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Setting the stage
The new mission statement is so that Wikimedia would become the essential infrastructure to support the open source, the open knowledge movement where we voluntarily decide to not only support our project, but to support the general ecosystem.
JANE
I’m Jane McConnell and welcome to Imaginize World, where we talk with forward thinkers, pioneering organizations, and writers of speculative fiction. We explore emerging trends, technologies, world-changing ideas, and above all, share our journeys, challenges and successes.
Greetings, we all know the Wikipedia and today we’re going to learn more about what’s going on behind the curtains, things we might not be aware of. My guest is Florence Devouard, who’s been with the Wikimedia Foundation for 22 years, and the Wikipedia itself is only 23 years old. Florence was the second chairperson of the Wikimedia Foundation following Jimmy Wales. The Wikimedia Foundation is like a mothership, because there are 200 or so entities in the whole ecosystem, many country entities and other specific entities. However, one continent is absent from the Wikipedia and that is Africa. I should put that in the past tense, because Florence noticed this about 10 years ago and started some major initiatives in Africa to bring it to the Wikipedia, and the Wikipedia to Africans. She’s made lots of progress and she’ll talk about that with us.
Reliability has always been a concern for people about the Wikipedia. People say, “How can the information be up-to-date? It’s produced by normal people like us, how could it be reliable?” And in fact, today, it has become one of the top five websites used in the world. How did they achieve this? How did they make it a source of information today that’s verified and referenced? Florence will tell us the details.
I asked about the future, what lies ahead? What are the challenges for the next 10 or 15 years? The first one, unsurprisingly, is finances. It takes money to create a system that’s free for everyone. Second challenge is, how to share information in a media that fits today’s world, where people prefer video, audio, chunked, short pieces? AI is another challenge, the Wikipedia people have been using it for a long time, but the current spread of generative AI means that people are beginning to use ChatGPT to get information, and there’s a concern this might decrease the use of the Wikipedia by people who don’t understand what ChatGPT is really doing.
Freedom in the world is a very serious concern. What’s happening today in Russia with the Wikipedia will surprise you, and Florence is going to explain the details of it to us. A final challenge, which is critical for all of us is climate change and the fact that there is not enough data out in the open about climate change. Florence has a plea to all of us at the end of our conversation how we can help with that.
The Wikimedia Foundation now has a new mission statement and that is that they want to make the Wikimedia the essential infrastructure to support the open knowledge movement by 2030. Let’s find out from Florence how this is going to happen.
The Wikimedia world
Hello, Florence.
FLORENCE
Hello, Jane.
JANE
It’s really nice to see you here. We’ve known each other for, I don’t know, maybe 10 years. I remember when you came and talked to my group in Paris, twice in fact. We had a meeting at Alstom headquarters and we had a meeting at UNESCO, and both times my groups of digital practitioners were just blown away by what you had to say, it’s true, about the Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation. There’s so much about the Wikimedia Foundation that people don’t know and I’ve learned thanks to you. I’d like to start with you giving us an overview of what I would call the Wikimedia world.
FLORENCE
So, what most people have understood so far is that Wikipedia, which is the biggest project of this world, is edited, maintained by volunteers. So, that much is in people mind. So, volunteers, just to give you a figure, we’re not so numerous, we’re probably a 100,000 worldwide.
JANE
Oh, that’s quite a few people.
FLORENCE
That’s quite a few people, but when you compare to the number of readers, that’s actually not much. We’re still roughly in the top five of websites most visited in the world, so 100,000 is not so much in comparison to the number of readers we have, but it’s quite a few people. So, roughly, we have Wikipedia, which is the most well-known project, and we have others slightly less known, but Wikidata might ring a bell to some people, it’s structured data, and Wikimedia Commons for media objects. So, altogether, this is about 15 projects so far represent what we call the Wikimedia projects.
Then we gave a second name, which is the Wikimedia ecosystem. That’s a mix of the project, all the volunteers, and also a collection of organizations which were created over time to support the movement. That’s the thing that most people don’t know, don’t realize is that we have organization in spite of having many volunteers. They do not come out of the blue. They do not coordinate magically. We have organizations supporting that. And the first organization was created two years after the creation of Wikipedia. So, Wikipedia just turned 23 years old, the 15th of January was its anniversary and-
No gender gap
Well, happy birthday.
FLORENCE
Happy birthday. We did that last week. We did quite a few celebrations for that. And I’ve been in the project for 22 years, so I really joined the project a very long time ago. And at that time, it is true, it was entirely volunteer, entirely online.
JANE
Just to say it quickly, Florence, that you were the chairperson of the Wikimedia Foundation.
FLORENCE
Exactly.
JANE
You followed Jimmy Wales.
FLORENCE
Exactly.
JANE
When he stepped aside, you were there.
FLORENCE
Yes, exactly. So, I was coming to that, during two years, we were just online, nothing great. We were just doing our work. Then we created the sort of a mothership, which is the Wikimedia Foundation based in United States, with the first president being Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia. That was back 20 years ago and we had the first board election. I was elected as a representative of the community, and hooray for women, the two elected people were two women. So, gender gap, not so much for us, not at the organization level. We are here. So, I was elected. And then I was, for two years, vice-chair and then I became chair after Jimmy Wales on that one.
