 Hello, hello. Welcome, everyone. I hope most of you managed to get lunch. We have the great fortune today of welcoming my friend, Catherine Maher, the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, the charity that supports Wikipedia and its sister projects and has for the past 15 years. And she has previously done work supporting health and human rights in a bunch in many parts of the world. She worked at the World Bank and in Access Now. And when we first met, she was helping start off the innovation team at UNICEF, trying to build health and child welfare projects on an infrastructure of open source tools. And we're luckily talking about what the future holds for Wikipedia, positive and negatives, whether it's going to be around in 20 years. And she'll be having a little conversation afterwards with your high bank clerk. For the people just coming in, we run out of chairs. Don't sweat it. Feel free to hang out anywhere you want along the signs. And this is being recorded, so if you're doing something particularly exciting, just be sure to look up when you do it. Catherine, thanks so much for coming. Hey, everyone. Oh, I don't think I'm on. Can you hear me now? Excellent. Well, I am incredibly excited to be here. And speaking about this topic today, it's something that has consumed my thinking for the past year and the thinking of the Wikimedia community and Wikimedia Foundation as a whole. I'm also just delighted to be here because as SJ mentioned, my relationship just with the Berkman community goes back to when I was at UNICEF. And this is a community that has given so much to the world in which I work over the years, and I have so much respect for all of the work that you do. So this is kind of a really exciting moment for me to be here to talk about this thing that I care so much about and probably is something that you're all familiar with and have your own deep feelings and associations with as well. So I was asked to talk about whether Wikimedia would exist in 20 years. And I'm going to use this presentation, but it's also going to be a little bit informal as I go along. You know, one of the things that they teach you is you should always answer the question you wish you'd been asked. And so instead of talking about when you're asked a question, and so instead of talking about Wikipedia in 20 years, what I'm really going to talk about is Wikipedia in 15 years because that is what we have been talking about at the Wikimedia Foundation for the last little while. We asked ourselves the same question of whether Wikipedia will exist. And I'm happy to say the immediate gut reaction is yes, but hopefully it's going to be much more than Wikipedia by the time we're done in 15 years. What would that make it? 32? 2032? No. Yes. Right. Okay. 2032. And by the 2032, hopefully it's a lot more than Wikipedia that you're thinking about when you're thinking about the Wikimedia ecosystem. So on our 15th birthday, which was January 15th, 2016, because we were starting 2001, not 2000, although that would have been really nice if we'd had that nice round number. We got to thinking, you know, 15 years in, we were this remarkable project and we had this moment of celebration, but it also made us ask ourselves the question, we're kind of a grown up in terms of internet years. There have been many projects that were started around the same time that we were started that have come and gone. And yet here we are. And not only are we something that has succeeded in sort of maintaining our longevity, in some ways we're much larger and more ambitious in terms of our scope and scale than we ever thought we would be. So what does the next 15 years hold? When we look back in 2032, can we say that we've accomplished? Not just building the free encyclopedia, but really what's the sort of midpoint vision that we want to set our eyes on. But before I go forward, I want to go back. This is what Wikipedia looked like many moons ago. You may recognize this. So anyone in the room recognize this Wikipedia? A few hands. You know, people like to tell me that Wikipedia hasn't changed since it started. And then I like to share them this slide. You know, back in the day Wikipedia was pretty wild and woolly. And a lot of our articles were pretty rudimentary. This is one of my favorite articles. This is the article entry for the standard poodle. And if you read closely, you'll see the standard poodle is the dog by which all other dogs are measured. Nerd jokes. Most of these have been edited out of Wikipedia by now. But I still find them funny. And of course, you know, the other thing about Wikipedia that we like to say is that as Wikipedia has grown, it's also sort of defied expectations. There is a statement that the problem with Wikipedia is that it only works in practice because of course, in theory, it would never work or it is a total disaster. And I have attribution needed in there because nobody really knows where this comes from. I've heard some folks say that a certain Jonathan Zitrain might have coined it, but I've heard others say that absolutely not. This comes from the community. So I'm going to put a shruggy in there, add a template and say attribution needed. And in reality, this is what we think about all the time. How could something that is this crowd sourced, if you want to use that term, certainly collaborative project work in such a way that it would expand to all these hundreds of different languages across so many different areas of topic and subject matter and involve and engage the contribution of not just hundreds of thousands, but literally millions of people over time and get them to agree on such contentious topics as Pokemon and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and yet somehow it does. And it's grown up a lot. I mean, this is actually what the standard poodle or poodle article looks like today, perhaps not quite as wild and wooly, but certainly full of citations and information for everything that you might need. You can see that it's got templates and info boxes and is embedded into wiki data, which we're going to talk a little bit more about later, and truly a resource that people depend on all the time. So what is that resource look like and what's a scale that it has in the world? As I mentioned, we're much larger than just an encyclopedia at this point in many ways. But when most people come to visit Wikipedia, they're behaving as though it is an encyclopedia. And the article is probably the first and final thing that they see. And that's fine. That is, after all, a lot of what we're here to do. Today, on average, we receive about 1.4 billion device visits a month. We don't actually know how many unique visitors there are, because our privacy policies prevent us from tracking unique users, which is a thing that we're very proud of. But so 1.4 billion unique devices, this number does go up and down as the school year goes in and out. As you can imagine, we get a little less traffic during the summer months, and a lot less traffic on Christmas Day until everyone opens their iPhones and then sort of the traffic pops back up again. But as you can imagine, this really means that we serve quite a large section of the world. And just in terms of traffic volume alone, this puts us as the fifth largest website on the internet today. And certainly the only noncommercial website that really cracks the top 10, certainly, I don't know where you would put BBC on that. But certainly the largest noncommercial website that's really serving sort of a broad audience as a website first. But it's so much more than just Wikipedia. Wikipedia, of course, is the insight I'll go back for a moment. Wikipedia, of course, is the encyclopedia. And to give you a sense of where we stand, we have nearly 300 Wikipedia's across 300 different languages. There are 40 plus million articles across all of those 300 languages. Now, some of them range tremendously English is the largest with more than 5.4 million articles. And then you have smaller Wikipedia projects like also Wikipedia, which has about 1000 articles. And so some of these are really emergent projects. But a lot of them are large functional projects that serve the communities and the languages that they're intended, intended to serve. So the 40 million