HEFFNER: I'm Alexander Heffner, your host on The Open Mind.
Days after the election last year,
and in response to a campaign of flagrant lies
and propaganda, the website that stood,
historically as the first line of defense against
misinformation, issued a message to its US based readers.
"People talk about us living in a post-factual era of politics.
Wikipedia is the antidote to that.
We believe the facts matter,
that reflective understanding matters.
To protect our independence,
we'll never run ads." Now, increasingly,
that website, Wikipedia is the last line of defense
against the raging proliferation against
untruths and mistruths that have dominated
political discourse in recent months and years.
We were honored to host the first two Executive
Directors of the Wikimedia foundation,
and today we extend that streak with its third
chief, executive director, Katherine Maher.
I've gotten to know Katherine as a most fierce
and eloquent champion of Wikipedia,
and its unique imperative, to ensure the integrity of
information, really knowledge,
disseminated across our digital horizons.
Katherine, it's a pleasure to have you here today.
MAHER: And it's such a pleasure to be here.
Thank you.
HEFFNER: And belated congratulations on your appointment.
MAHER: [LAUGHTER] Thank you.
HEFFNER: We're thrilled to be here.
Do you agree with that analysis of Wikipedia
today being that last line of defense?
MAHER: No, I think we're part of an ecosystem of information.
Um, the information about what's happening in the
world today, politics, current events,
is just a subsection of what Wikipedia does.
Wikipedia is available to talk about everything from
18th Century tapestries to the origins of our galaxy
to, of course, current events.
I wouldn't think of us as a last line of defense.
I think of us as part of a knowledge ecosystem.
We're more important than what's happening today.
We're really here for the past and we're here for the future.
And we sort of take a very long view of,
of human knowledge and history.
HEFFNER: To issue that warning in effect...
MAHER: [LAUGHTER]
HEFFNER: Or promotional campaign around the integrity of information,
as Americas were contemplating the reaction
or their reactions to the election,
the discourse was not being shaped sufficiently by fact.
MAHER: Mm-hmm.
HEFFNER: And you were at least acknowledging that, right?
MAHER: We were acknowledging that.
I mean it was timely for us.
We always spend November and December talking
to our readers.
It's when we do our annual fundraising campaign,
and we felt like we had to acknowledge the fact
that the conversation in the public and the
United States was very much around, are facts real?
Do they exist?
Can we find some sort of common consensus in all
of the chaos of the conversation.
And we believe that we can.
In fact we believe that's what Wikipedia does best.
It takes all of this disparate information,
and it encourages people to find truth among dis-,
among disagreement, and it encourages people to find
consensus among, sort of like,
deeply challenging, contextual differences,
and we wanted to articulate that that is
something that we feel that we can still do as,
as a society.
It's not partisan.
It's not political.
There are truths that exist,
and we can find them together.
HEFFNER: What does the reliability of Wikipedia depend on?
MAHER: The reliability of Wikipedia depends on
reliable sources of information.
So there are a couple core principles that go into
building a Wikipedia article.
They have to do with, no original research on Wikipedia.
You want to be able to verify back to secondary sources.
You want to make sure that it's written in a very
neutral point of view, um, and those secondary
sources are everything from academic journals,
to the press, and when we think about what
constitutes a reliable source,
we're looking for the characteristics of
reliability, not a list of sources.
So what I mean by that is, you know,
does a publication, does it have a history of fact checking.
Um, is it known for issuing corrections when
it gets things wrong.
Does it engage in contemplation around what
truth actually is, and sort of self critical
reflection when it maybe doesn't live up to those standards.
HEFFNER: So how do you scale
and this is an ongoing question we've had
for years now on this program,
but how do you scale that mission in a way that can
affectively combat the onslaught of
misinformation, and is there any mechanism
through which you try to identify that, to overt course.
MAHER: Sure, so, how do you scale the Wikimedia
mission, I think is a mystery even to Wikimedians.
There is this sort of expression that nobody
really kind of knows how it works in theory,
but it's a really great thing because it does seem
to work in practice.
I think there's something so compelling about the
idea that any single person can contribute to
the sum of all human knowledge,
regardless of where you come from,
regardless of what language you speak,
regardless of whether you're an expert
in the subject area.
All you need to do is have a good set of resources,
some critical thinking, and dive right in there.
Say, say what it is that you're saying.
How does that scale?
I think, you know, hundreds if not thousands
of graduate papers have been written about trying
to actually unpick sort of the mechanics of it,
but when it comes to the moment in time today,
I think what we're really looking for is,
you know, what model can Wikipedia hold up to the,
to the world, just in terms of thinking about,
how do you engage people in critical conversation.