Country chapters
At the same time, we also created a few new chapters and there was one in Wikimedia in France, called Wikimedia France. I was one of the founders of Wikimedia France, which is still around. Little by little, we added some more. Usually, it’s based by country, so you might have Wikimedia Deutschland, Wikimedia Netherlands, and so on, Wikimedia Switzerland. We have some of them quite evolved with staff and budget, and some of them have no staff and a tinier budget, and some of them don’t even have a legal structure. It’s more a group of individuals coordinating doing things in their place. So, just to give you a figure, we currently have one big foundation, Wikimedia Foundation, so that’s the mothership. And we have 38 chapters, or rather big entities, and over 140 smaller entities, so that’s worldwide. Chance is, if you are in a country, you will have one of these entities in your country. So, roughly 200 structures exist and are also part of the ecosystem.
JANE
That’s I think something that most people don’t realize.
FLORENCE
No, I think most people don’t know that. They just think collaboration just happens. Yeah, it happened, but we’re also connected to the real world. We have servers, we need to pay the servers. We have brands that we need to protect, of course, like the Wikipedia name or the Wikipedia logo needs to be protected. We have a legal entity, so we need to be able to receive requests from government or for individuals when they’re complaining. We need to answer journalists and usually journalists like to have a human real person in front of them with a real name. They don’t like so much a username which is weird. And we have partners like museums, like university, and they prefer to have entities in front of them. So, that’s why we developed this entire ecosystem to be able to connect ourselves to the rest of the world, so to speak.
Wikipedians in Residence
That’s fantastic. Is the Wikipedian in Residence part of that?
FLORENCE
So, Wikipedian in Residence is something we created over time. Most people are volunteers in that whole frame. Then we have some people, staff of the entities of some of the bigger entities. Then over time we got some increasing number of relationship with, in particular, museums, archives, libraries, university, non-governmental agencies, and those wanted to have a special relationship to some very expert Wikipedian, so that they could build partnership, exchange data, understand licenses, what could we do together? To do that, they usually recruit, identify people we call Wikipedian in Residence. Those are people who are going to be a go-between between the Wikipedia community and this partner, and they will know both worlds, and they will try to create some bonding there.
So, those people, we call them the Wikipedian in Residence, because they are in residence in another entity. I’m a Wikipedian in Residence part-time. It’s not a full-time job and I’m a Wikipedian in Residence at WIPO. That’s the World Intellectual Property Organization. That’s a UN agency and I have been working with them for the past two years and I’m entering my third year with them to try to get some stuff done together.
Criticism
This is a lot that the Wikipedia or the Wikimedia organization will come to face when it comes to things like copyright, and using material, and who owns the material. I mean, there’s a lot of criticism of the Wikipedia. There used to be more criticism because of the quality, the so-called bad quality of the content. I know I faced that myself with the editor of my book. I think I told you the other day when we were talking, and she asked me to take a quote out that I had had in my book about defining something from the Wikipedia. She said, “It’s just notorious for bad information”, and I disagreed strongly, and I did not take it out, and I can look it up and I can give you the page number, but I mean… No.
The point is, I told her, “I’ll change it if you can find anything anywhere on the internet that gives me this information in a comprehensive, easy to understand summary. And of course, she couldn’t, but I was struck by the fact that her reaction was so… She’s in the publishing world and her reaction was real vehement. It was quite strong.
FLORENCE
Yeah. It’s getting better. Thank God it’s getting better.
JANE
Good. Good.
FLORENCE
Well, the first few years were fine, because nobody knew us, so we were in a quiet space. Then little by little the media started getting attention on us and, of course, our rules at that point were not super strict, it was quite lenient, and we got a lot of criticism in particular in France. France was one of the-
JANE
In France?
FLORENCE
Yeah, France was one of the most, most critical country amongst all. Yeah, I think it’s because we have a sort of a special relationship with encyclopedia with our past story, so there’s this sort of a requirement that we need to be perfect, we need to be associated with the academic world, we need to do something scientifically. And we were not all that, of course. There was no review system. Well, we had personal review system, but not an obligation of the identification of the person or of the expert. So, we had a different system and they didn’t get it. So, we were criticized a lot the first few years. And of course, we had a bunch of scandals which also made us appear as problematic.
I remember in particular case, because I was the chairwoman at that time, so I felt the whole story. It was a journalist called Seigenthaler in the US, and that person had information… Nobody knew that person. So, he had a biography, but nobody really looked at it, and he had an information which was vastly incorrect. He found out after two years and he thought that’s a great opportunity to raise the topic publicly. And God, it did. So, there was a lot of negative buzz around this. So, that was negative at the moment. But in the end, it was great because it allowed us to grow. We thought about our roles, we thought about our processes. And we are ever learning organization, so we thought about how can we improve that so that we are even more correct, do more fact checking, more review. And we improved over time. So, all the negative, little by little, disappeared.
