Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is Andrew Ross Sorkin, the founder of Dealbook. Every year, I interview some of the world's most influential leaders across politics, culture, and business at the Dealbook Summit, a live event in New York City. On this year's podcast, you'll hear my unfiltered conversations with Gavin Newsom, the CEO of Palantir and Anthropic, and Erica Kirk, the widow of Charlie Kirk.
Listen to Dealbook Summit wherever you get your podcasts.
From The New York Times, this is The Interview. I'm Lulu Garcia Navarro.
Chapter 2: What challenges is Wikipedia currently facing?
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?
I draw a distinction between what's going on maybe with politics and journalism, the culture wars and all of that, and day-to-day life. Because I think in day-to-day life, people still do trust each other. People generally think most people are basically nice. And we're all human beings bumping along on the planet, trying to do our best.
And obviously, there are definitely people who aren't trustworthy. But the crisis we see in politics, trust in politicians, trust in journalism, trust in business, that is coming from other places and is something that we can fix.
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.
Yeah, I mean, I do think Wikipedia isn't as good as I want it to be. And so I think that's part of why people do have a certain amount of trust for us, because we try to be really transparent. You know, you see the notice at the top of the page sometimes that says the neutrality of this page has been disputed or the following section doesn't cite any sources. People like that.
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Chapter 3: How did Wikipedia's founding principles shape its culture?
What are the best arguments here?
Yeah, and basically every page has what's called a talk tab where you can see the history of the discussions and the disputes, which relates to another principle of the site, which is transparency. You can look at everything and see who did what and what their reasoning was.
Yeah, exactly. So, you know, oftentimes if you see something repeating, you think, huh, okay, well, why does it say that? Often you'll be able to go on the talk page and read sort of what the debate was and how it was, and you can weigh in there and you can join in and say, oh, actually, I still think you've got it wrong.
Here's some more sources, here's some more information, maybe propose a compromise, that sort of thing. And in my experience, it turns out that a lot of Pretty ideological people on either side are actually more comfortable doing that because they feel confident in their beliefs.
I think it's the people who, and you'll find lots of them on Twitter, for example, they're not that confident in their own values and their own belief system. And they feel fear or panic or anger if someone's disagreeing with them rather than saying, huh, okay, look, that's different from what I think.
Let me explain my position, which is where your more intellectually grounded person will come from.
What you're saying is supported actually by a study about Wikipedia that came out in the science journal Nature in 2019. It's called The Wisdom of Polarized Crowds. Perhaps counterintuitively, it says that politically contentious Wikipedia pages end up being of higher quality, meaning that they're more evidence-based, they have more consensus around them.
But I do want to ask about the times when consensus building isn't necessarily easy as it relates to specific topics on Wikipedia. Some pages, they have actually restricted editing privileges. So the Arab-Israeli conflict, climate change, abortion, unsurprising topics there. Why are those restricted and why doesn't the wisdom of polarized crowds work for those subjects?
Well, typically the subjects that are restricted are, we try to keep that as short as we can. The most common type of case is if something's really big in the news or if some big online influencer says, ah, Wikipedia is wrong, go and do something about it.
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Chapter 4: What are the seven rules of trust proposed by Jimmy Wales?
Yeah, I mean, the Heritage Foundation here in the United States, which was the architect of Project 2025, have said that they want to dox your editors. I mean, how do you protect people from that?
I mean, it's embarrassing for the Heritage Foundation. I remember when they were intellectually respectable. And that's a shame that if that's what they think is the right way forward, they're just badly mistaken.
But it does seem that there is this movement on the right to target Wikipedia over these types of concerns. And I'm wondering why you think that's happening.
I mean, it's hard to say. There's a lot of different motivations, a lot of different people. Some of it would be, you know, genuine concern if they see that maybe Wikipedia is biased or, you know, I have seen, for example, Elon Musk has said Wikipedia is biased because they have this really strong rules about Only citing mainstream media and the mainstream media is biased. Okay.
