Rapid Response: How Wikipedia will survive AI, with CEO Maryana Iskander

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1:17As the internet is getting flooded with more and more machine-generated content, we're sort of seeing that Wikipedia is becoming more and more trusted, right? There are real societal concerns about how technology impacts our lives. And to have a source that is created by human beings, run by a not-for-profit organization that has grown from like a joke to the last best place left on the internet, which is, you know, kind of the more recent headlines. After 23 years, this is a digital project unlike anything humanity's ever seen. And our volunteers, I would say, are both realistic, pragmatic, and optimistic about what this next chapter is.

2:11That's Marianna Iskander, CEO of Wikimedia, the nonprofit behind Wikipedia. I wanted to talk to Mariana to hear how Wikipedia is faring in an era of media mistrust, AI-generated misinformation, and the fierce cultural debate over truth and neutrality, heated more than ever in the run-up to the presidential election. Mariana shares how Wikipedia has surprisingly thrived in the face of these threats, as well as amid competition from ChatGPT and other AI competitors, plus what's keeping her up at night right now. She talks about recent threats from both the Pakistani and Russian government and offers lessons about leading through unprecedented turbulence.

2:52So let's get to it. I'm Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

3:03I'm Bob Safian. I'm here with Mariana Iskander, CEO of Wikimedia, the nonprofit supporting Wikipedia. Mariana, welcome to Rapid Response. Thanks for joining us. I am so delighted to be here, Bob. Thanks for having me. So Wikipedia is in many ways a bellwether of today's kind of fraught relationship with facts and news and bias and key cultural issues. How does Wikimedia manage or engage with those issues? My experience is that almost everybody uses Wikipedia, but very few people really understand how it works and sort of what happens behind the screen. This is one of the top 10, top five, in some countries, literally the top most visited site.

3:51It gets 15 billion devices visiting Wikipedia every month, which is twice the population of the globe. It's operated by a nonprofit organization called the Wikimedia Foundation. It relies mostly on the generosity of small donations, which for me signals its value and use to millions and millions of people. And the content is created by volunteers all over the world, hundreds of thousands of them on topics across 330 languages. Those volunteers follow core pillars that were the founding basis of Wikipedia and lots and lots of policies and guidelines to ensure that the content is accurate, verified, user-cited sources.

4:40It's not a place for people's opinions. It's a place to try to provide a neutral and verified set of information for the world. And so how does the Wikimedia Foundation, which you run, interact with the content, the things that we read and see on Wikipedia? We predominantly provide the technology infrastructure, but the content itself is really written, managed, and moderated by volunteer communities all over the world. The foundation has a critical role to play in legal and regulatory matters, in community support, but we really partner with and support communities and the content creation itself.

5:29You joined Wikimedia CEO in 2022. And I understand you started with a listening tour of Wikipedia contributors. Why? What did you want to learn? What did you learn? Maybe some of your readers are familiar with a book called The Spider and the Starfish, which talks about how, I would say, organizations and institutions around the world are becoming more decentralized, have more stakeholders to manage. I just think this like old notion of we live in the four walls of an organization really isn't the case anymore. And that book uses Wikipedia as an example of a starfish kind of organization. So I knew I was entering a very decentralized world with a lot of stakeholders, literally in every country of the world.

6:19Since I hadn't come from sort of inside the Wikipedia world, it was critical to listen first. And so I did. I spent about three months just listening, talking to folks in about 55 countries. And I would say that I heard things that made me hopeful that after 23 years, this is a digital project unlike anything humanity has ever seen. And our volunteers, I would say, are both realistic, pragmatic, and optimistic about what this next chapter is. their relationship to the issues around bias and around what to trust and what not to trust. Are there things that you heard back from them around this particular moment?

7:06I would say that after 23 years, it takes a lot for our volunteers to get agitated, if I'm candid with you, because I think they've seen a lot of things. They've seen a lot of headlines announcing the death of Wikipedia. You know what I mean? The policies that they use to ensure that the content can be trusted have really endured the test of time. So how we think about reliable sources, how we think about verified facts, how we think about a neutral point of view. Wikipedia's co-founder, Larry Sanger, made headlines earlier this year by going after your predecessor, Catherine Marr, who now runs NPR, calling for her to resign from NPR.