How do you think about the sources,
engaging in media literacy or uh, critical reflection.
How do you engage in dialogue that is about
the information at hand rather than sort of the passions
or, or politics that we bring to the table.
Um, and, you know, in terms of what it
is that we're doing to get that out there,
well, we're keeping ourselves as open as we've ever been.
Anybody can edit Wikipedia,
and we're here to tell you that we want you to be
part of that process.
HEFFNER: I want you to encourage our viewers to be involved...
MAHER: [LAUGHTER] I do...
HEFFNER: Please, please, before we get there though,
the prerequisite for that is just learning how you
can retain competiveness in this ecosystem...
MAHER: Mm-hmm.
HEFFNER: Where, as I was saying to another guest,
the lowest common dominator of discourse is,
the emoji, is, a tweet, is a 140 characters,
the capacity to learn, the patience or stamina with
which someone would be able to grapple with all
the facets of a particular entry, that's in question now.
MAHER: So I mean, I actually,
I text with emojis. I tweet on twitter.
I think there's a time and a place for different
forms of communication.
One of the things that we found so interesting as we
get to understand more about Wikipedia,
and it is a universe that's constantly
expanding, and even at the Wikimedia Foundation,
we're always learning more about how it works,
um, is understanding that many of the people
who come to us, come to us to answer a question
that they have. It might be something simple.
It might be about pop culture.
It might be something about history.
It might be something about, uh, philosophy.
You know, people come to us for all sorts of different reasons.
What we then find is that, that sort of self-directed
learning often drags them deeper into that rabbit
hole of understanding, until they've got multiple
tabs in their browser open.
They've clicked through 17 different articles and
found themselves in a totally different space.
We want to maintain that serendipity.
And I think, to your point,
about how to make that a richer experience,
um, that's something that we're always looking for,
and looking to do, whether it's through increasing
the quality of images on the site,
whether it's thinking about how do you bring
rich media, and interactive displays of
information into Wikipedia,
these are definitely the next steps for us.
But we also want to stay true to who we are,
as a text based source of information.
The way that you consume textual information is
different than the way you consume video.
You can't snack on video in the same way.
You can't sort of skim through it.
With text based information,
Wikipedia makes it really easy,
whether it's that you're looking for a population
of a city, or whether you're looking at the
etymology of how that city came to be named,
you can find all of tat through scanning,
and we think there's something there's,
there's an integrity to that.
HEFFNER: An integrity to that, uh, when you
think of the evolution of the Facebook profile,
or any social media site that uh,
had to respond to the marketplace,
uh, and the result was, arguably betraying some
aspect of their mission, which you have not done,
and I think that's important to acknowledge.
I was saying to you off-camera,
I just returned from this conference on post-factual
democracy where there was a,
an expiration of the political currents,
and how we ought to respond to insure that
integrity, not just on our computers but in our
self-government, in our... MAHER: In our mission...
HEFFNER: Right.
MAHER: Our obligation and accountability.
HEFFNER: In our digital footprint...
MAHER: Absolutely.
HEFFNER: Broadly speaking, um,
how do you apply that, um, for someone who's watching
and wants to be armed with the truth and help make
possible the perpetuation of truth?
MAHER: Hmm. So one of the wonderful things about
Wikipedia is you don't actually need to be an expert.
Um, as I mentioned, you need to have access to
reliable sources, you need to cite the things
that you write into an article.
But, I've written articles about things that
I'm most decidedly not an expert in,
for example, um, my very first article was about
a housing development on LA's skid row.
I've never been to LA's skid row,
but it felt like an important thing that was
missing in terms of talking about services
that were available for the homeless population
there so I pulled up a bunch of resources,
I did some research, and then I went and I wrote
an article, and I cited it as carefully as I could,
and it's there on Wikipedia today.
So you don't have to be an expert.
You do, we do ask people to engage in sort of
deliberative reasoning and,
and contemplation as they go into articles,
to spend the time learning about the subject and,
and that way they become an expert.
But it's a wonderful, like general purpose sort of expertise.
That's not to say that we don't have expert editing Wikipedia.
We have medical doctors, we have scientists,
we have all sorts of different folks,
um, professors of English literature,
um, historians of linguistics coming and
editing Wikipedia, and that's what makes it such
a great balance of, of general purpose expertise,
and deep expertise and so anybody,
anybody can really engage in that.
I think, to your, perhaps your other point
about the accountability to the mission,
you know, one of the things that Wikipedia is,
it's also very self reflective. Um, it's very transparent.
Every single edit that has ever been made,
you can go back and take a look at,
for every article that's ever been written,
all the way back to the very first edit.