articles, roughly 300 languages, to give you a sense of just the scale of it, it's edited 350 times a minute, we have more than 250,000 people who edit it every single month, of which about 70 to 80,000 edit more than five times a month. And over time, we know that that has been millions and millions of people. Again, we don't have exact numbers because we just don't track these sorts of things. But I think it's reasonable to say that around the world, at least tens of millions of people have contributed to Wikipedia over time, making it a project that is truly of the people, by the people, for the people, if you will. But what I was saying earlier is that it's so much more than just the article space. Wikipedia at this point is truly somewhat of a graph of human knowledge. Now, it is an imperfect knowledge, we'll certainly say that and we'll get into that a little bit when talking about what the future looks like. But this, for example, is a map of DBpedia or databasepedia, which is a separate project, we don't run this, but because of our open licensing policies and the way that we make everything transparent and accessible and work with researchers, this is some, this is a project that actually looks at the structured and linked data within Wikipedia and then maps it. And what you can see is that this is actually an ecosystem of everything that is influenced by the data sets that are contained within Wikipedia. So if you're using natural language processing tools, if you're using machine translation, chances are that even just sort of algorithms in general these days, chances are that they have been touched or trained in some sort of way on the data that Wikipedia provides, intentional or otherwise, whether it's the data sets that we release or whether it's just brute force scraping of the corp that exists within the projects. Wikipedia is influencing things in ways that go far beyond looking up that article about the standard poodle. A recent study that came out really recently supported by MIT, talking about how access to Wikipedia influences scientific dialogue with an average of one per 200 words being influenced by the information that's accessible on Wikipedia. Conversations about how 50% of doctors use Wikipedia as a primary source. There's a study. Don't laugh. This is actually really important. What would say to doctors is the same thing we say to educators. Use it as a jumping off point. Check the citations, please. Don't make any life changing decisions based on Wikipedia. We say the same thing that I would say, I was told as a student, you can't cite an encyclopedia, so don't cite Wikipedia in your reports. But this is actually really important and the reason this is really important is it's nice to think about all the access to medical resources that we have sitting in this room on our high band with connections. But if you actually look at the access that most people have in the world, it's quite limited. So these are tools that provide an essential resource for those doctors and medical students who are operating and working in low bandwidth environments. Wikipedia is a high quality source of information in this regard. In politics, there was a recent study that came out of the business school here that showed that the more you edit Wikipedia, if you come in with a partisan viewpoint, the more neutral your language becomes, making Wikipedia the only place on the web that I know where people become more reasonable after participating rather than less. And as I mentioned earlier, it's not just Wikipedia. Wikimedia Commons is our free image repository with more than 40 million free images. That's as many images that exist as articles in Wikipedia and Wikidata, which is our relatively new five years old, free and open data source, CC0 licensed, structured in linked data, really sort of making the ideal of the semantic web reel, or at least we're trying. And to give you a sense of how large this is, Wikidata now accounts for over 50% of all of the edits that are made within the Wikimedia ecosystem today. I really see it as the future of what free knowledge looks like within the Wikimedia environment. And we're not just a website, we're a community as well. This represents everywhere we have where we have an affiliate organization or some sort of body that's working to advance free knowledge. These are some of the friendly faces of the folks who do it. They partner around the world. They advocate for open knowledge policy in the European Union, in the United States, and many sort of administrations and legislative bodies globally. They're working to advance free knowledge, not just the encyclopedia. And I think that that is really the core of what we're here to talk about today. Of course, as we looked at what the world was going to look like in 15 years, we wanted to also understand what the world itself looks like. And so we began by doing some really simple things. We can't project what technology will look like, but we can count babies. And in 15 years, the world is going to look really different. Populations in places where we are most prevalent are shrinking. Some of our largest Wikipedias today are Wikipedias like Russian Wikipedia, Japanese Wikipedia, German Wikipedia, and of course English Wikipedia. And populations are growing in places where we do not exist. So we have some questions that that puts in front of us. We also know that there are tremendous changes in the production consolidation and dissemination of information. Consolidation is something that I'm sure many of you are familiar with. The fact that the top five, I mentioned that we're one of the top five visited websites. Two of those top five are owned by one company. Of the top 10 apps in the app store, the majority are owned by three companies. So consolidation on the web, or if you can even call apps the web, given that they are closed gardens, is a real consideration and that has tremendous implications for the way that information is disseminated and as well the way that information is produced. These have implications for a secondary something like us which relies exclusively on secondary sources. That doesn't even get into the issues of reliability and credibility, and I hate the term, but I'll use it anyway, fake news, which is something that comes up quite frequently in our conversations. Wikipedia is also something that most people know as something that they use through a browser. I don't know the last time anybody used it not through a browser, except maybe you have like a Google Home or an Alexa or you've asked it a question via Siri. Chances are if you've been engaged with any one of those devices and asked them a general purpose knowledge question, you've asked them a question that has been answered through information scraped out of Wikipedia. Wikipedia doesn't have an app that does that and we certainly don't have a home-assisted device. So there are questions about experiential intermediation that are starting to come to the surface, which isn't just a consumption layer, it's also a participation layer, because Wikipedia relies on participation as a means of staying up-to-date, credible, accurate, and relevant to the world. And so we're asking ourselves what is the direct connection that we need to have, to go from read-write only on the web, to going to being read-right across multiple different experiences, because part of our core promise is a promise of participation, a world in which every single person can freely share in knowledge, not just consume it. We think that's critical to being engaged knowledge participants and advocates. And of course there is declining trust in civic institutions and changing policy environments everywhere we look. These are pressures that are coming to bear as spaces globally continue to close, spaces for freedom of expression in specific nations certainly, but also discourses that we're having right here in the United States. I certainly never expected to live into a period where I saw the president of this country question the license of the free press, not that there are licenses for the free press, but that is a very different issue. And in some places there are, and in some of those places Wikipedia is not accessible. And we've made that choice not to