begun draconian and it seems to have many moving goalposts so lawyers here and prosecutors here are still said to be finding their way and this particular case is set to be able to define certain parameters for national security law more and more cases are expected to be brought to prosecution in the future. and hello again here's a check of the headlines on al-jazeera mean mars military has seized power and detained civilian leader. and other officials it says it will hold elections after a year when a state of emergency has expired the takeover comes after the military alleged widespread voter fraud in november's election. party is urging people to reject the coup and protest there is heavy military presence in major streets throughout me and mar communication lines have been disrupted following the

military's takeover alley fowler's one of the few western journalists to be based in me and maher she says the military are ready house power in the country and that's why people were skeptical this coup would happen. under this current constitution the military as it was designed the military very comfortable and this was a constitution written by the military it was soo written by the former military government and they spent years writing it then years implementing it and so i think what is quite important to remember is that the military have never been keen to get rid of the constitution but what we heard last week was on wednesday men on lang said that at some point if the constitution wasn't being followed that it should be abolished there's been widespread international condemnation of the coup the un is calling it a serious blow to democratic reforms while the european union is calling for the outcome of recent elections to be respected

a plane carrying south africa's 1st 1000000 coronavirus vaccine doses for masters atika has arrived in johannesburg the country is battling a 2nd wave of infections driven by more contagious varian 1st identified there has been concern over the effectiveness of vaccines against the mutation south africa is the worst hit country on the continent with almost one and a half 1000000 cases and more than 44000 deaths drugmaker pfizer has pledged 7 additional $75000000.00 vaccines to the european union for the 2nd quarter that brings the total number of doses for the block this year to $600000000.00 according to european commission president lyon use a vaccine rollout has been slower than hoped in part due to supply issues drug maker astra zeneca has reduced their quota of doses to the block by over a half those are the headlines talk to al-jazeera is coming up next. february on al-jazeera under strict access to iran's nuclear program is about to

end will u.s. president joe biden overturn trying sanctions and help rebuild relations al-jazeera sets out on a journey to the heart of what it means to be a true supporter of the political game the us has the highest prove it 1000 count in the world the new administration has promised to turn that around we'll have extensive coverage the big picture we do is have a perfect storm of events in 2020 and expose the truth about drakes of the hawk to the united states and as president joe biden embarks on his 1st month in the white house we'll bring you the latest developments escape attempts to repair global relationships february on al-jazeera part of the plan from my fellow hunger a love that we i had a while traveling the extra mile where are the media don't go we go there and we give them a chance to tell their story was told. we would see if. we

could pedia according to wikipedia is an online free content encyclopedia project helping to create a world in which everyone can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. created in 2001 it recently celebrated its 20th anniversary and has grown to become the world's largest reference website with 55000000 articles and more than 300 languages which u.p.d. attracts 1700000000 visitors every month. the freely editable content project is supported by the wiki media foundation as of 2020 the foundation employs more than $300.00 people and has any will revenues in excess of more than $100000000.00 but at a time when truth is under assault like never before what role does with a pedia play in the media ecosystem what steps is it taking to counter misinformation and when it comes to hate speech online should tech giants and social media platforms be the ones to moderate down. these are some of the

questions we put forward to the chief executive officer and executive director of the we can media foundation catherine more talks to al-jazeera. chief executive officer of the wikimedia foundation catherine marr thank you for talking to al-jazeera thank you for having me catherine i've heard you say in the past that wikipedia is not meant to be truth what do you mean by that. what i mean by that is that we could pedia is a constantly changing record of what we agree on and i'm important it is full of facts are facts but the idea of truth is something a little more complicated that requires us negotiated together and can change at a time when truth is under assault like never before what role does wikipedia play in this media ecosystem. i think it will be competing offers is a place for us to negotiate our understanding of the world and that's what i mean

