Here is the full transcript of Katherine Maher’s talk titled “What Wikipedia Teaches Us About Balancing Truth and Beliefs” at TED conference.
In her talk “What Wikipedia Teaches Us About Balancing Truth and Beliefs,” Katherine Maher, former CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, discusses the unique role of Wikipedia during a global crisis of misinformation and declining public trust in institutions. She attributes Wikipedia’s increased trust to its openness, volunteer-driven content, and transparent policy-making, which adapt to the evolving world.
Maher highlights Wikipedia’s handling of disagreements, where polarized contributors engaging in conversation lead to more balanced and productive outcomes. She emphasizes the importance of productive friction in shaping public records and enhancing ideas. Maher also stresses the need for clear rules and community norms, inclusive decision-making, and acknowledging personal biases.
She introduces the concept of ‘minimum viable truth’, suggesting a focus on collaboration over seeking absolute truths. Maher concludes by advocating for patience and humility in decision-making processes, underscoring the value of collective action and trust-building.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
It is lovely to be with you here this evening. So as you just heard, my name is Katherine Maher, and I used to be, until very recently, the CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, which is the organization behind Wikipedia. And my tenure coincided with a very strange time for information. A global crisis of fake news and disinformation, which meant that our free-knowledge movement really sort of stood alone.
At the same time, too, we saw a collapse in public trust around the world in many of our critical civic institutions. And one of the reasons for this collapse in public trust, in things like public science and an independent free press, and even perhaps in the idea of democracy itself, is that people around the globe are increasingly skeptical about the ability of these institutions to respond to our future challenges and changing needs. And yet, during this time, trust in Wikipedia actually went up. Something that surprised us as much as anyone.
The Uniqueness of Wikipedia
And so I started wondering, what is it about this organization, this radical experiment in openness, self-governance, and amateurism, volunteerism, that made it so different? And I’ve come to believe that in many ways, the things that made Wikipedia implausible are actually what prepare it to respond to our changing world. And make it a place that people love and trust. And so one of the things about it, of course, is that it is edited entirely by volunteers, ordinary people from all over the world.
All of the decisions about encyclopedic content and organizational policies take place in a transparent and open fashion. This means that Wikipedia can continue to change as the world changes around it, integrating new ideas and new perspectives. But I think one of the most critical things that I found really important is that its model pushes us to work together into deliberation and into conversation so that the end result is something that most of us feel is reasonable and fair.
Now, easy enough for some things, like articles on animals with fraudulent diplomas, which is a real article on Wikipedia. But what about the hard things, the places where we are prone to disagreement, say, politics and religion? Well, as it turns out, not only does Wikipedia’s model work there, it actually works really well. Because in our normal lives, these contentious conversations tend to erupt over a disagreement about what the truth actually is.
Wikipedia’s Approach to Truth
But the people who write these articles, they’re not focused on the truth. They’re focused on something else, which is the best of what we can know right now. And after seven years of working with these brilliant folks, I’ve come to believe that they are onto something. That perhaps for our most tricky disagreements, seeking the truth and seeking to convince others of the truth might not be the right place to start. In fact, our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that’s getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done.
Now, that is not to say that the truth doesn’t exist, nor is it to say that the truth isn’t important. Clearly, the search for the truth has led us to do great things, to learn great things. But I think if I were to really ask you to think about this, one of the things that we could all acknowledge is that part of the reason we have such glorious chronicles to the human experience and all forms of culture is because we acknowledge there are many different truths.
And so in the spirit of that, I’m certain that the truth exists for you and probably for the person sitting next to you. But this may not be the same truth. This is because the truth of the matter is very often, for many people, what happens when we merge facts about the world with our beliefs about the world. So we all have different truths. They’re based on things like where we come from, how we were raised, and how other people perceive us.
The Challenge of Collective Decision-Making
Now you and your neighbor, who’s probably a reasonable person — they look like a nice person? Yeah, they’re probably a reasonable person. You two can probably get together and come to some sort of shared agreement. But what happens when a third person joins the conversation or a fourth or a fifth? What happens when we try to expand this out to the scale of all 7.8 billion of us? We are a vast and varied world. The reality is we are a vast and varied world.
And so when we try to use our personal truths to come to conversations around collective decision-making on important issues, we start to run into problems. Because collective decision-making, the sort of thing that we want to do in democratic and open societies, requires that we get together with common understandings about the root of the problem and some assumptions about how we might get out of it.
But if we’re using our personal truths to do this, we end up having conversations about our values and our identity.
Because remember, our truths come from where we come from. And then we’re focusing on what divides us instead of what we can agree upon. And that allows us to start having conversations about the truth in a way that focuses on what we believe rather than what can be known. And that is a definition that is deeply divisive and harmful. I think about our lack of urgent action on climate change. We’ve known for a very long time now about the negative impacts of man-made carbon in the atmosphere.