censor our information, but to acknowledge that we would rather stand for freedom of information. But these questions and these challenges are only pressures that we expect to increase over time. And so what do we need to do to prepare for this? What happens is our new realities are wobbling as, or sorry our old realities are wobbling as new ones emerge. So this is the context in which we started to have this conversation, interfaces, demographics, changes in sort of political and commercial consolidation and pressure in space. So we launched this project Wikimedia 2030 where we thought no big deal we'd answer these questions. We'd have a conversation with our community. And as you know, having a conversation with a large distributed open source community is pretty easy. And you can achieve consensus really fast. I'm just kidding. So we began this project. We launched it. It was Wikimedia 2030. I'm going to go through the process bit really quickly because Wikipedians love this. But I know that's not why you're here. The point being that we spoke to thousands of Wikimedians around the world in 20 different languages, hosted hundreds of salons, interviewed experts, did all sorts of sticky note exercises with the idea beginning to start to understand a little bit about what people's priorities and concerns are. We heard from our community about what was most important to them. Number one, knowledge gaps and biases. As you can imagine, there are quite a few of those Wikimedia. We tend to think of it as a mere held up to the world, the biases of the world or the biases of Wikipedia. But that is also the case that Wikipedia is also just biased, right? 80% of our editors on average are male. And we have a lot of articles about Pokemon and battleships and dead white European philosophers and not so much about pretty much everything else. Community health and ensuring sort of sustainability and robustness, integration with education, availability across languages, going beyond Wikipedia. All of these are sort of themes that came up. And you can see at the bottom, I'm a little worried about this values. I don't know what that means. And if you want to know what we learned, we have where Wikipedians, we wrote it all up. There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages of reports and data and citations that 2030.wikimedia.org. But just really in brief, what we learned is that Wikimedia does not serve the whole world. And in fact, we're not even close. Here is some of the evidence of awareness among the internet users. So you can see in the United States and France, we're doing great 84%, 87%. But there are plenty of places in the world that have never heard of us. I don't know why. Is it because we're not relevant to them? We don't answer the questions that they are looking for. We don't have the content that is important to their communities. I'd hazard a guess. It's all of the above. We looked at traffic by region and as you can see, similar breakdowns. We're still a largely global North project. Structural inequalities are preventing us from achieving our mission. These are issues that we face not just in content, but in terms of access, in terms of penetration, in terms of the cost of access. These are challenges that we're going to need to address if we're ever going to be successful. We need to adapt to changing knowledge needs. As we went out and did all of this research, we learned quite quickly that young people, this is my favorite, we interviewed a young woman in South Africa and we said, yeah, Wikipedia, it's the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Have you ever heard of it? And she said, what's an encyclopedia? Is that a thing where old people go to look up old information and old books? So there's a question as to whether that conceptual model even matters to the people that we're trying to reach. It's not to say that they don't need knowledge. This is a very educated young woman. She just didn't really think an encyclopedia was relevant to her. Not just as the framework with which we engage with information perhaps a bit outmoded, but the interfaces themselves might be. People use chat in many places of the world. They don't use the search function in terms of going to their browser and entering into a search engine. Increasingly, people are moving away from institutions into influencers as a means of seeking and understanding the world around them. I trust the person who just had a similar lived experience, so I'm going to ask them my question. Not this anonymous institution that I don't understand how it works or how it's produced or who's interested has in mind. In fact, most people have no idea what the Wikimedia Foundation even exists. When we talk to people, they think Wikipedia is a project of Google. We should leverage new technology to achieve our mission. Already, Wikipedia relies very much on the human machine interface, but it is clear to us that that is only going to continue to evolve. And so what are the ways in which we can harness this in ways that are consistent with our values? I like to think of it as, and I'm not alone in thinking of this, as sort of what is ethical AI or machine learning? How do we think about legibility as a concept so people understand what the implications are? How do we think of active consent so that people agree to what is being done with machines as they think about how knowledge is being formed? An inclusion to ensure that we are aware and can address some of the biases that are inherent in the way that we train on data sets and build our algorithms. And many people in the world want to join us, but they just don't know how. Because a lot of the models that existed when the web was coming up and it was all new to us are no longer the models with which people understand how to participate. I grew up when Wikipedia didn't exist. I joined the web when it was still just being formed. You know, it was obvious to me how to edit a wiki page because that was the only way you could edit anything on the web. Today, that's just not something that many institutions think of, and they don't necessarily realize that when we say anyone can edit, we really do mean anyone. And we want that participation. So these are the five themes that emerge. Healthy, inclusive communities. It has to be welcoming if we want all people to participate. The augmented age, advancing with technology. A truly global movement. It's not enough for just the Europeans and the Americans to care about wiki media. The most respected source of knowledge. It's an ambition. Engaging the knowledge ecosystem, right? So how do we really truly participate as part of a broader open community? And that is how we got to a direction for our future, which I'm running out of time, so I'll go through quite quickly. This is a little controversial, the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of open knowledge. We're very collaborative, and so people don't like being sort of the superlative of anything. But the idea being that we are embedded within the open knowledge ecosystem, thinking of ourselves as going beyond the encyclopedia to recognize that the platform structures and resources that we have are critical to sustaining that open knowledge ecosystem. For example, as the largest re-user of Creative Commons, licenses, this is something that helps sustain what open licensing actually looks like. Anyone who shares our vision will be able to join us. And we boiled that down in the concepts of service and equity. Knowledge is a service. It's a little Silicon Valley ESCS, software as a service, platforms as a service. But we really like to embrace the service component of it. Providing a service to the world. How do we evolve our underlying infrastructure so that our platform is more flexible and allows more people to build things on top of it but also embraces new experiences, interfaces, and devices. Allows people to query and engage with information in the Wikimedia ecosystem in new ways. Building tools for ourselves, our allies, and our partners so that we are not just a good steward of the information that we have but we help and engage other institutions in the way that they open their information. And enabling new forms of knowledge, not just text but perhaps