when i say it's a little bit different than truth all of us have different experiences that we come to the world with and conversations that we competed as a place where volunteer editors bring those different experiences from various different and persuasion political leanings and have to negotiate to find some sort of consensus which is what we all agree on as a servant matter of the general public and that's really were with pierre is the sort of space of common ground from your perspective what steps do you think internet based and online platform should be taking to counter misinformation and this information oh i think this is one of the greatest challenges of our time as it's leading to fragmentation and that's making it harder for us in society is to rise to hardest challenges but i'd like to see is internet i'm seeking a similar approach to the one that we could pedia has pioneered which is really being transparent about the ways in which they moderated information bringing their community users into conversation around kind of community standards. that we'd

like to see and having a are. our policies around what the level of tolerance is for information that could be problematic or rise to the law. and danger to the public and what i mean by that is we saw social norms take pretty clear standards around information when it came to the code 19 and make viewing this is a public health issue a matter of life and death but as we now know political information is a matter of life and death as well and so i would like to see them exercise perhaps clear execution on those terms of server terms of service or community standards that all of them happen and could wield marked so something significant to happened recently former president trump was banned by facebook by twitter by other online platforms you know there are those who have celebrated the move and who say that it was long overdue and then there are those who say it was a violation of free speech what's your take on this. it's

a private forum so it's not really a matter of free speech one way or another that is a misunderstanding of the application and the responsibility of platforms as private entities i think that that's really a question for those who consider as they think about what role incitement plays on their pop arms and to the consistent application of those terms and use you know every single papar has them and we know that there have been brought in carved out carve outs for certain political figures whereas those have not been applied to others and very even across the globe we'd like to see greater transparency about when those are tied to which politicians but also greater consistency and that would be the right path forward if we're talking about moderation when it comes to incitement and when it comes to hate speech what advantages does wikipedia have when it comes to the issue of moderation and stopping the spread of misinformation that twitter and facebook and other platforms don't have i mean there's the fact

that there's only. one page for each subject i would keep on wikipedia make it easier when it comes to moderation you make it easy for us yes absolutely the fact that we only have one page it's the same. i absolutely everyone across the globe is really important and when it comes to being able to offer clarity and transparency about what kind of information it is that we can pedia is offer and we're not a social platform in the same way as some of these other ones you mention there are numerous of algorithmic pathways for you to fall down there's only one version of the information that's very transparent of where comes from it links out in ways that allow individuals to be able to pursue their own interests we play a fundamentally different role in the end of information ecosystem and i think that's something that is really unique about what would be pediatricians to offer is here to set your curiosity but it's not here to sort of trigger our passions our impulses and deep in what we believe is actually here what to expand what we

believe so we can be is now 20 years old and many are now praising pedia for being a line of defense against misinformation that's really a far cry from how the site was perceived in the early days right absolutely have been an interesting moment for us as we celebrate our 20th birthday to see how far we've come one of the things that we have the size to be true is that part of the reason perhaps with a p.d.f. of trusted today is that it's always been so transparent about the fact that we actually ask you to read it with a critical eye and not trust all the information that that's why we have citations that's why it's very clear the record of every single article that's ever been at it and you can go in and see for yourself you can even edit it if you see something that is a mistake i look at it is a work in progress we've been open about this since day one and i think that that almost is a place of humility or honesty that people are looking for in their sources of

information. and this challenging moment that we find ourselves in you know when i ask you to expand on that answer a little bit because what one of the things is really interesting about wikipedia is that you can see the history of revisions for the entries which is something you were just mentioning you can read some of the back and forth between editors in the talk pages do the conversations that happened between wiki p.d.'s editors reflect the kinds of conversations that are happening privately inside news publications and tech companies it's hard for me to say i only work at the comedian foundation so i don't know the inside conversations that news up again and tech companies i would hope that those are the conversations that these different entities are at and we could be dns and have conversations and debate what is notable and what is news worthy out in public and i think that that's actually a strength of the model is that transparency creates an accountability as to what we could be editors are actually up to and you can always go back and take a look and say well why isn't this controversy