In France, I lived that full-time in particular from, well, the publisher, true, because we were hurting them first place, and a lot from the teachers. The teachers were very, very critical, of course. And as for the politicians, they considered we were a cult. I was told that many, many times, “You are cult anyway”, like we had dreadlocks or whatever. I don’t know, it was a bit strange. So, how could we fight that because we reacted? Well, first, more work, more effort, and more policies to get that well-order, improve the system.
We also did some external-facing things. I can mention a few ones.
JANE
Yes, please.
Partners bring credibility
For example, Wikimedia France, we always have a president. That president is always in Paris, because in Paris then he can meet the big people. He can be a face, he can be a human being, not a random list of weird individuals somewhere. He can be a real person. And usually, we don’t take the 15-years-old people. One of our presidents, for example, was somebody working in a museum as a curator of something super expertise level. He was very well-dressed, suit, and a tie, and everything. He looked great. So, he could go and talk to the officials and “Ah, they are not weird band with whatever.” That was one. We did a lot of teaching, a lot of training conferences. I did that a lot as well. Training teachers to explain them how the system is working. For example, Wikimedia France is certified by the government, by the national education system to train-
JANE
Certified as what? As an educational-
FLORENCE
It’s recognized as a partner of the French education system to explain how it works.
JANE
Wow.
FLORENCE
And that helped greatly. When people understand better, they see all the limits, they see the roles, then things started changing. There were comparisons with the other encyclopedia. And you know about what happened with all the bad facts that currently the fake news on the internet, they realized that Wikipedia managed pretty well in comparison to all that bad information that stands on the internet. So, now we have a rather, I would say, good reputation, rather good in spite of being always some critical people, of course. It still happen and will always happen, but it’s better.
One of the things we did very much to make ourselves more respectable I would say was precisely partnership with museums, with archives, with libraries, with the university, with UN agencies, and so far, because once we start working with them, they understand how we work, they recognize the quality of what we do, they’re happy to partner with us. And then when outside people see that we actually work with them, they think, “Ah, they’re probably not so weirdos if the museum blah blah accept to work with them.” So, it gives us some stability and the people we work with are actually typically like us. Many of our participants are actually librarians, they are actually teachers, they are people working in the knowledge movement already, so it feels like family. So, we are connected now to our family, so to speak.
JANE
That’s interesting. That sounds like the initiatives that were taken were very effective. Did that happen in other countries as well?
FLORENCE
Yeah, though in some countries it’s much more complicated. For example, if you ask most people in the street in France, if they know Wikipedia, they will say, “Yeah” They use it. If I ask the same thing, say, in Benin, most people, they don’t know. And it’s more complicated to partner with the museum, because they already have so many challenges from the financial and organization perspective. So, that most of the time, even if they wanted to partner with us, they could not. They do not have the human power to do that. It depends on the countries, depends on the countries.
Birth of Wikipedia Africa
Florence, you mentioned an African country. That interests me very much, because when you and I talked for my audio podcast back a couple of years ago, you talked a lot about what you had done in the Wiki In Africa, and that’s an absolutely fascinating initiative that you started, and I think it’s still going on from what I can tell on the internet. When you consider what the continent, well, Africa, of course, many different countries, the different levels of technology, of awareness, and so on, and so on, but I gather that it’s made quite a difference in the places where you’ve been active, especially in schools with children. Can you talk a little bit about what you’ve done there?
FLORENCE
Yeah, I can. I’ve been part of the movement 20 years. That’s a generation. Of course, I haven’t been doing the same thing during this 20 years. I have changed jobs, so to speak. So, the first 10 years I mostly dedicated myself to the movement at large, and to Wikimedia France, and to Wikimedia Foundation. Back in 2013, I decided to change. I wanted to do something different and to focus my attention on something that had been bugging me for a very long time. Wikimedia was mostly European and North American. Period.
JANE
Ah. Right.
FLORENCE
Most participants were American and European. At that time, while Wikimedia France was already well established, already had staff member, and blah blah, and when I was looking at Africa, it was not that there was nothing, but next to nothing. We had a chapter in South Africa with something like five members at most. We had a few things in north of Africa, such as Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, there was stuff going on, but the rest of the continent, basically nothing. People didn’t know about Wikipedia. There were no participants, so to speak. When they were African participants, there were usually students in France or in the US.
JANE
Ah, yes.
FLORENCE
They were not locally. So, most of the content about Africa was actually written by people from Europe and North America, so it was all wrong. It was all wrong. A typical example was, when you were looking at the pictures, most of the pictures were pictures taken by tourists, who went on safari, for the safari. So, they brought back some pictures of lions, and sunsets, and such. So, I thought, no, it cannot go on this way. We said we wanted to bring the entire knowledge to the entire humanity, but the entire knowledge we’re missing a lot here, missing a lot. And most of the content about Africa was not yet even on internet. So, I decided to make that change and I’ve been focusing on that for the past 10 years now.
