Lulu Garcia Navarro

I'm Lulu Garcia Navarro.

As one of the most popular websites in the world, Wikipedia helps define our common understanding of just about everything.

But recently, the site has gone from public utility to a favorite target of Elon Musk, congressional Republicans, and MAGA influencers, who all claim that Wikipedia is biased.

In many ways, those debates over Wikipedia are a microcosm of bigger discussions we're having right now about consensus, civil disagreement, shared reality, truth, facts, all those little easy topics.

A bit of history.

Wikipedia was founded back in the Paleolithic era of the Internet in 2001 by Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales.

It was always operated as a nonprofit and it employs a decentralized system of editing by volunteers, most of whom do so anonymously.

There are rules over how people should engage on the site, cordially, and how changes are made, transparently.

And it's led to a culture of civil disagreement that has made Wikipedia what some have called the last best place on the internet.

Now, with that culture under threat, Jimmy Wales has written a book called The Seven Rules of Trust, trying to take the lessons of Wikipedia's success and apply them to our increasingly partisan, trust-depleted world.

And I have to say, I did come in skeptical of his prescriptions, but I left hoping he's right.

Here's my conversation with Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales.

I wanted to talk to you because I think this is a very tenuous moment for trust.

And your new book is all about that.

In it, you sort of lay out what you call the seven rules of trust based on your work at Wikipedia.

And we'll talk about all those as well as some of the threats and challenges to Wikipedia.

But big picture, how would you describe our current trust deficits?

One of the reasons why you can be an authority on this is because you created something that scores very high on trust.

You have built something that people sort of want to engage with.

How does Wikipedia define a fact?