a factor why isn't this news story on it could be to article and generally there's a good answer in that discussion space that that helps the reader understand why something might be that encyclopedia and why perhaps something has been held off for a later day as as information continues to develop or as we look for more sources to verify that in fact is the nature of the information so i want to take us a take a step back for a minute and look at how we could pedia monitors the content i mean could you tell us a bit more about the fact checking process how do you get to be a wikipedia volunteer and how many volunteers do your have shown so they're about $280000.00 people who get it because p.d.f. every single month over the 20 years that we've been in existence that's tens of millions of people who contributed to the competing there is a smaller group of individuals who are very active on a monthly basis and they do most of the monitoring that you just mentioned of course people who had it with p.d.f. on so many different topics truly. just the complete range from pop culture into

politics from the sciences to space exploration and the various articles that you see are monitored by different people based on the interest that they have from breaking news politics to the pandemic that we've all been living through at any time and it is need to be competing articles people get notified about those that it's there is a list of every single change that happens that it's happened 350 times a minute so it's a fast running list but we support getting community with software that allows them to flag what is likely to be a good at it helps increase the breadth and depth of the encyclopedia 1st less likely to be vandalism or a malicious effort to undermine the quality of information in the encyclopedia and that the capacity to see everything that's happening in real time to get notifications when edits are made to sensitive articles like those about political leaders are critical health information is how we can communities stays on top of

what's going on on wikipedia at all times it's not to say that sometimes mistakes aren't they are people and things that sporting events and the length but those are caught very quickly and what we say reverted back to the original more accurate. the process by which information is posted on wikipedia i've heard in the past interviews with you where you say that you don't consider that a form of journalism how do you describe it. it's complicated right or that it's. something that doesn't really have a parallel and the information space this idea of a collaboratively edited in information general public information source or general information source we could be a it has a as a symbiotic relationship with journalism it depends on journalism journalism is very important much in the same way it depends on research and the sciences and humanities and other other areas of knowledge production i think what we offer instead is a place of. for the general or people in common in general information about

a topic that they're interested in and in the world it helps them go deeper on for example news stories of the day by getting the background on text the history and one place so that they can be a better news consumer and more important news consumer so it's really a symbiotic relationship that i think helps elevate both of both the areas of knowledge production but it's not quite the same it serves a different role i want to go back to something you mentioned in the previous answer when you talked about trying to get information across in a time of a pandemic you know in an attempt to stop the spread of misinformation about covert 19 the world health organization partnered with wikipedia how is that collaboration going to get it's going really well thank you for asking as soon as the pandemic hit we knew that we could p.d.s. articles about health information were going to be a front and center we saw this during the west african bullet crisis in the previous decade so our medical editing community was quite keen to get the best

information possible out in we could be articles of course what made this very different from casts of the health issues is that this was a novel virus we didn't know anything about it when in 1st stopped across the globe and back result of it about it and began articles or updating all the time we decided that we wanted to work with the best in public. health communications and of course i had already had been in contact with w.h.o. about other initiatives around improving public health information so it was really just a matter of strengthening those informal and actually into our own partnership and today you can find more than 7000 articles about the code in 1000 and democratic of media many of which are illustrated with information from the w.h.o. in graphics about public policy everything from social distancing to hand washing to more of the particulars of the virus itself and we're proud to play a role in helping the. joe and other health institutions get this really critical

and permission out in a way that people have access to particularly since it's now in so many languages competing articles about the code in 1000 pandemic are in more than $120.00 languages many of which would not necessarily perhaps you know the front of the list for public health translations even for an institution a human body how much has readership increased and how much has user engagement increased during the pandemic and it's increased a lot by double digits we are at the beginning of the pandemic actually didn't expect this we were mostly wary about the health and safety of our readers and contributors and didn't know if people would have the time to contribute to it as it turns out during shelter in place lots of people did and we saw those readership numbers and numbers that we've never seen certainly not mine and my time here at the asian and double digit increase in terms of at our ship now of course you know the world has continued to evolve and adapt to what's going on and some of those

