My own entry is basic and bland, and predominantly accurate. There is one very small mistake in it, the name of the publisher of my last book. As I am not permitted to correct this myself, or nominate anyone I know to do it, I shall await the time until a stranger spots it (or reads this book and quotes it as a reliable source).*
These kinds of errors, however, are only one of Wikipedia’s dilemmas. More involved issues, and the attempts to solve them, were acknowledged in a company progress report in 2017: ‘Toxic behaviors and harassment have had a negative impact on participation in our projects. Our success has generated an overwhelming amount of maintenance and monitoring, and we have addressed these challenges with tools and practices that have turned good-faith community members away … the structures of our movement are often opaque or centralized, with high barriers to entry.’
The fact that Wikipedia is a non-profit organisation that doesn’t track its readers (and thus doesn’t sell on a reader’s information) must necessarily raise the question of how it keeps going: it has a lot of servers and cyber security to maintain, as well as about 550 staff and contractors, and its headquarters in San Francisco, and it has a legacy-maintaining charitable foundation to run. Part of the answer lies in an email I received recently from Katherine Maher, Wikimedia Foundation’s executive director. The subject was ‘Simon – this is a little awkward’, and the message, which came with a photograph of the smiling sender, was an appeal for a donation.
Two years earlier I had responded to another appeal. Wikipedia received the occasional large donation (in 2018, Amazon gave it $1 million, not least, one suspects, because Alexa mines it for information), but most of its $100 million-plus annual income comes from small personal donations from users. In 2017 I donated the huge sum of £2 to carry on its sterling work, but the foundation was insatiable – it wanted yet more.
Maher wrote in her emaiclass="underline" ‘98% of our readers don’t give. They simply look the other way. And without more one-time donors, we need to turn to you, our past donors, in the hope that you’ll show up again for Wikipedia, as you so generously have in the past.’ If I didn’t give again, she feared, Wikipedia’s integrity was at stake. ‘You’re the reason we exist. The fate of Wikipedia rests in your hands and we wouldn’t have it any other way.’
‘You’re the reason we exist’: Katherine Maher and friends at WikiConference India in 2016
I ignored it. But a month later Katherine Maher wrote to me again. There was a new photo of her, still smiling, but she had a darker message: the email was titled ‘We’ve had enough’. It explained how every year Wikipedia has had to resist the pressure of accepting advertising or selling on information or establishing a paywall, and every year they’ve been proud to resist. But ‘we’re not salespeople,’ Maher wrote. ‘We’re librarians, archivists, and information junkies. We rely on our readers to become our donors, and it’s worked for 18 years.’ Katherine Maher now wanted another £2, although there were also click-buttons to give £20, £35 or £50.
Obviously these weren’t personal emails – hundreds of thousands of others received the same messages – but I thought I’d make it personal by going to see her. As with Wikimania, the virus scuppered our plans, so we met on Zoom, which meant I got to watch her eat breakfast eggs on her partner’s sourdough at her home in San Francisco.
She told me she was in her late thirties and that her surname rhymes with car. She says she began editing Wikipedia as a university student in 2004, an article about the Middle East which she doesn’t think survived on the site for very long. She joined the Wikimedia Foundation in 2014 as chief communications officer after a career in communications technology at UNICEF and a digital rights company. Soon after becoming executive director in 2016, she encountered a problem about herself: the freshly created Wikipedia page detailing her appointment and early career was marked for deletion. ‘I wasn’t notable enough,’ she told me. ‘The thinking was, “just because she runs the foundation doesn’t mean that she’s actually done anything of great note in the world”.’ She says she loved this utterly compliant nature of the beast she was now running, although she wondered whether the proposed deletion also had a gendered element to it. The article stayed.
Our chat necessarily led to a discussion of what, after four years in the job, she would now regard as the most notable achievements of her tenure. She spoke in terms of an ongoing battle. ‘While Wikipedia is not a site on the Internet that has really obvious issues of harassment … it is not an environment that is particularly welcoming to new people. It is not an environment that is particularly welcoming to women. It is not particularly welcoming to minorities or marginalised communities.’
She says the aggressive approach she’s taken towards those editors she sees as destructive has occasionally ‘blown up in my face’, not least her decision last year to ban an editor she saw as ‘prolific, but not productive … somebody who was driving other editors away through their behaviour’. She has upset others by her insistence that the world in which Wikipedia will operate in the future will demand large additional and alternative sources of revenue. Machine learning and artificial intelligence will require new tools that are computationally expensive. The site, though efficient, may need a complete aesthetic rethink (it does look increasingly twentieth century). And the expansion into emerging communities in Africa and elsewhere will also require new resources.
When we spoke again a few weeks later, our conversation turned philosophical. ‘I don’t think Wikipedia represents truth,’ she began. ‘I think it represents what we know or can agree on at any point in time. This doesn’t mean that it’s inaccurate, it just means that the concept of truth has sort of a different resonance. When I think about what knowledge is … what Wikipedia offers is context. And that’s what differentiates it from similar data or original research, not that that isn’t vital to us.’
Original research is what news organisations push out every single day. Maher mentions a YouGov poll from 2014 that found Wikipedia to be more trusted in the UK than the BBC. ‘I think for a lot of companies, they would say, “That’s wonderful, we beat our competitors.” My response was, first, the BBC is not a competitor. And second, that’s not wonderful at all. If there’s a trust deficit with the sources that we rely on then ultimately that deficit will catch up with us as well. We require that the ecosystem be trusted.’
Maher calls herself an inclusionist, arguing against those who wish to keep Wikipedia on a high intellectual footing, reasoning that anything that involves a learning journey is beneficial. ‘If we don’t have your Bollywood star, or pop singer, then you’ll come to us and you’ll bounce right off, because you don’t see anything that’s relevant to your life.’