But the implications of that data challenge our identities, our industries, our communities in ways that have led and created resistance and even disinformation, and the resulting public debates about the truth of climate change have prevented us from taking specific and concrete actions that could mitigate the harms to us around rising seas, increasingly deadly waves of heat and cold, and powerful storm systems. With such urgent threats ahead of us, we need better ways to get to a shared understanding.
Fortunately, I’ve seen how, at Wikipedia, we can come to cooperative and productive conversations around disagreement and decision making without using one shared truth as our baseline. Its generous and accommodating approach offers us a practical way to take it down a notch, focusing on something a little less stressful: the best of what can be known right now. And the good news is we can know a lot of things. We have high-quality information, facts, and data that allow us to do things like track the migration of endangered species or the spread of a pandemic around the world.
These are useful tools in our toolbox, but they don’t necessarily alone change minds or unite disparate views. So how do we do that? We shift from focusing on one key truth to instead finding minimum viable truth. Minimum viable truth means getting it right enough enough of the time to be useful enough to enough people. It means setting aside our bigger belief systems and not being quite so fussy about perfection. And this idea of minimum viable truth is actually a tremendously forgiving idea, which is one of the things I love about it the most.
It recognizes our messy humanity. It acknowledges space for uncertainty, for bias, and for disagreement on our way to the search for the answers. So, one thing you may not know about Wikipedia is that it actually assumes that we are all biased. It is the reason that you are not supposed to write articles about yourselves. Because can any of you truly be neutral about how brilliant and remarkable you are?
The Power of Overcoming Biases
But when we are forced to defend our biases, when we are forced to go into the data and the citations and really engage, grapple with the intellectual struggle that comes from meeting up against other people’s biases, our horizons can expand and we can get to new and better understandings about the world. How does this work? Well, in 2019, a group of researchers released a study looking at how Wikipedia writers take on the most contentious and difficult topics. And what they found was that the system actually works really well. These are some of the best articles on Wikipedia.
And many of them are written by people who fundamentally disagree with one another. They also found something interesting, which is that the more these polarized contributors engaged in conversation, the more balanced and productive their contributions became. Which means that Wikipedia may be one of the only places on the internet where disagreement actually makes you more agreeable. Now, I knew instinctively this is true because I’ve seen how productive friction can really get us places, how mistakes and debate actually bring people into the conversation.
You don’t sit back when you disagree with someone, because engaging offers you the chance to shape the public record. Through that process, ideas become sharper, better, and more understandable. In this way, the seeds of our disagreement can actually become the roots of our common purpose. All of this is very well and good, but what does it mean and how do we actually apply it to other organizations and institutions and systems that we are a part of, in order to increase trust and reduce polarization and perhaps get some important things done?
Applying Wikipedia’s Principles
Well, I’ve already talked a little bit about productive friction, the good kind that makes our ideas better. That is possible because of a few things: notably, clear rules and strong community norms. Clear rules help us engage on the substance of the issue rather than debating the identity of the author. Those rules are not upheld by any one individual on high; they’re actually maintained and uplifted by the entire community, so we all have a shared sense of responsibility for success.
The other piece of this is that it is essential that decisions are not just made by those who show up in the room. You have to be intentional about bringing all the voices in. When Wikipedia first started, the majority of its authors were Western white men, which led to some really significant biases and gaps in the types of articles that were written and the slant of those articles. Recognizing this, by being intentional about undoing some of these systems that were actively excluding people and doing the hard work of actually rebuilding them so that more people would feel welcome in the conversation, we are now able to have a better reflection of the known world.
Interdependence and Shared Power
The next piece of this is really about interdependence. The way that the system works is that you cannot go it alone. In order for your contributions to stick, they have to earn the agreement of your fellow contributors, which is a powerful forcing mechanism for people to work together. Next is the idea of shared power. All of those debates result in 350 edits a minute to Wikipedia, which means that no one person can be in charge of the whole thing. You have to let go of power, give it to other people, and trust in their ability to manage the areas of their own expertise and interests.
And by doing so, you earn their commitment and agency to make this project work. It also requires humility because you’re going to get it wrong some of the times. But getting it wrong some of the time is worth it for getting it right most of the time. And speaking of time, you have to have a very different relationship to urgency. So much in the world is about moving fast. But moving fast has actually broken a lot of things: it’s broken our trust, it has undermined our confidence in many of our systems of governance, perhaps even our faith in democracy itself.
By slowing down a little bit and bringing the conversation in, by listening with sincerity, debating with respect, consulting widely, and weighing difficult decisions with candor, you can actually build systems that endure. But most importantly, you can build trust, that quality that is in such short supply right now. And trust in one another is what we need in order to weather uncertainty and take brave action.
So what I’m asking all of you today is to set aside your own personal truth for just a minute, for the opportunity to sit in someone else’s. It’s to endure the productive friction of coming to common agreement with someone who you may not agree with or perhaps even like. And with just enough rules and a little bit of time, I believe that you can do it. And you just might find, we all just might find, that the most important things that we do are the ones that we do together. Thank you.