We've never bowed down to government pressure
anywhere in the world, and we never will.
We understand that we're hardcore,
and actually there is a bit of nuance
about how different companies respond to this,
but our response has always been just to say no.
And if they threaten to block, well, knock yourself out,
you're gonna lose Wikipedia.
The following is a conversation with Jimmy Wales,
co-founder of Wikipedia,
one of, if not the most impactful websites ever,
expanding the collective knowledge, intelligence,
and wisdom of human civilization.
This is Lex Friedman Podcast.
To support it, please check out our sponsors
in the description.
And now, dear friends, here's Jimmy Wales.
Let's start at the beginning.
What is the origin story of Wikipedia?
The origin story of Wikipedia.
Well, so I was watching the growth
of the free software movement, open-source software,
and seeing programmers coming together
to collaborate in new ways,
sharing code, doing that under a free license,
which is really interesting,
because it empowers an ability to work together
that's really hard to do if the code is still proprietary,
because then if I chip in and help,
we sort of have to figure out how I'm gonna be rewarded
and what that is,
the idea that everyone can copy it
and it just is part of the commons,
really empowered a huge wave
of creative software production.
And I realized that that kind of collaboration
could extend beyond just software
to all kinds of cultural works.
And the first thing that I thought of was an encyclopedia.
I thought, oh, that seems obvious,
that an encyclopedia, you can collaborate on it.
There's a few reasons why.
One, we all pretty much know what an encyclopedia entry
on, say, the Eiffel Tower should be like.
You should see a picture, a few pictures maybe,
history, location, something about the architect,
et cetera, et cetera.
So we have a shared understanding
of what it is we're trying to do,
and then we can collaborate,
and different people can chip in and find sources,
and so on and so forth.
So set up first, Newpedia,
which was about two years before Wikipedia.
And with Newpedia, we had this idea
that in order to be respected,
we had to be even more academic
than a traditional encyclopedia,
because a bunch of volunteers on the internet
getting out of the ride at an encyclopedia,
you know, you could be made fun of
if it's just every random person.
So we had implemented this seven-stage review process
to get anything published.
And two things came of that.
So one thing, one of the earliest entries that we published
after this rigorous process,
a few days later, we had to pull it,
because as soon as it hit the web
and the broader community took a look at it,
people noticed plagiarism,
and realized that it wasn't actually that good,
even though it had been reviewed by academics and so on.
So we had to pull it.
So it's like, oh, okay, well,
so much for a seven-stage review process.
But also, I decided that I wanted to try,
I was frustrated, why is this taking so long?
Why is it so hard?
So I thought, oh, okay.
I saw that Robert Merton had won a Nobel Prize in economics
for his work on option pricing theory.
And when I was in academia, that's what I worked on,
was option pricing theory, how to publish paper.
So I'd worked through all of his academic papers,
and I knew his work quite well.
I thought, oh, I'll just,
I'll write a short biography of Merton.
And when I started to do it, I'd been out of academia,
hadn't been a grad student for a few years then.
I felt this huge intimidation,
because they were gonna take my draft
and send it to the most prestigious finance professors
that we could find to give me feedback for revisions.
And it felt like being back in grad school.
It's like this really oppressive sort of like,
you're gonna submit it for review,
and you're gonna get critiques.
A little bit of the bad part of grad school.
Yeah, yeah, the bad part of grad school, right?
And so I was like, oh, this isn't intellectually fun.
This is like the bad part of grad school.
It's intimidating, and there's a lot of
potential embarrassment if I screw something up
and so forth.
And so that was when I realized,
okay, look, this is never gonna work.
This is not something that people
are really gonna wanna do.
So Jeremy Rosenfeld, one of my employees,
had brought and showed me the Wiki concept in December,
and then Larry Sanger brought in the same,
said, what about this Wiki idea?
And so in January, we decided to launch Wikipedia,
but we weren't sure.
So the original project was called Newpedia,
and even though it wasn't successful,
we did have quite a group of academics
and like really serious people,
and we were concerned that, oh,
maybe these academics are gonna really hate this idea,
and we shouldn't just convert the project immediately.
We should launch this as a side project,
the idea of, here's a Wiki where we can start playing around.
But actually, we got more work done in two weeks
than we had in almost two years
because people were able to just jump on
and start doing stuff,
and it was actually a very exciting time.
Back then, you could be the first person
who typed Africa is a continent and hit save,
which isn't much of an encyclopedia entry,
but it's true, and it's a start, and it's kind of fun.
Like, you put your name down.
Actually, a funny story was several years later,
I just happened to be online,
and I saw when, I think his name is Robert Allman,
won the Nobel Prize in economics,
and we didn't have an entry on him at all,
which was surprising, but it wasn't that surprising.
This was still early days, you know?
And so I got to be the first person to type Robert Allman
won the Nobel Prize in economics and hit save,
which, again, wasn't a very good article.
But then I came back two days later,
and people had improved it and so forth.
So that second half of the experience
where with Robert Merton, I never succeeded
because it was just too intimidating.
It was like, oh no, I was able to chip in and help.
Other people jumped in.
Everybody was interested in the topic
because it's all in the news at the moment.
And so it's just a completely different model,
which worked much, much better.
What is it that made that so accessible, so fun,
so natural to just add something?
Well, I think it's, especially in the early days,
and this, by the way, has gotten much harder
because there are fewer topics
that are just greenfield available.
But you could say, oh, well, I know a little bit about this
and I can get it started.
But then it is fun to come back then
and see other people have added and improved
and so on and so forth.
And that idea of collaborating where people can,
much like open source software,
you put your code out and then people suggest revisions
and they change it and it modifies
and it grows beyond the original creator.
It's just a kind of a fun, wonderful, quite geeky hobby,
but people enjoy it.
How much debate was there over the interface,
over the details of how to make that seamless and frictionless?
Yeah, I mean, not as much as there probably
should have been in a way.
During that two years of the failure of Newpedia,
where very little work got done,
what was actually productive was
there was a huge, long discussion, email discussion,
very clever people talking about things like neutrality,
talking about what is an encyclopedia,
but also talking about more technical ideas, things.
Back then, XML was kind of all the rage
and thinking about, ah, could we,
shouldn't you have certain data
that might be in multiple articles
that gets updated automatically?
So for example, the population of New York City,
every 10 years there's a new official census,
couldn't you just update that bit of data in one place
and it would update across all languages?
That is a reality today, but back then it was just like,
how do we do that, how do we think about that?
So that is a reality today where it's,
there's some universal variables, Wikidata.
Yeah, Wikidata, you can link from a Wikipedia entry,
you can link to that piece of data in Wikidata.
I mean, it's a pretty advanced thing,
but there are advanced users who are doing that.
And then when that gets updated,
it updates in all the languages where you've done that.
I mean, that's really interesting.
There was this chain of emails in the early days
of discussing the details of what is,
so there's the interface, there's the-
Yeah, so the interface, so an example,
there was some software called Use Mod Wiki,
which we started with.
It's quite amusing, actually,
because the main reason we launched with Use Mod Wiki
is that it was a single Perl script.
So it was really easy for me to install it on the server
and just get running.
But it was some guy's hobby project, it was cool,
but it was just a hobby project.
And all the data was stored in flat text files,
so there was no real database behind it.
So to search the site, you basically used Grap,
which is just like the basic Unix utility
to look through all the files.
So that clearly was never going to scale.
But also, in the early days, it didn't have real logins.
So you could set your username, but there were no passwords.
So I might say Bob Smith, and then someone else comes along
and says, no, I'm Bob Smith, and they both had it.
Now, that never really happened.
We didn't have a problem with it,
but it was obvious, you can't grow a big website
where everybody can pretend to be everybody.
That's not going to be good for trust
and reputation and so forth.
So quickly, I had to write a little login,
store people's passwords and things like that,
so you could have unique identities.
And then another example of something quite,
you would have never thought would have been a good idea,
and it turned out to not be a problem,
but to make a link in Wikipedia, in the early days,
you would make a link to a page that may or may not exist
by just using camel case, meaning it's like upper case,
lower case, and you smash the words together.
So maybe New York City, you might type N-E-W,
no space, capital Y, New York City,
and that would make a link.
But that was ugly, that was clearly not right.
And so I was like, okay, well,
that's just not going to look nice.
Let's just use square brackets.
Two square brackets makes a link,
and that may have been an option in the software.
I'm not sure I thought up square brackets, but anyway.
We just did that, which worked really well.
It makes nice links, and you can see,
and it's red links or blue links,
depending on if the page exists or not.
