Jimmy Wales

Where will we be in 50 years time?

Maybe in 50 years time,

It's going to be amazing.

And the idea of humans writing encyclopedia articles will seem as quaint as candles versus light bulbs.

Although I think as with candles versus light bulbs, I think the Wikipedia community, we just enjoy it as a hobby.

And it turns out it's really popular with the readers.

And that's great.

But that's not why we do it.

We do it because we enjoy it as a hobby.

Like, let's make an encyclopedia.

It's fun.

I do.

I do.

I mean, certainly, let's just take as one example, like U.S.

politics, that lack of bipartisan give and take, which has always been part of what makes the system work, has been breaking down for quite some time.

And that divisiveness and that sort of bringing the culture wars into literally everything is kind of toxic and it's really problematic.

And I think there's a lot of a lot of that contributes to but is also caused by a breakdown of trust in society.

One of the core starting ideas of the book was watching over the years the Edelman Trust Barometer survey.

and seeing a steady decline in trust in journalism and politics and business and so forth, was like, ooh, that's a problem.

But it also causes problems.