Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales on trust in an uncertain world
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With 11 billion views every month in the English language alone, a name and logo that are among the most instantly recognisable on the planet, and celebrating its 25th birthday this year, Wikipedia, the world's great free online encyclopaedia, needs no introduction. I'm joined by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. Jimmy, good morning to you. Good morning. Thanks for having me on. Well, thanks a million for joining us. Wikipedia, take us back to the beginning. What prompted the idea and what problem were you trying to solve with it?
Well, I was watching the growth of free software, open source software, and thought that idea of people coming together to collaborate in new ways could be a big thing on the internet. And I've always loved encyclopedias and just looking up facts and things like that. And so I thought, oh, let's try and do this and see what happens.
OK, and so as a kid, did you have the big collection of encyclopaedias on the shelf in the family home and pull them down off the shelf when you needed to find something out? Oh, yeah. Yeah.
You know, I remember even as a very small kid looking at tigers and reading about tigers and things like that.
And I just loved it. And the idea of Wikipedia, it's a community and people can contribute to it if they see something missing or if they see something wrong, people can contribute to it. And obviously there's moderators to make sure it's accurate.
Yeah, yeah. We've got, you know, thousands of volunteers all around the world in many, many, many languages. You know, people are always curious, who are these people? What are they like? Well, we're a bunch of nerds and we like information and we like digging into things and having debates and trying to get it right and so on and so forth.
What inspired Jimmy Wales to create Wikipedia?
So it's a really sweet bunch of people.
Yeah. Now, the problem nowadays, I suppose, is that facts and truth are more contested than they ever were before, aren't they?
Yeah, in many ways, yes. But of course, having been doing this for 25 years, I always remind people there's always stuff to argue about. That's always been true. And so, yeah, although there's a lot of contention and mistrust in the world today, You know, at the heart, people are the same, and most people just want to get it right.
Now, you've recently written a book on this topic, co-authored with Dan Gardner. It's called The Seven Rules of Trust, and you really put the emphasis on the importance of trust. Yes.
Yeah, so Wikimedia, of course, is very trusting. You know, we let anybody come and help us and participate and join. And also Wikipedia has gone from being kind of a joke in the early days, like people didn't really take us seriously, to being one of the few things that people more or less trust. I mean, it's not perfect, of course, but people do realize it's pretty good. So I thought, what are the lessons learned? Because we're seeing this huge drop in trust in the media, in politics, in business and so forth, which is causing a lot of negative consequences in the world because if we're electing untrustworthy politicians, lots of bad things come from that. And so just really wanted to put trust back on the agenda to say, well, what are the things that we need to do to build a society that can function on trust rather than all the anger and things that we have going on right now?
Okay, well, that sounds like an appealing prospect. How do we get there?
Well, you know, a big part of it is, I would say, is kind of kindergarten ethics. You know, it's treat people, you know, be personal. Rule number one, be personal. You know, having a good purpose in an organization. You know, if you have a clear... simple purpose that helps align what everybody's doing and you know what it is you're trying to accomplish that can do a lot towards actually getting it you know wikipedia we say we're writing an encyclopedia like that really clarifies a lot of what we're doing uh and so you know we don't allow ranting and we you know we try to be as neutral as we can and all of that kind of thing so there's a lot of lessons
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