But the thing that didn't occur to me even think about
is that, for example,
on the German language standard keyboard,
there is no square bracket.
So for German Wikipedia to succeed,
people had to learn to do some alt codes
to get the square bracket,
or a lot of users cut and paste a square bracket
when they could find one,
and they would just cut and paste one in.
And yeah, German Wikipedia has been a massive success.
So somehow that didn't slow people down.
How is it that the German keyboards
don't have a square bracket?
How do you do programming?
How do you live life to its fullest with a square bracket?
Very good question.
I'm not really sure.
I mean, maybe it does now,
because keyboard standards have drifted over time
and becomes useful to have a certain character.
I mean, it's same thing.
Like there's not really a W character in Italian,
and it wasn't on keyboards, or I think it is now,
but in general, W is not a letter in Italian language,
but it appears in enough international words
that it's crept into Italian.
And all of these things are probably Wikipedia articles
in themselves.
Oh, yeah.
The discussion of square brackets.
Whole discussion, I'm sure.
On both the English and the German Wikipedia.
And the difference between those two
might be very interesting.
So Wikidata is fascinating,
but even the broader discussion of what is an encyclopedia,
can you go to that sort of philosophical question
of what is an encyclopedia?
What is an encyclopedia?
The way I would put it is an encyclopedia,
or what our goal is, is the sum of all human knowledge,
but sum meaning summary.
So, and this was an early debate.
I mean, somebody started uploading the full text of Hamlet,
for example, and we said, hmm, wait, hold on a second.
That's not an encyclopedia article, but why not?
So, hence was born Wikisource,
which is where you put original texts and things like that
out of copyright text, because they said,
no, an encyclopedia article about Hamlet,
that's a perfectly valid thing,
but the actual text of the play
is not an encyclopedia article.
So most of it's fairly obvious,
but there are some interesting quirks and differences.
So for example, as I understand it,
in French language encyclopedias,
traditionally, it would be quite common to have recipes,
which in English language, that would be unusual.
You wouldn't find a recipe for chocolate cake in Britannica.
And so, I actually don't know the current state.
Haven't thought about that in many, many years now.
The state of cake recipes in Wikipedia,
in English Wikipedia.
I wouldn't say there's chocolate cake recipes.
I mean, you might find a sample recipe somewhere.
I'm not saying there are none, but in general, no.
Like we wouldn't have recipes.
I told myself I would not get outraged in this conversation,
but now I'm outraged.
I'm deeply upset.
It's actually very complicated.
I love to cook.
I'm, you know, I'm actually quite a good cook,
and what's interesting is there's,
it's very hard to have a neutral recipe because-
Like a canonical recipe for chocolate cake.
A canonical recipe is kind of difficult to come by
because there's so many variants
and it's all debatable and interesting.
For something like chocolate cake, you could probably say,
you know, here's one of the earliest recipes
or here's one of the most common recipes.
But you know, for many, many things,
the variants are as interesting, you know,
as somebody said to me recently, you know,
10 Spaniards, 12 paella recipes.
So, you know, these are all matters of open discussion.
Well, just to throw some numbers, as of May 27th, 2023,
there are 6.66 million articles in the English Wikipedia
containing over 4.3 billion words,
including articles the total number of pages is 58 million.
Yeah. Does that blow your mind?
I mean, yes, it does.
I mean, it doesn't because I know those numbers
and see them from time to time,
but in another sense, a deeper sense, yeah, it does.
I mean, it's really remarkable.
I remember when English Wikipedia passed 100,000 articles
and when German Wikipedia passed 100,000,
because I happened to be in Germany
with a bunch of Wikipedians that night.
And you know, then it seemed quite big.
I mean, we knew at that time
that it was nowhere near complete.
I remember at Wikimania in Harvard,
when we did our annual conference there in Boston,
someone who had come to the conference from Poland
had brought along with him a small encyclopedia,
a single volume encyclopedia of biographies.
So short biographies, normally a paragraph or so
about famous people in Poland.
And there were some 22,000 entries.
And he pointed out that even then,
2006 Wikipedia felt quite big.
And he said, in English Wikipedia,
there's only a handful of these,
less than 10%, I think he said.
And so then you realized, yeah, actually,
who was the mayor of Warsaw in 1873?
Don't know, probably not in English Wikipedia,
but it probably might be today,
but there's so much out there.
And of course, what we get into
when we're talking about how many entries there are
and how many could there be,
is this very deep philosophical issue of notability,
which is the question of, well, how do you draw the limit?
How do you draw what is there?
So sometimes people say, oh, there should be no limit,
but I think that doesn't stand up to much scrutiny
if you really pause and think about it.
So I see in your hand there, you've got a BIC pen,
pretty standard, everybody's seen billions of those in life.
Classic though.
It's a classic clear BIC pen.
So could we have an entry about that BIC pen?
Well, I bet we do, that type of BIC pen,
because it's classic, everybody knows it,
and it's got a history.
And actually, there's something interesting
about the BIC company.
They make pens, they also make kayaks,
and there's something else they're famous for.
Basically, they're sort of a definition
by non-essentials company.
Anything that's long and plastic, that's what they make.
So if you want to find the common ground.
The platonic form of a BIC.
But could we have an article about that very BIC pen
in your hand?
So Lex Friedman's BIC pen as of this week.
The very specific instance.
And the answer is no, there's not much known about it.
I dare say, unless it's very special to you
and your great-grandmother gave it to you or something,
you probably know very little about it.
It's a pen, it's just here in the office.
So that's just to show there is a limit.
In German Wikipedia, they used to talk about
the rear nut of the wheel of Uli Fuchs bicycle,
Uli Fuchs the well-known Wikipedian of the time,
you can't have an article about literally everything.
So then it raises the question,
what can you have an article about, what can't you?
And that can vary depending on the subject matter.
One of the areas where we try to be much more careful
would be biographies.
The reason is a biography of a living person,
if you get it wrong, it can actually be quite hurtful,
quite damaging.
And so if someone is a private person
and somebody tries to create a Wikipedia entry,
there's no way to update it, there's not much known.
So for example, an encyclopedia article about my mother,
my mother, school teacher, later a pharmacist,
wonderful woman, but never been in the news.
I mean, other than me talking about
why there shouldn't be a Wikipedia entry,
that's probably made it in somewhere, standard example.
But there's not enough known.
And you could sort of imagine a database of genealogy,
having date of birth, date of death,
certain elements like that of private people,
but you couldn't really write a biography.
And one of the areas this comes up quite often
is what we call BLP1E, we've got lots of acronyms.
Biography of a living person
who's notable for only one event
is a real sort of danger zone.
And the type of example would be a victim of a crime.
So someone who's a victim of a famous serial killer,
but about whom like really not much is known.
They weren't a public person,
they're just a victim of a crime.
We really shouldn't have an article about that person.
They'll be mentioned, of course.
And maybe the specific crime might have an article,
but for that person, no, not really.
That's not really something that makes any sense
because how can you write a biography
about someone you don't know much about?
And this is, it varies from field to field.
So for example, for many academics,
we will have an entry that we might not have
in a different context because for an academic,
it's important to have sort of their career,
what papers they've published, things like that.
You may not know anything about their personal life,
but that's actually not encyclopedically relevant
in the same way that it is for a member of a royal family
where it's basically all about the family.
So we're fairly nuanced about notability
and where it comes in.
And I've always thought that the term notability,
I think is a little problematic.
We struggled about how to talk about it.
The problem with notability is it can feel insulting.
So no, you're not noteworthy.
My mother's noteworthy.
She's a really important person in my life, right?
So that's not right, but it's more like verifiability.
Is there a way to get information
that actually makes an encyclopedia entry?
It so happens that there's a Wikipedia page about me,
as I've learned recently.
And the first thought I had when I saw that was,
surely I am not notable enough.
So I was very surprised and grateful
that such a page could exist.
And actually just allow me to say thank you
to all the incredible people that are part of creating
and maintaining Wikipedia.
It's my favorite website on the internet.
The collection of articles that Wikipedia has created
is just incredible.
We'll talk about the various details of that,
but the love and care that goes into creating pages
for individuals, for a big pen,
for all this kind of stuff is just really incredible.
So I just felt the love when I saw that page.
But I also felt just because I do this podcast
and I just through this podcast,
gotten to know a few individuals
that are quite controversial.
I've gotten to be on the receiving end
of something quite, to me as a person who loves
other human beings.
I've gotten to be at the receiving end
of some kind of attacks through the Wikipedia form.
Like you said, when you look at living individuals,
it can be quite hurtful, the little details of information.