numbers have gone down a bit but we still see sort of a sustained increase across the board so it turns out that when we are in a time in which nobody stands and we don't have good models for it information really is the thing that people turn to catherine we could be here probably wouldn't exist in the form that it is without search engines like google google of course alongside the conglomerate known as alpha bit which is one of the 5 tech giants that dominate the internet is the fact that there is a monopoly when it comes to search traffic a problem. i mean i think i'm going to say that i'm not a scholar of antitrust and certainly it's perhaps a little bit outside of the remit of that we can media and to comment on i think what we would say is that an open web is tremendously important and it is important that people are able to have access to services that meet their needs. it is a and a reality that when you have

a single service. is that that search the close it's very difficult to be able to know for all countries all languages all communities whether those do in fact meet as the ins and so ensuring that we have a web that is open both in terms of standards and open for competition is really sort of the basis that ran up and let me ask you this since we're competing is not ad supported it means you don't really have to worry about maximizing engagement or worry about presenting content that goes viral that makes it much different than the other platforms that are out there that depend on click right absolutely it's one of the reasons that we are really proud to be a nonprofit charitable institution defacto as of the matter is that we just want to serve people's knowledge needs in the best way possible and so that's going to look really different for everyone having the flexibility to be an institution that is singularly focused on that mission of knowledge for the world allows us to meet different decisions when it comes to what software we develop and roll out allows

us a longer term horizon in some difficult decisions such as how we deal with censorship for example and i think that that's a great place for an institution with a mission like ours what are the biggest misconceptions that you encounter that people have out there about wikipedia. i mean i think the biggest one of course is can you trust it and what we usually say is well we we want you to be a critical reader we want to be the place that you start but not the place where you've been it that's why we have all those citations that's why the model of verifiable information is what we could be built on the one thing that i think i would say is for all the teachers in the world to have perhaps rightly had sort of a critical eye of the pedia is that our students are using it anyway young people are using it to learn and it actually offers a great opportunity to talk about the production of knowledge on line who contributes to the production of knowledge whether you know where this information come from how do you read it critically all of the sorts of it had a guy g.

around. being an informed media consumer we can beat it can be a great learning experience for that students because we know they're using it anyway sometimes at the best possible teasing and catherine i want to look for a moment some of what you bring from your past experiences into your role as c.e.o. of the wicca media foundation because i've heard in other interviews you've given you said that you had gotten involved you know in the early days of the arab spring and even before that the you got involved in working within the space of using technology for the development of human rights and democracy this is when you were working with groups like unicef and the national democratic institute i remember reporting from countries like yemen during the arab spring when i spent a lot of time there you know activists were so full of hope about the democratizing effect of the internet and mobile technology a decade on when you see how technology has been used to repress societies to intimidate activists how does that make you feel. i feel

naive i think but i was very optimistic of course about the way that technology could be used but even in 2011 it became clear very quickly that technology could be used for great armaments while we were aware of the internet shutdowns were tools and troll that surveillance was widespread in many countries surveillance of activists using their phones and their and their internet connections and their networks a other of other individuals defending human rights and and so i think that you know it is always then a double edged sword it and say can perhaps some time press to see that so clearly as we do today technology is very powerful but it is of course with anything our all it can have its downsides well and i think that is actually one of the reasons that perhaps if anything and strengthened my own belief in projects like wikipedia that our community control of that start on the basis of some fundamental values around the right to freedom of inquiry and freedom of information and that really

do you come from the basis of having a mission to make the world a better place no matter where you come from no matter what language you speak is the idea that someone has something to contribute it's a fact if it could be via that it's only 280000 people or planet of billions which means that there are many places that are not well documented there are many histories traditions culture is communities that could really benefit from your contribution your photographs your knowledge your familiarity with your country and your home. and your experience we give media has struggled with ensuring there is diversity among editors it's been reported that they have skewed largely white and male especially when it comes to english language in trees one of the efforts that are in place right now to try to fix that going forward i think this is a very it acura. concern of the could be about 80 percent of our editors and i as