thinking about how do we capture oral histories. How do we think about welcoming rich media experiences into our projects. And equity. Equity is important to us. How do we think about the communities that are left out, the knowledge that hasn't been brought into the discourse. How do we welcome people from every background, not just those who are privileged enough to have high bandwidth connections and expensive laptop devices. How do we ensure that we have a friendly and welcoming space so that we address that 80-20 ratio? These are serious challenges. Not just the 80-20 ratio. There are many people left out by that binary. How do we break down the barriers to accessing and sharing and knowledge? These are the questions that I think we will be confronting over the course of the next 15 years. We say that these are the things that we need to focus on because we believe that if we do not focus on these things, it is true that Wikipedia will exist in 15 years. We'll still be in encyclopedia. You can always leave an encyclopedia on a bookshelf. But if you just leave it on a bookshelf, it will gather dust. We want to make sure that we're much more than existing in 20 years or 15 years. We want to make sure that we're a place in which everyone can participate, in which we are embedded in the spirit of learning and exploration and curiosity, and that we are somebody that can help increase the amount of information that is available in the world, that we can be a leader and a partner in opening information so that it is available to all? So to answer the question, yes, I'm bullish. And now I would love to go to the questions so I can get sit in the hot seat and hear what it is you all have to say. Thank you. So thank you. I'm Yochai Benkler. I teach here and I'm going to start the conversation with you. I have to say one thing that struck me about your talk was the confidence. No. OK, I first wrote about Wikipedia when it was six months old. I spoke at the fifth anniversary. I spoke at the 10th anniversary. Mr. the 15th. And what happened even by the 10th was still, is this real? How are we doing it? We're losing editors. Are we getting enough editors? There's a confidence here that that's a solved problem. You're going to be around. And a lot of what I'm seeing is is out of a sense of confidence and engagement with a world that is not necessarily friendly. So let me sort of start by. To me, Wikipedia was always interesting as a different model of organizing ourselves of producing things. The one thing that to me was missing from this ambitious, generous model that you're describing was a sense of political and ideological education. So you talked about the communities around the world who participated in open knowledge politics as it were. But there's a real tension, as we know from a Wikipedia shutdown around Sopa Pippa or the protest day. Where do you see in these conversations you had with the Wikipedians around the future this tension between knowing that you occupy a world in which there's a small number of companies trying to structure the world in a certain way and that politics matter and this embrace of the idea that Wikipedia is the only platform where people come and they don't become more extreme, they become more reasonable and the tension between those two. Do you think of yourself as a political organization? Are you the Lorax? Are you speaking for the trees? I just... Okay, yeah, it's still on. Is it still on? So I think that is a... Can you hear me in the back? I'm like, okay. I think that is an excellent question and this is actually one of the most controversial things that came out of the direction, the strategic direction that we came up with around service and equity is there was a real desire in certain parts of our community to embrace advocacy for the world in which we want to exist and to think about how we could be more of an advocacy-oriented organization and I want to be careful about the word political because the way that I think about this is free knowledge is inherently radical, right? The idea that we are here to... We exist to liberate information, perhaps not in the most dramatic of ways, Wikipedia is a very rule-abiding, but that is ultimately what we're trying to do is something that flies in the face of thousands of years of human history that has really seen literal empires and great wealth built off of the accumulation and control of information and so what that means is that our mission in and of itself is radical and when we run into the realities that are commercial or political, we have to recognize that our mission can be political. It does not mean that we are partisan and I think that that is something that is a struggle that we will have to engage with over the course of the years to come. The web that we were created in was a very different sort of, felt like a very different environment. I don't actually want to sort of buy into the naivete that it was, but it felt like a different environment and certainly one in which there was far less scrutiny as to the motives and sort of the implications for the work that we did. Today, I think that we have to contend with the fact that the information and the mission that we seek to serve is something that is going to be controversial in places and we have to decide how much do we want to step into that controversy in order to defend the underlying circumstances that are necessary for our mission to actually be achievable and I believe that there's an expression in Wikipedia that you need to be bold, revert to be bold. I believe that we need to be bold on this one. I think we also do need to be careful though that we are not taking up the credibility and trust and power that the institution has been imbued with through the participation of so many people over time and using it in a way that is reckless. So what is reckless? I think reckless is being, there has been a temptation over the course of the past few months at least within the Wikimedia Foundation in some parts of our communities to respond to what feels like an unprecedented public discourse globally and I believe that responding in a way that responds to that discourse could be quite reckless. Responding in a way that advances a vision of the way that we would like to see the world and investing in that vision, in that collaboration, in that community building, in that exchange, in inclusion, in diversity of content, that is not reckless. That is an obligation to our mission. That is setting a vision for the world in which we want to live and that allows us to hold the banner for an alternative to the discourse in which we currently are, see the rest of the world spinning into. So let me then push you on a slightly, in a related but narrower, perhaps crystallized, I hope crystallizing. You talked about Divipedia, you talked about the various ways in which an Alexa will deliver. So there's this tension between on one hand, maintaining open data and open knowledge structures, no matter who's trying to wrap them. With the sense of growing concentration of a small number of actors and finding yourself understood, oh, isn't Wikipedia a project of Google's? So that's a political, forget the word political, if it mixes us with part of it. That's a question of institutions and power. Have you had a conversation about the extent to which you need to think differently about licensing, about control in order to preserve the knowledge commons, rather than allowing for Wikipedia to seed private clubs and leverage that into something that essentially makes Wikipedia into a commodity instead of a way of being human? I think that you have touched on one of the two existential debates that emerged from our strategic discussions. And the first, just to sort of figure it out there, is the tension between participation and quality, which we can get into. And then the second, which is the tension between the mission says that all information should be available to all and therefore we don't care who distributes it and actually for us to maintain the integrity of the model, that information needs to be something that is associated with the Wikimedia ecosystem. I come down on the side of the ladder, but that is controversial. Many in our community say, everyone should be