Wiki loves Africa Photo Contest
So, I launched many programs, some with the support of Wikimedia Foundation, some with the support of various organization. I could, in particular, mention the Goethe Institut, Fondation Orange, with whom I’ve been working for the past 10 years, but some other organizations as well, but those are my number ones, I would say. And I found some partners to work with, and we started a group, and we created later an association called Wiki In Africa, which is located in Cape Town. I’m located in Marseille, so it’s really distance work for me, and we have been working in giving visibility of Wikipedia in Africa, so as to start recruiting people. We have mostly be given… trying to identify potential participants there, training them, coaching them, mentoring them. We’re still doing that 10 years later, and we make it so to support them when they were creating their own local groups. We have at the same time some project working on the entire continent. There’s a big photo contest, Wiki Loves Africa.
JANE
I saw that, yeah.
FLORENCE
Yeah. It’s 10th year this year. It’ll start next month, and we are doing the 10th edition, so-
JANE
You have a great website for that, we’ll put a link to it.
FLORENCE
Yeah, thank you. It’s probably the biggest photo contest in Africa, I’m fairly sure of that. And we have initiative related to the gender gap, because we wanted to push the African women to do more, and get up to speed. And a lot of project in the education sector, I’m still working on that with primary or secondary school, in particular in rural areas and areas with bad internet or no internet at all. So, there’s a whole collection of programs we have been setting up, and I’m super happy with the impact. I mean, the difference in ecosystem about Africa in our organization now is completely different now than it was 10 years ago. There’s still a lot to do, but we now have over 20 user groups in Africa, in French-speaking, Arabic-speaking, and English-speaking, so not covering the entire continent, but quite a lot.
Wiki in Global South important for future
Some of these groups are well-developed. Ghana is great. Nigeria is great. Benin is doing quite a lot. Tunisia, Côte d’Ivoire, Benin, Cameroon, all those ones, Senegal, just things, birthing, lots of energy, lots of people now coming up, and lots of content. I can see the impact, so it’s very, very satisfactory for me, and I continue that job.
JANE
It’s interesting, because I think the countries in Africa represent very much the future for the planet, and in South America, same thing, and in some parts of Asia. It’s very interesting to think that what you’re doing is bringing access to information and knowledge to these people, and enabling them to share information and knowledge with the rest of the world.
FLORENCE
Enabling is the biggest part of it, because we’re missing so much content about them and this content is not always published elsewhere. So, that’s a big discovery and that’s tough, because in most cases we don’t really have sources that are available to double-check things. It’s a big issue for all the content coming from this continent is, where do we find a source to double-check what has been added is actually real and not fake. It’s like in US and France, we will have too much information. The problem will be to find the right source, the good one. For them, the problem is simply to have a source. It’s a completely different challenge.
Youth hungry to be connected
For us in Europe, the challenge will be often that many of our participants are way older. In Africa, they are way younger. In Europe, we will have people mostly willing to volunteer some time just because they want just to do something. Whilst for them, they are hungry for being connected to the rest of the world, having the opportunity for job elsewhere, learning, getting more skills. So, it’s an entirely different ecosystem because not the same reason to participate than most Europeans, for example. For me, it’s fascinating. I’m still discovering after 10 years.
JANE
It’d be interesting to look at the situation again 10 years from now and see what the change has been in these countries not directly related to the Wikimedia Foundation, but to the countries in general and to what extent there are things that can be not attributed directly, but could be indirect effects of this work.
FLORENCE
That’s one of the… I would love to have, well, the means to evaluate the impact, for example, of our education programs. When we do a program in a school with primary kids, like participating through a writing drive, which is called WikiChallenge African Schools, the idea is we bring them some tablets, some blackboards, a contest, some tools. And for the first time, they’re still not connected to the internet, but at least they learn digital stuff. They learn how to type, they learn screens. So, it’s an entire different situation from another school where they don’t have this material, how will that make a difference for these kids to have been confronted to this material maybe two years, three years, four years than the other kids in the country? Will that make a difference? Will they be better educated, more willing to jump in the big bath? I don’t know. We don’t have really measures of that. That would be awesome too.
JANE
That would be really interesting. Maybe there are some scholars, some researchers who will look into that.
Measurement is needed
Yeah, I’m still looking for them. I’m trying. The measurement is a major… Something agitating the grant world, the all supporting organizations. The organizations that currently support to get out of poverty, to get more education, they used to be funding project more on the leap of their faith, but now they want proof. They want more proof that what they deliver in terms of money is actually making a difference, a significant difference. This requirement is getting much bigger, and for reasons.
JANE
That would be very interesting to find… It wouldn’t take many people, just a few researchers, who would be interested in the topic and who could get a grant maybe from their university to study it. I say that, you’ve obviously tried to do it and you’ve not been able to and I-
FLORENCE
Some people, but so far…
JANE
Yeah. Well, we’ll see.
The future for Wikimedia
FLORENCE, how do you see… We’re moving towards talking about the future and I’d like to know how you see the future, say, 10, 15 years from now within the Wikimedia world, which for me is basically the world that we live in, but I believe you mentioned something about the mission of the Wikimedia Foundation that has changed or is changing.
FLORENCE
Yeah. So, it’s quite funny to try to project ourselves 15 years in the future when the, well, the structure has been there for 23. It’s nearly doubling our lifespan.
JANE
Double your life, yeah.
FLORENCE
Yeah. Maybe I can give you a little bit of context before moving to some of the things that are currently ongoing. So, obviously, when we started, we didn’t start from an organization. We started as a bunch of people. So, we didn’t have anything like a mission statement of all these things. We had a vision, access to knowledge, knowledge for everyone. And we had pillars, we had values that were very important to us, like everyone is welcome to come and help. It’s open, free licenses because we wanted to be able to share with everyone. So, there was a bunch of pillars there, but we somehow certified, confirmed those probably four or five years later by having a vision, a mission statement, and values, and blah blah blah, something a little bit more official so that everybody would be on the same page.
Then maybe after nearly 10 years, we made our first strategy. We did a strategy process, which was not done by a bunch of staff people. It was really done by involving the community, so it was messy. We didn’t go very far. This was mostly led by the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation at that time, but she mostly wanted to understand better what united us together. So, the outcome of it was just a little bit weak, so to speak, in the sense that it was just only the elements that united us together, but this was nothing really challenging. It was, we knew about this thing. So, much later, it was back in 2015, which is an important date, 2015, we decided to do our Wikimedia 2030 strategy. So, we actually were putting ourselves in the shoes of 15 years later. We started in 2015 for 2030. I think it took us about five years to draft our strategy.
JANE
Five years?
FLORENCE
Five years, yeah, I think so because we wanted it to be as inclusive as possible. So, we involved everyone. We had local events everywhere. We worked in many different languages. There were some people trying to analyze and get something out of it, propose it again. So, it was very long work. And out of this work, there was very interesting elements that got out, and one was a change of the mission statement. We used to be essentially knowledge for everyone and we will support the project to make that happen, the project being Wikipedia and such.
2030: Be essential infrastructure for open knowledge
We changed the mission statement and the new mission statement is so that Wikimedia would become the essential infrastructure to support the open source, the open knowledge movement. So, it’s a much larger mission statement where we voluntarily decide to not only support our project, but to support the general ecosystem. So, being more involved in advocacy, more supportive of other programs that are not our programs, trying to protect somehow family-related area. So, that was a change. I’m not convinced it’s really yet implemented except for a few elements, but we do a lot of advocacy, for example, for the decision over laws and all the legal framework that goes around copyright for example, and all the questions related to privacy, safety of people online, and so on. There’s a lot of work around this. And we also established 10 directions, 10 programmatic elements, and some of these programmatic elements we manage pretty well. It’s ongoing. We worked on the implementation and some of them, honestly, are a little bit of a nightmare. And-
JANE
Why are they a nightmare?
New ways of learning
We haven’t really succeeded to progress very much on this, so I can safely say that we can say that those goals are still true for the next 15 years, because it’s not there. So, I can pick up a couple of example, but the one I think would be the easiest for people to understand is the tech part. People do not consume knowledge now as they used to do in the past. If you look when we were about 20 years old, both you and I, to consume knowledge, we go to the library and we pick up the-
JANE
Book. The book.
FLORENCE
Encyclopedia, or newspaper, or journals. That was the way we consumed knowledge. Maybe radio and television, right? And-
JANE
Yes. And going to classes where teachers would explain everything.
FLORENCE
And going to classes, which assumed that there were classes.
JANE
Assuming there were classes, correct.
FLORENCE
Not too far away, not too expensive.
JANE
True.
FLORENCE
So, depending on where you were, you had more or less chance. And one of the big reason why Jimmy Wales thought of starting the Encyclopedia is, because in the United States when you go to university, well, one, it’s very expensive. Two, you usually have to travel away from your parents, so you need to be able to afford that. And the tuitions are very expensive. And the books, usually you have to buy the books written by the teacher of the class, of the course. That’s how they make money. And the book is usually $80 for each class, and that’s the US. In Africa, might be even more challenging.
New media replacing old
So, he started Wikipedia, but at that time, the way we consume knowledge, let’s say 2005 was mostly it became online. So, we were still mostly using text because of the bandwidth limitation, mostly using text, but the text was online. It was less and less in the books, which is why Encyclopedia Britannica disappeared to the favor of Wikipedia. But we were on the text, so Wikipedia fitted perfectly the way people consume knowledge. Then we moved to videos, that’s why YouTube became big thing.
JANE
Yeah, very big. Yeah.
FLORENCE
Very big, very powerful, and the place where most people spend their time. So, it was difficult for us to move to the video, because working together on a video is much more complicated than working on the text both in terms of production, of review, of update, it’s complicated. And we started getting slow, delayed on the tech part, because we were still on our old interface with the text whilst people were moving to Facebook and all those things, which were more fluid in terms of user experience. What’s going on now, JANE? What is going on now?
JANE
Well, you’re thinking about AI, aren’t you?
FLORENCE
I’m thinking of two things. I’m thinking people are still on video-
JANE
Video, yes.
Short better than long
… but now they want super short video, like TikTok.
JANE
Oh, I see what you mean. Absolutely. They want TikTok. They want the shorts.
FLORENCE
Three minutes.
JANE
Three minutes, yeah.
FLORENCE
Immediate. Three minutes is even quite long. So, they want something just here on the desk. Compare that to reading a long Wikipedia article, we still need that, we need the in-depth information, but for many people, they also want this little thing very quickly. Also, the tendency is subtitled, like on YouTube. You can watch a video on YouTube and get it subtitled real-time and translated Now with AI. I don’t know if you use HeyGen, or such tool, you can give it a text and an avatar is reading the text for you. That’s cool, right?
