India, March 21 -- 1The far Right in the United States has called out biases within Wikipedia. What would you say to this? Whenever there's any kind of criticism, what we need to do is to be transparent, grapple with the criticism, take it seriously. Say, "Okay, well, look, come and help us. How do we make things better?" In some cases, you look and say, well, actually, the criticism isn't founded, and so this is just not fair. In other cases, you say, oh, okay, we could improve in this area. I think you always have to take things seriously, because if you lose that spirit of intellectual curiosity and wanting to make things better, then you're lost. 2In an interview, you said Wikipedia enables a healthy discursive environment in which opposing factions can still contribute to the same subject. Could you elaborate? At Wikipedia, we're trying to write an encyclopedia article; and an encyclopedia article shouldn't take sides. It should present the major viewpoints. People are actually quite good at this. Obviously, journalism has a big piece of this. For most news-reporting, you shouldn't take one side or the other. You're just trying to explain to the public what a debate is about and what the different sides are saying. We just take that sort of old value system to say, if we're trying to be fact- based, then we have to be fair to all sides. Even if we maybe agree with one side more than the other, that is irrelevant. 3You've also said that facts can be threatening... If people are uncomfortable with some things in history, then that may be awkward or embarrassing, and for some authoritarian governments, that can be a problem. But in open societies, we accept that there are different views out there, and we have to grapple with them, and we should be fair about it. Facts aren't actually threatening, even if some may feel they are. 4In a time of AI, how do you see Wikipedia evolving? One of the important things about Wikipedia is that it's very human; we're very human-centric human knowledge. One of the things we know as Wikipedians is how hard it is to do good reference work. There's a lot to debate about, in the details and obscure facts, and in what the quality sources are. So far, the natural thing AI can do is produce large volumes of very casual text that may not be accurate, and that's really not good enough. The human component is necessary. The reason all the AI models train on Wikipedia is because human-curated knowledge is incredibly important. 5Which authors inspired you to pen your thoughts? There are many author friends who were inspiring. I'm a big fan of Tom Friedman. I really like to read his books, though I don't always agree. I enjoy ideas....