YouSaid · the spoken record

Maryana Iskander

lines on the record: 27
first: 2024-10-15
most recent: 2024-10-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“There's this kind of let's call it the above the line issues we're seeing playing out. I would say that the below the surface stuff that I worry about is the strength of the institutions on which we rely, right? A free press, independent sources, research from universities that can be cited and used 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. And I think for us, really having a sense of our role vis- ⁇-vis this broader world is pretty critical for our own kind of.”
2024-10-15 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Wikipedia will survive AI, with CEO Maryana Iskander · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really appreciate that question. I think building a team you can trust is like 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? How does this impact what we're doing? And I do think that the fact that this system works and that it has been working for 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 Know just trying to get it right Hard”
2024-10-15 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Wikipedia will survive AI, with CEO Maryana Iskander · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do 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.”
2024-10-15 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Wikipedia will survive AI, with CEO Maryana Iskander · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You are 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 vandalism, usually within a matter of seconds. We have, you know, at the foundation in terms of our staff 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.”
2024-10-15 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Wikipedia will survive AI, with CEO Maryana Iskander · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mean, I would say yes and no. I think that things that endure endure because the fundamentals are strong and make sense, right? The everyday of how do we change and evolve our technology? How do we respond to the introduction of voice assistance when Siri and Alexa and others came out? How do we now respond to generative AI? I would say that there is an evolution on it 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 basic fundamentals are holding us in good stead.”
2024-10-15 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Wikipedia will survive AI, with CEO Maryana Iskander · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Referenced the spider in the starfish. There's a section that talks about the role of the CEO. 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. It's a very different paradigm of leadership than many traditional organizations”
2024-10-15 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Wikipedia will survive AI, with CEO Maryana Iskander · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I know. I know. It's astounding, actually. 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. That's the game we're in. And I think that finding other allies to be in that with us has also been really important.”
2024-10-15 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Wikipedia will survive AI, with CEO Maryana Iskander · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2024-10-15 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Wikipedia will survive AI, with CEO Maryana Iskander · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You go back to the very, very early days of Wikipedia, machines have always been in the equation using tools to deal with 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. It 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 experience.”
2024-10-15 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Wikipedia will survive AI, with CEO Maryana Iskander · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. I 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”
2024-10-15 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Wikipedia will survive AI, with CEO Maryana Iskander · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“AI is going to evolve. It'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 along 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. And so we're on it and we're paying close attention and we're engaging, but also not freaking out, I would say.”
2024-10-15 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Wikipedia will survive AI, with CEO Maryana Iskander · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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? 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”
2024-10-15 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Wikipedia will survive AI, with CEO Maryana Iskander · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. Because 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.”
2024-10-15 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Wikipedia will survive AI, with CEO Maryana Iskander · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I 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 and then we communicate 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”
2024-10-15 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Wikipedia will survive AI, with CEO Maryana Iskander · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2024-10-15 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Wikipedia will survive AI, with CEO Maryana Iskander · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. Lots 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.”
2024-10-15 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Wikipedia will survive AI, with CEO Maryana Iskander · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I spoke at an event, a person made a comment how could Wikipedia possibly be trusted on a particular issue? So I said, well, let's go look at the page together around that topic. And they were kind of 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. So 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 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.”
2024-10-15 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Wikipedia will survive AI, with CEO Maryana Iskander · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 a drop in our traffic since chat GPT. 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. I 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, 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.”
2024-10-15 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Wikipedia will survive AI, with CEO Maryana Iskander · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 raised 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? There 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.”
2024-10-15 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Wikipedia will survive AI, with CEO Maryana Iskander · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 depends on how closely it impacts the work itself”
2024-10-15 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Wikipedia will survive AI, with CEO Maryana Iskander · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I 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.”
2024-10-15 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Wikipedia will survive AI, with CEO Maryana Iskander · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2024-10-15 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Wikipedia will survive AI, with CEO Maryana Iskander · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 since 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”
2024-10-15 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Wikipedia will survive AI, with CEO Maryana Iskander · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2024-10-15 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Wikipedia will survive AI, with CEO Maryana Iskander · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That were the founding basis of Wikipedia and lots and lots of policies and guidelines to ensure that the content is accurate, verified, uses cited sources. It'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.”
2024-10-15 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Wikipedia will survive AI, with CEO Maryana Iskander · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. It 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.”
2024-10-15 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Wikipedia will survive AI, with CEO Maryana Iskander · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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? 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 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.”
2024-10-15 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Wikipedia will survive AI, with CEO Maryana Iskander · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT