 I'm going to sit this one out because I want to hear from you two guys a lot, especially how you react to the discussion so far. So on my right is Catherine Mayer, who's the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, which is probably the largest nonprofit thing on the web, probably the largest web collaborative project that exists and the largest reference source in the world. Possibly. Possibly. All right. So we're really lucky to have Catherine. Tony Marks, in addition to running the largest public library in the world, the New York Public Library, is also the co-chair of the Knight Commission on Media, Trust, and Democracy. So thank you so much for being part of that with us and been an inspiring leader in the public library space. I've got lots of questions for both of you, but I'm going to stop and just see if you guys have any reactions to the special, particularly the last two conversations from Susan and from Ethan and Matanya about the role of data and what excites you and what scares you. Please. Well, first, thank you to John to the Knight Foundation. It's great to be with you all. I have to start with a story. So before I came to the library, I used to work and live in the woods in Massachusetts, not quite as far as Ethan lives, but up there. And when I got the job and came to New York, I found myself on the subway. So going back to Susan's subway stories, reading the New York Times the way my daddy taught me is cumbersome. And the woman next to me is reading the New York Times on this. In a la New York, I sort of, you know, I say, God, you know, that's got to hurt your eyes. And she looks down at her screen and she looks over at my text, looks down at her screen, she says, my font is bigger than that. We're in a new world, right? I mean, I'm happy to defend this. I'm both a pessimist and an optimist, meaning, you know, I think we all see the dangers we're living in, and certainly the challenges to trust and democracy and media are amongst those dangers, the questions of privacy and how we give people their rights to what they should have the right to. God knows, as a library, we take that very seriously. But I also agree with Susan that, you know, we're just at the infancy of this thing. And it is an amazing, amazing tool. So let me just, if I can just, at the library, we focus on a number of things. One, because we serve the poorest neighborhoods in New York, which includes some of the poorest neighborhoods in America, we have to start at the base. So going back to earlier discussions, two and a half million New Yorkers, New York City, don't have broadband at home. So we started lending 10,000 households at a clip to take hotspots home, so they would have broadband. It's amazing that San Francisco is thinking of now doing this. This should be, what did I do wrong, the, you know, look, this should be a utility. It should be a public utility, at least at a basic level. And so we're working at that. We used to have a partner at the FCC who wanted to help us. That's no longer the case. Secondly, you know, people with or without connectivity, especially in the poorer neighborhoods, don't know how to use this thing. Don't know how to, like, turn it on. We teach 125,000 people a year at this point, basic computer skills, all the way up to coding, where we have 5,000 people on a wait list in the poorest neighborhoods. These are mostly women, mostly people of color, what once was, minority in America. And you know, we have to address that as well. But thirdly, lastly, and this is where the connection is between us, we are in the content business. We are in the quality content business. We actually believe in facts. We think they're important for a democracy. And we do not think, even though this device was invented with a vision of universal access to quality information, if you just think back to where it all began, everybody's gotten distracted by shiny objects, huge profits, competition, whatever it is. And certainly, my children are distracted, right, let me announce, endlessly distracted by mostly invidious comparisons, as far as I can tell. And we have to get back to the place of competing with that distraction, that because, as Ethan said, there's only so much attention. And we're losing the war for the attention of most people. And we're losing it because we're not actually competing for it. Certainly the library thought it never had to compete for a thing, right, that we never had to promote a thing. Those days are over. So we have to find a way to get back on the path to the Holy Grail, together with the DPLA, the Internet Archive, all the other great libraries of the world, and say, how do we get the world all the quality content that is out there, the corpus of accumulated knowledge, and make it so easy and so attractive that we can compete for attention. And I'll close by saying, my fantasy, Catherine, you can tell me if this sounds reasonable, is when my kids do research on Wikipedia, which they do. Yeah, of course. They all do. Sorry. I didn't mean to diminish there. I want you, when you get to the fact that you're most interested in and you see a footnote and it has a site, I want you to be able to click there and possibly through your local library actually get the whole text. So you can say, OK, that was interesting, but I want to go deeper and we want to make it easy for you to go deeper. I mean, there are all kinds of possibilities. Let's do it. Let's do it. Let's do it. But yes, it is possible in a world and where more of those texts are accessible and available. We've been working with libraries, we've been working with the OCLC to bring their World Cat system using their API to pull all of their resources into Wikipedia's citation graph. These are the things that we believe in fundamentally. We don't want people to read Wikipedia and stop before they hit the citations. We want people to be critical readers. We're like you, we believe in quality. We believe that when you break that almost evidentiary chain between the information that exists on Wikipedia and where it actually comes from, you're doing a disservice to your audience. It's not intellectually honest. But I think that I want to go back to this question of optimism and pessimism and where is the internet today. I had my burn it all down moment recently. I'm sure many of you in the audience burn it all down. It's over. I've done 25 years. It was reading this piece about the auto generation of content for children on YouTube. I'm sure many of you, yeah. So it was one thing when it was our democracies and our democratic institutions and our sort of civic ideals. But when it got to the next generation, that was sort of where I drew the line. And yet, I keep going back to this quote, this James Baldwin line around, I cannot be a pessimist