Raju Narisetti on Wikipedia & the Mission To Take Free Knowledge to Every Person

While it is one of the most popular websites, few stop to think about what it takes to keep Wikipedia running.

Wikipedia has become an pillar of the internet. Founded in 2001 – after the dotcom bubble burst and before social media websites came into their own – the online multilingual encyclopaedia has been an indispensable fixture of the internet for two decades.

While it consistently ranks among the top 10 most popular websites, few stop to think about what goes behind keeping such a massive not-for-profit project up and running.

The Quint caught up with Raju Narisetti, veteran journalist and a member of the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, to talk about what goes on behind the curtains, their donation and awareness campaigns, and where the website is headed.

We know what Wikipedia is, but what does Wikimedia Foundation do?

Wikipedia is the platform on which most people experience the mission of free knowledge and information. That's where all the volunteers are. But a platform like that – 1.5 billion devices that come to it every month, tens of millions of articles, supporting close to 300 languages.

All of that needs a few things, right?

One, it needs significant infrastructure; a lot of data centers making sure there's redundancy, making sure it's always available, a lot of emphasis on privacy and how do you preserve data. All of that requires significant technology, resources, and the people to manage that.

Then you need people to create governance principles. How do different communities interact with each other? How do you grow the volunteers? How do you support the 25 languages in India? All of that requires, again, resources, and people.

So Wikimedia was set up as the nonprofit that would help fuel the growth and expansion of Wikipedia.

Wikipedia's mission is gigantic; to provide every human being on our planet with access to free knowledge. Wikimedia exists to help get to this really big goal.

Where do you get your funds from and where does this money go?

So all of the funds are donations, first of all. It's a nonprofit, so we don't do anything for commercial benefit. All of the money comes from people donating to the cause, if you will.

43 percent of the money goes towards the websites. This is engineering, design, legal support, etc. Another 32 percent goes to the volunteer community through grants, programmes, and training tools. And roughly 13 percent goes towards governance and administration. These are the 500 plus people who work for Wikimedia Foundation.

Last year, our budget was $120 million, give or take, and to raise that kind of money you need to kind of put some resources behind payment systems. For example, in India, we take Paytm. We take all of the ways Indians can contribute.

So about 12 percent goes to fund collection from our 7 million individual donors. The average donation is Rs 1,155, about $15.

So it's not that most of the donations are pretty small and, interestingly, there are five lakh individual donors from India, which is a pretty amazing number to think about because there's no pay wall.

And the reason we are focusing on India and South Africa right now in a campaign that began in May, is we find that the awareness of the availability of this free knowledge platform is less than 50 percent in India.

Could you tell us more about this campaign?

We are trying to increase the awareness with the #KnowWithWiki campaign, aiming, particularly at young people. Because we feel India and South Africa are nations with the majority of the population being relatively young, we try to kind of focus on them to say, "here's a platform that's available."

You can obviously read anything you wanna read on it, but we encourage you to also contribute. There's so many things in India that are worth putting on Wikipedia to share with Indians, and we are seeing tremendous growth in Indian languages as well.

It's a fairly digital campaign and we have roped in a lot of influencers to talk about what is available on Wikipedia, what more can be put there, and the success in India.

Take languages, 25 Indian languages are there on Wikipedia already.

Hindi is globally ranked number 55. There are about 140,000 articles and close to six lakh users. Tamil is globally ranked number 61, about 130,000 articles and close to two lakh users. Telugu is ranked 81 with close to one lakh users and 70,000 articles, but some of the fastest growing languages are like Punjabi and Odiya.

We feel like the non-English growth in India is going to be pretty significant. Actually it's true globally as well. 89 percent of our articles are actually non-English.

That's kind of what we are trying to do.

You recently launched an aggressive funding campaign. Is there a cash crunch at Wikipedia right now?

All our campaigns are time based, depending on the country. For example, in the west, the Thanksgiving to Christmas period tends to be the giving period. So we'll put some campaigns then. So it depends on the country and is always time bound.

The easy answer to your question is no, this is not a fundraising campaign related to any shortfall or crisis, but I would say that since our mission is to provide free knowledge and information to every person on this planet, we will always need money to do that.

I think it's easy to look at a number like $120 million, that is our annual budget and say, "Wow, that's a big number. Why do they need money?"

Let me give you a couple of examples. Depending on the month, we are probably the fifth or sixth or seventh largest site in the world in terms of the number of visits. If you look at the top five or top six in front of us, it'll be Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Baidu.

Baidu said in their annual report that they have spent $4 billion just on research and development. Facebook said that they will spend between $29 and $34 billion just on Capital expenditure in 2022.

So here are organisations that are roughly in the same ballpark as we are, having to spend significant amounts to keep up with the infrastructure. And here is Wikimedia, completely nonprofit, doesn't take any money, no advertising.

We do some of the same big infrastructure work, to support 1.5 billion devices with data centers around the world, making sure that whenever you want information, it's available. I think those things cost a fair amount of money.

Does Wikipedia have a misinformation problem?

The short answer is yes and no. Let's take the misinformation issue. Any platform including one that is based on being neutral and fact based is prone to misinformation.

Sometimes the misinformation is accidental. Since we don't create original content, the accuracy depends on pointing to accurate sources.

So, if a source is inaccurate and that happens to get cited, it could stay on Wikipedia for a while, till somebody spots it.

If it's deliberate, somebody will spot it fairly quickly. We have bots that can identify if there's sock puppet editing going on. We have this idea, prioritised pages which have a lot more tech and human observers on them, just to make sure that they are not messed with.

First of all, most things get corrected within five minutes. Secondly, every change that's made is actually there. So you can fully transparently see who did it, why they did it. What's the argument around it. What's the discussion. So overall, we feel like our ability to handle misinformation is significantly better than anybody else's.

Most biographical articles are about men, and most editors are men. Do you see this as an issue and are you doing something to solve this?

It's a significant issue, but it's also something that happens. And let me explain why. So we don't create original content, it's based on citations.

Since the invention of the Gutenberg press, the number of articles that have been written about men vastly exceed the number of articles that have been written about women. So when you're reliant on citations, by nature, you are significantly constrained.

We've probably gone from 12 to 13 percent profiles of women to, as you said, close to about 20 percent. Obviously a long way to go. But the body of written material on women tends to be not great. Wikipedia tends to reflect that.

It's not an excuse at all. We need to do a lot more and there are both volunteer and Wikipedia supported efforts. Wiki Women in Red is an amazing group of women who have taken it upon themselves to identify and create lists of women who are worthy of a page who still don't have one.

I really hope organisations can discover women who have not been written about at all, because then we would love to point to that.

I'm absolutely not pointing to others and saying, it's all your problem. We need to do a lot more. And we are trying to do a lot more. We cannot erase the historical bias against women, but we need to continue to put significant energy behind getting more profiles of notable women onto Wikipedia.