All That We Touch

Impact Studios

Exploring the entangled relationships between technology, society, nature and politics. All that we touch, we change, and all that we change changes us.

Episodes

  1. 8 hr ago

    The 'Last Best Place on the Internet': Will Wikipedia survive AI?

    In the future, will Wikipedia still be written by humans? This episode asks what happens to that promise as two very different futures close in. Co-host and author Richard Cooke calls Wikipedia ‘the last best place on the internet’ - one of the only things still standing from the early web's promise of a civic, collaborative internet. This episode traces two futures already taking shape. The first is AI. It might surprise you how long Wikipedia has used AI successfully. And unsuccessfully... Like in the strange true story of a Wikipedia language edition almost entirely about insects, written in Cebuano by one Swedish professor's bot, as a tribute to his wife. Now generative AI like ChatGPT is raising the stakes again. The second future is hiding in plain sight, on Wikipedia's own turf: an ambitious project to turn its millions of articles into structured, machine-readable facts that could be translated into any language, instantly. A utopian dream - or the thing that replaces human editors? VoicesHeather Ford is an ARC Future Fellow and Professor in the School of Communication and Social Sciences at UTS. She is a former Advisory Board member of the Wikimedia Foundation and the author of “Writing the Revolution: Wikipedia and the Survival of Facts in the Digital Age” published by MIT Press. Dr Francesca Sidoti is a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the ARC Discovery project ‘Wikipedia and the nation’s story: towards equity in knowledge production’ in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Richard Cooke is an author, reporter and screenwriter. The author of three books, he is the former US correspondent and current contributing editor to The Monthly magazine. His latest book is The Last Best Place On The Internet: A Human History of Wikipedia. Dr Michael Falk is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Studies at the University of Melbourne, and is a computational literary scholar, data scientist, speaker and writer. In all his work, he aims to combine the creativity of the arts with the rigour and precision of data science. Josh Lim a long-time Wikipedia editor, and the founder of Wikimedia Philippines. He speaks seven languages and works as a community manager. He has a strong interest in studying the dynamics of tech communities, particularly on the Wikimedia projects but also at large. ResearchFalk, Michael. ‘Wikilambda the Ultimate: The Wikimedia Foundation’s Search for the Perfect Language’. AI & SOCIETY, 2026, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-026-02899-w. In 2020 the Wikimedia foundation launched its first new project in nearly a decade, and includes Abstract Wikipedia, a language-agnostic Wikipedia that will be dynamically translated into the reader’s native tongue. The project is designed to address a fundamental bias in Wikipedia, namely its bias towards majority languages such as English and Spanish. More reading'Wikipedia Warriors'List of people imprisoned for editing Wikipedia (Wikipedia) EFF Launches New Offline Campaign for Saudi Wikipedian Osama Khalid by Jillian C. York (Electronic Frontier Foundation, 2026) Wiki warriors: activists fighting to keep truth of brutal Marcos regime in Philippines alive (The Guardian, 2017) The last best placeThe Last Best Place on the Internet: A Human History of Wikipedia by Richard Cooke (Black Inc Books, 2026) Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet by Richard Cooke (Wired, 2020) How Wikipedia became the responsible adult of the internet by Stephen Harrison (Australian Financial Review, 2019) Peer productionHere Comes Everybody: How change happens when people come together by Clay Shirky (Penguin, 2009) The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler (Yale University Press, 2006) Wikipedia and AIWikipedia bans AI-generated content in its online encyclopedia (The Guardian, 2026) Breathe, Don’t Panic, there is a different story about Wikimedia + AI futures by Sadads (The Signpost, 2026) Wikipedia goes to war against AI slop articles with new deletion policy (PC World, 2025) Vandalism on Wikipedia (Wikipedia) Cebuano WikipediaWikipedia's largest non-English version was created by a bot. Generative AI poses new problems (ABC, 2025) Cebuano Wikipedia, a large language edition Wikipedia finally has a WikiClub! (Wikimedia 2024) WikidataTeaching Wikipedia to write itself by Rebecca J. Rosen (The Atlantic, 2012) Abstract WikipediaWikiLambda the Ultimate by e mln e and Tilman Bayer (The Signpost, 2026) Some reflections on designing Abstract Wikipedia so far by Maria Keet (Keet blog, 2023)

    The 'Last Best Place on the Internet': Will Wikipedia survive AI?

  2. 20 Jul

    Wikipedia's three big fights: what knowledge counts?

    Wikipedia promised to be the sum of all human knowledge. Then the fighting started. Host Heather Ford and writer Richard Cooke walk through three of Wikipedia's biggest fight. Not the daily edit wars over the spelling of yoghurt, but the fights over what Wikipedia is, and whose knowledge gets to be part of it. There are more than 300 language versions of Wikipedia. So why does everyone treat the English one as the real one? A game played by millions of people can't get a Wikipedia page. And two warring camps of editors, with very nerdy names, quietly decide what deserves to exist on Wikipedia. One side almost always wins. Three fights. All of them shaping what you learn from the world's biggest encyclopedia. VoicesHeather Ford is an ARC Future Fellow and Professor in the School of Communication and Social Sciences at UTS. She is the author of “Writing the Revolution: Wikipedia and the Survival of Facts in the Digital Age” published by MIT Press. Richard Cooke is an author, reporter and screenwriter. The author of three books, he is the former US correspondent and current contributing editor to the The Monthly magazine. His latest book is The Last Best Place On The Internet: A Human History of Wikipedia. Achal Prabhala is a writer, researcher, and activist based in Bangalore, India, whose work spans two decades and two intersecting causes: access to medicines in the Global South, and the politics of knowledge. Prabhala runs the AccessIBSA project, which is an inter-disciplinary campaign for access to medicines in India, Brazil and South Africa. He served on the Wikimedia Foundation's advisory board from 2006 and was an advisor on the Whose Knowledge? campaign. Florence Devouard is a speaker and independent digital strategy consultant, and she facilitate the discovery of and participation in Wikimedia projects through conferences, seminars, and training sessions on wiki software, Wikipedia, online communities, collaboration, and knowledge management. In 2006 she was President of the Wikimedia Foundation. Since 2008, she has served on the Wikimedia Foundation's Advisory Board. Research linksOpeningIndigenous games Australian Government: Australian Sports Commission Fight #1 English Wikipedia as the ‘invisible centre’WikiGap: Promoting Epistemic Equity by Surfacing Knowledge Gaps Between English Wikipedia and other Language Editions (arXiv 2025) argues that although Wikipedia is architecturally multilingual and aspires to provide knowledge to "every single person on the planet in their own language," its design and community practices systematically privilege English content, and at the interface level this dynamic obscures cross-linguistic differences. How is Wikipedia funded? (Wikimedia Foundation 2025) Wikipedia is funded primarily through single or monthly donations from millions of individuals around the world. Each year, around 2,000 individuals and institutions make donations of above $1,000 to the Wikimedia Foundation. Writing the Revolution: Wikipedia and the Survival of Facts in the Digital Age (MIT Press 2022) An extended case study by