And because I've become friends with Elon Musk
and I've interviewed him,
but I've also interviewed people on the left, far left,
people on the right, some people would say far right.
And so now you take a step,
you put your toe into the cold pool of politics
and the shark emerges from the depths
and pulls you right in.
Boiling hot pool of politics.
I guess it's hot.
And so I got to experience some of that.
I think what you also realize is there has to be
for Wikipedia kind of credible sources, verifiable sources.
And there's a dance there
because some of the sources are pieces of journalism.
And of course, journalism operates
under its own complicated incentives
such that people can write articles that are not factual
or are cherry picking all the flaws
that you can have in a journalistic article.
And those can be used as sources.
It's like they dance hand in hand.
And so for me, sadly enough,
there was a really kind of concerted attack
to say that I was never at MIT.
I never did anything at MIT.
Just to clarify, I am a research scientist at MIT.
I have been there since 2015.
I'm there today.
I'm at a prestigious, amazing laboratory called LIDS.
And I hope to be there for a long time.
I work on AI, robotics, machine learning.
There's a lot of incredible people there.
And by the way, MIT has been very kind to defend me.
Unlike Wikipedia says, it is not an unpaid position.
There was no controversy.
It was all very calm and happy
and almost boring research that I've been doing there.
And the other thing,
because I am half Ukrainian, half Russian,
and I've traveled to Ukraine,
and I will travel to Ukraine again,
and I will travel to Russia
for some very difficult conversations.
My heart has been broken by this war.
I have family in both places.
It's been a really difficult time.
But the little battle about the biography there
also starts becoming important for the first time for me.
I also want to clarify sort of personally,
use this opportunity of some inaccuracies there.
My father was not born in Shkalsk, Russia.
He was born in Kiev, Ukraine.
I was born in Shkalsk, which is a town not in Russia.
There is a town called that in Russia,
but there's another town in Tajikistan,
which is a former republic of the Soviet Union.
It is, that town is now called B-U-S-T-O-N,
Buston, which is funny,
because we're now in Austin and I also am in Boston.
It seems like my whole life is surrounded
by these kinds of towns.
So I was born in Tajikistan.
And the rest of the biography is interesting,
but my family is very evenly distributed
between their origins and where they grew up,
between Ukraine and Russia,
which just adds a whole beautiful complexity
to this whole thing.
So I want to just correct that.
It's like the fascinating thing about Wikipedia
is in some sense, those little details don't matter.
But in another sense,
what I felt when I saw a Wikipedia page about me
or anybody I know is there's this beautiful kind of saving
that this person existed,
like a community that notices you.
It says, like a little,
you see like a butterfly that floats and you're like, huh?
It's not just any butterfly, it's that one.
I like that one.
Or you see a puppy or something, or it's this big pen.
This one, I remember this one as the scratch
and you get noticed in that way.
And I don't know, that's a beautiful thing.
And it's, I mean, maybe it's very silly of me and naive,
but I feel like Wikipedia in terms of individuals
is an opportunity to celebrate people,
to celebrate ideas and not a battleground of attacks
of the kind of stuff we might see on Twitter,
like the mockery, the derision, this kind of stuff.
And of course you don't want to cherry pick,
all of us have flaws and so on,
but it just feels like to highlight a controversy
of some sort when that doesn't at all represent
the entirety of the human, in most cases, is sad.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So there's a few things to unpack and all that.
So first, one of the things I find really,
always find very interesting is your status with MIT.
Okay, that's upsetting and it's an argument
and can be sorted out.
But then what's interesting is you gave as much time
to that, which is actually important and relevant
to your career and so on,
to also where your father was born,
which most people would hardly notice
but is really meaningful to you.
And I find that a lot when I talk to people
who have a biography in Wikipedia
is they're often as annoyed by a tiny error
that no one's gonna notice,
like this town in Tajikistan has got a new name and so on,
like nobody even knows what that means or whatever,
but it can be super important.
And so that's one of the reasons for biographies,
we say like human dignity really matters.
And so some of the things have to do with,
and this is a common debate that goes on in Wikipedia
is what we call undue weight.
So I'll give an example.
There was a article I stumbled across many years ago
about the mayor, no, he wasn't a mayor,
he was a city council member of,
I think it was Peoria, Illinois,
but some small town in the Midwest.
And the entry, he's been on the city council
for 30 years or whatever.
He's pretty, I mean, frankly, pretty boring guy
and seems like a good local city politician.
But in this very short biography,
there was a whole paragraph, a long paragraph
about his son being arrested for DUI.
And it was clearly undue weight.
It's like, what does this got to do with this guy
if it even deserves a mention?
It wasn't even clear, had he done anything hypocritical,
had he done himself anything wrong,
even was his son, his son got a DUI,
that's never great, but it happens to people
and it doesn't seem like a massive scandal for your dad.
So of course, I just took that out immediately.
This is a long, long time ago.
And that's the sort of thing where, you know,
we have to really think about in a biography
and about controversies to say,
is this a real controversy?
So in general, like one of the things we tend to say
is like any section, so if there's a biography
and there's a section called controversies,
that's actually poor practice
because it just invites people to say,
oh, I want to work on this entry.
Let's see, there's seven sections.
Oh, this one's quite short, can I add something?
Go out and find some more controversies.
Now that's nonsense, right?
And in general, putting it separate from everything else
kind of makes it seem worse
and also doesn't put it in the right context.
Whereas if it's sort of a life flow
and there is a controversy,
there's always potential controversy for anyone,
it should just be sort of worked into the overall article
because then it doesn't become a temptation.
You can contextualize appropriately and so forth.
So that's, you know,
that's, you know, part of the whole process.
But I think for me, one of the most important things
is what I call community health.
So yeah, are we going to get it wrong sometimes?
Yeah, of course.
We're humans and doing good quality, you know,
sort of reference material is hard.
The real question is how do people react, you know,
to a criticism or a complaint or a concern?
And if the reaction is defensiveness or combativeness back,
or if someone's really sort of in there being aggressive
and in the wrong, like, no, no, no, hold on,
we've got to do this the right way.
You got to say, okay, hold on, you know,
are there good sources?
Is this contextualized appropriately?
Is it even important enough to mention?
What does it mean?
You know, and sometimes one of the areas
where I do think there is a very complicated flaw
and you've alluded to it a little bit,
but it's like, we know the media is deeply flawed.
We know that journalism can go wrong.
And I would say, particularly in the last,
whatever, 15 years, we've seen a real decimation
of local media and local newspapers.
We've seen a real rise in clickbait headlines
and sort of eager focus on anything
that might be controversial.
We've always had that with us, of course,
there's always been tabloid newspapers,
but that makes it a little bit more challenging to say,
okay, how do we sort things out
when we have a pretty good sense
that not every source is valid?
So as an example, a few years ago,
it's been quite a while now,
we deprecated the mail online as a source.
And the mail online, you know,
the digital arm of the Daily Mail, it's a tabloid.
It's not completely, you know, it's not fake news,
but it does tend to run very hyped up stories.
They really love to attack people
and go on the attack for political reasons and so on.
And it just isn't great.
And so by saying deprecated,
and I think some people say, oh, you banned the Daily Mail.
No, we didn't ban it as a source.
We just said, look, it's probably not a great source, right?
You should probably look for a better source.
So certainly, you know,
if the Daily Mail runs a headline saying,
new cure for cancer, it's like, you know,
probably there's more serious sources
than a tabloid newspaper.
So, you know, in an article about lung cancer,
you probably wouldn't cite the Daily Mail,
like that's kind of ridiculous,
but also for celebrities and so forth to sort of know,
well, they do cover celebrity gossip a lot,
but they also tend to have vendettas and so forth.
And you really have to step back and go,
is this really encyclopedic
or is this just the Daily Mail going on a rant?
And some of that requires a great community health.
It requires massive community health.
Even for me, for stuff I've seen,
that's kind of, I'm actually iffy about people I know,
things I know about myself.
I still feel like a love for knowledge emanating.
From the article, like I feel the community health.
So I will take all slight inaccuracies.
I love it because that means there's people,
for the most part, I feel a respect and love
in a search for knowledge.
Like sometimes, because I also love stock overflow,
stock exchange for programming related things.
And they can get a little cranky sometimes
to a degree where it's like, it's not as,
like you can see, you can feel the dynamics
of the health of the particular community
and sub-communities too.
Like particularly C Sharp or Java or Python or whatever.
Like there's little communities that emerge.
You can feel the levels of toxicity
because a little bit of strictness is good,
but a little too much is bad because of the defensiveness.
Because when somebody writes an answer
and then somebody else kind of says,
well, modify it and then get defensive.