JANE
Yes.
FLORENCE
Like when we do a podcast, you listen instead of having to read.
JANE
Right.
AI already being used
It is still on the reading thing. It has lots of structured data, but it is not using it to easily immediately display the essence of it for somebody who wants the thing immediately. So, we have a whole bunch of things where we are getting late and then AI, we’re not scared of AI, we have been using it within the Wikipedia project for quite a while now. So, it’s nothing new for us, but what it is becoming in particularly in the newer generation, I saw my son do that recently and I was just shocked, was looking for info. He didn’t go to Google, he went to ChatGPT to ask an info. I was, oh my god, it’s not on ChatGPT, which was the stream that he was using, that you’re going to find proper checked, updated information. That’s not the right place.
JANE
No, that’s not the way it works.
FLORENCE
But that’s what they’re doing.
JANE
Of course, they are. I know.
User experience primordial
So, this is a big challenge for us. Within our list of 10 things we wanted to improve, there was the user experience, because it’s always needed, making easier to consume or to participate. And there was the innovate in tech, but we are late and there are many reasons for that. But if you look at all these companies pouring things, doing great things, they’re pouring money, they’re pouring tech people to work in that. We don’t have that. We don’t have as much money or as many programmers willing to do that. So, that’s a challenge for us for the future is, how do we stay relevant in the way people are using the info. That would be, for me, the biggest challenge we face at the moment. That’s the…
JANE
Yeah, that’s a big one because, on one hand, you cannot give up the fact that you have long, detailed referenced articles. That’s very important. On the other hand, it won’t draw people in as quickly as little shorts will. So, you probably need to find some combination.
FLORENCE
We probably need to find some combination and one of them might be… I don’t know if you remember, when you go on Google and you ask info about a person, you get a sort of a info box on the right base stuff, even that would be great.
JANE
Yes, yes.
FLORENCE
Even having a tool that allows to give that quickly or make people do queries super quickly and super easily on their cell phone. So, this third challenge is definitely one of our big focus, I’m sure, for the next 15 years. That’s number one for us.
Need new ways for financial stability
We have a second one which is somehow linked to what we just said about AI, it’s money, simply money. Financial sustainability for the movement is a big one. Also, the way we redistribute and how we make informed decision which fits with our own values, which are subsidiarity and equity. I’d like to give you some background info about this. So, I said we are between 150 to 200 organization. The main organization that makes money, that collects money is the Wikimedia Foundation. The budget of the foundation is around $170 million roughly. Just that. It’s, at the same time, a lot and at the same time really nothing when you compare-
JANE
Nothing to corporations, major corporations.
FLORENCE
Corporations. Tiny drop of money. This money comes from, if my memory is correct, around 70 million come from the banners when we have the fundraising banners. At the end of the fiscal year, you would see, “Give $5 to Wikipedia to support.” So, that’s-
JANE
Yeah, I’ve seen them. I’ve given it several times.
FLORENCE
Thank you, Jane. Please, everyone should do that. So, that’s about 70. And then the second big lot is coming from email that are being sent for recurring donors or past donors asking them to donate again. It’s working pretty well. Once people have donated at least once, they might give more next time. Then the other ones are big donors. There’s quite a certain amount of money, but not huge amount of money. And we have developed an API that can be used by enterprise that brings in a bit of money and an endowment has been set up a few years back and is every year giving a little bit of money. All of that makes 177. The trends that are coming is that lesser and lesser money will come from the fundraising, the banners at the top. So, why is that?
JANE
Yes, why?
FLORENCE
For now it’s only dropping, because the community’s complaining about the banners a lot, say, “We shouldn’t have these banners all the time. It’s embarrassing.”
JANE
Ah. Okay.
FLORENCE
So, they complained so much, then last year the foundation decided to, “Okay, we stop earlier than planned.” That’s just internal stuff, but if we look further, if more and more people actually use AI to answer the question and give them the details, then they will not come as much on Wikipedia. They will not need to.
JANE
Wow.
Will AI, scraping Wikipedia, replace authentic verified content
Most of the AI are being trained using Wikipedia, so they need our stuff to be there, and to be relevant, and to be up-to-date. And they have the right to use it to train the model, but as soon as the people consume only from the AI, they will not see that info come actually in big part from Wikipedia, and they will not come to the website. It’ll be less recognized as the source of info, so less participants, and less visitors, less donors.
JANE
Have you tried approaching some of the big AI companies and asking for some kind of partnership, non-exclusive partnership and grants that they would give you in exchange for visibly openly scraping?
FLORENCE
We approach them, we shamed them, in some cases. We said, “Most of your business is based on that.” And of course, they gave some money, but maybe not enough so that we get back to our technical support need, and maybe it’ll not be enough to balance this thing. Look at the Open AI, which is securing so much attention from my teenagers. They do not make any enough money that they will actually give us money, that will not be in their mind. Maybe Google, yes, will, or Apple, or whoever. Google typically gives some money, but Open AI. I don’t know if there are donors and I don’t know if they would even think of, and how much it might be.