Heather Ford of English Wikipedia functioning as the venue where the globally authoritative account of a non-Anglophone event, the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, gets negotiated. “What an un-wiki way of doing things”: Wikipedia’s multilingual policy and metalinguistic practice ( 2011) Wikipedia defines itself as "the biggest multilingual free-content encyclopaedia on the internet," making an explicit language policy part of its mission statement. Astrid Ensslin argues that when you critically examine what Wikipedia actually does, its policies, its interface, its symbols, its community practices, this multilingual self-image conceals a deeply Anglo-centric structure. Fight #2 Oral citationsOral Citations project on Wikipedia Ethnographies of the Digitally Dispossessed (In The Routledge Companion to Media Anthropology 2022) A book chapter describing the oral citations project and its ethnographic study by Heather Ford. Possible Enlightenments: Wikipedia’s Encyclopedic Promise and Epistemological Failure (MIT Press 2019) Wikipedia challenges traditional notions of expertise, authorship, access, and transparency. It also conserves features of the genre that characterize its emergence from western Enlightenment logic. Given Wikipedia's maturity, Matthew Vetter asks how do we understand this contradiction? When Knowledge Isn’t Written, Does It Still Count? (New York Times 2011) Fight #3 Inclusionists vs DeletionistsRepresentation and the problem of bibliographic imagination on Wikipedia (Luyt 2021). A history of the inclusionist versus deletionist debate, how it influenced the representation of the Phillippine-American War on Wikipedia, and exarcerbated representational gaps on the platform. The Missing Wikipedians (In Critical Point of View: A Wikipedia Reader 2012) An early discussion of the cultures of deletionism in the context of African topics (using a case study of Makmende, the Kenyan internet meme on Wikipedia) by Heather Ford. Wikipedia approaches its limits (The Guardian 2009) The online encyclopaedia is about to hit 3m articles in English – but growth is stalling as 'inclusionists' and 'deletionists' fight for control. Further reading and watchingPeople are Knowledge documentary by Achal Prabhala (Vimeo 2011) Interview with Achal Prabhala (The Believer 2014) Writer and activist Achal Prabhala on expanding the parameters for what is considered knowledge (Bubblegum Club 2018) Wikipedia and the Crisis of Knowledge Equity by Jake Orlowitz (Medium 2026) Clips9/11 news montage (YouTube 2001) Creative Commons Summit 2021: Keynote by Achal Prabhala (YouTube 2021) CreditsThe executive producer of this series is Heather Ford. The series is hosted by Heather Ford, Francesca Sidoti and Richard Cooke. Produced by Jane Curtis. Associate producer is Francesa Sidoti. Story consultant is Rachael Cusick. Sound by John Jacobs. Bell music composition by Maksim Voloshin-Cleary. Executive Producer of UTS Impact Studios is Sarah Gilbert. It’s produced on Gadigal Country in Sydney Australia. wikihistories is supported by Australian Research Council Grant DP220100662, ‘Wikipedia and the Nation’s Story: Towards...

    Wikipedia's three big fights: what knowledge counts?

  3. 13 Jul

    Australia and Wikipedia: the bias in the map

    Wikipedia doesn't set out to play favourites. But when a made-up Melbourne suburb has more history than real Australian places, something is shaping what gets written. Who - or what - decides which Australian places matter on Wikipedia? Hosts Heather Ford and Francesca Sidoti go looking, through a map of 35,000 places, a street corner in Penrith, and a fight over one island's name. How is Wikipedia biased, and why? The answer will surprise you. VoicesHeather Ford is an ARC Future Fellow and Professor in the School of Communication and Social Sciences at UTS. She is the author of “Writing the Revolution: Wikipedia and the Survival of Facts in the Digital Age” published by MIT Press. Dr Francesca Sidoti is a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the ARC Discovery project ‘Wikipedia and the nation’s story: towards equity in knowledge production’ in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dr Michael Falk is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Studies at the University of Melbourne, and is a computational literary scholar, data scientist, speaker and writer. In all his work, he aims to combine the creativity of the arts with the rigour and precision of data science. Research linksAustralian places and WikipediaMap of Australian places on Wikipedia (Wikihistories: 2025) Map showing Edit intensity of Australian place articles: English Wikipedia (Wikihistories: 2025) Full report: How Australian places are represented on Wikipedia (Wikihistories: 2025) We analysed 35,000 Wikipedia entries about Australian places. Some of them sanitise history (The Conversation: 2024) Erinsborough Wikipedia Page Penrith Wikipedia page K'gari Wikipedia page Bias and WikipediaCan History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past by Roy Rosenzweig (The Journal of American History Volume 2006) Wikipedia's known unknowns (The Guardian 2009) The earliest geographical analyses of Wikipedia’s geographical biases is described Professor Mark Graham. ‘Anyone can edit’, not everyone does: Wikipedia’s infrastructure and the gender gap ( Social Studies of Science 2017) How Wikipedia’s infrastructure introduces new and less visible sources of gender disparity, by Heather Ford and Judy Wajcman. Who Gets To Be Notable And Who Doesn't: Gender Bias On Wiki (NPR All Things Considered 2021) On Wikipedia, gender inequality is hiding in plain sight. Of more than a million and a half biographies - that's on the English-language version - fewer than 19% are about women. A recent study by Francesca Tripodi brings some new insight into why that is. Demographic disparity in Wikipedia coverage: a global perspective (EPJ Data Sci. 2025)Even though people identifying as female and non-binary genders have been better represented in terms of the number of Wikipedia language editions over time, and they are currently better covered than males, current global coverage of people on Wikipedia still shows disparities in both gender and geographical location of biographical subjects in various dimensions. Wikipedia editorsWho is contributing to Wikimedia projects? (Wikimedia Foundation, nd) The Wikipedia “Change the Stats” page that collates research into the Wikipedia editor base as a baseline for increasing the diversity of Wikipedia editors. Community Insights Report (Wikimedia Foundation, 2020) A survey with 2500 Wikimedians looking at their demographics, social and technological experiences. Findings from the survey included: Wikimedia contributors are 87% male. Almost half live in Europe and one-fifth in Northern America, as compared to 9.7% and 4.8% of the global population.Fewer than 1% of Wikipedia’s editor base in the U.S. identify as Black or African American.Although women were still markedly underrepresented among contributors, there was a modest increase in women contributors between 2019 (11.5%) and 2020 (15.0%). Further reading“Finding Eliza: power and colonial storytelling” by Larissa Behrendt (2016) “Finding Eliza” exhibition at Hervey Bay Regional Gallery until 16 August 2026 ClipsJimmy Wales on bias: Lex Fridman podcast 19 June 2023 Comedian Guy Williams on visiting Rottnest Island Herbs French Letter World Heritage Fraser Island officially restored to Indigenous name, K'gari, supported by public (ABC News 7 June 2023) CreditsThe executive producer of this series is Heather Ford. The series is hosted by Heather Ford, Francesca Sidoti and Richard Cooke. Produced by Jane Curtis. Associate producer is Francesa Sidoti. Story consultant is Rachael Cusick. Sound by John Jacobs. Thanks for feedback from Sarah Gilbert, Regina Botros, Celine Teo-Blockey, Siobhan Moylan, Lachlan A Court, Zlata Maltceva, Rosa Ellen, and Kate Lawrence. All That We Touch artwork by Alexandra Morris. Episode tiles by Jane Curtis. Bell music composition by Maksim Voloshin-Cleary. Executive Producer of UTS Impact Studios is Sarah Gilbert. It’s produced on Gadigal Country in Sydney Australia. wikihistories is supported by Australian Research Council Grant DP220100662, ‘Wikipedia and the Nation’s Story: Towards Equity in Knowledge Production’. Find out more at wikihistories.net TranscriptsWikipedia and Australia: the bias in the map Transcript Word doc Wikipedia and Australia: the bias in the map Transcript PDF

