English subtitles for clip: File:National Liberal Club editathon August 2016 summary video.webm

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I'm Dr Seth Thévoz, I'm the librarian here at the National Liberal Club,

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and today it's a terribly exciting event.

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Two dozen people have decided to spend their spare time on the hottest day of the year,

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coming in to edit Wikipedia.

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The National Liberal Club has a really quite varied archive and library.

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Everything including original documents and manuscripts going back to the nineteenth century,

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rare pamphlet collections, an exhaustive series of books on the British liberal tradition

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and quite a few little rare oddities as well

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and we're really delighted to be able to put that at Wikipedia's disposal.

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I'm looking for information about the first lady associate member of the club, and also the first full lady member.

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I think it's hard to find because you have to read through all the minutes of the meetings

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of the membership committee, and the lady associate membership started sometime in 1968,

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and I'm just getting to the whole discussion of what kind of fees to afford them and what

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kind of privileges to be given to ladies.

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One of the main reasons why we are delighted to be collaborating with Wikimedia UK

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is to try and actually live up to our original charter, which is to keep alive the liberal tradition in the UK,

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liberal ideas, liberal philosophy and discussion of these. And so I think, by having a fair-minded

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and thorough, rigorous series of articles on Wikipedia, that actually helps in a twenty-first century context.

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This was for a gentleman who was a dry-cleaner from Finchley, by the name of Harry Willcock,

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who was responsible for the repeal of ID cards in the 1950s, because ID cards were introduced

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as a wartime convenience in World War Two and they were kept on after that.

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And Willcock was famously stopped by police, asked to produce his ID card and said,

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"well I'm a liberal: I don't believe in that sort of thing."

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So even though he had an ID card, he wasn't carrying it and didn't believe he should do.

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And he went all the way to court. Originally he lost his case, but it went to the Court of Appeal

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He eventually won, and on the basis of that ID cards were repealed.

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He actually died in the National Liberal Club, in a debate. The last word he ever said was 'freedom'.

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I think there's an instinctive sympathy in the National Liberal Club with what Wikipedia is trying to do.

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Not just because everybody uses it on a day-to-day basis as a simple reference tool

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but also because at its heart it's about a collaborative project, it's about sharing wisdom,

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and pooling that knowledge and actually thinking "we can do better than what's in front of us

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and what's already there." And that goes, actually, for the way Wikipedia is set up.

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However good it is on any one day, or bad for that matter, it can always be better,

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and it can always be improved.

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And there is something inherently liberal, I think, about the improvability of that.