Jimmy Wales

And you're like, yes, look at my encyclopedia article about Paris.

It's amazing.

Obviously, it's not amazing, but it's kind of fun.

But it meant that when people outside Wikipedia would come in, you would sometimes see a really well-written article and sometimes you would say, oh, here's the article about Paris.

It's two sentences, like it's completely ridiculous, like it's not even real.

That was just a matter of growth.

It was a matter of getting better over time.

It wasn't that that was wrong or inaccurate or crazy.

It just wasn't good enough yet.

So, you know, that was part of the trajectory is sort of slowly, you know, making the product better and, you know, getting it to the point where readers could say, oh, actually, I generally anything I look for, I find it in Wikipedia.

And generally, it's quite good.

And sometimes I find something weird and that's OK, you know.

Another piece of that was in the early days, it's kind of like a very easy, lazy journalist thing to do.

You spot some error in Wikipedia and you write an alarmist article about something's wrong in Wikipedia.

After a little while, it was sort of like in the early days of eBay, you would see these sort of scare stories of like,

Oh, my God, someone's selling their baby on eBay.

This is a terrible thing.

And then after a while, you sort of realize, yeah, but like there's a link.

And if somebody tries to sell their baby, then it gets reported and eBay takes it down.

It's actually not that interesting.