    Australia and Wikipedia: the bias in the map

  4. Episode 1 Trailer

    Introducing... Wikipedia

    It started as a joke. An encyclopedia anyone could edit? Now it’s one of the ten most visited websites in the world. Even when you think you're not using it, you probably are. It's feeding your search results, your voice assistant, your AI chatbot. But if Wikipedia shapes how we understand the world, what shapes Wikipedia? Host Heather Ford, researcher Francesca Sidoti, and author Richard Cooke investigate the site and all that it touches. Episode 1 asks, what does Australia look like on Wikipedia? The answer takes you from a fictional soap-opera suburb to a dispute over what a place should be called. Episode 2 goes inside the three big fights that made Wikipedia what it is today. Episode 3 asks what its future holds, in the age of generative AI? Episode 4 is a True/False quiz with nuanced answers to simple questions. Episode 5 is for teachers and students wanting practical tips on how to research and teach with Wikipedia. Episode 6 is for Wikipedia editors wanting to share First Nations knowledge respectfully. All That We Touch: Wikipedia is produced by Impact Studios at the University of Technology Sydney. First episode coming soon. Follow now so you don't miss it. VoicesProfessor Heather Ford is an ARC Future Fellow and Professor in the School of Communication and Social Sciences at UTS. She is the author of “Writing the Revolution: Wikipedia and the Survival of Facts in the Digital Age” published by MIT Press. Dr Francesca Sidoti is a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the ARC Discovery project ‘Wikipedia and the nation’s story: towards equity in knowledge production’ in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Richard Cooke is an author, reporter and screenwriter. The author of three books, he is the former US correspondent and current contributing editor to The Monthly magazine. His latest book is The Last Best Place On The Internet: A Human History of Wikipedia. ResearchTop ten websites in the world by traffic in May 2026: Semrush CreditsThe executive producer of this series is Heather Ford. It is hosted by Heather Ford, Francesca Sidoti and Richard Cooke. Produced by Jane Curtis. Associate producer is Francesa Sidoti. Story consultant is Rachael Cusick. Sound by John Jacobs. Bell music composition by Maksim Voloshin-Cleary. Executive Producer of UTS Impact Studios is Sarah Gilbert. It’s produced on Gadigal Country in Sydney Australia. wikihistories is supported by Australian Research Council Grant DP220100662, ‘Wikipedia and the Nation’s Story: Towards Equity in Knowledge Production’. wikihistories.net

    Introducing... Wikipedia

  5. 30 Jun

    0. Introducing All That We Touch - investigating the relationship between technology and society

    Are we really separate from the things we make? Do we really control our own tools? And where do we end, and they begin? All That We Touch explores the relationship between technology and society, and how the things we make shape and reshape us in turn. Host Matt Ryan speaks with Tamson Pietsch about the podcast's central questions and its sources of inspiration. In a changing climate, the powerful Western notion that humans are separate from nature, enjoying dominion over it, is coming undone. Meanwhile, digital life has us doubting whether we are fully in control of some of our most everyday objects and technologies. Our title is taken from Octavia Butler's novel, The Parable of the Sower. The dystopian story opens with the lines "all that we touch, we change, and all that we change changes us." It's a credo that seems to neatly sum up philosopher Bruno Latour's central idea: that humans, tools, language and technologies are bound together in networks where nothing stands apart, pure and untouched. You'll hear a sneak preview of the first two stories we'll bring you over the coming months, on a podcast that will feature documentaries, talks and recordings of live events - all on that theme of technology and society. Voices Dr Matthew Ryan is a Chancellor's Research Fellow at UTS' Faculty of Design and Society. Associate Professor Tamson Pietsch is director of UTS' Australian Centre for Public History at UTS and managing director of Impact Studios. Actress Lynne Thigpen reads the excerpt from The Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Buter. Professor Heather Ford and Dr Francesca Sidoti, along with author Richard Cooke, present our inaugural series on Wikipedia - coming very soon. Michelle Maloney and Abe Noe-Hayes feature in a forthcoming episode, Liquid Gold. Credits This introductory episode was produced by Lachlan A'Court. Excerpt from Parable of the Sower is by Octavia E. Butler, narrated by Lynne Thigpen, provided courtesy of Recorded Books, © 2000. The full recording is available wherever audiobooks are sold. All That We Touch is made on Gadigal land, in Sydney, by UTS Impact Studios. Executive producer is Sarah Gilbert. Further listening To learn more about Bruno Latour, you can listen to Ep 169 of Philosophize This! or Ep 230 and 231 of The Partially Examined Life. The Parable of the Sower, read by Lynne Thigpen, is available at Audible. You can hear an excellent discussion of the novel on Backlisted, Ep 223.

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About

Exploring the entangled relationships between technology, society, nature and politics. All that we touch, we change, and all that we change changes us.

Information

  • Creator
    Impact Studios
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    5
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2026 Impact Studios
  • Show Website
    All That We Touch