Sue Gardner interviewed by the Australian press
| External audio | |
|---|---|
 The in-depth interview with Sue Gardner broadcast by ABC on 15 February 2013 | |
| Shorter ABC interview broadcast on 13 February 2013 |
Sue Gardner's visit to Australia sparked a number of interviews in the Australian press. An interview published in The Daily Telegraph on 12 February 2013, titled "Data plans 'unnerving': Wikipedia boss", saw Gardner comment on Australian plans to store personal internet and telephone data.
The planned measure, intended to assist crime prevention, would involve internet service providers and mobile phone firms storing customer usage data for up to two years. Gardner commented:
| “ | The ability to store massive amounts of data and retain it for long periods of time ... is unnerving. ... It could be sold. It could be used for commercial purposes. We haven't yet figured out as a society how to use that information well and be responsible custodians of it, and that's really unnerving." | ” |
Voicing concerns about efforts to introduce government regulation of the internet, Gardner recalled the 2012 blackout of the English Wikipedia, saying: "Would I support them in doing it again? I would. I'm not sure we'd ever do it again, but I'd certainly be open to doing it again."
Gardner also discussed the deletion discussion concerning the Wikipedia article about the death of Melbourne ABC employee Jill Meagher (see Signpost coverage). An Australian female librarian had mentioned to her the possibility that male bias might have led to the article's being proposed for deletion, as "she felt that men were more likely to say that it was not a notable event. [She thought] there was a gender factor, which is really interesting."
Another interview appeared on ABC News on 13 February, under the headline "Wikipedia flush with funds, short on volunteers". Gardner discussed the financial health of the Wikimedia Foundation, which now had annual takings of $40 million—up from around 1 million in 2007—and a healthy cash surplus. She also touched on the editor decline:
| “ | We don't know how serious of a concern that should be. There's a school of thought which suggests that after you've written the article about Saturn and accounting and France, that you don't need as many editors as you used to—once you have a solid base of articles inside Wikipedia, really at that point you're just making small improvements and you're just keeping things up to date. I don't know if that's true or not—when I read Wikipedia I find lots missing and I think that there's lots of new material that wants to be added to Wikipedia that's not there yet. | ” |
The interview further covered Wikipedia's competition, third-world expansion, and how the availability of information online is changing the way people think.
An almost hour-long interview with Gardner, recorded in front of a live audience at the State Library of Queensland, was broadcast by the ABC on 15 February 2013, as part of the series "Conversations with Richard Fidler". Among the topics discussed in this in-depth interview were Wikipedia's origins, reliability and mission, its donor structure, its contributor demographics and the gender gap and their effect on Wikipedia content, the lack of editorial control of Wikipedia content by the foundation, contributor anonymity, censorship and handling of controversial content, the editor decline and the visual editor, as well as Gardner's personal background.