Well, thank you so very much for having me, Lynn. Glad to be here. Oh, this is very exciting. So I have to ask, what

got you started as a Wikipedia volunteer? Well, it dates back to June 4th, 2007. I was visiting my younger son, Sean, in San Francisco. I was in his apartment, and I'd been working. And it was kind of the end of my workday and started doing what people commonly do. I was searching on Google for this, that, and the other. And among the things I searched for was a book publisher whose books I collect. I'm a bibliophile. I collect old books. I don't read them. I collect them. And I looked for Book League of America, expecting that on that Google search, there'd be a Wikipedia article. But there wasn't. And so I looked on the second page of the search and still nothing. I thought, okay, I'll just go into Wikipedia and I'll look for it there. And when I searched for it in Wikipedia and still didn't find it, it was like this aha moment, like, my gosh, it's 2007 and Wikipedia doesn't have an article about everything. Oh, my gosh. And at that moment, I remembered that, again, my son, Sean, who had just got back from serving in the Peace Corps in Ukraine, had told me that when he came back from Ukraine, he showed me how in Wikipedia, you can see the edit history of every article. And he had edited the article about the city where he was stationed. And it made me think, you know what, if Sean could figure out how to edit Wikipedia while he was in Ukraine, I bet I can figure out how to edit it. I bet I can create this article. And lo and behold, I did just that. What

a great origin story. I love that your personal curiosity was your impetus for getting engaged for people who haven't done this. How did these articles come into being? Well,

either you're at home, you're at some museum or library at an event, and you're curious about something, and there are references about it outside of Wikipedia, but either the article on Wikipedia is incomplete or non-existent, and you decide maybe then and there, I'm going to do something about it. In the end, we're all volunteers. Wherever we live on planet Earth, we're volunteers, and we want to contribute to this encyclopedia of our time. And we know that we can do it because anyone can edit Wikipedia. I mean, you or me, your 15-year next-door neighbor, my 55-year aunt, any one of us can edit Wikipedia. And if we're so inclined and curious enough to do so, we do. That's

so cool. So I wanted to focus on the mechanisms that support being a trustworthy place for people to direct their curiosity, because that feels like such a weighty responsibility. Do you think of it that way? I mean, do you think of, do you feel the weight of that responsibility?

I really do. didn't at first back in 2007, but more and more, particularly as times have changed, I do, particularly as LLMs are scraping websites.

LLM, that's large language models for AI.

Wikipedia in its 300 plus language versions, and is incorporating the information in Wikipedia and outputting it in its various forms. I think about how with Wikipedia, not only are there facts, but the facts have reliable sources attached to the fact. And not only is there a reliable source that one can view, which you can view on other kinds of websites where there are a list of references. What's different about Wikipedia is one of our pillars called verifiability. You can actually click the link of the source that you see there and go to that website and see what was written. You can verify the fact. And I think that's what makes Wikipedia so unique and so important because you can not only see a fact and see the source related to the fact, you yourself can verify it.

Yeah. Yeah. One of the things I learned as I made myself a student of Wikipedia in all of this was about these principles, what I think of as sort of defining values actually for the culture of Wikipedia that are neutrality, verifiability, and no original research. And talk to me about neutrality, because neutrality is a really difficult thing to ensure. It's like so many other things that what seems neutral to one body may not seem so neutral to another. So how do you thread that needle? You

do that by presenting all sides of a coin, if you will, a coin having two sides, but all sides in an article. And we assure it because we collaborate as we write. So not only is there information on an article's page, but each article has a talk page associated with it where we can have a discussion about a certain fact, where we can discuss, did we present everything and did we present everything that we know that we can cite and did we present it in a neutral way? So in a very kind of a simple example, I would say that if one newspaper article said that Jane Doe was born in 1850 and another one said that she was born in 1865, we would include both dates and we would cite what we're attributing the choice of 1850 and 1865 in that article. In other words, we presented both sides, if you will, and then we leave it to others who maybe come along later and have access to other kinds of documents where maybe they can actually substantiate that she was born on this date or that. And by the same token, if we move to the present day, where we're talking about facts related to, let's say, today's history, but also previous histories, you know, all the wars that were ever fought, there's, you know, multiple sides to what happened, depending on who's writing and the references they're using and even what language version of Wikipedia you're reading the article in. So by neutrality, we present all the sides that we can using consensus as a way to do it and references to reliable sources that can be verified so that others can read and form their own opinions.