Wikipedia's enduring, nuanced perspective on truth | Katherine Maher

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4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 30 May 2022

⏱️ 15 minutes

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Summary

Even with public trust at an all-time low, Wikipedia continues to maintain people's confidence. How do they do it? Former CEO of Wikimedia Foundation Katherine Maher delves into the transparent, adaptable and community-building ways the online encyclopedia brings free and reliable information to the public -- while also accounting for bias and difference of opinion. "The seeds of our disagreement can actually become the roots of our common purpose," she says.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Elise Hugh. You're listening to TED Talks Daily. If there's one thing that's painfully
0:08.8	clear from politics and as we have fought a pandemic, it's that we don't all share the same
0:15.2	truths. Today's talk addresses that. Catherine Marr is a technologist policy expert and the former CEO of the
0:22.5	Wikimedia Foundation. In her talk from Ted Monterey 2021, she shares an idea to increase trust
0:28.9	and reduce polarization, helping us find a way toward common ground. It is lovely to be with you
0:37.2	here this evening.
0:38.2	So as you just heard, my name's Catherine Marr, and I used to be, until very recently,
0:43.5	the CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, which is the organization behind Wikipedia.
0:49.4	And my tenure coincided with a very strange time for information,
0:55.2	a global crisis of fake news and disinformation,
0:59.2	which meant that our free knowledge movement really sort of stood alone.
1:04.4	At the same time, too, we saw a collapse in public trust around the world
1:09.5	in many of our critical civic institutions.
1:13.3	And one of the reasons for this collapse in public trust
1:16.0	in things like public science and an independent free press
1:19.5	and even perhaps in the idea of democracy itself
1:22.2	is that people around the globe are increasingly skeptical
1:25.7	about the ability of these institutions to respond
1:29.1	to our future challenges in changing needs. And yet, during this time, trust in Wikipedia
1:36.0	actually went up, something that surprised us as much as anyone. And so I started wondering,
1:43.2	what is it about this organization?
1:45.3	This radical experiment in openness, self-governance and amateurism, volunteerism, that made it
	...

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