able to take it and grab it and bring it to the world. And it doesn't matter who intermediates us as long as they're distributing it. My personal belief, and again, there's a tension here. This is not shared. There's no consensus, as it were. Is that if you break the sort of evidentiary chain within the ecosystem of the knowledge structure that Wikimedia has built, that it does rely on citations, that it does rely on this graph, we are no better than almost any other resource of information. I thought about this, somebody asked me the other day, is just the fact that Wikipedia has become more trusted over time, has that led to more trust being imbued in other sources of online information, AKA, are you responsible for the current state in which we find ourselves where everyone believes everything they read on the internet? I said, oh God, I hope not. But I think this speaks to your point, which is I do believe that if you break that sort of citation layer, a lot of the value that Wikipedia has created in terms of the integrity of the process is lost. But the question of licensing, that's a controversial one. It has come up recently. It's come up in quiet rooms behind closed doors. I don't know, and I guess now I'm bringing it to an open room, I know. This is not a closed door, right? This is not a closed door. This is not a closed door. Oh, I'm aware. Be aware. I am aware. But tell us. I am. There are some things on the record and there are some things up. This one's on, no, I put it on there. This is a question that has come up recently, is do we need to think about the way in which we, maybe it's not just, maybe it's not changed our licensing, that would be tremendously difficult, as I'm sure you know. But do we need to think about the way that we enforce our licensing differently? And do we need to be a little bit more aggressive about that in a way that stands not just for, I think, Wikipedia, but stands for the commons and becomes an advocate on behalf of the commons as a whole, because I think any one of you with a simple insert search name here, search will find is that the attribution in the commons and is something that is aspirational in actual application quite often. So that actually, that I think is critical, because this question of the extent to which you see yourself as back to the question of the Lorax for the commons, as protecting institutionally and politically where necessary, as telling the story and educating. The idea, again, to me, what was so exhilarating for so many years was the idea that you had a functionally effective community doing something that in theory shouldn't work. You actually have at least one user who on their talk page takes responsibility, so you should know. But it was in practice. It moves, it shouldn't move, but it nonetheless, and yet it moves. And so the question is, and it's tied very specifically to questions of attribution, questions of the shape of, through the attribution clicking through to the framework, the question of actually educating publicly, not just about these values of equity. Sure, you can do them internally, as were all of the conversations that were so central at the 10th anniversary around gender imbalances. But at the same time, the question is, to what extent you can actually distribute the understanding of participatory self-governance and equity as things that actually work so that it's not just about Wikipedia, it's about this is a way of doing things. And is that within your framework? Take your process, your participatory process of how to think about this, and turn it into a training program for municipalities for how to get citizens to, is that part of the self-imagination? Oh, I wish we had those resources. No, I mean, I think that that's a phenomenally good question. One of my great frustrations is that over the years, and I think there's a tension here, I'll say my great frustration is that over the years we withdrew into ourselves as a community. And when I joined to the Comedia Foundation, it felt like we were afraid of our own power. When I joined, people kept saying, oh, we're the this of that, right? We're the, using other people's models to refer back to what we were, and I was like, come on guys, this is the project that's launched, thousand dissertations, probably more, right? We are our own model, and it is important for us to embrace the fact that not only are we our own model, we're something that works. Now, the reason I say that was some hesitation is because I also think that that withdrawal into ourselves is something that allowed our values to really become solidified and instilled in a meaningful way, and those are the values of openness and transparency and the like. And I think that that is critical, perhaps we had been a little bit more open to the world, those would have been a little bit more malleable at earlier points before we were quite as well established, but really getting back to your question, I think it's an essential, I think it's an imperative for us to have a stronger voice at this particular period of time, and that to me gets to the question as well around what is recklessness. I think that what Wikipedia can offer is a powerful alternative to the discourse that we find ourselves in today. I'm reminded about sort of the fake news debate, what everybody, we had all these people come to us after the election this year, and people say, well, again, how does Wikipedia deal with fake news? Have you changed your way of dealing with this? And we said, no, this is what we've been doing for 16 years. I mean, yes, we've evolved over time, but this is not a new framework for us. In fact, we provide an example of an infrastructure of a governance mechanism that for all of its flaws, and I really do want to emphasize, there are flaws, right? 17% of the biographies on English Wikipedia are about women. That's a problem. There are flaws with representation. There are flaws with participation. There are certainly errors within Wikimedia. I'd be the first person to say this, it largely works, and it provides a compelling alternative for how we might think about governance, as you said, far beyond just a, not just a website. The largest re-knowledge project in the world. So I think people are going to want to come in. I want to try to do one more question, and I apologize to people when I'll sneak out. I just have to go teach, but I want to make sure that we just do one more step about peer production more generally. Absolutely. And Wikipedia really being the flagship, and the question is, where's the fleet? In other words, central to the idea of free software, in its original free software, of Wikipedia as the flagship of peer production is the idea that there's the possibility of building an alternative way of working together. And particularly when we're in this moment where we understand that working together is problematic, high inequality, tension between labor and capital, it's an idea, and I guess it has these two components. One is the extent which is much more directly tied to what you were talking about, which is providing open, equitable, global infrastructure for a critical knowledge utility. And the second is as the question of model for peer production. So these are the two questions. To what extent in your conversations that plays a role, the notion that you're essentially the flagship of a way of doing things and who are your allies in this? And the question, and the second is, are you thinking strategically about what other places in infrastructure will become bottlenecks that you could go in? So actually those are two much too complex questions. Let me just focus on the second one because the first one is too much my obsession and not enough central to yours. Sorry about that. Data is becoming a critical infrastructure for everything from automation to platforms to municipal governance. And you start by talking about wiki data. But the question is to what extent is it in your framework to really think about a situation where if you're in Europe and people have a right to their own Facebook data, they collect that data and deposit it in something that actually provides a personal data commons on which open infrastructure can work out. Is that part of the story? Is it not part