7:47She'd made comments about white bias at Wikipedia, which he called woke. Like, was that something you saw coming? Or is that something that you just sort of see scroll across your phone? Because Wikipedia is in some sense a reflection of what's happening in the world. Everyday stuff happens in the world that comes across my screen. And it could be something specific to us. It could be something specific to the content that's sort of being written about. So I would say whatever's happening in the world might somehow get reflected in our universe. And, you know, depends on how closely it impacts the work itself.

8:27Does your role as the head of Wikimedia Foundation get involved in how you manage the way people think about Wikipedia, because you're managing that brand at the same time. I mean, I guess I would just say at a human personal level, it's hard. I would say that for the foundation itself, it's a calculus of what are the right responses? What do we actively get engaged with that is supporting our volunteers, particularly, I would say, if they're taking the right stand on difficult issues? I mean, you raise the question of trust. And what I would say is that as the internet is getting flooded with more and more machine generated content, we're sort of seeing that Wikipedia is becoming more and more trusted, right?

9:15There are real societal concerns about how technology impacts our lives. And to have a source that operates at the same level of global traffic as a lot of these other platforms, that is created by human beings, doing it in the interest of free knowledge for all, run by a not-for-profit organization that has grown from like a joke to the last best place left on the internet, which was, you know, kind of the more recent headlines. We haven't seen, you know, a drop in our traffic since ChatGPT. In fact, we kind of seen the opposite, which is this is becoming more reliable, more critical, you know, typically the largest source of training data in the large language models.

10:02I can't predict where the future is going to go on any of this, but I do think that a lot of the fundamentals that are in place for this resource, this asset, this public good, you know, this like free for all service, it just, it's like, it's impossible to imagine. They say that Wikipedia only exists in practice and not in theory. Because when I say all of that, you're like, how can that possibly be in 2024? Like, how can that continue to be true? But it is. As someone who's trying to put out trusted information myself, obviously a very different way than Wikipedia does, I worry that people sort of feel like we don't know what to believe, we don't know who to believe.

10:45And because people don't necessarily really understand how the information gets put onto Wikipedia. How much do you worry that that trusted independence that you've built over 20-some years won't start to dissipate? I spoke at an event. A person made a comment. How could Wikipedia possibly be trusted on a particular issue? I said, well, let's go look at the page together around that topic. They were flabbergasted at how accurate it was actually. It presented all the different points of view. There's a talk page that tells you who edited it, what changes they made. There's an opportunity for you to post questions and ask about it.

11:26So I think the radical transparency of everything being out in the open serves us well. I want to be clear, there are mistakes on Wikipedia, but the point is somebody fixes them and somebody can like, you know, edit them if they see them. When I engage with people and they express that disbelief, kind of getting into the details often helps them understand. But it relies on people like you. It relies on reliable sources and journalism and university presses and all kinds of other things. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been challenging for lots of us to navigate. Wikipedia deemed the Anti-Defamation League an unreliable source about Gaza this summer.

12:07Do you hear about that before it's announced and you have a role in managing the message? How does that come to you and come out from there? That particular issue has quite a lot of complexity. The foundation put out an extensive statement. We have had debates around reliable sources. There's a long litany of those, particularly as it relates to topics where there might be organizations that engage in research and advocacy, as well as content creation and gathering. And the Gaza-Israel war, I think, is a good example, as you would see if you looked at the article about the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

12:49Lots and lots of engagement, because in some cases, points of view evolve and sort of change over time as well. The key, which speaks again back to the point I wanted to make about neutrality, is if you go to Wikipedia and look at the reliable sources policy, it's all there, long and extensive and clear. And in the case of the foundation, it varies how we would respond and how we would really just make clear what it is the editors have done and why they've done it, which was the case here. Yeah, so you're explaining you're not taking a position one way or the other, but you're supporting, in general, your community about the decisions that it's making.

13:31I guess the point I want to make here is everything's out in the open, you know what I mean? So everybody can sort of read everything and come to their own conclusions. We point people back to the talk pages themselves, back to the articles themselves, because the whole system relies on editors following these policies. We often get asked by governments to take down content. So we had a case where we were temporarily blocked in Pakistan for a weekend. We had gotten an early indication from the Telecommunications Authority. As a new CEO, I was freaking out and we communicated to our volunteers that this was likely to happen.

