Despite the rise of AI models such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini, the “old school” Wikipedia remains one of the most visited sites in the world – with 15 billion visitors every month. Maryana Iskander, CEO of Wikimedia, the non-profit organization behind Wikipedia, offers how the platform stacks up against AI competitors, and navigates one of the most debated issues of our time: Where can we find reliable information in 2024?
This is an abbreviated transcript of the interview Quick Responseowned by Bob Safian, former editor-in-chief of Fast company. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Quick Response features direct interviews with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Quick Response wherever you get your podcasts to make sure you don’t miss an episode.
Wikipedia is in many ways today’s kind of relationship full of facts and stories and biases and important cultural issues. How does Wikimedia handle or engage with those issues?
My experience is that almost everyone uses Wikipedia, but very few people really understand how it works and what kind of things happen behind the screen. This is one of the top ten, top five—and in some countries, the most visited site. It receives 15 billion devices that visit Wikipedia every month, which is twice the number of the world’s population.
It is operated by a non-profit organization called the Wikimedia Foundation. It relies heavily on the generosity of small donations that, to me, show its value and use to millions and millions of people. And the content is created by volunteers around the world. Hundreds of thousands of them, with topics all over the world.
In 330 languages, those volunteers follow the core principles that were the foundation of Wikipedia’s founding, as well as many policies and guidelines to ensure that content is accurate, verified, and uses cited sources. It is not a place for people’s opinions. It is a place to try to provide neutral and verified information about the world.
And how does the Wikimedia Foundation, which you use, interact with the content, the things we read and see on Wikipedia?
We mostly provide the technical infrastructure, but the content itself is actually written, managed, and moderated by volunteer communities around the world. The foundation has an important role to play in terms of legal and regulatory issues and community support, but it is truly collaborative and supportive of communities and content creation itself.
In the past, I would Google something, and Wikipedia was often the first result. Now, I see Google’s Gemini AI first, or sometimes I’ll just ask ChatGPT. Is AI somehow your competition?
Bob, I worry and think about that all the time. We are seeing a huge shift from what I would call a link-based internet to a conversation-based internet.
I think in Wikipedia, it has two types of forks. The first is, will people scroll down far enough and click on the link and come to the Wikipedia page? And, in a way, in the short term, that’s more important to us. It’s important to our revenue model because it’s how people find us and make their donations.
It is important that our volunteers understand what they are doing and how it is seen. The other side is that you probably won’t scroll down and click on the Wikipedia page, but the answer that Gemini or the AI gives you is from Wikipedia because it’s a great source of data for many of these types. The struggle is whether you know that or not, whether it’s defined—which I would say is probably one of the most important things that we’re trying to focus on, and how AI will evolve.
It’s about motivating people to keep doing this and giving, right? Attribution is important as a way of thinking about what will be a person’s motivation. To continue to create things that machines can do, you know what I mean, suck and feed yourself in these various conversations. So I think Wikipedia is becoming more and more important, even if it is becoming less visible. Do teenagers come to the page and read a long article? My nephew searches the internet through YouTube.
But we haven’t seen a drop in page views on the Wikipedia platform since the launch of ChatGPT. We are on it, we are listening, and we are participating, but also not panicking, I would say.
If Wikipedia is a less consistent source of training data for AI engines, is that a good thing or a bad thing? I mean, it’s a good thing about improving the quality of what those AI agents produce, but do you really want to get paid for it?
I think that’s not really in the model. I mean we thought about that and talked about that. I think we have a different role to play. How will we use our voice and our place in this ecosystem to talk about making models more open? If you look at the AI models built by our teams, they are all transparent. They provide communities with all the data to check whether they are working or not. So when people say it can’t happen, I mean we do. I realize it’s a different business model, but it’s an important data point.
Your business model is unconventional—no ads and unpaid contributors. And yet he still dominates this era of trillion-dollar tech giants. It’s an unexpected paradox, isn’t it?
I know. I know. It’s amazing, actually. That’s really the point. It is amazing and almost unbelievable. If you ask our donors why they do this, they don’t do it to get paid. It’s like there’s something else going on here that’s talking and motivating people, trying to be part of an ecosystem of information with other people who care about accurate information, who care about the Internet giving us something to trust. That’s the game we’re in, and I think getting other teammates to be with us was also very important.
Your customers, in a sense, are not the end users of the product, right? But can they contribute? It should be the best volunteers who are very different from paid staff. What do you think differently about that?
In the book Starfish and Spiderthere is a section that talks about the role of the CEO as a catalyst rather than the role of the CEO as a respected head. The quick reason is that if you have a spider and cut off its head, all the legs fall off, and everything dies.
Although if you have a star and you cut off a leg, it just regenerates the leg, and the other stays the same. I think the analogy is good to be part of this very distributed system where, I mean, I have paying employees. The Wikimedia Foundation, as a non-profit organization, has about 700 people, but we have hundreds and thousands of volunteers. There is no supervision; you should cooperate. You have to be influential. There are very few things I get to wake up and decide for myself any day of the week, right?
I live in a system of stakeholders and communities. It is a very different leadership concept than most traditional organizations.
You rely on your community to take care of yourself. You could see bad actors trying to influence that. Is that a new layer for your organization?
You are absolutely right. There are ways that bad actors can get their way. People vandalize pages, but we’ve cracked the code on that, and usually bots can be deployed to restore the vandalism, usually within seconds. At the base, we created a disinformation team that works with volunteers to track and monitor.
In this election year, we have seen that our public policies are working, they are the answer to some of those threats, but there is no autopilot.
Aren’t you worried that the Russian government or the Chinese government might try to infiltrate your community of collaborators?
Do I worry about that? I worry about that all the time! Creating a very healthy, large, and diverse community of donors is a way to ensure that all opinions are represented and not hijacked by a small group.
With all these things swirling around, how do you keep yourself on top in the midst of all this chaos?
I really appreciate that question. I think building a team you can trust is a must so you don’t lose your mind.
When I started this job, I was very aware of what was happening in the world and how it affects what we do. The system works, and has been working for almost two and a half decades giving you comfort. Our servers never go down, even when we get huge spikes in traffic, usually when celebrities die. So the day Wikipedia got the most hits in our history was in September [2022] when Queen Elizabeth died.
But it is the time of leaders when just trying to fix is difficult.
What is at stake for Wikimedia right now?
There are the above issues that we see at play. I would say the things below that I worry about are the power of the institutions we rely on such as free media, independent sources, university research which can be mentioned as sources of information.
So there is an infrastructure around information integrity that is important to Wikipedia. Caring for those stories, journalism, research, and how people produce and disseminate information are things that can and do make headlines. I think our sense of our role in looking at this wider world is essential to our integrity and our survival.
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