Katherine Maher Quotes

In 8 hours I’ll put on a mask, leave my home, head to the airport, fly for 6 hours, quarantine for 14 days, and hopefully by mid-July I’ll be able to see my mom. I would not be going if there were not urgent family issues, but I won’t lie: I am afraid.

Disagreement is the essential friction that produces our best content

Holistic histories and analyses of power and influence are a threat to simplistic narratives and can be an accelerant for understanding, empathy, and justice.

The right to information and right to freedom of expression are fundamental human rights and we'll stand by and defend those values... Knowledge is so fundamental to allowing us to make decisions that empower and fulfil us as individuals... The internet is increasingly a highly commercialised place where privacy is illusory, where platforms and information tend to be highly concentrated, where information is algorithmically presented to you with tremendous bias based on what it is you looked at last. The internet is no longer a free and open space.... Wikipedia is one of the remaining free and open spaces on the internet... What we stand for is not just Wikipedia, but the open ecosystem of free information across the world. The need for us to create information. The need for inquiry. The need for sharing. The need for transparency and accountability. The need for presentation and celebration of languages and cultures... If governments try to get us to take information down, we don't...

I truly cannot wait to be sardined back on BART/MTA with all you stinky wonderful mouth breathers, my personal space is yours, read over my shoulder, I truly don't care, I love you all.

Ran without pain for the first time since quarantine! Yes, only a mile, and yes, it was very slow, and yes, I am woefully out of shape. But it was a run and it was glorious.

A month ago, we were planning for the future. Today, we still are — just a different future than any of us expected... At Wikimedia, we live by a mantra: everything that happens in the world happens on Wikipedia. And when things happen, the world looks our way.

In my experience, it is perfectly possible to have opinions and also produce valuable, fact-based information for the world.

Wikipedia’s content [is] freely licensed for reuse by anyone and that’s part of our mission: that every single person can share in free knowledge... We want people all over the world to use, share, add to, and remix Wikipedia. At the same time, we encourage companies who use Wikimedia’s content to give back in the spirit of sustainability.

When you meet Wikipedians from every corner of the globe, from every background imaginable, from grannies to 13-year-old students, from Kazakhstan to Uruguay to Korea, you are reminded of all the things that unite us, the ways in which our diversity enriches what we know... I leave knowing that one of the things that makes us human is our curiosity, and one of the things that is the record of our curiosity is our knowledge.

Big organizations do good work. So do small organizations working with specific communities. Often, they work together. Please support both for #Beirut

It’s never exactly a good time to step away -- transitions always have some rough edges -- but it’s always best to do so when the organization is strong, and before you’ve overstayed your welcome. The movement is in a good, strong place. Our communities are growing, our readership is too

If our vision is a world in which every single human can freely share in the sum of all knowledge, then all knowledge has to be written by all people, which means that it has to represent all people... We really need to think about what kind of language we are using to talk about the value of free knowledge, because free knowledge is valuable to absolutely everyone and we want to make sure that we are communicating that in a way that resonates... If we have more women editing Wikipedia, do I expect more articles about women scientists and novelists? Absolutely... But do I expect more articles about things that are just of interest to anybody. Yeah, I expect that too.

Our 87-year-old neighbor has no power, so we’re storing his food on a freezer hooked to a generator. Our family friend is dying of pancreatic cancer and had to be transferred from home hospice, because he has no power. Hope your shareholders feel good about their dividends.

It’s easy to forget how much has changed during how dark these past four years have been. But to hear the Democratic candidate for the VP of the United States speak about structural racism from the convention podium is unprecedented.