New CEO at Wikimedia

The non-profit that operates Wikipedia, one of the world’s most popular websites, has a new CEO, Maryana Iskander (and yes, she has a Wikipedia page). Her priorities for the Wikimedia Foundation, where she’ll take over in January, are diversifying Wikipedia’s volunteer writers and promoting the foundation’s mission of making information accessible. Iskander, who comes to Wikimedia from a South African non-profit, recently talked with The Associated Press about her plans for the volunteer-managed online encyclopedia.

What attracted you to Wikipedia?

The job profile starts with this extremely striking statement about the fact that knowledge belongs to all of us. The idea that anything belongs to all of us is really quite revolutionary. It’s like we’re living in a world in which increasingly most things don’t feel common and don’t feel shared. The chance to be part of an organization that has that as a core value was hugely appealing.

Wikipedia is famously created and edited by volunteers. What do the 500-plus employees do?

The foundation itself enables the platform, software and technology. We provide support to these communities all over the world and do a huge amount of policy and advocacy work.

What are the biggest challenges for Wikipedia?

Most of the content on Wikipedia comes from the global north. It doesn’t represent the full sum of human knowledge. How do we get more content both about and from people in the global south?

Wikipedia contributors skew male, European and North American. How can you be more inclusive?

Every country and frankly, language community, is different. But one of the things that we’ve learned about how Wikipedia has increased its presence in Nigeria is that it’s important to first try to raise awareness about Wikipedia, so that people understand it as a resource. Then people will be more interested in coming to be contributors.

Wikimedia has an annual budget of over $100 million. There is some criticism that the foundation has money to fund its expenses and yet is begging users for money.

Wikipedia is the only top 10 website in the world operated as a not-for-profit, so it’s trying to deliver services on a fraction of the budget of the big tech platforms. I think our intent is never to harass users. We see that lots of people are very happy to make what is usually a pretty small contribution in support of something that they use and find valuable. That keeps us from needing to sell personal information or ads or do things that would compromise the neutrality and integrity of the platform.