14:16And then we communicated that was on a Friday night. The block happened. Two days later, it had been lifted. I think that even governments of very large nations can appreciate that this is a pretty radical decision. I'm glad to say that was my only experience with something like that. We have an ongoing legal case with the Russian government fined by the court system there. It's been trickling along. We are observing very carefully how the government might respond, who it's blocking, you know, what the demands are, getting fines in court. The stakes feel very high and very anxiety producing for us as a leadership team.

14:57Because the mission is to have access, you know, giving access to free knowledge and free information and giving people not only the freedom to read it, but the freedom to contribute to it as well. Wikipedia really is an amazing counterintuitive model. It's easy to take something so ubiquitous for granted, but the fact that it even exists and is thriving in the face of government opposition in places and relying only on donations, it just shows how broad the range of possibilities for businesses can be. So how is Wikipedia responding to the threat of chat, GPT, and other AI? We'll dig into that after the break.

15:37Stay with us.

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16:54Every state has its own payroll, benefits, and compliance rules, which can pull your focus away from growth. That's why founders use Deal. Deal is the professional employer organization, or PEO, that gives you a dedicated HR expert plus Fortune 500-level benefits for your team. The National Association of PEOs says businesses can grow twice as fast if they use one. So if you're scaling, make it simple with Deal. Go to deel.com slash mos and get up to three months free. Before the break, Wikipedia CEO Mariana Iskander talked about the resilience of Wikipedia and how it deals with threats and controversy.

17:38Now she talks about the emerging competition from ChatGPT and other AI, plus how she operates as a CEO in an organization based on unpaid volunteers. Let's jump back in. In the past, I'd Google something. Wikipedia was often the first result. Now I see Google's Gemini AI first, or sometimes I'll just ask ChatGPT. Is AI in some ways your competition? Bob, I worry and think about that all the time. We're seeing a huge shift from what I would call a link-based internet to a chat-based internet. I think for Wikipedia, it has kind of two forks. The first is, will people scroll down far enough and click on a link and come to the Wikipedia page?

18:28And in some ways, in the short term, that really does matter to us. It matters for our revenue model, because that's how people find us and make their donations. It matters for how our volunteers understand what they're doing and how it's visible. The other side of that is maybe you're not going to scroll down and click on the Wikipedia page. But the answer that Gemini or AI is giving you is coming from Wikipedia because it is the largest source of data for most of these models. And the struggle is whether you know that or not, whether attribution, which I would say is probably one of the most important things we're trying to focus on and how AI is going to evolve.

19:06it's about motivating people to continue to do this and to contribute, right? Attribution matters as a way of thinking about what is going to be human motivation to continue to create things that the machines can, you know what I mean, suck up and feed back to you in these various chat bots. So I think Wikipedia is becoming more and more vital, even if it's becoming less and less visible. Do teenagers come to a page and read a long article? I mean, my nephew searches the internet through YouTube. But as I said earlier, we have not yet seen a drop in page views on the Wikipedia platform since ChadGBT launched.

19:45And so we're on it and we're paying close attention and we're engaging, but also not freaking out, I would say. If Wikipedia is such a consistent source of training data for AI engines, is that a good thing or a bad thing? I mean, I guess it's a good thing in terms of improving the quality of what those AI agents put out. But do you wish you got paid for it? I think that's not really in the model. I mean, we've thought about that and talked about that. I think we have a different role to play. How are we going to use our voice and our place in this ecosystem to talk about making the models more open?

20:29I mean, if you look at the AI models that our teams have built all in the open. They provide communities with all the data to assess whether they're working or not. So when people say that can't be done, I mean, we're doing it. I recognize it's a different business model, but it's an important data point. How are you using AI today and how might that be shifting? If you go back to the very, very early days of Wikipedia, machines have always been in the equation, using tools to deal with, you know, repetitive tasks, always a human in the loop. And that remains the case until today. So there's no human missing from any of the loops around our AI models, our own use of AI.

21:14It comes up a lot in supporting communities potentially around translation. I know we're in English, but there's a ton of the world that is operating in other languages and the internet does not reflect that. And then the question of how do we see Wikipedia content being used by others? There was a brief period that ChatGPT was really focused on plugins and we created a Wikipedia plugin that essentially allowed ChatGPT to only pull from Wikipedia when it answered your questions and again, to try to learn and understand from that kind of an experiment. As I said, just trying to be a data point for the world that all these things that people often say is not possible is being done.

21:56I mean, your business model is so unconventional, you know, no ads and unpaid contributors. And yet you're still dominant in this age of sort of trillion-dollar tech giants. It's an unexpected paradox, right? I know. I know. It's astounding, actually. That's, I think, really the point. It's astounding and almost disbelieving. If you ask our contributors, why do they do this? They're not doing it to get paid. It's like there's something else going on here that speaks to human motivation, trying to be part of an information ecosystem with other people who care about accurate information, who care about an internet that, you know, gives us something we can trust.

22:39That's the game we're in. And I think that finding other allies to be in that with us has also been really important. Your customers in some ways are not the end users of the product, right? But are the contributors. It's got to be very different leading volunteers as opposed to paid staff. How do you think about that differently? I referenced the spider and the starfish. There's a section that talks about the role of the CEO as catalyst, as opposed to the role of the CEO as the kind of the titular head. And the quick premise is if you have a spider and you cut off its head, all the legs fall away and the whole thing dies.

23:20Whereas if you have a starfish and you cut off a leg, it just regenerates the leg and the rest of it sort of stays intact. And I think that that is a good analogy for being part of this like, very diffused system where I mean, I do have paid staff. So the Wikimedia Foundation, as a nonprofit organization, we have about 700 people, but then we have hundreds and thousands of volunteers. and there is no directing, right? You have to be in partnership. You have to be influencing. There are very few things I get to wake up and decide on my own any day of the week, right? I live in a system of stakeholders and communities.

23:57It's a very different paradigm of leadership than many traditional organizations. So many tech businesses talk about pivoting and yet it feels like at Wikimedia that there's sort of a trust, the kind of the basic premise behind it is just sound and we can sort of long-term just stick to what makes it work? I mean, I would say yes and no. I think that things that endure, endure because the fundamentals are strong and make sense, right? The every day of how do we change and evolve our technology? How do we respond to the introduction of voice assistants when Siri and Alexa and others came out? How do we now respond to generative AI?

24:46I would say that there is an evolution on a daily, weekly, quarterly basis within the organization of understanding external trends, a rapidly, rapidly changing environment and context. I just feel very privileged to be part of this massive experiment of humanity in the digital age and feel confident that things will continue to change. But those those basic fundamentals are holding us in good stead. You're relying on your community to kind of police itself. You could see bad actors wanting to sort of how do we get in and influence that? Like, is that a new layer of challenge for your organization also?

25:30You're absolutely right. There's all kinds of ways that bad actors can find their way. People come vandalize pages. We've kind of cracked the code on that. And often bots can be disseminated to revert vandalism, usually within a matter of seconds. We have, you know, at the foundation in terms of our staff, you know, built a disinformation team that really works with volunteers to track and just monitor. In this election year, we've seen that our community policies work, being an antidote to what some of those threats are, but it's not a, there's no autopilot. You don't worry that, you know, the Russian government or the Chinese government is going to try to, you know, infiltrate your community of contributors.

26:15Do I worry about that? I worry about that all the time. And so I think that creating this like very healthy, large, diverse contributor community is the way to ensure that all points of view are going to be represented and not hijacked by a small group. With all of these things swirling around, how do you keep yourself personally level-headed amid all the turbulence? I really appreciate that question. I think building a team you can trust is a prerequisite to not losing your mind. I would also say, you know, when I started this job, I had a lot of just wide eyes around like what's happening in the world?

26:57How does this impact what we're doing? And I do think that the fact that the system works and that it has been working for like almost two and a half decades just gives you comfort. You know, our servers really never go down, even when we get huge spikes in traffic, which, by the way, typically happens when celebrities die. So the day that Wikipedia got the most hits in our entire history was in September when Queen Elizabeth died. But I think that there's no denying that this is a time for leaders where, you know, just trying to get it right is hard. What's at stake for Wikimedia right now? So there's the kind of, let's call it the above the line issues we're seeing playing out.

27:48I would say that the below the surface stuff that I worry about is like the strength of the institutions on which we rely, right? Free press, independent sources, research from universities that can be cited and used, you know, as sources of information. And so there's a lot of like infrastructure around information integrity that is critical for Wikipedia, right? And so caring about those issues, caring about journalism, caring about, you know, censorship, how it is that people are producing and curating and disseminating knowledge, I think are the things that might happen and not make the headlines or might be eroding and not make the headlines.