Conversations
Jimmy Wales says it is possible to have a collaborative, trusting world online
27 May 2026
Chapter 1: What inspired Jimmy Wales to create Wikipedia?
Jack McLennan was 27, fit and visibly strong. He was trained well. He knew how to hit and I was gobsmacked. He seemed ready for anything, but then he suddenly vanished. I was just talking to him last night, like, how the hell does that happen? I'm Rob Bergen. Join me as I investigate what became of Jack in the new season of Unravel.
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Wikipedia has become a resource that people use every day. It started in 2001 when Jimmy Wales had a completely ridiculous idea to establish a free online encyclopedia, a not-for-profit enterprise built by volunteers all over the world. Wikipedia was defined at the outset by five pillars. The first was Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. Number two is Wikipedia is written from a neutral point of view.
Three, Wikipedia is free content that anyone can use, edit and distribute. Four, Wikipedia's editors should treat each other with respect and civility. And five, Wikipedia has no firm rules. To begin with, this global experiment was ridiculed. But Wikipedia grew and grew and grew, and as it did, it became more and more reliable.
And today, it's become one of the few things on an increasingly awful internet that people really do trust. But to succeed, Wikipedia had to overcome the challenge of asking strangers on the internet to trust each other. Jimmy Wales says that trust is something that can and must be cultivated in a world where it's running a bit thin.
To that end, he's written a book called The Seven Rules of Trust. I recorded this conversation with Jimmy Wales last week at the Sydney Town Hall as part of the Sydney Writers' Festival. And just so you know, if you've got kids in the car, there's a little bit of strong language here and there.
APPLAUSE
Jimmy, you grew up in Huntsville, Alabama in the United States. Were there encyclopaedias in the family home when you were a kid?
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Chapter 2: How did Wikipedia evolve from a ridiculed idea to a trusted resource?
So with a pen, no. However, every year, World Book would send out the annual update. And the annual update, you know, would say, well, my mother bought them. I was born in 1966, and she bought them when I was a little baby. So it was like a 1967 edition later on.
people landed on the moon so there was an update to the article about the moon so they would send out the annual volume and you know it's like maybe the 1973 volume and they would have these stickers and they would say um you know like oh and you would take the sticker and you'd go look under m and open moon and you put the sticker and saying oh look in the 1975 there's there's an update um and so that was my first experience of editing the encyclopedia hansville
Alabama has the Marshall Space Flight Center, a major wing of NASA there. You mentioned the moon landings there. I just wonder if that gave you a kind of a fascination and a love of technology.
Yeah, yeah. Huntsville is an interesting place because it grew from about 20,000 people to about 200,000 people in the 20 years from 1960 to 1980. I'm born kind of in the middle of that. So it was a boom town, and most of the people who came in were being brought from all over.
There was a period in time when Huntsville, Alabama had the highest per capita number of PhDs in the country because they brought all the rocket scientists to Huntsville. And we lived close enough to where they would test the Saturn V booster rockets that the windows would rattle in the house.
So it was very exciting, you know, as a little kid, the idea of space and, you know, people going to the moon, it was amazing.
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Chapter 3: What are the five pillars that define Wikipedia?
So yeah, I had a real love for technology.
So when you grew up, you got into finance, then got interested in the early internet. Tell me about the first encyclopedia project you worked on that was called Nupedia, N-U-P-E-D-I-A.
Yeah, so Newpedia was the same vision, really. It was a free encyclopedia to be written by volunteers. But I didn't really understand online communities. I didn't know what I was doing at all. It had been inspired by seeing the growth of open source software programs coming together to collaborate in new ways. Like Linux and things like that.
Yeah, Linux, and today it's a huge part of the infrastructure of the Internet is open source software. But with Newpedia, one of the things that we were concerned about is trust. We thought, oh, well, if it's just written by a bunch of sort of random people on the Internet, nobody will trust it. So we decided that we had to be even more academic than... than a traditional encyclopedia.
So there was a seven-stage review process to get anything published. And, you know, people would have to fax in their CVs to prove they were qualified to write. Fax in the CVs. Fax in the CVs, yeah. I mean, what's funny is I was just giving a talk at... It was in New York at Columbia University, and I realised the audience... because Wikipedia is 25 years old now.
I'm like, oh, most of you aren't even 25 yet. Maybe I better explain what a fax machine is. It's sort of like sending paper through a phone line. I mean, don't worry about it, but it was before the internet. And so people had to fax in their CVs. And, you know, it was very, very slow going. I was getting frustrated. And so I decided to write an article to just go through the process myself.
