Access to information is essential to healthy communities and should be treated as such... This becomes even more clear in times of global health crises when information can have life-changing consequences. All institutions, from governments to international health agencies, scientific bodies to Wikipedia, must do our part to ensure everyone has equitable and trusted access to knowledge about public health, regardless of where you live or the language you speak.
chief executive officer and president of National Public Radio
Katherine Roberts Maher (born April 18, 1983) is an American businesswoman. She became the chief executive officer (CEO) and president of National Public Radio (NPR) in March 2024, succeeding John Lansing. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Maher worked for UNICEF, the National Democratic Institute, the World Bank and Access Now before joining the Wikimedia Foundation, where she was chief executive officer and executive director from 2016 to 2021. She subsequently joined the Atlantic Council and has served as the chief executive officer of Web Summit and chair of the board of directors at the Signal Foundation. She is a member of the US Department of State's Foreign Affairs Policy Board.
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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...
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.
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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.
The COVID-19 epidemic is something that makes clear our global human interconnectedness and the responsibility we have to one another. We don’t have precedent for its challenges, but we do know that our best response relies on the sort of global empathy, cooperation, and community building that sits at the heart of this organization.
Diversity is baked into our vision statement: the sum of all knowledge, every single human being. And feminism is a foundational part of diversity: if we’re talking about every single human being, we need to be talking about every single human being, including women and non-binary people. So, not only is this part of my values, it’s absolutely part of the Foundation’s mission.
When it became clear that SARS-CoV-2, or simply, the latest coronavirus, was spreading globally and likely to become a pandemic, we took it seriously. Our responsibility is to keep Wikipedia online and available for the world, especially in moments of crisis. A world that is changing requires changing how we work.