Um, what this means is that there's an
accountability to our readers,
as to what's in Wikipedia, who put it there,
why was it put there, and when was it put there.
We're very forthright about that.
There's a transparency to that that I think is
really critical to our integrity,
and that's not something you necessarily find in a
world of like, fast moving algorithmic news feeds
and revisions of articles in, in publications
that are put up and taken down without any sort
of clarity as to what was in the previous one
and what's changed to the next.
That's not true of Wikipedia.
You can find, where information came from,
who put it in there, why they put it in there,
and I think that that maintains an
accountability with our readers,
where we trust them to trust us and we also trust
them to know when to do more research,
and correct us if we're wrong. Um, and that's really rare,
and I think it does depend on this idea
that we believe that people are fundamentally smart,
and that if you give them good information and the
ability to engage in good faith, they'll generally do so.
HEFFNER: I think you're making an important point
about the accountability and the origin of
democratic purpose, democratic values imbedded in your
model of how you actually function,
and if you think about it, the analogy was made,
in a question that was asked at this conference,
about democratic norms and values in the US and of
course Wikipedia serves an international community,
but looking at it from this vantage point of,
when we pay taxes, in terms of accountability of
how those funds are being used by the government...
MAHER: Mm-hmm.
HEFFNER: That, we understand municipal
services broadly, but we don't have that kind of,
we can look at the IP address,
we can find the source of the information,
the citation, and trace it back...
MAHER: Mm-hmm.
HEFFNER: Um, and so fact is veritable fact and can't be denied as such.
The other point you made about experts,
I think is useful to know, because it is the
self-purported experts that are often at these
polar ends of the spectrum,
and refuse to find the common ground that often
is a gray area of nuance in a fact.
MAHER: And we all like facts that reinforce
our worldview, right?
There's a, sort of an instinctual element of that.
It, it, um, animates systems in our brain,
it makes us feel good, it releases serotonin,
and we're like ha, look, we're right.
Um, Wikipedia is not about facts necessarily that
reinforce your world view.
In fact there was a recent study that I believe was
conducted at the graduate school of business at
Harvard, Harvard Business School,
um, that looked at, the longer you're engaged in editing
Wikipedia, and if you come from a particularly
polarized point of view, the more you shed that
polarization, and move towards neutral
perspective, which means you use more neutral
language, you take a more neutral approach,
you bring more facts to the conversation in a way
that is about open discourse and dialogue,
that is more questioning, that is more accepting of
perhaps people who don't share your point of view.
And so we think that there's a model there
around discourse, and expectations too,
where we say, look, you know,
hyper partisan language or,
highly polarized language, is not acceptable.
We expect civility and discourse,
civility, meaning respect, meaning patience,
meaning an openness to others,
and that, I think is something that scales
within the Wikimedia model.
We have a, a page, we call it's like the newsroom
behind every article on Wikipedia,
and these conversations happen behind the scenes
in every single one.
We would love to see something similar.
I don't think the solution to today's hyper partisan
moment is for us to be sitting on television,
shouting at each other.
I think it is much more the model of the Wikipedia conversation.
It's six people around a table having coffee,
talking about their experiences,
and coming to some sort of understanding and empathy
for the perspective that we all bring.
I'd much rather that we were all meeting in church
basements or synagogue basements,
or mosque basements and having a conversation
about what it means to be a community,
about the different perspectives that we have,
and trying to find some sort of common identity or purpose.
Now that's far beyond Wikipedia.
That's jut my reflection as a citizen today,
but I think community conversations are far
closer to the solution than anything you see in
terms of talking heads on a screen.
HEFFNER: What do you say to someone,
respectively looking in at what you do,
who says, I, I couldn't possibly relate to one of
those six people in the mosque or church or
synagogue, in that, you still face...
MAHER: Of course you can relate, I mean...
HEFFNER: You would hope, but...
MAHER: All of us, all of us have parents, some of us have children,
you know, we all have people that we love and care about.
I think it's possible to find those similarities.
You know, many of us have grown up using,
you know, public school infrastructure.
What was that experience like.
There's ways that we can relate to each other
through finding common experiences and identities
that may have nothing to do with our political
perspective, that allow us to be in closer dialogue
with each other as neighbors.
You know we all, as neighbors, we share fences...
HEFFNER: Right.
MAHER: Like, we sit on both sides of it.
That's a common thing that we have in, we have together.
HEFFNER: So, do you not experience some resistance
that has formed in recent years,
that suggests that Wikipedia is some
kind of elite institution, that is not...
MAHER: Sure.