And I realized it was incredibly intimidating. I was going to have to write my first draft, and then they were going to send it to the most prestigious professors that they could find to review the draft and give me feedback. And it was basically like being back in grad school. You know, it was like very, like, it wasn't fun. And I realized, okay, this isn't going to work. It has to be fun.
It has to be. And, you know, much, much later, there was, the article I was going to write was about Robert Merton, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work in option pricing theory, which is what I had published a paper when I was an academic in finance and so forth. I thought, oh, I know his work, and it was all very scary.
But later, when Richard Allman won the Nobel Prize, we didn't have an article about him because he was very young. So I just happened to be online when the news flashed up, and I was like, oh, we don't have an article. So I just wrote he won the Nobel Prize and hit save, you know? And that wasn't a very good article, but, you know, within a couple of days, people had come and had it and so on.
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Chapter 4: How did trust become a foundational element for Wikipedia's success?
It didn't work, yeah. But rather than sort of walking away with your tail between your legs, you decided to walk away from that burning building, absorb the lessons of defeat and come back again. And that's when Wikipedia was invented. What was different about Wikipedia?
So with Wikipedia, we had sort of said, look, this is too heavy, this whole seven-stage review process. And the community of people who had come together, we had a couple hundred people on the mailing list, and people were excited about it, even though in two years, we had only managed to get about two dozen articles done. Because the process was so hard.
And so I was like, well, let's make it easier. And so somebody showed me the idea of wiki. So wiki is software. It just means a website anybody can edit. It comes from a Hawaiian word, wiki wiki, which means quick. So if you go to Maui at the airport, the bus is called the wiki wiki bus, because it's allegedly quick. I wouldn't agree, but...
And, you know, we decided, okay, let's try this wiki thing. But because the community we had, we were afraid they were going to hate it and be very, very skeptical because they were all like proper academics and so forth.
Chapter 5: What are the seven rules of trust proposed by Jimmy Wales?
We didn't want to put it on Newpedia. So we just said, okay, it's going to be this separate website, which would be just like a scratch pad for us to get started collaborating. It turned out in two weeks, we had more work done than in almost two years. And people liked it. And they started contributing. It unleashed the energy of that
group of people who had spent two years discussing writing an encyclopedia and then we finally could get started.
So why did the wiki process work so well as a tool which allows people to write and edit each other's work? Why didn't it immediately descend into a kind of a flame wall where someone would just simply completely erase something else someone's written on a matter of opinion and then scribble all over the top of it?
Yeah, and there was a lot of concern about, would that be possible? I mean, there were a few details that made a difference. So one thing that, with a wiki, very quickly, so I just downloaded an open source wiki software package, use mod wiki, and it was very, very basic. It was so basic that it didn't even have real user accounts. So you could log in as Richard Feidler,
and then tomorrow I could show up and I could set my username. I can also be Richard Feidler because there were no passwords. So that was obviously never going to work. That would have been troll fest.
Can I just say, please don't do that, anyone.
So I, you know, we added that. But also it didn't keep the past history. So if somebody came and made three edits, it kept maybe three versions. If you made three edits, the oldest version was gone forever. So that's actually some of the very earliest history got lost because of that.
So how come it didn't descend into a gigantic ship?
Yeah, so basically what happens is if somebody comes in and vandalizes, you can always just revert to the last good version. We had to sort of think about some of the rules. So very early it was like civility is actually really important, like be nice to each other. We had... Actually, a great innovation was the idea of the talk page. Most wikis out there, they just had one namespace.
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Chapter 6: How does Wikipedia maintain civility among its contributors?
And then when my daughter was born, she was born just the day after Christmas, and she was very, very ill and in the hospital. And so I, like any panicked first-time patient, parent. I rushed to the internet to try and understand what the problem was. And it was not a good experience. Basically, you could find a few random blog posts.
There wasn't really social media at that time like there is today. You could find academic journal articles where some of them were online, but it was way too hard for a parent who knew nothing about this disease. And So I didn't... I just literally had no idea. And it made me think, you know what, actually, what we're trying to do is really important. People do need to have access to knowledge.
They need a clear, you know, written at a level for a general adult, well-referenced explanation of whatever it is they want to know. And it also, just the moment of crisis... Also made me feel like life's too short. And so where I'd been kind of dithering, like, what should we do? I was like, you know what? Let's just try this wiki thing.
We just have to try it because we've got to get this done. And, you know, there was an element of trust that I learned from that. I had to trust this doctor who I knew nothing about. But he did great. And by the way, she's 100% fine. She's working in Boston and all that good stuff.
So you made a decision to trust the doctor and there are reasons why you do that and it worked out well for you. And it's a bit like the same thing whenever we catch a plane. Catching a plane is a rather boring experience now in the best possible way insofar as every time we board a plane, we pretty much trust the airline and a whole...
bunch of people that they've done their job carefully, diligently. We just do that without needing to see these people. Is that what trust in an institution is? The ability to place your lives in the hands of a complete stranger?