And there's this tension that's not conducive
to like improving towards a more truthful depiction
of like that topic.
Yeah, a great example that I really loved this morning
that I saw, someone left a note on my user talk page
in English Wikipedia saying,
it was quite a dramatic headline thing,
racist hook on front page.
So we have on the front page of Wikipedia,
we have a little section called, did you know?
And it's just little tidbits and facts,
just things people find interesting.
And there's a whole process for how things get there.
And the one that somebody was raising a question about
was comparing a very well-known US football player, Black.
There was a quote from another famous sport person
comparing him to a Lamborghini, clearly a compliment.
And so somebody said, actually, here's a study,
here's some interesting information
about how Black sports people are far more often compared
to inanimate objects and given that kind of analogy.
And I think it's demeaning to compare a person to a car,
et cetera, et cetera.
But they said, I'm not deleting it, I'm not removing it,
I just wanna raise the question.
And then there's this really interesting conversation
that goes on where I think the general consensus was,
you know what, this isn't like the alarming headline,
racist thing on the front page of the community,
that sounds, holy moly, that sounds bad.
But it's sort of like, actually, yeah,
this probably isn't the sort of analogy
that we think is great.
And so we should probably think about
how to improve our language and not compare sports people
to inanimate objects and particularly be aware
of certain racial sensitivities that there might be
around that sort of thing if there is a disparity
in the media of how people are called.
And I just thought, you know what,
nothing for me to weigh in on here.
This is a good conversation.
Nobody's saying people should be banned if they refer to,
what was his name?
The fridge, Refrigerator Perry,
the very famous comparison to an inanimate object
of a Chicago Bears player many years ago.
But they're just saying, hey, let's be careful
about analogies that we just pick up from the media.
I said, yeah, that's good.
On the sort of deprecation of news sources,
really interesting because I think what you're saying
is ultimately you want to make a article by article decision
kind of use your own judgment.
And it's such a subtle thing because
there's just a lot of hit pieces written about individuals
like myself, for example, that masquerade as kind of
an objective, thorough exploration of a human being.
It's fascinating to watch because controversy
and hit pieces just get more clicks.
I guess as a Wikipedia contributor,
you start to deeply become aware of that
and start to have a sense,
like a radar clickbait versus truth.
Like to pick out the truth from the clickbaity type language.
Oh yeah, I mean, it's really important.
And we talk a lot about weasel words.
Actually, I'm sure we'll end up talking about AI
and ChatGPT, but just to quickly mention in this area,
I think one of the potentially powerful tools
because it is quite good at this,
I've played around with and practiced it quite a lot,
but ChatGPT-4 is really quite able to take a passage
and point out potentially biased terms
to rewrite it to be more neutral.
It is a bit anodyne and it's a bit cliched.
So sometimes it just takes the spirit out of something
that's actually not bad.
It's just like poetic language and you're like,
okay, that's not actually helping.
But in many cases,
I think that sort of thing is quite interesting.
And I'm also interested in,
can you imagine where you feed in a Wikipedia entry
and all the sources and you say,
help me find anything in the article
that is not accurately reflecting what's in the sources.
And that doesn't have to be perfect.
It only has to be good enough to be useful to community.
So if it scans an article and all the sources and you say,
oh, it came back with 10 suggestions
and seven of them were decent
and three of them it just didn't understand,
well, actually that's probably worth my time to do.
And it can help us really more quickly
get good people to sort of review obscure entries
and things like that.
So just as a small aside on that,
and we'll probably talk about language models a little bit
or a lot more, but one of the articles,
one of the hit pieces about me,
the journalist actually was very straightforward
and honest about having used GPT
to write part of the article.
Oh, interesting.
And then finding that it made an error
and apologize for the error that GPT-4 generated,
which has this kind of interesting loop,
which the articles are used to write Wikipedia pages.
GPT is trained on Wikipedia
and there's like this interesting loop
where the weasel words and the nuances can get lost
or can propagate even though they're not grounded in reality.
Somehow in the generation of the language model,
new truths can be created and kind of linger.
Yeah, there's a famous web comic that's titled Cytogenesis,
which is about how something, an error's in Wikipedia
and there's no source for it,
but then a lazy journalist reads it and writes the source.
And then some helpful Wikipedian spots that it has no source
finds the source and adds it to Wikipedia.
And voila, magic.
This happened to me once it, well, it nearly happened.
There was this, I mean, it was really brief.
I went back and researched it.
I'm like, this is really odd.
So, Biography Magazine,
which is a magazine published by the Biography TV channel,
had a processor profile of me and it said,
in his spare time, I'm not quoting exactly,
obviously it's been many years,
but in his spare time,
he enjoys playing chess with friends.
I thought, wow, that sounds great.
Like I would like to be that guy, but actually,
I mean, I play chess with my kids sometimes,
but no, it's not a hobby of mine.
And I was like, where did they get that?
And I contacted the magazine and said,
where did that come from?
They said, oh, it was in Wikipedia.
I'd looked in the history.
There had been vandalism of Wikipedia,
which was not, you know, it's not damaging.
It's just false.
So, and it had already been removed,
but then I thought, oh gosh, well,
I better mention this to people
because otherwise somebody is going to read that
and they're going to add it to the entry
and it's going to take on a life of its own.
And then sometimes I wonder if it has,
because I've been, I was invited a few years ago
to do the ceremonial first move
in the World Chess Championship.
And I thought, I wonder if they think
I'm a really big chess enthusiast
because they read this biography magazine article.
So, but that problem,
when we think about large language models
and the ability to quickly generate very plausible,
but not true content, I think is something
that there's going to be a lot of shakeout
and a lot of implications of that.
What would be hilarious is because of the social pressure
of Wikipedia and the momentum,
you would actually start playing a lot more chess,
just not only the articles are written based on Wikipedia,
but your own life trajectory changes
because of the Wikipedia, just to make it more convenient.
Yeah.
Aspire to.
Aspire to, yeah.
Aspirational.
What, if we could just talk about that
before we jump back to some other interesting topics
on Wikipedia, let's talk about GPT-4
and large language models.
So, they are in part trained on Wikipedia content.
Yeah.
What are the pros and cons of these language models?
What are your thoughts?
Yeah, so, I mean, there's a lot of stuff going on.
Obviously, the technology has moved very quickly
in the last six months and looks poised to do so
for some time to come.
So, first things first, I mean, part of our philosophy is
the open licensing, the free licensing,
the idea that this is what we're here for.
We are a volunteer community,
and we write this encyclopedia.
We give it to the world to do what you like with.
You can modify it, redistribute it,
redistribute modified versions.
Commercially, non-commercially, this is the licensing.
So, in that sense, of course, it's completely fine.
Now, we do worry a bit about attribution
because it is a Creative Commons attribution
share-alike license.
So, attribution is important,
not just because of our licensing model and things like that
but it's just proper attribution
is just good intellectual practice.
And so, and that's a really hard, complicated question.
You know, if I were to write something about my visit here,
I might say in a blog post, you know,
I was in Austin, which is a city in Texas.
I'm not gonna put a source for Austin as a city in Texas.
That's just general knowledge.
I learned it somewhere, I can't tell you where.
So, you don't have to cite and reference every single thing.
But, you know, if I actually did research
and I used something very heavily,
it's just proper, morally proper to give your sources.
So, we would like to see that.
And obviously, you know, they call it grounding.
So, particularly people at Google are really keen
on figuring out grounding.
That's such a cool term.
So, any text that's generated,
trying to ground it to the Wikipedia quality source.
I mean, like the same kind of standard
of what a source means that Wikipedia uses,
the same kind of source will be generated.
The same kind of thing.
And of course, one of the biggest flaws
in ChatGPD right now is that it just literally
will make things up just to be amiable, I think.
It's programmed to be very hopeful and amiable
and it doesn't really know or care about the truth.
You can get bullied into,
it can kind of be convinced into it.
Well, but like this morning,
the story I was telling earlier
about comparing a football player to a Lamborghini,
and I thought, is that really racial?
I don't know.
But I'm just, I'm mulling it over.
And I thought, I'm gonna go to ChatGPT.
So, I sent to ChatGPT 4.
I said, you know, this happened in Wikipedia.
Can you think of examples where a white athlete
has been compared to a fast car inanimate object?
And it comes back with a very plausible essay
where it tells why these analogies
are common in sport model.
I said, no, no, I really,
could you give me some specific examples?
So, it gives me three specific examples, very plausible,
correct names of athletes and contemporaries
and all of that, could have been true.
Googled every single quote and none of them existed.
And so, I'm like, well, that's really not good.