HEFFNER: An organic democratic process, such as
you've described, because that's the person that I'm alluding to,
who has that point of view and it doesn't matter how many citations,
how many are from neutral, objective sources,
MAHER: I would say that, you know,
somebody who might disagree with one thing
that they read in terms of a political debate,
or coverage of a news event,
might find something else that they fundamentally
agree with, if it's the coverage of their favorite
television show, for example.
We tend to think of Wikipedia as sort of very
high minded and all about, you know,
um, Plato's Cave or um, the,
um, I read a lot about, for example,
the physics of flight, I'm fascinated by planes.
You know, we tend to think of it as very high minded,
intellectual, academic, but in reality we have
hundred of articles about pop culture,
about the Simpsons, about Pokémon.
I mean it's famous for at one point having an
article for almost every Pokémon character that has
ever been created, and I challenge people not to
find commonalities, and to find identity in the
things that we share that are part of our popular
cultural experience.
HEFFNER: Absolutely. I was just looking up Hamlet and reading
all the accounts of Shakespeare's Danish prince.
Um, the, the thing that we come back to of,
supporting your community, which is a unique one,
the economic model of an informed democracy matters
fundamentally, in terms of where your focus is.
If you're gonna have an electorate or a citizenry
that is informed, as opposed to misinformed,
or if you're gonna have a factually rooted
democracy, I think you are able to generate some
foundation of stability in that educated
infrastructure because of what I read from the outset, no ads...
MAHER: Yeah.
HEFFNER: A model that's not contingent upon going viral,
clickbait, and that is...
MAHER: It's unique.
HEFFNER: Few and far between.
MAHER: Definitely.
HEFFNER: We're on the public airwaves.
We share that with you, but,
the, I think this question of informed democracy,
and it being in the economic model determining
if we're going to be factually rooted or not, is important.
MAHER: I do think it's important.
I, I, I always struggle a little bit with this being
honest, because I don't mean to imply that our
friends at privately owned publications for example,
are necessarily any less factual than
we would aspire to be.
In fact, I think that, as I mentioned earlier,
so many Wikipedia articles are written based on
sources and citations that come from the press
that might be privately held.
But I do think there is something wonderful to the
integrity of being a for-profit that is
independent and that is supported by the value
that it gives to people, right,
and that might, that's true of public media,
and I think it's true of Wikipedia as well which,
we sort of think of as like little 'p' public media.
We belong to the public.
We want, you know, the content on Wikipedia
is freely licensed.
It doesn't belong to us at the foundation.
In fact it belongs to the world.
We want Wikipedia and the idea of free knowledge
to belong to the world as well,
and we want people to support that idea,
and they do, millions of people around the globe
support Wikipedia every year.
That, that sort of independence I do think is
really critical to sort of the integrity of saying,
we're not going to optimize for how long you
spend on our site. We're not going to track you.
We don't track anybody who comes to the sites.
We know vaguely how many devices come
to Wikipedia every month.
We don't know how many unique users,
and we're really OK with that.
We don't want to end up in a situation where
we're trying to retain your eyeballs on the site
for as long as we possibly can.
Some of these platforms that are very popular
today have what, sort of known as a god metric,
which is something like, how many minutes a day
do you spend on that site?
Taken to its rational point of,
or taken, spun that out to sort of the point
of absurdity, it would seem that they want
you on their device, on their devices or on their
platforms, 24 hours a day. I don't want to live that life.
You know I want to dip into information sharing.
I want to dip into social networks that I'm part of,
and then I want to come back out and sit across
the table and have a conversation that is not
intermediated by devices.
So, we believe very strongly that not being
dependent on ad revenue, not being dependent on the
number of clicks, not being dependent on the
number of minutes you spend on our site,
is actually critical to providing people
with sort of an integrity of experience.
If you're just looking for one fact,
and you come and spend five minutes looking for
it, then we're not doing our job.
But if you're coming for five minutes really
reading into a subject, or fifty minutes reading
into a subject, that's great too.
We're, who is it, it's not for us to judge how people learn.
We're just here to provide that information.
And being a neutral nonprofit that's supported
by people, helps us do that.
HEFFNER: And are people learning?
Do we know people are learning.
MAHER: I, I do hope that people are learning.
I mean what's your, I think the definition
of learning should be as broad as it can possibly be.
As I mentioned, if you're going on to look up
something about a popular television show,
maybe you're learning that it's rooted in,
you mentioned Hamlet earlier.
Maybe you're learning that it's actually rooted in
some sort of historical allegory or,
or archetypical story that is a core to our human experience.
That, that is a form of learning,
even if it comes from a reference as I,
to the Simpsons, or something along those lines.