I mean, that's an interesting question, interesting criticism. Certainly, I think worthy of some reflection by everyone, the media and so on and so forth. But it's hardly news to anybody and not actually that interesting. Then other people in various places around the world, not speaking just of the US, but facts are threatening.
And if you and your policies are at odds with the facts, then you may find it very uncomfortable for people to simply explain the facts. And I don't know, that's always going to be a difficulty. But we're not about to say, gee, you know, maybe science isn't valid after all. Maybe the COVID vaccine killed half the population. No, it didn't. Like, that's crazy. And we're not going to print that.
And so they're going to have to get over it.
I want to talk about a recent example of a controversy surrounding Wikipedia, and that's the assassination of Charlie Kirk. You know, Senator Mike Lee called Wikipedia wicked because of the way it had described Kirk on its page as a far-right conspiracy theorist, among other complaints that they had about the page.
And I went to look at the time that we're speaking, and that description is now gone from Wikipedia. Those on the left would say that that description was accurate. Those on the right would say that that description was biased all along. How do you see that, that tension?
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Chapter 5: How does Wikipedia maintain trust among its users?
So, you know, that's not my favorite way of raising money, but the truth is a lot of people are responding very negatively to that behavior.
One of the things I do say in the book and I've said to Elon Musk is that type of attack is counterproductive even if you agree with Elon Musk because to the extent that he has convinced people falsely that Wikipedia has been taken over by woke activists, then two things happen.
your kind and thoughtful conservatives who we very much welcome and we want more people who are thoughtful and intellectual and maybe disagree about various aspects of the spirit of our times. Come and join us and let's make Wikipedia better. But if those people think, oh no, it's just going to be a bunch of crazy woke activists, they're going to go away.
And then on the other side, the crazy woke activists are going to be like, great, I found my home. I don't have to worry about whatever. I can come and write rants against the things I hate in the world. We don't really want them either.
You said you talked to Elon Musk about this. When did you talk to him about it and what was that conversation like?
I mean, we've had various conversations over the years. You know, he texts me sometimes. I text him sometimes. He's much more respectful and quiet in private. But that you would expect. He's got a big public persona.
When was the last time you had that exchange?
That's a good question. I don't know. I think the morning after the last election, he texted me that morning. I congratulated him.
Obviously the debate that happened more recently was because of the hand gesture that he made that was interpreted in different ways. And he was upset in the way that it had been characterized on Wikipedia.
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Chapter 6: What factors contribute to Wikipedia's editorial disputes?
Yeah, I think it could. And I actually think that the lessons are pretty timeless. At the same time, yeah, it's absolutely valid to acknowledge the Internet is different now and there's new problems, new problems that come from it.
social media and all the rest and the you know the aggressively politicized culture wars that we live in uh that is different but i don't think that's a permanent change to humanity i think we're just going through a really crazy era and uh here we are
Do you think the Internet didn't go the way of Wikipedia? You know, collegial, working for the greater good, fun, nerdy, all the words that you use to describe that moment of creation.
Well, you know, the thing is, I'm old enough that I sort of grew up on the Internet in the age of Usenet, which was this massive message board thing. Kind of like Reddit today, except for not controlled by anyone because it was by design distributed and uncontrollable, unmoderatable for the most part. And it was notoriously toxic.
There was some skepticism then, and that was when it first was recognized, I suppose first recognized, that anonymity can be problematic, that people behind an alias, behind their keyboards, no accountability. can be just really bad and really vicious. And, you know, that's when we first started seeing spam. I remember some of the early spam and everybody was like, oh, my God, what's this spam?
You know, it's terrible. So I think some of these things are just human issues. But now they've you know, that's to a larger degree than then. We live online.
It's in our pocket all the time.
It's in our pocket all the time. Yeah. So obviously the impact is much more.
I mean, I think I was thinking about Wikipedia in particular and maybe why it went a different way in that you chose at a certain point to make it a not for profit. You chose not to sort of capitalize on the success of Wikipedia. And it made me wonder about that.
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