I wanted to explore a thought process I was in.
I thought, first I thought, how do I Google?
And it's like, well, it's kind of a hard thing to Google,
because unless somebody has written about this specific
topic, it's, you know, it's a large language model.
It can, it's processed all this data.
It can probably piece that together for me,
but it just can't yet.
So, I think, I hope that ChatGPT 5, 6, 7,
you know, three to five years,
I'm hoping we'll see a much higher, you know,
level of accuracy where when you ask a question like that,
I think instead of being quite so eager to please
by giving you a plausible sounding answer,
it's just, I don't know.
Or maybe display the,
how much bullshit might be in this generated text.
Like, I really would like to make you happy right now,
but I'm really stretched thin with this generation.
Well, it's one of the things I've said for a long time.
So, in Wikipedia, one of the great things we do
may not be great for our reputation,
except in a deeper sense for the long-term, I think it is.
But, you know, there'll be a notice that says,
the neutrality of this section has been disputed,
or the following section doesn't cite any sources.
And I always joke, you know,
sometimes I wish the New York Times would run a banner
saying the neutrality of this has been disputed.
They could give us, we had a big fight in the newsroom
as to whether to run this or not,
but we thought it's important enough to bring it to you,
but just be aware that not all the journalists
are on board with it.
Ah, that's actually interesting, and that's fine.
I would trust them more for that level of transparency.
So yeah, similarly, chat GPT should say, yeah,
87% bullshit.
Well, the neutrality one is really interesting,
because that's basically a summary of the discussions
that are going on underneath.
It would be amazing if, like, I should be honest,
I don't look at the talk page often.
I don't, it would be nice somehow
if there was a kind of a summary in this banner way
of like this, lots of wars have been fought
on this here land for this here paragraph.
It's really interesting, yeah.
I hadn't thought of that, because one of the things
I do spend a lot of time thinking about these days,
and people have found that we're moving slowly,
but we are moving thinking about, okay, these tools exist.
Are there ways that this stuff can be useful
to our community?
Because a part of it is we do approach things
in a non-commercial way, in a really deep sense.
It's like, it's been great that Wikipedia
has become very popular, but really,
we're a community whose hobby is writing an encyclopedia.
That's first, and if it's popular, great.
If it's not, okay, we might have trouble paying
for more servers, but it'll be fine.
And so how do we help the community use these tools?
What are the ways that these tools can support people?
One example I never thought about,
I'm gonna start playing with it,
is feed in the article and feed in the talk page,
and say, can you suggest some warnings in the article
based on the conversations in the talk page?
I think it might be good at that.
It might get it wrong sometimes, but again,
if it's reasonably successful at doing that,
and you can say, oh, actually, yeah, it does suggest
the neutrality of this has been disputed
on a section that has a seven-page discussion in the back,
that might be useful, I don't know, worth playing with.
Some more color to the, not neutrality,
but also the amount of emotion laden
in the exploration of this particular part of the topic.
It might actually help you look at more controversial pages,
like a page on the war in Ukraine,
or a page on Israel and Palestine.
There could be parts that everyone agrees on,
and there's parts that are just like tough, tough.
The hard parts, yeah.
It would be nice to, when looking at those beautiful,
long articles, to know like, all right,
let me just take in some stuff where everybody agrees on.
I can give an example that I haven't looked at
in a long time, but I was really pleased
with what I saw at the time.
So the discussion was that they're building something
in Israel, and for their own political reasons,
one side calls it a wall,
harkening back to Berlin wall, apartheid.
The other calls it a security fence.
So we can understand quite quickly,
if we give it a moment's thought,
like, okay, I understand why people would have
this grappling over the language.
Like, okay, you want to highlight the negative aspects
of this, and you want to highlight the positive aspects,
so you're going to try and choose a different name.
And so there was this really fantastic Wikipedia discussion
on the talk page.
How do we word that paragraph
to talk about the different naming?
It's called this by Israelis,
called this by Palestinians.
And that, how you explain that to people
could be quite charged, right?
You could easily explain, oh, there's this difference,
and it's because this side's good and this side's bad,
and that's why there's a difference.
Or you could say, actually, let's just,
let's try and really stay as neutral as we can
and try to explain the reasons.
So you may come away from it with a concept.
Oh, okay, I understand what this debate is about now.
And just the term Israel-Palestine conflict
is still the title of a page, a Wikipedia.
But the word conflict is something that is a charged word.
Of course, yeah.
Because from the Palestinian side or from certain sides,
the word conflict doesn't accurately describe the situation
because if you see it as a genocide,
one-way genocide is not a conflict,
because to people that discuss,
that challenge the word conflict,
they see conflict is when there's
two equally powerful sides fighting.
Yeah, yeah, no, it's hard.
And in a number of cases,
so this actually speaks to a slightly broader phenomenon,
which is there are a number of cases
where there is no one word that can get consensus.
And in the body of an article, that's usually okay,
because we can explain the whole thing.
You can come away with an understanding
of why each side wants to use a certain word.
But there are some aspects, like the page has to have a title.
So there's that.
Same thing with certain things like photos.
It's like, well, there's different photos, which one's best?
A lot of different views on that.
But at the end of the day,
you need the lead photo,
because there's one slot for a lead photo.
Categories is another one.
So at one point, I have no idea if it's in there today,
but I don't think so.
I was listed in American, entrepreneur's fine,
American Atheists.
And I said, hmm, that doesn't feel right to me.
Like just personally, it's true.
I mean, I wouldn't disagree with the objective fact of it.
But when you click the category and you see
sort of a lot of people who are, you might say,
American Atheist activists, because that's their big issue.
So Madeline Murray O'Hare or various famous people who,
Richard Dawkins, who make it a big part
of their public argument and persona.
But that's not true of me.
It's just like my private personal belief.
It doesn't really, it's not something I campaign about.
So it felt weird to put me in the category,
but what category would you put, you know?
And do you need that category?
In this case, I argued, it doesn't need that category.
That's not, I don't speak about it publicly
except incidentally from time to time.
I don't campaign about it, so it's weird to put me
with this group of people.
And that argument carried the day.
I hope not just because it was me.
But categories can be like that,
where you're either in the category or you're not.
And sometimes it's a lot more complicated than that.
And is it, again, we go back to, is it undue weight?
Someone who is now prominent in public life
and generally considered to be a good person
was convicted of something, let's say DUI,
when they were young.
Normally, in normal sort of discourse,
we don't think, oh, this person should be
in the category of American criminals.
Because you think, oh, a criminal,
yeah, technically speaking, it's against the law
to drive under the influence of alcohol,
and you were arrested and you spent a month
in prison or whatever.
But it's odd to say that's a criminal.
So just as an example in this area is Mark Wohlberg,
Marky Mark, that's what I always think of him as,
because that was his first sort of famous name,
who I wouldn't think should be listed as,
in the category, American criminal,
even though he was convicted of quite a bad crime
when he was a young person,
but we don't think of him as a criminal.
Should the entry talk about that?
Yeah, that's actually an important part of his life story,
that he had a very rough youth
and he could have gone down a really dark path
and he turned his life around.
That's actually interesting.
So categories are tricky.
Especially with people,
because we like to assign labels to people
and to ideas somehow, and those labels stick.
And there's certain words that have a lot of power,
like criminal, like political, left, right, center,
anarchist, objectivist, what other philosophies are there?
Marxist, communist, social democrat,
democratic socialist, socialist.
And if you add that as a category,
all of a sudden it's like, oh boy, you're that guy now.
Yeah.
And I don't know if you want to be that guy.
Well, there's definitely some really charged ones,
like alt-right, I think is quite complicated and tough.
I mean, it's not a completely meaningless label,
but boy, I think you really have to pause
before you actually put that label on someone,
partly because now you're putting them in a group of people,
some of them are quite,
you wouldn't want to be grouped with.
So it's, yeah.
Let's go into some,
you mentioned the hot water of the pool
that we're both tipping a toe in.
Do you think Wikipedia has a left-leaning political bias,
which is something it is sometimes accused of?
Yeah, so I don't think so, not broadly.
And I think you can always point to specific entries
and talk about specific biases,
but that's part of the process of Wikipedia.
Anyone can come and challenge and to go on about that.
But I see fairly often on Twitter
some sort of quite extreme accusations of bias.
And I think, actually, I just, I don't see it.
I don't buy that.
And if you ask people for an example,
they normally struggle,
and depending on who they are and what it's about.
So it's certainly true that some people
who have quite fringe viewpoints,
and who knows, the full rush of history in 500 years,
they might be considered to be path-breaking geniuses,
but at the moment, quite fringe views.
