Jimmy Wales
π€ SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
I had had some ideas around this and yeah, just started and it's obviously turned out to be quite timely as we have a lot of issues around trust in society and I want to encourage people to let's get back to a society of trust.
Yeah, I mean, I think for me, you know, one of the seven rules of trust that is most meaningful in that regard is purpose.
Like Wikipedia has a very simple purpose, which is to build an encyclopedia.
And we make all our decisions around that and the rules about participation and so forth.
And that's very different from social media where there isn't a clear purpose other than free speech and openness.
And therefore, that toxicity really creeps in quite a lot in social media.
You know, people say outrageous things because they get rewarded for it.
They get more followers, they get more engagement, and the algorithms love that.
about clickbait all the time, clickbait all the time.
And, you know, that's very different from the world of Wikipedia, where, I mean, thank goodness, our headlines are so boring.
There's no clickbait, you know, it's like the article on Thomas Jefferson's called Thomas Jefferson, you know, but it's it does what it says on the 10.
You know, that's a way that's a very British expression, I'm afraid.
But But yeah, I mean, I do think that that having a simple purpose is a part of what keeps us focused and keeps our community focused.
I mean, we're really old fashioned, like what we look for are reliable sources.
So we want, you know, sort of academic research or quality newspapers, quality magazines, quality books, really old fashioned.
And, you know,
The idea that we should treat the New England Journal of Medicine as the same as Social Media Influencer Online is obviously just wrong.
You really want facts.
And that's what people want from Wikipedia.