too. I have a real problem with class and responsibilities as fixed things.

Fast forward to 2011, and I saw a job posting on the Wikimedia jobs page 2 days before the position closed. I said - I love Wikipedia, so I wrote my cover letter, tweaked my resume and stayed up for 48 hours and made a video version of my cover letter and applied. People noticed and eventually I was hired on a temporary basis and now it's full time.

What is your job at the WMF - what is it that you exactly do?

group photo of the San Francisco Wikipedia Hackathon

jobs.wikimedia.org recruiting video

I find and document unique stories about the people who make Wikipedia and all the other wiki-projects to use for fundraising and communication. I also produce video and photography for the foundation as needed. I try to record as many editor interviews as I can on video. Speaking as a Wikipedian, I think it's awful that for years we have seen a rich caucasian North American named Jimmy Wales as the only face or personality associated with Wikipedia. My job is to change that misconception that we as an organization and a movement have inadvertently generated.

What is the power of a story?

Stories are part of what make us human. They motivate and guide us through life whether we know it or not. You can raise an army or a congregation with a story. What makes stories about Wikipedia so interesting is that Wikipedia and all of the Wiki-projects are written with the goal of publishing factual information and weeding out the opinion, the characters, the people! The characters and personal stories about Wikipedia that I find are sort of Wikipedia's behind-the-scenes footage.

Is there a secret recipe of compelling stories?

Yes. You need a hook, something that stands out in your mind. When you can press the novelty button in someones brain that makes them remember it. That's why metaphor is a profound part of language - it's a whole story in a few words that burns in your head and can be used to summarize a whole set of ideas.

Every person has a story but often times people don´t know it. How do you get people to tell their story?

First, you have to be honest, straightforward and clear. Absolutely no duplicitousness or bullshit. I have to tell people what I'm doing and what we plan to do with their interview.

Second, I talk about the person I'm interviewing about herself and then about her involvement with Wikipedia. We usually talk for about an hour. This way, I have a bit of a background (in addition to whatever research I have done about the person before the interview) about why they might be writing the articles that they write on Wikipedia.

Third, talk to my interview subjects like they are people! Have a conversation! If I 'put on a tie' and acted all formal then people would feel that they have to act all formal too -- that completely kills conversation. It's a wall. Auf Deutsch es gibt 'Sie' und 'du', alles soll 'du' sein. Of course, I am polite, but if the conversation moves one way or another or adopts one tone or another I'll follow that, and that will lead to all kinds of stories and phrases. I have to listen. You don't just check off a list of questions. Every interview I get into is exciting to me.

Generally the more lower-class people are, the easier it is for them to open up and be personal and the older they are the more time they have had to collect stories. This is somewhat difficult to find in terms of Wikipedians, because many are educated 20-somethings.

You have been travelling around the world to catch peoples stories for the fundraiser. How do you prepare yourself before the interview takes place?

I try to gather as much information as I can about a person before I speak with them. I look up edit histories and talk pages and try to ask a few screening questions before I meet with someone in person or on the phone. That way I can go into an interview with some tailored questions looking for a story that I may already be wanting to tell. For example if I know that someone is a medical doctor who writes about obesity, I'd want to ask questions about the reliability of Wikipedia, especially in terms of medical issues that could be life or death. I'd want to talk about their specific field of practice, and why they write about obesity. I'd want to ask if they knew anyone personally who was affected by obesity or if they were obese themselves.

I try to construct a timeline about the person that they can fill in during the interview. Sometimes I have very little to work with, edit histories and talk pages can only yield so much, so I have some general questions that I ask everyone.

I do everything I can to respect cultural differences, so research about where a person is from is important too. This is hard sometimes when you do telephone or Skype chats.

What has been your most wonderful experience with an interviewee?

Karthik Nadar

I have to say Karthik Nadar was awesome. When I met him, I was in Mumbai, India and we both agreed to meet in my hotel room. When he came in, he looked around the room (which was about 15 feet by 10 feet) and said that he and his sister, mom and dad live in a room about that size with no refrigerator or air conditioning because they are not eco-friendly. He speaks Sanskrit at home. He works as an accountant and spends alot of time on a computer, so he has some free time to edit Wikipedia. One day a terrorist attack happened not far from where he was. He took a photo with his cellphone of a blown-up car & started the article for that event on English Wikipedia. I took his portrait, and he made it into the 2011 fundraising campaign. People kept tweeting about how handsome he was. His story stands out to me, maybe because it made me think about 9/11.

Is storytelling for Wikimeda/Wikipedia something special, is there a difference from the storytelling of other non-profit-organizations?

I went to a professional presentation about storytelling the other month and it was all about advertising. They were talking about marketing tie-ins between cartoon movie icons and sugar-water manufacturers and creative ways to make ad spots and maximize number of media impressions. All they cared about was money. I wanted to throw up. Don't get me wrong - I love creativity and theatrics but I think the difference at Wikimedia is that it's all about if it works. It's sort of how can I use my sense of creativity to help Wikipedia make people free with information? If I have an idea here, the goal it to build it and see if it works, and not to sell it to a company and let them test it and who cares what happens to it after that cause I just got paid. In that way, it's similar to other non-profit organizations. It's amazing what a difference it makes when you care about what you are working on.

What does storytelling has to do with fundraising?

Storytelling diversifies fundraising which pays for the whole party. I work on the fundraising team. My team takes the 'creative content' that I generate and we craft appeals for donations from the interviews. I tell people this before I interview them. A little backstory; before I started, during the 2010 fundraiser the team ran appeals from donors who were awesome and had them write their own appeals. It was a disaster. It turns out that nobody likes to ask for money and no one had any idea if we could make an appeal from an editor work. Then when I started we had some dumb luck on our first try. We interviewed Brandon Harris and he said some fiery stuff comparing where he works now with where he worked before. We A/B tested the appeal with a photo versus the old Jimmy Wales appeal and photo and it actually outperformed the Jimmy appeal. That process I don't control, but it's very interesting. The fundraising team does a few A/B tests over the course of the year up until the year end fundraiser so that we can tweak the photos and the appeals we have and that process helps us understand what will work where and what won't. The ratio of interviews I have to do until I find a decent fundraising interview is about 15 to 1, so there's a small mountain of content there that we can use for all kinds of things. At the moment these are private because people tell me things that could get them fired, imprisoned, divorced, killed or otherwise put in bad situations. We have to be careful.

What are your storytelling-plans for the next fundraiser?

Victor Grigas interviewing Portugese Wikipedia editor Aerolitz

In March I was in Brazil and Argentina and in a week I'll be in Germany and Russia and I have plans to go to Kenya later in the year. Theres a guy in Kenya who built an airplane from scratch using a Toyota engine from reading Wikipedia. I can't wait to talk to him. Also at Wikimania this year we plan to shoot all of our interviews on video and cut a 90 second video that explains Wikipedia to the general public in the voice of the editors. We have to be creative and test new ideas, because the strategic plan for 2013 calls for us to raise something like 60 million dollars, double what we raised 2011. Thats why I'm doing this interview. I'm hoping that people who write Wikipedia or use Wikipedia and have an interesting story to tell (or know people who do) will get in touch with me at vgrigas@wikimedia.org and share their story to help make Wikipedia better.