And they're just unhappy that Wikipedia
doesn't report on their fringe views as being mainstream.
And that, by the way, goes across all kinds of fields.
I mean, I was once accosted on the street
outside the TED conference in Vancouver
by a guy who's a homeopath who was very upset
that Wikipedia's entry on homeopathy
basically says it's pseudoscience.
And he felt that was biased.
And I said, well, I can't really help you
because we cite good quality sources
to talk about the scientific status, and it's not very good.
It depends, and I think it's something
that we should always be vigilant about.
But in general, I think we're pretty good.
And I think any time you go
to any serious political controversy,
we should have a pretty balanced perspective
on who's saying what, what the views are, and so forth.
I would actually argue that the areas
where we are more likely to have bias
that persists for a long period of time
are actually fairly obscure things,
or maybe fairly nonpolitical things.
I just give, it's kind of a humorous example,
but it's meaningful.
If you read our entries about Japanese anime,
they tend to be very, very positive and very favorable
because almost no one knows about Japanese anime
except for fans.
And so the people who come and spend their days
writing Japanese anime articles, they love it.
They kind of have an inherent love for the whole area.
Now they'll, of course, being human beings,
they'll have their internal debates and disputes
about what's better or not.
But in general, they're quite positive
because nobody actually cares.
On anything that people are quite passionate about,
then hopefully there's quite a lot of interesting stuff.
So I'll give an example, a contemporary example,
where I think we've done a good job
as of my most recent look at it.
And that is the question about the efficacy of masks
during the COVID pandemic.
And that's an area where I would say the public authorities
really kind of jerked us all around a bit.
In the very first days, they said, whatever you do,
don't rush on and buy masks.
And their concern was shortages in hospitals.
Okay, fair enough.
Later, it's like, now everybody's got to wear
a mask everywhere.
It really works really well and it's, you know.
Then now I think it's the evidence is mixed, right?
Masks seem to help, in my personal view,
masks seem to help.
They're no huge burden, you know.
You might as well wear a mask in any environment
where you're with a giant crowd of people and so forth.
But it's very politicized, that one.
And it's very politicized where certainly in the US,
you know, much more so, I mean, I live in the UK,
I live in London.
I've never seen kind of on the streets,
sort of the kind of thing that I,
there's a lot of reports of people actively angry
because someone else is wearing a mask,
that sort of thing in public.
And so, because it became very politicized,
then clearly if Wikipedia, no, so anyway,
if you go to Wikipedia and you research this topic,
I think you'll find more or less what I've just said.
I'm like, actually, after it's all, you know,
to this point in history, it's mixed evidence.
Like masks seem to help, but maybe not as much
as some of the authorities said, and here we are.
And that's kind of an example where I think,
okay, we've done a good job, but I suspect there are people
on both sides of that very emotional debate
who think this is ridiculous.
Hopefully we've got quality sources,
so then hopefully those people who read this can say,
oh, actually, you know, it is complicated.
If you can get to the point of saying,
okay, I have my view, but I understand other views,
and I do think it's a complicated question.
Great, now we're a little bit more mature as a society.
Well, that one is an interesting one,
because I feel like I hope that that article
also contains the meta-conversation
about the politicization of that topic.
To me, it's almost more interesting
than whether masks work or not, at least at this point.
It's like why it became, masks became a symbol
of the oppression of a centralized government
if you wear them.
You're a sheep that follows the mass control,
the mass hysteria of an authoritarian regime,
and if you don't wear a mask,
then you're a science-denier, anti-vaxxer,
a alt-right, probably a Nazi.
Exactly, and that whole politicization of society
is just so damaging.
And I don't know, in the broader world,
how do we start to fix that?
That's a really hard question.
Well, at every moment,
because you mentioned mainstream and fringe,
there seems to be a tension here,
and I wonder what your philosophy is on it,
because there's mainstream ideas and there's fringe ideas.
You look at lab leak theory for this virus,
there could be other things we can discuss
where there's a mainstream narrative,
where if you just look at the percent of the population
or the population with platforms, what they say,
and then what is a small percentage in opposition to that,
and what is Wikipedia's responsibility
to accurately represent both the mainstream
and the fringe, do you think?
Well, I mean, I think we have to try to do our best
to recognize both, but also to appropriately
contextualize, and so this can be quite hard,
particularly when emotions are high.
That's just a fact about human beings.
I'll give a simpler example,
because there's not a lot of emotion around it.
Our entry on the moon doesn't say,
some say the moon's made of rocks, some say cheese.
Who knows?
That kind of false neutrality is not what we want to get to.
Like, that doesn't make any sense, but that one's easy.
Like, we all understand,
I think there is a Wikipedia entry called something like,
the moon is made of cheese, where it talks about,
this is a common sort of joke or thing that children say,
or that people tell to children or whatever.
It's just a thing.
Everybody's heard, moon's made of cheese.
But nobody thinks, wow, like, Wikipedia is so one-sided,
it doesn't even acknowledge the cheese theory.
I'd say the same thing about flat earth, you know?
Again, very-
That's exactly what I'm looking up right now.
Very little controversy.
We will have an entry about flat earth theorizing,
flat earth people.
My personal view is,
most of the people who claim to be flat earthers
are just having a laugh, trolling,
and more power to them, have some fun,
but let's not be, you know, ridiculous.
But then-
Of course, for most of human history,
people believe that the earth is flat,
so the article I'm looking at
is actually kind of focusing on this history.
Flat earth is an archaic and scientifically disproven
conception of the earth's shape as a plane or disc,
meaning ancient cultures subscribe to a flat earth
cosmography, with pretty cool pictures
of what a flat earth would look like,
with dragons, is that a dragon?
No, angels on the edge.
There's a lot of controversy about that,
what is on the edge?
Is it the wall, is it angels, dragons?
Is there a dome?
And how can you fly from South Africa to Perth,
because on a flat earth view,
that's really too far for any plane to make it.
It's all spread out.
What I want to know is what's on the other side, Jimmy?
What's on the other side?
That's what all of us want to know.
Yeah.
So there's some, I presume there's probably a small section
about the conspiracy theory of flat earth,
cos I think there's a sizeable percent of the population
who at least will say they believe in a flat earth.
I think it is a movement that just says
that the mainstream narrative, to have distrust
and skepticism about the mainstream narrative,
which to a very small degree is probably
a very productive thing to do as part
of the scientific process, but you can get
a little silly and ridiculous with it.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's exactly right.
And so I think I find on many, many cases,
and of course I, like anybody else,
might quibble about this or that in any Wikipedia article,
but in general, I think there is a pretty good
sort of willingness and indeed eagerness to say,
oh, let's fairly represent all
of the meaningfully important sides.
So there's still a lot to unpack in that, right?
So meaningfully important.
So, you know, people who are raising questions
about the efficacy of masks, okay,
that's actually a reasonable thing
to have a discussion about, and hopefully we should treat
that as a fair conversation to have
and actually address which authorities have said what
and so on and so forth.
And then, you know, there are other cases
where it's not meaningful opposition, you know?
Like you just wouldn't say if, I mean,
I doubt if the main article, Moon,
it may mention cheese, but probably not even,
because it's not credible and it's not even meant
to be serious by anyone, or the article on the Earth
certainly won't have a paragraph that says,
well, most scientists think it's round,
but certain people think flat.
Like that's just a silly thing to put in that article.
You would want to sort of address, you know,
that's an interesting cultural phenomenon.
You want to put it somewhere.
So this, you know, this goes into all kinds
of things about politics.
You want to be really careful, really thoughtful
about not getting caught up in the anger of our times
and really recognize.
Yes, I always thought, I remember being really kind
of proud of the US at the time when it was,
McCain was running against Obama, because I thought,
I've got plenty of disagreements with both of them,
but they both seem like thoughtful and interesting people
who I would have different disagreements with,
but I always felt like, yeah, like that's good.
Now we can have a debate.
Now we can have an interesting debate,
and it isn't just sort of people slamming each other,
personal attacks, and so forth.
And you're saying Wikipedia also represented that.
I hope so, yeah, and I think so, in the main.
Obviously, you can always find a debate
that went horribly wrong, because there's humans involved.
But speaking of those humans,
I would venture to guess, I don't know the data,
maybe you can let me know,
but the personal political leaning of the group of people
who edit Wikipedia probably leans left, I would guess.
So to me, the question there is,
I mean, the same is true for Silicon Valley.
The task for Silicon Valley is to create platforms
that are not politically biased,
even though there is a bias for the engineers
who create it, and I think,
I believe it's possible to do that.