of the story? So perhaps not that exact example, but I do think that this is part of the story. And that's when I think of knowledge as a service and what are the tools and infrastructure that we can offer? People know us as Wikipedia, but when you think about it, we also run MediaWiki and we run WikiBase, which is the open structured data repository that runs WikiData. And I can absolutely envision a world in which WikiBase is a dominant database for structured information. The great example of why this would matter is we do these editathons on a regular basis and this year for Black History Month, I think it was this year, the National Portrait Gallery in the Smithsonian decided that they wanted to do an editathon on black artists. And when they went into their catalog, they realized they had no way of determining which of the artists in their collection were of African American descent. None, they just didn't have that data, but WikiData did. And so they were able to use WikiData to pull from their catalog to understand who was in their collection they could feature to work on this editathon. Similarly, we run WikiLabs Monuments, which is this great photographic documentation process. Turns out that is the largest database of human heritage monuments in the world. UNESCO uses our database, at least that's what they've told us. So I can easily imagine a world, and this is actually one thing that I think is critical. It's something that we can provide to the commons and then enriches, whoo, there goes my microphone, enriches the ecosystem in turn, is providing infrastructure that opens more knowledge through things like WikiBase. And thinking about how we expand it, not just as something that serves Wikipedia or WikiData, but something that offers a service to a greater number of institutions, and perhaps does have an end user component that is about the individual user thinking about their data sets, but certainly has an opportunity for us to think about institutional components or institutional users that enriches the open knowledge information ecosystem as a whole. And I think that that, is that ambitious? Absolutely. Is that something we're gonna be doing for three years? I don't know. But is it something that we see on the horizon? Yes, very much so. And we know that there are other third parties that are already engaging with this, and it's not just the sort of usual players that you'd imagine. We know that there are commercial entities that are already taking up WikiBase and using it in their work. So yes, we want to revolutionize it all. Okay, great. I'm sure people are dying to jump in, so opening the floor. Hi, I have a really quick question. I really enjoyed your talk, and it's just a yes or no question. Would you be thrilled if everyone here went home and made a donation to Wikimedia? The answer is yes. Of course, thank you. Ellery. I see an Ellery in the back. Hi. Hi. So I wondered if you could talk a little bit about people who hesitate to participate because the idea of creating knowledge or freeing it, I think both of those things are happening when somebody participates in writing or editing an article, is a little scary, a little radical. This is something that I've been thinking about a lot in different contexts, but one interesting example, a Global Voices Community Member, which is the community I'm most a part of, who was working on a project to build Wikipedia and Odio, which is a small language in India, and he talked about how there were people who were hesitant to participate because they wanted to put, in addition to doing a lot of translation, they also wanted to put stuff about, they wanted to put stories, kind of cultural heritage material into the system, but then they were afraid of what would happen once it was in there. What if somebody who doesn't know us tries to edit it? Yeah, these are, so great question. First of all, Odio may be a small language, but it is the oldest of the Indic language Wikipedia's, so, wooh, Odio, and it has a great community. The, I think this is a great question on it, I almost break it up into sort of three parts, right? The first is the hesitation to participate, the second is the issue of cultural heritage and other forms of understanding cultural heritage and other ways of documenting cultural heritage, and the third is the question of who knows us best, right? And so I think on the first question, this is something we see often, and it's something that is universal. I don't know what I have to contribute. And so one of the things that, I think there's different ways that we can address this, we're thinking about how do you create more sort of open environments that are more collaborative and social and help people with sort of pairing in order where they come and they learn how to edit Wikipedia as a more social exercise and they're sort of onboarded and accultured in that way, we're thinking about how do we replicate that on in the online space, how do we think about small and directed tasks so that people when they say, gosh, I really want to contribute, but what would be most useful have a good pathway into that. So I think there's a sort of product and social components that we can do there. I'm not saying they'll work, they'll be experiments, and I'll come back in a year and let you know, or two years and let you know. The second one, this is something that is really a challenge as our communities who, particularly communities that come from places where oral tradition is far more embedded within the historical record and memory of a community, they'll be the first to tell us, look, Wikipedia's standards of notability don't allow for my heritage to be recorded in a meaningful way. And we're having this conversation right now about what sources would actually look like in the sort of oral tradition space. And not just oral tradition, but I think that that opens the door to thinking about sourcing more generally, because as sort of I think you alluded to, a lot of the knowledge that we have about many places in the world that don't have, that I hesitate to say this, come from sort of an anthropological understanding where you've got somebody who doesn't speak the language going to a place, doing some sort of documentation, going through peer review and publishing it, and then saying, ah, this is clearly the most accurate understanding of this particular heritage or culture or history, when that community itself is not represented in the means of production of knowledge. And then the third part of that, which is how do you protect it so that other people don't come in and edit it? I think that our experience there is how do you grow a community that is healthy and robust enough that it is sustaining and can achieve that homeostasis or self-regulation to ensure that there are many eyes on who can help preserve that narrative? So those are three I think highly interrelated and very difficult challenges. And to the point that we talked about knowledge equity and equitable support for emerging communities, one of the big shifts that I anticipate will be away from how do we optimize current production on German and English and French and Spanish Wikipedia? We love all of those Wikipedia's, and we will continue to support them, but also thinking about what are the unique needs of these other communities? I recently learned about the creation of Dinka Wikipedia in the incubator. Dinka is a language spoken in South Sudan where people are creating knowledge on Facebook and then having one person sending it to another person as a post who will then upload it to Wikipedia because they are unfamiliar with the Wikitext and it feels like a safer production space to do it as a Facebook post. And so these are the emerging realities that I think we need to contend with if we really truly wanna support all knowledge. And I know you have to run. We have a soft break for people who have a one o'clock clash and there are some open chairs for people who are sitting along the wall. I have a quick question on that last point about creating a safe space. What are the possibilities for making safer spaces for people who wanna just start contributing and don't know how to defend themselves from established experience editors? I hate to hear that people