The future we build needs to be open (Katherine Maher of Wikipedia) | Web Summit 2019

7:24PM Nov 5, 2019

Speakers:

Casey Lau

Katherine Maher

Keywords:

wikipedia

trust

people

knowledge

crisis

humanity

world

build

power

shared

encyclopedia

create

internet

solutions

single

open

curiosity

systems

future

economists

The internet has shown us the value and the impact of the open movement. Open web, open licenses, and open source. But we have also seen that open itself is not enough. Open is not equal or accessible for all. How can we, as the innovators of tomorrow, build a future that is open, equitable, and fair? To explore, please welcome to the stage the CEO of Wikipedia, Katherine Maher.

Hey, everyone. Tough act to follow, football in Portugal. But I appreciate you having me all here today. As you heard, my name is Katherine Maher. I'm the CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation. And while you may never have heard of us, my guess is you've heard of our major project, Wikipedia. Can I do a quick show of hands? You're gonna have to put down your phones for a second. Who here in the room has used Wikipedia? Alright, cool. That helps. Thank you so much. Because what you have done is made this small nonprofit website, one of the most popular places on earth. So in my job, I get a lot of questions. For some reason, people seem to think that leading Wikipedia is a little bit like being Wikipedia. not actually true. So among questions like, does the universe have a color? It does. Cosmic latte. Or whether bears are related to dogs. They are not. Same sub border, different family. Someone recently asked me a much more serious question. Is the world in a crisis of knowledge? That's a hard question. Because nearly every day, we hear about fake news, the death of civil discourse, or the unraveling of truth itself. I understand why people might wonder. But I don't believe that knowledge is in a crisis. Think about how many hands just went up. When I asked you who uses Wikipedia. You are all part of a global community of knowledge seekers. You are all proof of how relevant knowledge is, for all of us, every day. And it's not just you. There are hundreds of millions of people who use Wikipedia every single month. So clearly, our need for knowledge is as strong as ever. So we don't believe that we are in a crisis of knowledge. Rather, we, it seems, are in a crisis of trust. And this is a real problem. Because trust is an essential operating condition for contemporary societies. We trust systems we often can't see or touch. We trust people we may never speak to or meet. We trust science we may never understand. We trust that the currency in our wallets has value. We trust that first responders will come when we call. And we trust that when planes go up, they'll come down safely. We trust the workings of the world around us, often without giving them second thought. Trust is the invisible infrastructure that enables our globalized world to function. Without trust, the systems we take for granted would simply cease to work. And it seems that we are in a crisis of trust that is unprecedented in living memory. From governments, to the press, from medicine to science, people around the globe are turning away from traditional sources of authority. Around the world confidence in democracy is collapsing. In almost every nation, newspaper readership is on the decline. public health officials wring their hands at viral hearsay, displacing medical consensus. Today, we are far more likely to trust claims from people we know rather than research backed up by facts.

Why is this happening? Well, some economists point to widening gaps and income inequality, fewer people are finding their way up the economic ladder. Governance experts point to corruption, the capture of institutions by elite power that permanently tips the scale. Media scholars observed polarization and partisanship made worse by intentionally blurred lines that makes it harder for us to distinguish between fact and opinion. surveys and Western nations have shown a decline in confidence in the fairness of effectiveness of democracy. Information manipulation wielded as a weapon is undermining elections, institutions, and the Free Press mental hold to account. We are increasingly polarized and partisan or disagree disaffected and disengaged when the systems stop working for all of us, we stop trusting them. And we start distrusting one another. Whatever the cause, it's undeniable. This crisis of trust is hurting our societies, our future and our climate. This breakdown is contributing to perhaps our most existential contemporary challenge. Our planet is burning this past week In my home state of California, it's quite literally been on fire. A quarter of a million people displaced from their homes, and hundreds of thousand more left in the dark. Globally, we all know the scale of the climate crisis. Yet we lack consensus about the urgency, the necessary interventions, and our respective responsibilities as citizens and nations. It's what's called a collective action failure, a situation in which cooperation would benefit us all, but we can't bring ourselves to make it happen. Our individual incentives aren't powerful enough. We don't trust that long term sacrifice is in our long term interest. The climate crisis is just one pressing example. Trust is a requirement for the sorts of international cooperation that we have come to depend on over the past century. And the sort of cooperation that we're going to need to take on the challenges of the future. Without trust and the institutions that it enables, we lack the capacity to move beyond individual solutions to wide scale systems change. We are paralyzed in a state of inaction.