There's kind of conspiracy theories
that it somehow is impossible,
and there's this whole conspiracy
where the left is controlling it and so on.
I think engineers, for the most part,
want to create platforms that are open and unbiased,
that create all kinds of perspective,
because that's super exciting,
to have all kinds of perspectives, battle it out.
But still, is there a degree
to which the personal political bias of the editors
might seep in, in silly ways and in big ways?
Silly ways could be, I think,
hopefully I'm correct in saying this,
but the right will call it the Democrat Party,
and the left will call it the Democratic Party.
It always hits my ear weird, like, are we children here?
We're literally taking words
and just jabbing at each other,
like, yeah, I could capitalize a thing in a certain way,
or I can just take a word and mess with them.
That's a small way of how you use words,
but you can also have a bigger way about beliefs,
about various perspectives on political events,
on Hunter Biden's laptop,
on how big of a story that is or not,
how big the censorship of that story is or not,
that kind of, and then there's these camps
that take very strong points
and they construct big narratives around that,
and it's a very sizable percent of the population
believes the two narratives that compete with each other.
Yeah, I mean, it's really interesting,
and it feels, it's hard to judge
the sweep of history within your own lifetime,
but it feels like it's gotten much worse,
that this idea of two parallel universes
where people can agree on certain basic facts
feels worse than it used to be,
and I'm not sure if that's true
or if it just feels that way,
but also I'm not sure what the causes are.
I think I would lay a lot of the blame in recent years
on social media algorithms,
which reward clickbait headlines,
which reward tweets that go viral,
and they go viral because they're cute and clever.
I mean, my most successful tweet ever
by a fairly wide margin,
some reporter tweeted at Elon Musk,
because he was complaining about Wikipedia or something,
you should buy Wikipedia, and I just wrote not for sale,
and 90 zillion retweets, and people liked it,
and it was all very good,
but I'm like, you know what?
It's a cute line, and it's a good mic drop and all that,
and I was pleased with myself.
I'm like, it's not really discourse.
It's not really sort of what I like to do,
but it's what social media really rewards,
which is kind of lets you and him have a fight,
and that's more interesting.
I mean, it's funny, because at the time,
I was texting with Elon,
who was very pleasant to me and all of that.
He might've been a little bit shitty.
The reporter might've been a little bit shitty,
but you fed into the shitty with a snarky, funny response,
not for sale, and like, where do you,
so that's a funny little exchange,
and you could probably, after that, laugh it off,
and it's fun, but that kind of mechanism
that rewards the snark can go into viciousness.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, and we certainly see it online.
You know, like a series of tweets,
sort of a tweet thread of 15 tweets
that assesses the quality of the evidence for masks,
pros and cons, and sort of where this,
that's not gonna go viral, you know?
But, you know, a smackdown for a famous politician
who was famously in favor of masks,
who also went to a dinner and didn't wear a mask,
that's gonna go viral, and, you know,
that's partly human nature.
You know, people love to call out hypocrisy and all of that,
but it's partly what these systems elevate automatically.
I talk about this with respect to Facebook, for example.
So, I think Facebook has done a pretty good job,
although it's taken longer than it should in some cases,
but, you know, if you have a very large following
and you're really spouting hatred
or misinformation, disinformation,
they've kicked people off.
They've done, you know, some reasonable things there.
But actually, the deeper issue is,
of this, the anger we're talking about,
of the contentiousness of everything,
I make a family example with two great stereotypes.
So, one, the crackpot racist uncle,
and one, the sweet grandma.
And I always wanna point out,
all of my uncles in my family were wonderful people,
so I didn't have a crackpot racist uncle,
but everybody knows the stereotype.
Grandma, she just posts sweet comments on the kids' pictures
and congratulates people on their wedding anniversary.
And crackpot uncle's posting his nonsense.
And normally, sort of at Christmas dinner,
everybody rolls their eyes.
Oh yeah, Uncle Frank's here.
He's probably gonna say some racist comment
and we're gonna tell him to shut up
or maybe let's not invite him this year.
You know, normal human drama.
He's got his three mates down at the pub
who listen to him and all of that.
But now, grandma's got 54 followers on Facebook,
which is the intimate family,
and racist uncle has 714.
So, he's not a massive influence or whatever,
but how did that happen?
It's because the algorithm notices,
oh, when she posts, nothing happens.
He posts and then everybody jumps in to go,
gosh, shut up, Uncle Frank, that's outrageous.
And it's like, oh, there's engagement,
there's page views, there's ads, right?
And those algorithms,
I think they're working to improve that,
but it's really hard for them.
It's hard to improve that if that actually is working.
If the people who are saying things that get engagement,
if it's not too awful, but it's just, you know,
like maybe it's not a racist uncle,
but maybe it's an uncle who posts a lot
about what an idiot Biden is, right?
Which isn't necessarily an offensive
or blockable or banable thing, and it shouldn't be.
But if that's the discourse that gets elevated
because it gets a rise out of people,
then suddenly in a society, it's like,
oh, this is, we get more of what we reward.
So I think that's a piece of what's gone on.
Well, if we could just take that tangent.
I'm having a conversation
with Mark Zuckerberg a second time.
Is there something you can comment on,
how to decrease toxicity
on that particular platform, Facebook?
You also have worked on creating a social network
that is less toxic yourself.
So can we just talk about the different ideas
that these already big social networks can do
and what you have been trying to do?
So a piece of it is it's hard.
So I don't, the problem with making a recommendation
to Facebook is that I actually believe
their business model makes it really hard for them.
And I'm not anti-capitalism.
I'm not, you know, great.
Somebody's got a business, they're making money.
That's not where I come from.
But certain business models mean you are gonna prioritize
things that maybe aren't that long-term helpful.
So that's a big piece of it.
So certainly for Facebook, you could say, you know,
with vast resources, start to prioritize content
that's higher quality, that's healing, that's kind.
Try not to prioritize content
that seems to be just getting a rise out of people.
Now those are vague human descriptions, right?
But I do believe good machine learning algorithms,
you can optimize in slightly different ways.
But to do that, you may have to say,
actually we're not necessarily gonna increase page views
to the maximum extent right now.
And I've said this to people at Facebook.
It's like, you know, if your actions are, you know,
convincing people that you're breaking Western civilization,
that's really bad for business in the long run.
Certainly these days I'll say Twitter is the thing
that's on people's minds as being more upsetting
at the moment, but I think it's true.
And so one of the things that's really interesting
about Facebook compared to a lot of companies
is that Mark has a pretty unprecedented amount of power.
His ability to name members of the board,
his control of the company is pretty hard to break.
Even if financial results aren't as good as they could be,
because he's taken a step back from the perfect optimization
to say actually for the long-term health
in the next 50 years of this organization,
we need to reign in some of the things
that are working for us and making money
because they're actually giving us a bad reputation.
So one of the recommendations I would say is,
and this is not to do with the algorithms and all that,
but you know, how about just a moratorium
on all political advertising?
I don't think it's their most profitable segment,
but it's given rise to a lot of deep, hard questions
about dark money, about ads that are run
by questionable people that push false narratives,
or the classic kind of thing is you run,
I saw a study about Brexit in the UK
where people were talking about,
there were ads run to animal rights activists
saying finally when we're out from under Europe,
the UK can pass proper animal rights legislation.
We're not constrained by the European process.
Similarly, for people who are advocates of fox hunting
to say finally when we're out of Europe,
we can re-implement, so you're telling people
what they wanna hear, and in some cases,
it's really hard for journalists to see that.
So it used to be that for political advertising,
you really had to do a lot of research
for political advertising.
You really needed to find some kind of mainstream narrative,
and this is still true to an extent,
mainstream narrative that 60% of people can say,
oh, I can buy into that,
which meant it pushed you to the center,
it pushed you to sort of try and find some nuanced balance.
But if your main method of recruiting people
is a tiny little one-on-one conversation with them
because you're able to target using targeted advertising,
suddenly you don't need a consistent,
you just need a really good targeting operation,
really good Cambridge Analytic-style
machine learning algorithm data to convince people.
And that just feels really problematic.
So I mean, until they can think about
how to solve that problem, I would just say,
you know what, it's gonna cost us X amount,
but it's gonna be worth it to kind of say,
you know what, we actually think
our political advertising policy hasn't really helped
contribute to discourse and dialogue
and finding reasoned middle ground and compromised solutions
so let's just not do that for a while
until we figure that out.
So that's maybe a piece of advice I'd give.
And coupled with, as you were saying,
recommender systems for the newsfeed and other contexts
that don't always optimize engagement
but optimize the long-term mental wellbeing
and balance and growth of a human being.