have to defend themselves from established experience editors. I mean, how many people here have had a Wikipedia article that they created put up for deletion in the last year or so? It happens. If Vargo Seltzer has a hard time getting a stub article saving it from deletion. No, I- I'm one of my colleagues, I'm like, yeah. What do we do about that? Yeah, this is a real challenge. Yochai said earlier that you were surprised by the confidence of the conversation because a few years back we were not nearly so confident about our longevity or confident about the health of our editorial community. I don't want to imply that we are confident. I just think we understand the challenges a little bit better than we have in the past in large part because we actually have data now which we never used to really have which is nice, we like data. I think we're looking at a variety of different ways to address the question that you raised which is how do you create spaces that encourage people to learn in a way that feels welcoming? And there was a project that was created a few years back. It was really sort of a community-based project on English Wikipedia called The Tea House which is a forum for newbies to come ask questions in a judgment-free environment and get actual support from a real live person as opposed to some sort of, we have hundreds of thousands of pages, not really hundreds of thousands, but hundreds of pages of policies that you can look up. The Tea House turns out has the greatest conversion factor for return repeat editors of anything we've ever tried. So I think there's a question of how do you encourage those sort of community peer mentoring spaces as well as how do you think about from a product experience space? And when I talk about product, because I apologize, this wasn't a word I was really familiar with before heading out to go work for Wikipedia. What I'm talking about is the features and interfaces within the Wikipedia editing or reading space. So how do you think about from a product environment what might look like a way to create and receive sort of nudges as you contribute to information? Like, I mean, think of Clippy for Microsoft Word but done right, right? Like, instead of saying, it looks like you're trying, you know, write a letter, sit. Before you submit an article, for example, you might hear, might see something that says, you know, this looks like this could use more citations or something that we are now using machine learning to evaluate like the quality of an article based on a variety of different things. Be able to run it through an evaluative service to say this looks like it could use a little more work and here maybe here are some resources to help you with that. I mean, all of these things are technically possible at this point. I don't know how successful they would be. I mean, this is something we'd have to test out. It's just a question of resourcing that would, the resources that would be necessary to actually start to build that. Okay, so I have a microphone. So I guess I just want to finish up on that and then ask a different question. If one developed tools that did that kind of checking to help new editors, I would strongly encourage that before releasing that, you actually run it on existing articles. Because the story that I was alluding to was actually, I modeled a webpage on a male colleagues who was already up and accepted and happy and I submitted it for a female colleague that was rejected a number of times. So can I just, there's a really cool hack that one of our engineers built it's called, and you can use it to drop any URL in, like the New York Times or Wikipedia. It's called neutrality.wtf and it inverts gender identifiers. It's a really interesting, and she built it as a way of reflecting on bias within Wikipedia. And I want to just point out that I recognize that's a binary bias. We actually have some pretty rad Wikimediants who are talking about all sorts, like the transgender gap on Wikipedia and other issues that are not about really thinking about representation in a non-binary space. But yes, you were absolutely correct. There is a problem there. But so the other thing that you sort of referred to implicitly a couple of times is, communities achieve homeostasis and articles. So we happen to have done a bunch of work looking at controversy in what, or otherwise known as edit wars on Wikipedia. They are pervasive. And I just wonder how to think about it, right, in that there really are very controversial articles. Some of them would surprise you. I don't think Standard Poodle was one of them, but there are some that seem as innocuous as that. The skyline of the city of Paris. Super controversial. There you go, okay. So how do you think about controversy since you're trying to free knowledge? How do you think about it? So what has been interesting as an, I don't have a good answer for this and I'll share why. What has been interesting that we've seen emerge recently is that historically that has all been under the rubric of editorial policy and there has always been a very clear sort of wall between editorial policy which is set by the editors and the operation of the sites themselves and support to the community which is provided by the Wikimedia Foundation. We are a platform provider. We are not an editorial product and so we adhere to that bright line for a variety of reasons including it allows us to engage with favorable protections that allow us to publish things that other parties might not otherwise be able to publish. So to some extent that has sort of sat outside of what the Wikimedia Foundation spends a lot of time thinking about but I think that increasingly as we're aware of the bias aspects we have started to engage with thinking about how do we address some of these editorial gaps as a whole and this is bringing us into conversations around controversy because we are starting to see where some of those controversies start to impact community health overall. And so I don't know that I haven't answered for you yet because I think we're trying to unpack this as I'm thinking of an incident that's happening right now on Greek Wikipedia and we're trying to unpack some of these issues around what happens when a community deadlocks and information stops being produced and conflicts are not being resolved and those conflict resolution mechanisms begin to break down to the extent that it has a deleterious effect on the health of the project overall. On specifically how Wikipedia handles controversy and it is as you said it's not just sort of the border between Ukraine and Russia but it's also elephants, thank you Stephen Colbert or articles around as I said the skyline of the city of Paris is that there's like a cooling off period and an article might be semi-protected for a while or they'll bring in a neutral party to assess an arbitrated decision or it'll be pushed up through our arbitration mechanisms as intercommunity disputes but there aren't, we're beginning to see where some of those limitations exist and I think part of our job at the foundation is thinking about what are ways that we can provide the community with data and resources to allow them to start to understand their own challenges and reflect back on this and so we have some community, we have a team within the foundation that's working on this at this very moment around new article creation on English Wikipedia because there's a huge backlog and our reviewers are saying we can't even get to this and so we're saying well let's help you by modeling some of the information so that you can actually understand the source of the problem. So I think that increasingly what you're going to see is a partnership between the editorial challenge the community faces and the tooling that the foundation can provide to start to think about how do we unlock some of these critical conflicts. I would love that, we probably have a lot to learn. I think it's slightly related. My question is in the same way as we have different languages of Wikipedia that are taking the same concept but perhaps that are actually focusing on different things because of the cultural background that goes with the different language. Have you been thinking to actually have different articles for the same