for I am alive. And I also believe that optimism is a duty and it is a duty within each of us to think about what is the role that we can play so that we don't have to burn the internet down because we are only 25 years in. It's a relatively young technology and there is so much opportunity that we've already seen it create. You know, Wikipedia is a stunning example of this. It is not just the students who are doing their research on Wikipedia or talking to Alexa and they don't realize they're talking to Wikipedia. It is the doctors who use the offline version of medical Wikipedia in places where access to textbooks are either too expensive or they're 10 years out of date or they don't exist in a local language. It is transformational what access to information actually offers. And we know this in the local library setting where we have students who use Wikipedia as an extension of those library hours at the end of the day. We know this to be true all over the world. And so how do we create more opportunity like that? I don't know. I worry tremendously about the themes. I don't think we've addressed that the themes of consolidation are real. And that consolidation is something that we haven't had to contend with. I've been thinking about this in the context, and John, you were in a conversation recently around this, of what is a public space on an architecture and an infrastructure that is inherently not public. Every aspect of the stack, from the cabling to the layers, like the application layer that runs at the very top, it's all privatized. And the traditional response to consolidation in these spaces is one of creating a public carveout. But that's usually because there's some sort of aspect of scarcity. You think of public land. You think of art. You think of spectrum. There's some sort of scarcity and so there's a pressure to create some sort of public layer or public place. And we don't have that on the internet because the internet is infinite. There is no scarcity. And so I've just been really grappling with this idea of how do we deal with these inherent tensions of consolidation where we have just a very few arbiters of what is valuable and how we interface and this idea that there is no public space through which we engage. And that has implications for good as well as really thorny questions. Like what do we do when something like Stormfront gets kicked off Cloudflare? What is the public space for reprehensible ideas? So I, you know, absolutely. And how do we judge and how do we filter going back to the earlier conversation and who decides who gets to filter? You know, I do think we are clearly at a moment where the public perception of the major platforms has shifted, right? We hear stories about, you know, major, these major companies and sponsors of meetings like this. They are announced as the sponsor and they get booed instead of applauded at this point. I heard that one this morning. I heard that too. Yeah, the, I will say, look, the, the, the information supply is incredible, which is why, as Ethan said, the need to filter and to, you know, it's going to be all the more important. I'll just give one sort of other side to that, which is to say that the information is, is sort of overwhelming, but at the same time to note that the majority of the books written in the history of the world that are in our physical libraries are not available to most people beyond two sentences, right? And the two sentences, that was a decision of the Supreme Court, couldn't be a more direct statement about the superficiality of what is being offered, right? I mean, how, you can't do better than that. I understand the legal reasons for it, but we have to get past that, right? Yeah, someone said, I heard the statistic and citation needed. I have no idea where it comes from. That, on brand, on brand. Someone, someone will know it before you finish saying it. I'll tell you. It was at a Wikipedia conference. And they said that 7% of the world's knowledge is in books. Again, I have no idea. But one of our Wikipedia and sitting next to me from Ghana goes, that's some of some of the world's knowledge. And I love that because our vision statement is, imagine a world in which every single human has a, can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. And we have been thinking a tremendous amount about not just accessibility but representation and who gets to participate and what are those barriers. We have, at Wikimedia, have just recently gone through this process of thinking, you know, we're 16 years old. We started as this crazy impossible idea. We should be this free encyclopedia anyone can edit and then maybe people will trust it. And here we are in this, in this place and time where we have greater trust than the BBC in the UK. I don't know that that's a good thing to be clear. I actually think that the institutions of journalism, we want them to be trusted. We rely on them. We rely on them as secondary sources. We wouldn't exist without them. But the idea going back to sort of, if we look at 16 years into our, into our existence, in 2030, we just sort of chose a date, 29 years in, what will we have created at that point? And we came to this, this conception of knowledge equity. And what does knowledge equity look like in the future when we really think about the breadth of information that's available, the representation that exists. We sort of estimate that only 5% of the knowable, of things that are notable in the world are actually represented on English Wikipedia, let alone all of the other Wikipedia's. And so there's certainly these massive inequities, only 17% of biographies of people on English Wikipedia about women, only 2.5% of geotag content is about the continent of Africa. You have these really great sort of asymmetries and differentials that we want to be able to address. And when we think about how do we address those questions, who are the partners that we have in this? Certainly the library space. But when you look around and ask yourself these questions, who are you talking to? Because I think that the only way that we're going to be able to address this meaningfully is through coalitions of like-minded partners. And where we reinforce your mission because we become the jumping-off point to everything that's in your collection, and we get the chance to work with your collection to improve the quality of our content. But who else do we need to bring in? I mean, we spend a lot of time, as some of you know, talking to foundations, to thought leaders, we talk to the tech industry. We certainly never did that before. And we talk to our communities because I think according to Pew studies, the libraries are the most trusted institution in America. Now that may be because they're things we aren't able to do and