male as we don't have specific detail numbers because we don't actually track this information we have a strong privacy policy that is related to our belief that people should have the freedom to explore the information that's important to them without us knowing what that is it's means of protecting our readers and in countries and places where information can be a concern. to those who are political environment that they live and we would like to see more about app. we'd like to see more women write about topics that are interested them not just about women but just about the world and the increased representation of peoples and increase diversity of perspectives ensures that we have a better and more comprehensive understanding of the world in which we live rather than simply servile white male european or north american perspective and so at the big media foundation we're investing in growing our communities out the global

investing and efforts that support women both in terms of writing women's history into it could be via but also increasing the number of women participating we could be and we're making it easier to end it with a cavern you wrote an op ed for the los angeles times that was headlined wikipedia mirrors the world gender bias is it doesn't cause them what did you posit in that piece and what was the response. yeah i think what we can p.d.f. really does is it's a important to think about it as a a tertiary source that is it is a source that's built on secondary sources such as what's reported in the news what's written about in history books that's written about in academic and scientific journals and the like and so what we were saying is that we could be has long considered itself reflective of the knowledge that exists in other places a summary of that knowledge and that means that if we. don't have a great history of women if we don't have great histories of countries that have

been colonized as written from the perspective of those who who are from those countries then we are missing out on the perspectives the understanding of the world from a great majority of people and back probably the global majority of people one of our contributors often says we can be is a mirror held up to the biases of the world and we can't write about the things that i have not been written about yet and so we encourage that everyone takes an active responsibility and thinking about what does representation like what is inclusion look like in the knowledge space whether it is thinking about the number of women that are interviewed for an article or the perspectives that go into talking about issues of health to ensure that these are really in compassing of minority perspectives and marginalized communities that haven't always been able to have in the mainstream understanding of the world what does the future look like.

i'm really excited about what could be a future one of the things that has been true is that we've seen an increase in contributions to it could be to in the readership of wikipedia even at a time when we are told that there is an information crisis i think what that speaks to is the fact that information is something that everyone values and everyone needs to see this across you know 300 language versions of those we could be contributors on every continent of the globe and yes including antarctica which speaks to this universality of our need our knowledge this is something that we all something every culture community country cherishes and so for us with a good idea we want to be able to serve the world and so really thinking about what that means to truly have more content more great greater depth and diversity and more enlightened which is. greater a thriving communities of knowledge creek. readers and all countries and then

really also the flip side is you know we are both the knowledge community and technology site and so our goal is to ensure that we can be a remains as relevant simple and accessible as ever or whatever that actually looks like there's certainly a lot of engineering in our future as we think about how to anticipate what it means to be in everyone's pocket or or wherever actually that whatever that might look like chief executive officer of the wicked media foundation catherine moore thank you for talking to al-jazeera thank you so much for having me i. i'm counting the cost the world's richest monarch and the protests to reform the institution how much is thailand's king worth is the u.a.e. the next state to a pseudo bank and coffee farmers in colombia struggling to recruit labor.

counting the cost of al-jazeera this underwater treasure is a risk of disappearing coral bleaching caused by rising temperatures. great. strain the eric 'd eric agents. and the tourism industry. we will lose instantly if we have another bleaching event of the magnitude if this continues they just will not be the opportunity for the corals to recover in between those mad. scientists a calling for stronger climate policy from the government to reduce emissions without this situation and they get worse. ok calm and make sure you're not hyping the situation be part of the debate my main characters are women when no topic is off the table the law is in the last allow child marriage to happen legally easer basically archaic walls dads often legitimize and

legalize pedophiles. online jump into the college section and the team to be part of the discussion this stream on out is there a. long. war . this is al-jazeera. when you're watching the al-jazeera news our lives my headquarters here in the. coming up in the next 60 minutes military seizes power in a coup and declares a state of emergency for a year it blames the government for ignoring claims of election fraud also the country's elected leader has detained her party as a people to reject.