Jimmy Wales

And we get a rush of people who don't understand our culture, don't understand the rules, and they're just vandalizing or they're just sort of being rude and so on and so forth.

And we just, as a calming down, just like, okay, hold on, just slow down.

We're going to protect the page.

And then there are pages where, you know, the most common type of protection we call semi-protection, which just means you have to have had an account for, I forget the exact numbers, it's something like four days and you have made 10 edits without getting banned.

Now, typically, and this is what's surprising to a lot of people about Wikipedia, like 99% of the pages, maybe more than 99%,

You can edit without even logging in and it goes live instantly.

That's like mind boggling.

But it kind of points to the fact that most people are basically nice.

Most people are trustworthy.

People don't just come by and vandalize Wikipedia.

And often if they do, it's because they're just experimenting or they didn't believe that would like, they're like, oh my God, it actually went live.

And I didn't know I was going to do that.

It's like, yeah, please don't do that again.

Yeah, I would.

I think that we are seeing all around the world a rise of authoritarian impulses towards censorship, towards controlling information.

And very often these come, you know, as a wolf in sheep's clothing because it's all about protecting the children or whatever it might be that, you know, you move forward in these kind of control ways.

But at the same time, you know, the Wikipedians are very resilient and they're very brave.

And one of the things that we believe is that in many, many cases, what's happened is a real lack of understanding by politicians and leaders of how Wikipedia works.

A lot of people really have a very odd assumption that it somehow works.

controlled by the Wikimedia Foundation, which is the charity that I set up that owns and operates the website.