I mean, definitely. And we do this all the time. And it's a good thing in society that we do, that we have trust for other people.
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Chapter 7: What role does transparency play in building trust online?
It turns out most people are actually quite trustworthy. Do you really believe that? I do, yeah. Yeah, lovely. I mean, if you think about, you know, if you jump into an elevator... with eight other people, and then the power goes out and you're stuck in the elevator with eight random people, you don't look like which one of you is going to stab me.
You just think, oh, these are probably perfectly nice people. I would say if you get together a thousand people, probably about ten of them will be quite annoying.
but the number who are actually malicious is very very small that most people have good intent most people are trying to get through life and have some fun and look after their kids and all that kind of good stuff and it's easy to forget that like when we live in a society that's having a real breakdown in trust you know if you go if you spend too much time on social media particularly like
x which is really really super toxic um you'll get the idea that most people are actually screaming lunatics who are idiots um and what's happening there is that the algorithms are promoting the sort of screaming idiots who are angry and lunatic and in fact if you're really good at it and quite clever at it you might even become president of the united states but um
But that's not the real world. That's not what most people are like. Most people are actually very nice. And we see this at Wikipedia. In Wikipedia, even today, after all these years, you can go to 99% of the pages in Wikipedia without logging in, you can click the edit link at the top of the page, make a change, hit save, it goes live immediately. I mean, that's insane, right?
But it works because when we look at those edits that come from, we call them anonymous IP addresses, They aren't as good as the edits of experienced Wikipedians who've learned the rules and who've been practicing and learning. But on net, they are positive contributions, even from people who just randomly go, I'll click edit and I'll do something. Those people tend to vandalize more.
They tend to misbehave more. They add something and didn't put a reference and things like that. But on net, they're doing the right thing. And that's really reassuring about random people on the internet.
You quote this framework for trust that is a kind of a pyramid thing. that has at each point of the pyramid authenticity, empathy, and logic. Authenticity, this is like honesty we're talking about here, character, that kind of thing. Yeah, yeah. Empathy, a willingness to listen, pay attention to other people. And logic, where does logic come in into this point in the pyramid?
So logic in this one is really just about reason, like doing the thing you're supposed to do. That's really how it plays out. It's a rational order. It's not like randomness and so forth. And so that is the main contributor to trust of that. And they're all interrelated. And this isn't my framework. This is a framework. It's actually quite common in the sort of
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Chapter 8: How is AI impacting the relevance of Wikipedia today?
So the first rule of trust in your book is to make it personal, as you say. And you made that personal decision to trust the doctor with your daughter's life. The newborn infant daughter was very, very ill. He proposed a complex... form of surgery that in the end did save her life. I know you weren't sitting there with your triangle of trust in your hand going, how do I evaluate this doctor?
But how do you map that on, that decision you and your wife made to trust the doctor in this case, onto that triangle?
Yeah, I mean, well, it was a few things. I mean, so clearly, you know, I was told by the staff that he was coming. He's from the local, and he is, like, the world expert on, it was meconium aspiration syndrome. He is the world expert on this, and he's, in fact, invented a, you know, a new treatment, and it's in trial. And if, you know, she meets all the criteria...
he'll go back into his office and it's a 50 50 chance of whether she gets it it's quite terrifying okay but that's the logic end of things is it yeah so that's the logic end of things right it's like we clearly understood yeah he is competent um the uh the empathy i would say was um i asked him a question uh and he he very quickly got me who i was he wasn't just like you know doctors sometimes can be a bit like patronizing and just like
you know, trust me and you'll be safe and all that. He drew a graph on the paper. I somehow figured out that would reassure me. So I felt like, oh, he sees me. He understands what type of person I am, a geek. And, yeah, so that made a huge difference.
And authenticity, character.
Yeah, just he looked like he seemed like he knew what he was doing. You know, it was as simple as that. I mean, sometimes in a crisis, I didn't have a few days to do a dissertation on his personality, but I'm like... I guess we should just do this. Unfortunately, she did get the treatment, which is quite terrifying, by the way. They paralyzed the baby.
They stopped the breathing, and they rinse out the lungs with this fluid he invented, like RNA, DNA-based fluid or something, proteins. Anyway, terrifying. But it worked. She was fine. So it paid off. Yeah.
Rule number two, you say people are born to connect and to collaborate, work with human nature. Evolutionary biology does tell us that humans are social and cooperative. We need to work together if we're going to hunt and kill the woolly mammoth to feed the tribe and to build a house.
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