Jimmy Wales

So, yeah, I'm not that worried about it.

I do worry about, you know, in this time when journalism has been under incredible financial pressure and there's a new competitor for journalism, which is sort of low quality churned out content produced for search engine optimization to compete with

real human written content, to the extent that that further undermines the ability for the business model of particularly local journalism is something that I'm very worried about, then that's a big problem.

And it's not directly about Wikipedia, but it is about, you know, it's very cheap to generate very plausible text that, yeah, that doesn't seem good to me.

Well, I mean, I think that a big piece of it is that the news media has not done a very good job of sticking to the facts and avoiding bias.

I think a lot of news media, not all of it, but a lot of news media has become more partisan, and there are reasons for it, and it's short-termism.

And you'll even see there's some stuff in the book about this, some arguments by some people in journalism that objectivity is, we should give up on it and be partisan and so on and so forth.

I think that's a huge mistake.

And I think there's lots of evidence for that.

You know, Wikipedia is incredibly popular.

And that's one of the things people say about Wikipedia that they really value.

And they're really disappointed if they feel like we're biased and so on and so forth.

So, I mean, I gave the example earlier because I live in the UK, I read these papers.

But, you know, if you look at the Telegraph and you look at the Guardian on an issue related to climate change, I can already tell you before we start reading which attitude is going to come from which paper.

Neither of them is doing a very good job of saying, actually, it's not our job to be on one side of that issue or the other.

It's our job to describe the facts and to understand the other side and so on and so forth.

Returning to that value system is hugely important because otherwise, how are you going to get the trust of the public?

Well, it's either fair or unfair for both, depending on what the actual situation is.

So, you know, there have been cases in the history of Wikipedia when somebody said to me, wow, Wikipedia is really biased on this topic.

And I say the response should be, wow, let's check it out.