FLORENCE
So, this financial thing long-term, it’s not yet happening, but we see that. We know it’s a potential threat for the 15 years. So, we have to think even further how to make it clear for people to realize that our content is used a lot by this system, so that they should continue helping our system so that the AI stay good. How could we convince the company doing money thanks to AI to also support us. So, there’s a whole maybe rethinking about where we should get our financial sustainability from.
JANE
Do you think it’s possible to formulate a statement and not a mission statement, but a clear statement of this kind of thing, “It’s important, somehow related to AI, getting information from the Wikipedia and that it’s important to ensure that it’s the best information possible, and your donation can help us…” I don’t know if a message like that would be possible?
FLORENCE
No, I’m pretty sure some of the communication people are thinking about that and already displaying this message. I think it might be understandable from companies at the moment, not so much from the public. It goes too much into detail for them to understand. So, that’s one thing, this financial. But within the financial, there’s something interesting as well is this question of redistribution.
Unseen costs need financing
Remember I said there was about 200 organization, foundation is the bigger one in the US. Mostly what they spend money on is the tech side. There’s the fundraising team, there’s the communication team doing a great job. There are people working on the software to try to improve the user experience. And the back office, there’s of course all the servers and the bandwidth. It’s a big, big expense. And there’s the legal team, which is not a small team either, and the advocacy. So, there’s a bunch of people working, I don’t remember exactly how many people are there because it changed quite a bit, but rough figures is around 500 to a 1,000, very rough figures just to give an idea. And the biggest other organization is Germany, which is entirely autonomous. Only making money from Germany works great. So, very powerful, several offices, hundreds of staff member. Okay, compare that to Togo. Togo, no office. I don’t think they have any staff member. So, locally, what can they do? It’s only a bunch of volunteers, they cannot do much.
So, a big question within us was raised around how do we actually make sure that areas can developed based not on the money that is available in the country, but based on what the rest of the group can give them. That’s one of our biggest challenge and I may have a few figures based on that. Roughly among this 177, the amount of money that is redistributed locally is 17 million, only 17 million. So, it’s less than 10%. And within that amount of money, with the understanding that basically Germany and Switzerland are autonomous, 25% of the 17 is given only to North America.
JANE
Really?
FLORENCE
See, the US is hugely funded. So, Africa is raising and we are pushing very much, I promise, Jane, we are pushing very much so that the amount of money dedicated to Sub-Saharan Africa is increased. And it is going up, in particular for Nigeria, because it’s a very large country with lots of different tribes and people from different cultures. But at the same time, we cannot pour huge amount of money on a group which has hardly any control in place. You cannot pour a big amount of money on three volunteers. It needs to be steady growth. And how could we decide how we do that? Should it be decided only by a bunch of people in the US or should it be a decision made by a global decision-making community? Those are complicated, but they are very important for our future. If I look in the next 15 years, I promise we have worked for 15 years there trying to identify how we can sustain the amount we have or increase it, and how could there be more equity in the way we redistribute it. That’s a big, big one. That’s a big one.
JANE
That’s a very big one. Just knowing you, Florence, basically you’re feeling positive about the future. I think with all your energy and the people you work with, you feel like you’re making progress even if it’s not as fast as you would like. Is that a fair statement?
Wikipedia in Russia
I think it’s a fair statement, yeah. I’ve seen all the up and downs, and up and downs, and we’re still going there, and there’s still a huge lot to do. We haven’t touched maybe some of the other, a little scary topic. For example, the freedom. The freedom generally in the world, which is a big one-
JANE
Which is decreasing at the moment.
FLORENCE
… which it seems to be decreasing. First, we have the short-term situation. There was an interesting post made recently about Gaza, about people’s lack of access to information in Gaza. How do we deal with such situation as all together? As human being, how do we deal with what is happening? But also, in our case, a lack of information for them, internet being cut, and so on. In 2023, we had many problems with the Russian Federation, to say it nicely. So, lots of requests for take down. They represented the highest number for all countries of complaints and requests for change of content, removal of a page-
JANE
Russia requested pages be taken down or changed?
FLORENCE
Yeah. Yeah. The highest number of requests last year came from them pretty normally. They also did a lawsuit-
JANE
Did they?
FLORENCE
… requesting money if we were not taking down this page, requesting that an office be created in Russia, so that they would have a Russian person to talk with. Can you imagine what would happen? No one would accept to do that. So, they’re creating a derivative version of Wikipedia, which would only contain what they wanted to be there. The networks are closing, some applications are not available there, so people cannot access the content. Early 2023 I think it was, we have some offline versions of Wikipedia that people can download on their computer. The highest number of downloads was in Russia, of course.
JANE
Really?
FLORENCE
People were downloading like crazy thinking this is going to be banned or something.
JANE
Ah.
Closed internet systems
So, those are short-term things, But you can see that there are countries were explicitly creating some sort of closed internet network in that country. So, how do we reach out to these people? How do we resist that? In some countries, reading Wikipedia is dangerous. In some countries, editing Wikipedia is very, very dangerous, because it goes against what is legal in the country. And at the more European, North American level, we have to all the time check the decisions that are being made, or new laws, or change in the laws. So, lots of advocacy work is being done to make sure that we keep a sort of a safe, secure environment for our contributors. Well, we had some rather good news recently in Europe, but it’s always a concern. A lot of time must be dedicated to this, making sure that we do resist from some attempt to limit the freedom of people to read and to participate Wikipedia. And for most people, it’s not visible, but it’s real.
JANE
Wow, I didn’t know that. That just shows, Florence, what the Wikipedia has become.
FLORENCE
Yeah, it’s a big role.
JANE
I mean, the more powerful something is, the more there are people against it, even when it’s a good thing, but it threatens some people.
FLORENCE
Right, but needs to be strong, need to be resistant, resilient. But for anyone who joins it, there’s still a huge lot to do, so it’s pretty cool.
JANE
Yeah. So, you’re making quite a nice pitch for people to join in your work.
Contribute to open knowledge
Yeah, please, give them money to help us continue would be a good one. You can give in your country, you can give to the Wikimedia Foundation, but if you’re in France, give in France. If you’re in Germany, give in Germany. Just make sure to keep the thing as non-hierarchical as possible, so that we spread the decision-making. We try to have as much as possible decision made at the local level rather than a global level to help out. It’s important element, I think.
JANE
That’s very important. I mean, that’s true for organizations of any sort. The lower the level of decision-making to the point where there is real responsibility for the decision, the better it is.
Well, I think we’ve covered a lot of topics, Florence. Do you have any final thoughts?
Real information cross-checked, about climate change is rare
I have one final thing I would like to mention, because I think it’s very much in the air and I think every organization need to question themselves on the topic. It’s climate change simply. And if we look 15 years ahead, we need to put that in our thinking as well, all of us, whether individual or organization. So, this is not something we leave aside as well. So, I wanted to share some of the few things that we have been trying to do. At the global level first, well, we tend to be mostly a community that works online. We do not travel much. We still have from time to time some conferences where we meet, which are absolutely necessary, so that we coordinate a little bit and get some family feeling, but we have tried to reduce that a bit. And we have tried to be super careful when it came to travel, so making the right decision, train instead of plane whenever it’s possible. There are quite a few things.
Some organizations, such as Wikimedia France, is actually measuring, trying to measure the impact of the work done by the association as also a way of trying to make a difference and making people aware of what they do and could do differently. That’s one.
But at the personal level, I worked at the beginning of the year 2023 on a program that was supported by African Union and the Wikimedia Foundation. We tried to do something that seems quite simple, but is actually missing, is to identify a topic of high level, high impact topics that are not yet covered in Wikipedia, but that should be. The example is, we have articles about climate change and impact of climate change in English for every European country or North America country. It’s there. So, impact of climate change in France does exist, and describe the situation and the evolution. So, it exists as an awesome source of information for anyone who wants to have a picture of the situation at the moment, and of the trends, and of the impact. There’s so much fake news on the internet related to that topic, so it’s a very good idea to have something straightforward there.
And I realized, in English we had only two such articles for the entire continent Africa. Simply, it’s not that it was small or outdated, it just did not exist. If you look for the impact of climate change in Zimbabwe, you had nothing.
So, we tried to get some participants to work on this, to identify the topic of high impact and to focus on those ones, and it revealed to be extremely difficult. Few participants. Not so many data in fact. There are some cases where lots of info, but it’s very hard to identify what is actually relevant and valid source, really double check. It’s complicated. So, it’s kind of a nightmare to try to find out your way on the topic on the internet and to actually try to analyze, it’s complicated work. It’s easy to write a biography about an artist. It’s way harder to write an article about the impact of climate change in Botswana. I mention this article because it now exists, we made it.
Help by sharing your data
But if I had a recommendation it’s any organization that has relevant data that they can share and that they can put in the open so that we can reuse them to build up our articles, to build up graphs, to build up images, or videos even, think about sharing them. We’re not necessarily asking for the reports, though available would be nice, but at least if you could share your data, so that we could actually write these high impact articles, climate change or any topic of interest for the future, but that’s a collective work. We do not produce data. We use data produced by others or recorded by others. And if we don’t know this data, if it’s hidden, if it’s not findable, we cannot use that. So, please a plea, help us do our job by making yours, if you have data, share your data with others. That would be my takeaway.
JANE
Wow, that’s a great takeaway, Florence. We’ll make that the banner, we’ll put it across our episode.
FLORENCE
Share your data.
JANE
Thank you so much, Florence. This has been illuminating. I even learned more today even after having talked with you recently talking about doing today. There’s just so much to be learned about the Wikimedia Foundation world, I would call it, because it’s a big deal what you guys have done. It’s really a big deal and you all deserve a lot of thanks from the rest of us.
FLORENCE
Thank you, Jane. And thank you for actually allowing us, me in particular, to share these stories, to explain what’s going on behind the curtains that people might not be aware of.
JANE
Yeah. Well, you do a very good job at explaining, Florence. You’re a very good voice for open information, open knowledge, and the importance it has on the world, the entire world.
FLORENCE
Thank you.
