All That We Touch

Every time we flush, we send a valuable resource down the drain: phosphorus, one of the essential building blocks of life and a key ingredient in the fertiliser that grows the world's food, along with nitrogen and potassium.

Meanwhile, we mine phosphate rock and potash, and generate climate pollution to manufacture ammonia (rich in nitrogen) to produce industrial fertiliser - essential for growing food to feed a hungry planet

But wha...

How can Wikipedia editors work with Indigenous content in a responsible way?

Hear a panel discussion with Indigenous lawyers Dr Terri Janke, Shavonne Wright, and Matilda Langford on the new Wikimedia Australia guide to respectful, accurate engagement with Indigenous knowledge.

Oral knowledge can't be referenced under Wikipedia's own rules, and that hits Indigenous knowledge hardest. Most Australian editors are non-Indigenous, and our...

Every student uses Wikipedia. Some schools and teachers still tell them not to.

This episode asks why, and explains how to teach Wikipedia literacy to primary and secondary school students, instead of banning it outright.

Researchers Heather Ford and Simon Knight answer questions and hear advice from teachers Ben Lawless, Marty Douglas and David Boon, and librarian Michelle Sadler.

Hear what good, critical Wikipedia use looks like in ...

Five questions. Two hosts. One deceptively simple quiz. Can Wikipedia articles really be edited by anyone? Does the site rely on your $5 donations, or is there more to the story?

Host Heather Ford goes head-to-head with guest Simon Knight in a true-or-false showdown about Wikipedia. Almost nothing is as straightforward as it sounds.

This is All That We Touch: Wikipedia, a documentary podcast series exploring what shapes the world's m...

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 y...

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 pla...

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 sur...

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 ...

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 separ...