therefore haven't been able to screw up yet. And one of the things we have to be careful about in our conversations is there are people who would like to grab that trust from us and run with it. Use our brand to bolster theirs to the disadvantage of not just our brand but of what we represent in society. Do you think that, I mean, I was recently listening to, at a library conference, listening to people speak about the changing role of libraries in society. How much of that trust comes from your function as a civic space rather than just the institution of access to information? I think it's civic space, right? We are the most used, most visited civic institution and space in New York City. 215 public libraries in the city as a whole get 40 million visits a year. In the poor neighborhoods, people have no place else to go. And in the wealthier neighborhoods, it's actually amazing going back to earlier conversations. The Rosemain Reading Room, which is one of the most beautiful rooms in the city, I think the most beautiful, but it's full every day. And most of those people are not using our books which is the only reason you need to be there. And most of them are on computer. And you just think, well, why are these people here? And it goes back to earlier conversations, they're here because we're not cavemen. Even though we could sit at home alone all day doing what we want, we actually wanna be with other people. We even more wanna be inspired by beautiful spaces and other people doing work of the mind. So there's that. I think librarians are pretty unthreatening. And for centuries have sort of literally said, well, let me help you find a better book. I think librarians are fierce. There's maybe some librarians. I'm gonna have to think about that. No, I just mean as defenders of your privacy as defenders of the right to freedom of inquiry. Oh, no, I meant as for the customer coming in. Sure, sure. Unthreatening sense of nobody thinks, oh, that librarian's giving me a book because Coca-Cola paid that person to give it to me. There's none of that, right? But the role of libraries is changing. I mean, this is a little off subject, but one of the things that, if I could imagine the future of libraries, which is part of my job to figure it out so I can get there before it hits me, civic space I think will be ever more important. And that includes computers and books and librarians and all those things. We're filling that space with education programs. So we're being much more proactive, not just passive, and I don't mean to diminish passive in the sense of civic space, but much more proactive. We've created about a million education spots at the NYPL annual over the last few years. But there will, and special collections, you're always gonna wanna come in, but there will be a day in the future where the basic circulating reading collection will not be on the shelves in the library. You won't need to come in for that. You'll be able to get it in your packet or on your glasses or whatever, or a chip in your head. And that'll be fine, right? But if we don't as libraries ensure that that is available to everyone, no one else will, because there isn't any profit in it. I just, you've mentioned this issue of Coca-Cola's not sponsoring it. You mentioned this issue of Coca-Cola's not sponsoring it, and I think that that for us has also been such a fundamental part of the integrity of our model is the fact that we don't run ads. And what I mean by that is we've heard a lot about the optimization of algorithms for stickiness and virality and what is interesting. And I love the idea that when I walk into a library, or when I walk into Wikipedia, that a article or a book about the history of, I'm gonna say Pokemon, because that's a classic Wikipedia trope. An article or a book about the history of Pokemon is just as valuable as the collected works of Shakespeare, and is given an afforded the same pride of place and treated the same way as it's retrieved from the stacks or was retrieved from our database. I think that that lack of incentive structure, and I think fundamentally what we're talking about when we're talking about fake news or anything else, we're talking about the incentive structure and the business model of serving information that it continues to attract eyeballs to serve ads against. That is what is so corrosive about the information ecosystem today. Totally agree, and we've all become addicted to that. And we sort of raised our children to think it's okay to not have an attention span, right? To just keep going, right? Don't bother me during this drive, go watch this video, whatever it is. I mean, we've all done it. We've all done it. Right? Right. Pokemon. The truth is, you know, I'm an educator. I don't think it all should be painless. I don't think it all should be sort of addictive viral stuff. Some of it, sometimes you gotta spend some time and some effort, and we've sort of forgotten to teach the next generation, and the gizmos are not helping, but that's important, right? It gets back to, from my perspective, you shouldn't trust what you read on the internet. You shouldn't take it at face value. It actually requires labor to do the work. And those are the skills that we need to be training for in libraries, have a fundamental role to play in that. Media literacy, critical thinking. But do you, I mean, Wikipedia demonstrated before anybody else that there is also a crowd source here and a wisdom in crowds that can be sort of leveraged, and that's been amazing, right? Yeah, I mean, I actually think the way that Wikipedia works is less about the crowd source and more about how we make decisions in very small instances. So the model only works at scale because we're having conversations about very small decisions. We're talking about what word to use for neutrality. We're talking about what citation is best. And it's at the end of every sentence rather than how we build the encyclopedia as a whole. And that's why when you read it, it feels like such an organic thing because it has no consistency. It's a giant edge case. But the reason it works is because small decisions and small conversations scale. And I think that that's one of those fundamental differences. It's not that the wisdom of the crowd is so great. The wisdom of the crowd can be great, but the wisdom of the crowd can also lead us to algorithms that show us big news, bad things. But when we're able to engage in that sort of those small dialogues about how we want to build our knowledge base, how we want to run our societies, how we want to build our communities, that's where the opportunity lies. That just feels like a really awesome spiking the ball moment. Thank you both so much. Thanks for both of what you're doing and what you've been doing. That was fabulous.