concept but not because of a different language but because perhaps of a different perspective or because of a different community in the sense that instead of trying really hard to come to a consensus and perhaps to distill the information to the maximum so that it actually is neutral to actually embrace the fact that there is a diversity of perspective of a particular topic and actually enable multiple pages to emerge that are focusing on those different perspectives. So we haven't done anything at this point around sort of forked articles that would allow you to say look at this article from one perspective, look at this article from another perspective. I tend to come down on the side of that would probably break the model because what the model does effectively is push to some sort of effort to achieve consensus and pauses when consensus can't be reached, right? So controversial information is not inserted until consensus can be reached around it and so it might be that evolution of understanding on particular topics is a little bit slower on Wikipedia than it is in scholarship but that's actually sort of core to the way that Wikipedia thinks of itself functioning. To your point, this is an issue in a variety of different languages where you'll have a different perspective. I just came back from Warsaw and our Central Eastern European Community Conference which brought together people from 23 different countries and as least as many languages from Uzbekistan to Germany to Russia to Republic of Sierpska. And as you can well imagine, these communities have very different historical experiences of their own truth. And so one of the interesting projects that they do is they have something where they all edit about each other's history as a means of understanding and enriching the coverage that exists within their own language because understandably Albanian has a lot of articles about Albanian history but it might not have so many articles about Greek history. And so that's one of the things where they're really trying to think about how do you enrich that broad based perspective as a whole. I am very interested with how as we, I think two things are going to start to force us to reconcile or start to engage with how do you reconcile very divergent experiences of history. One of which is the advent of WikiData really becoming far more integrated within Wikipedia as a whole because you'll start to be able to link articles one to one based on their subject matter in a way that is currently impossible. There's no super set of Wikipedia. English isn't the largest of the Wikipedia's and everything else is sort of a bad copy of it. They're all completely different in terms of the content that they have but WikiData will start to start identifying that and the other one is just machine translation gets better and better and better every day so you can start to see divergent viewpoints within the historical record. I was talking about this with a person in Beirut recently who was saying the way that they address this is they would write an article if it says the history of the Middle East, the Sykes-Picot Agreement what they would actually say do is they'd fork the article and they'd say the West or the Occidental Scholarship of the Sykes-Picot Agreement versus Arabic Scholarship of the Sykes-Picot Agreement and that would be the way that they would address this is understanding the different body of knowledge as represented and created through different perspectives and identifying and addressing those both as neutral representations of where this body of knowledge exists rather than trying to reconcile or fork the articles themselves. That's a great question though. I think we have time for one more question and then we'll take a break until this symposium starts. Sure. Hey Catherine, I'm Alvin, an affiliate here at Birkman and working on trying to get open source software kind of taking government code and releasing it as open source software but I'm curious about your internal policy decision making at Wikimedia and in the spirit of kind of openness how are those decisions made? Do you do it with the community? Are there certain decisions that are kind of more internal? What comes to mind is for example I think in the last year or so there was a decision to make sure that from one month you wait until three months I think before something is actually published and searchable on Google and Bing and other things like that. Yeah, so I think that happened in the last year or so and it looked like a community decision but I'm curious whether internal dynamics kind of play into that as well. I'm not sure, I know the exact... So whether something is like crawlable. So like whether a search engine externally populates a Wikipedia article it used to be I think a month and now it's 90 days. Are we're constantly... I'm pretty sure that's not... I'm not sure about that exact example because one of the things that we actually pride ourselves on is being more up to date than any of the dumps that we do on a weekly basis. So I'm pretty sure we're... I ran into it just when I was trying to publish a couple articles and then it was saying that you have to wait 90 days now before you can actually see it. So that has to do with a new article review which is a community editorial thing and that has to do with the question earlier about how do we engage with controversy and providing data to our community so they can understand where the bottlenecks are and this is this thing it's called act trial it's something that we're working on it's meant to give us sort of evidentiary data so that we can make better decisions as a community and that is exactly what you're referring to. So we make those decisions in partnership with the community. I think that generally speaking there are many people at the foundation who don't like that decision who believe that that sort of is at odds with the spirit of anyone can edit but one of the things that we heard loud and clear from certain community members that this was a challenge they could not keep up with the backlog of information and so we said all right let's try to find a way that we really understand the nature size scope scale of this problem and let's apply this let's actually build out a trial for us to be able to show you the data so that we can come to decisions around how we might need to update policies and so that is a great example of where we partner with community around policy making but it's not just this our terms of service our privacy policy, our data retention policies anything that is not sort of legally mandated is something that we engage with our community around thinking through what exists right there are certain things that are legally mandated within the United States and so that's a baseline but almost every other aspect of what we do from thinking about where are we gonna put caching servers to the way that we think about tagging referral traffic all of this is something subject to community discussion our decision to go to HTTPS recently that was subject to community not recently a couple years ago yes HTTPS not just HTTPS that was subject to community discussion these are all things that are part of a dialogue because we see ourselves at the foundation as being a community with a foundation rather than a foundation with a community and so all we are is just stewards of the project because we have the fortune to work there but we're stewarding it on behalf of the community which is giving us guidance on the decisions that we make and it can be a healthy tension right some of the conversations that we were and some of the data we were looking at within the strategy discussion that I spoke to earlier we're not necessarily things that all of our community members felt were necessarily important and so we take this sort of like short-term long-term where we feel as though our responsibility is to be looking out for the overall health and engage in community and conversation about how we might address challenges as they arise thank you so much Yochai, Yochai thinks it's a miracle that Wikipedia works at all for curating knowledge I think it's a miracle that the community still has a foundation that supports the community that goes to vice versa Thank you