The crisis of trust is not an inconvenience.

It is a defining existential threat. It is lead to division and paralysis. Rather than come together, we are defining ourselves by our differences, our connections to one another are splintering and as trust levels plummet. We find ourselves increasingly isolated, and tremendously divided. So that's pretty grim. I want to acknowledge that. But I'm here from Wikipedia, where we believe in impossible things, because we have accomplished them before. And I know that breakdown is not inevitable. As the saying goes, every crisis is an opportunity. Crisis can give community and give rise to a renewed sense of purpose. History shows us that time and time again, disaster is when we humans earn our humanity. It's the time when we extend a hand to a neighbor, a flashlight to a stranger, or our savings to survivors. If we recognize the urgency of the current moment, We have a chance to build something even stronger. The antidote to distrust must be rediscovering our shared humanity.

If that sounds fluffy, or even a bit naive, I'd ask you to just pause and think about how cynical that means that we've all become. Because it's our shared humanity that allows us to recognize each other as equals, deserving of rights and respect. It's our shared humanity that facilitates understanding, dialogue and community. It's something that asks us to see the dignity in one another, and to find our own compassion. It's both an identity and a virtue, and it's one that we all share. So with all that divides us, what is it that connects us? Wikipedia tells me that being human is all about biology, cells and DNA. We're mostly the same under the skin. So that's what makes us a species I guess. But what is it that makes us truly human? I'm not alone in believing that our humanity is rooted in our curiosity, our strenuous seeking our need for connection and understanding. As children, we are constantly exploring, experimenting and asking questions about everything around us. As any parents have a toddler knows, we ask why, of absolutely everything. And as we grow, we find more nuanced ways to ask why, but our innate curiosity remains the same. It's that spirit of inquiry that drives us. It's what drove us up to the moon and down into the human genome, and ultimately, it's what's going to take us out to Mars. It is the search for answers and the effort to understand Its knowledge, not just the creation of knowledge, but the sharing of knowledge. That is the legacy of our shared humanity. Knowledge is what we leave behind. When are it time for individuals searching and seeking is done. Throughout recorded civilization, it's always been this way. We stand here on the shoulders of giants, having passed knowledge down from one culture to another, across languages and borders. And it Wikipedia we know that knowledge is at its most powerful when it is open and free. I don't just mean free as in costs nothing but I mean free as in without restriction. It means the ability to create and to change, unfettered, unhindered, free from censorship, freely passed along from me to you and able to have evolve as the world around us changes independent and full of integrity. Free and Open Knowledge has a value that is endless and infinite. It is one of the rare examples of what economists call a non rival risk good. That is something that can be used over and over again, without ever diminishing its worth or supply. The more I use doesn't diminish, how much there is for you to use. And my value of having knowledge doesn't lessen the value of you having that same knowledge. So if our curiosity is what makes us human knowledge is proof of our humanity. In this sense, Wikipedia is the output of our humanity. It is a sprawling testament to our curiosity, and an experiment and our ability to build something together. It's a collaboration. Every single article is Written by individual volunteers, sometimes working alone, and sometimes together. Each contribution involves finding and summarizing sources and evaluating different perspectives in order to create and present the most neutral perspective on any topic, from celebrity biographies to Current Affairs, and you to every single person in this room can participate. Which is totally crazy, right? When's the last time you got to make the internet a better place? Over the past two decades, Wikipedia has grown from the internet's punch line to one of the most trusted websites in the world. And in a world in which we trust less and less, Wikipedia has more trust than most. Today, we're so much more than an encyclopedia, a website for winning a bb Ed. We are a place on the internet for context, a mix complexity of Place people come 17 billion times a month for common understanding. Wikipedia is the impossible project that has become a core part of the infrastructure of the 21st century, nearly as ubiquitous and far reaching as the internet itself. It is one of our foremost resources for learning for both people and machines. It is among the most expansive open data set that exists a high quality archive of knowledge representing hundreds of languages and perspectives. And it is embedded into your daily lives often in invisible ways, from the voices systems in your pockets and kitchens, to the data that informs and trains the most popular search, translation and natural language processing tools. But we didn't start out this way, and we don't take it for granted. We thought we were building an encyclopedia. But as it turns out, we've been building a place for common understanding a place and a process for building trust at a time that is consistently characterized as Post truth, post reason and post hope. I believe that the improbable success of Wikipedia might offer us some lessons for how to build solutions that take on our crisis of confidence. I want to share three things that I have learned from Wikipedia about how we can hopefully rise to the challenges that we face.