We know that people learn when they spend time on
Wikipedia and we can tell by the number of links that they click.
We can tell my sort of the,
the, the way that, the number of visits
that we get, the page views per, per month.
People are spending a tremendous amount of time on it.
It's brining value to a large number of people,
and if you sort of narrow that into sort of specific
use cases, you know we just,
members of our community just launched an app
that uh, takes all of the medical information on
Wikipedia and makes it available to you offline.
Now that might not seem really relevant to you
and I sitting here in a studio.
But if you're in a rural part of the world where
your access to the internet is limited,
your access to even electricity is limited,
the ability, and say you're a student of
medicine or perhaps you're a practitioner,
the ability to take that information with you
whenever you go, is quite critical.
And what I, the reasons I bring this up is,
it's already been downloaded something like
a quarter of a million times since it launched
just a few months ago.
I think that gives evidence to the fact
that there is real value in the information,
and people certainly are getting value out of it.
HEFFNER: When one of your predecessors was here,
Sue Gardiner, I asked her from the outset,
I said, I said, are you more or less confident,
upon her retirement from...
MAHER: Mm-hmm.
HEFFNER: The post you sit in now,
about the virtue of, of, the internet
and the internet as a force for good,
and it was a mixed answer...
MAHER: Hmm.
HEFFNER: But I, I think it definitely reflected your
achievements over that tenure.
As we close now, Katherine,
can you tell our viewers about your aspiration for
the achievement or achievements that you
aspire to make in this, in this tenure...
MAHER: Sure.
HEFFNER: Um, where,
MAHER: Where are we going.
HEFFNER: Are you and your fellow Wikipedia readers
and editors and staff, where are you going,
and what is the ultimate goal?
MAHER: So there's an aphorism that technology
is not good, technology is not bad, nor is it neutral.
And I am a firm believer in that.
I don't think that you can say that the internet
necessarily has been a, an unequivocal force for
good, and I certainly think it has offered a lot
of good to the world, so nor is it purely bad.
Um, it is a complex thing and,
Wikipedia sits within that complex ecosystem.
Our goals for the future, we turned sixteen,
just this past January.
Um, we've been around, we're, we're an adolescent.
We've been around long enough to be a very
different institution than we were when we started.
When we started out, you know,
everybody thought this model of an encyclopedia
that anybody could edit, how would that ever work.
Today we're trusted, we're relied upon,
we're reliable, we're used by people in nearly 300
languages around the world.
We've got a global contribute,
contributor community as I mentioned,
from medical doctors to students.
I think the question for us it,
what do you do with that responsibility.
Our vision statement is a world in which every
single human can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.
It doesn't say anything about an encyclopedia.
It doesn't say anything about being a website.
So I think we're asking ourselves a question over
the course of this year.
In 15 years time when we look back,
when we're 30 years old, what will we have accomplished?
Will every single human really be sharing in knowledge?
It's not just about accessing.
It's about participating, and using that knowledge
to do something that improves their lives,
their livelihoods, that gives them greater sort
of connection to the society and shared culture that we have.
HEFFNER: What is, in your mind,
the principle obstacle that you have to overcome,
whether it's culture at large,
or institutionally, in order to say that by 2030,
there will be a fuller grasp of knowledge across the globe?
MAHER: There are many obstacles.
I'm not going to try to summarize and simplify into one.
HEFFNER: And we've talked about some of that tonight.
MAHER: There's awareness, there's connectivity,
there's censorship, there is um,
leisure time, people's ability to actually engage
in knowledge, there's literacy challenges.
At the same time, there is increased connectivity
around the globe, access to information,
and access to the internet is less expensive
than it has ever been. Literacy is rising, globally.
There are some really wonderful trends that
we're looking at in terms of our ability to
potentially, actually reach that vision in a way
that was aspirational but not necessary practical
when we first started out.
So I think the opportunity for us is vast.
I think the challenge for us,
is how do we continue to grow in a way that
increases the diversity of content that exists on
Wikimedia sites, continues to make sure that we're
trusted and neutral and reliable to all,
um, and that we keep our mission and our vision at
the forefront of our hearts and that we sort of
keep that as our north star into the future.
HEFFNER: Onward.
MAHER: [LAUGHTER]
HEFFNER: Thank you Katherine.
MAHER: Thank you so much.
HEFFNER: And thanks to you in the audience.
I hope you join us again next time,
for a thoughtful excursion into the world of ideas.
Until then, keep an open mind.
Please visit The Open Mind website at
Thirteen.org/openmind to view this program online,
or to access over 1,500 other interviews,
and do check us out on twitter and Facebook
@OpenMindTV for updates on future programing.
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