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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In a given month, I might fly to New York to meet with the about making its collection more accessible online to Wikipedia, then head to Tunisia to meet members of the Wikipedia community. A big reason why I spend so much time on road is that we support nearly 300 languages. We’re committed to the idea that Wikipedia should be this essential knowledge infrastructure for the world. ... I used to be really aggressive—walk off the plane and go straight into meetings. Because we’re a nonprofit, we travel economy class everywhere; getting off a long flight can be tough.... If I need a nap, that’s OK. You have to be nice to yourself. ... One of the first things I do in a city is go for a run. It’s a great way to orient yourself—even if it’s just for a mile or two.
Women are just as competent in technology as men; it’s just that we’re not socialized to believe so... On English Wikipedia, for example, 18 percent of our biographies are about women... One of the reasons for the imbalance... is that men outnumber women roughly 9 to 1 among the site’s unpaid contributors... Another part of the problem is that if you actually look at representation of women in the broader public sphere, Wikipedia is a tertiary source... It requires secondary sources for an article to exist, which means that in order to write about a notable woman, you need to actually be able to find a newspaper article or a book or something that talks about her accomplishments and achievements. And we know that gender representation of women in all forms of media is actually not great. Women are less likely to be quoted in articles; women are less likely to be covered as the subjects of articles, even really notable women...
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.
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.