Yeah.
But it's a very difficult problem.
It's a difficult problem, yeah.
And you know, so with WT Social, WikiScreen Social,
we're launching in a few months time
a completely new system, new domain name, new lots of things
but the idea is to say, let's focus on trust.
People can rate each other as trustworthy,
rate content as trustworthy.
You have to start from somewhere,
so it'll start with a core base of our tiny community
who I think are sensible, thoughtful people,
want to recruit more.
But to say, you know what?
Actually, let's have that as a pretty strong element
to say, let's not optimize based on
what gets the most page views in this session.
Let's optimize on what sort of the feedback from people is,
this is meaningfully enhancing my life.
And so part of that is,
and it's probably not a good business model,
but part of that is, okay,
we're not going to pursue an advertising business model
but a membership model where
you don't have to be a member
but you can pay to be a member,
you maybe get some benefit from that.
But in general, to say actually the problem with,
and actually the division I would say is,
and the analogy I would give is,
broadcast television funded by advertising
gives you a different result
than paying for HBO, paying for Netflix, paying for whatever.
And the reason is, if you think about it,
what is your incentive as a TV producer,
you're going to make a comedy for ABC network in the US,
you basically say,
I want something that almost everybody will like
and listen to.
So it tends to be a little blander, family friendly,
whatever.
Whereas if you say, oh, actually,
I'm going to use the HBO example and an old example,
you say, you know what?
Sopranos isn't for everybody.
Sex and the City isn't for everybody.
But between the two shows,
we've got something for everybody
that they're willing to pay for.
So you can get edgier, higher quality in my view content
rather than saying,
it's got to not offend anybody in the world,
it's got to be for everybody, which is really hard.
So same thing here in a social network,
if your business model is advertising,
it's going to drive you in one direction.
If your business model is membership,
I think it drives you in a different direction.
And I said this to Elon about Twitter Blue,
which I think wasn't rolled out well and so forth,
but it's like, hmm,
the piece of that that I like is to say,
look, actually, if there's a model
where your revenue is coming from people
who are willing to pay for the service,
even if it's only part of your revenue,
if it's a substantial part,
that does change your broader incentives to say,
actually, are people going to be willing to pay
for something that's actually just toxicity in their lives?
Now, I'm not sure it's been rolled out well,
I'm not sure how it's going,
and maybe I'm wrong about that as a plausible business model,
but I do think it's interesting to think about,
just in broad terms,
business model drives outcomes in sometimes surprising ways
unless you really pause to think about it.
So if we can just link on Twitter and Elon,
before I would love to talk to you
about the underlying business model, Wikipedia,
which is this brilliant, bold move at the very beginning,
but since you mentioned Twitter, what do you think works?
What do you think is broken about Twitter?
Oof, I mean, it's a long conversation,
but to start with, one of the things that I always say is,
it's a really hard problem.
So I can see that right up front.
I said this about the old ownership of Twitter
and the new ownership of Twitter,
because unlike Wikipedia,
and this is true actually for all social media,
there's a box and the box basically says,
what do you think, what's on your mind?
You can write whatever the hell you want, right?
This is true, by the way, even for YouTube,
I mean, the box is to upload a video,
but again, it's just like an open-ended invitation
to express yourself.
And what makes that hard is some people have a really toxic,
really bad, some people are very aggressive,
they're actually stalking, they're actually abusive,
and suddenly you deal with a lot of problems.
Whereas at Wikipedia, there is no box that says,
what's on your mind?
There's a box that says,
this is an entry about the moon, please be neutral,
please cite your facts.
Then there's a talk page,
which is not coming rant about Donald Trump.
If you go on the talk page of the Donald Trump entry
and you just start ranting about Donald Trump,
people would say, what are you doing?
Like, stop doing that.
Like, we're not here to discuss,
like there's a whole world of the internet out there
for you to go and rant about Donald Trump.
It's just not fun to do on Wikipedia
as somehow it's fun on Twitter.
Well, also on Wikipedia, people are gonna say stop.
And actually, are you here to tell us,
like how can we improve the article
or are you just here to rant about Trump?
Because that's not actually interesting.
So because the goal is different,
so that's just admitting and saying up front,
this is a hard problem.
Certainly, I'm writing a book on trust.
So the idea is, in the last 20 years,
we've lost trust in all kinds of institutions,
in politics, the Edelman Trust Barometer Survey
has been done for a long time.
And trust in politicians, trust in journalism,
it's declined substantially.
And I think, in many cases, deservedly.
So how do we restore trust and how do we think about that?
And does that also include trust in the idea of truth?
Trust in the idea of truth.
Even the concept of facts and truth
is really, really important.
And the idea of uncomfortable truths is really important.
Now, so when we look at Twitter, right,
and we say, we can see it, okay, this is really hard.
So here's my story about Twitter.
It's a two-part story.
And it's all pre-Elon Musk ownership.
So many years back, somebody accused me
of horrible crimes on Twitter.
And I, like anybody would, I was like,
I'm in the public eye, people say bad things,
I don't really, I brush it off, whatever.
But I'm like, this is actually really bad.
Accusing me of pedophilia, that's just not okay.
So I thought, I'm gonna report this.
So I click report and I report the tweet
and there's five others and I go through the process
and then I get an email that says, whatever,
and a couple hours later saying,
thank you for your report, we're looking into this.
Great, okay, good.
Then several hours further, I get an email back saying,
sorry, we don't see anything here
to violate our terms of use.
And I'm like, okay, so I emailed Jack
and I say, Jack, come on, this is ridiculous.
And he emails back roughly saying, yeah, sorry, Jimmy,
don't worry, we'll sort this out.
And I just thought to myself, you know what,
that's not the point, right?
I'm Jimmy Wales, I know Jack Dorsey,
I can email Jack Dorsey, he'll listen to me
because he's got an email from me and sorts it out for me.
What about the teenager who's being bullied
and is getting abuse, right?
And getting accusations that aren't true.
Are they getting the same kind of really poor result
in that case?
So fast forward a few years, same thing happens.
The exact quote always goes, please help me,
I'm only 10 years old and Jimmy Wales raped me last week.
It's like, come on, fuck off, like that's ridiculous.
So I report and I'm like, this time I'm reporting,
but I'm thinking, well, we'll see what happens.
This one gets even worse because then I get a same result,
email back saying, sorry, we don't see any problems.
So I raise it with other members of the board who I know
and Jack and like, this is really ridiculous.
Like this is outrageous.
And some of the board members, friends of mine,
sympathetic and so good for them,
but I actually got an email back then
from the general counsel, head of trust and safety saying,
actually there's nothing in this tweet
that violates our terms of service.
We don't regard and gave reference to the Me Too movement.
If we didn't allow accusations,
the Me Too movement, it's an important thing.
And I was like, you know what?
Actually, if someone says I'm 10 years old
and someone raped me last week,
I think the advice should be,
here's the phone number of the police.
Like you need to get the police involved.
Twitter's not the place for that accusation.
So even back then, by the way,
they did delete those tweets,
but I mean, the rationale they gave was spammy behavior.
So completely separate from abusing me,
it was just like, oh, well they were retweeting too often.
Okay, whatever.
So like that's just broken.
Like that's a system that it's not working
for people in the public eye.
I'm sure it's not working for private people who get abuse.
Really horrible abuse can happen.
So how is that today?
Well, it hasn't happened to me since Elon took over,
but I don't see why it couldn't.
And I suspect now if I send a report and email someone,
there's no one there to email me back
because he's gotten rid of a lot
of the trust and safety staff.
So I suspect that problem is still really hard.
Just content moderation at huge scales.
At huge scales is really something.
And I don't know the full answer to this.
I mean, a piece of it could be, you know,
to say actually making specific allegations of crimes,
this isn't the place to do that.
You know, we've got a huge database.
If you've got an accusation of crime,
here's who you should call.
The police, the FBI, whatever it is.
It's not to be done in public.
And then you do face really complicated questions
about Me Too movement and people coming forward
in public and all of that.
But again, it's like,
probably you should talk to a journalist, right?
Probably there are better avenues than just tweeting
from an account that was created 10 days ago,
obviously set up to abuse someone.
So I think they could do a lot better,
but I also admit it's a hard problem.
And there's also ways to indirectly or more humorously
or more mocking way to make the same kinds of accusations.
In fact, the accusations you mentioned,
if I were to guess, don't go that viral
because they're not funny enough or cutting enough.
But if you make it witty and cutting and meme it somehow,
sometimes actually indirectly making the accusation
versus directly making the accusation,
that can go viral and that can destroy reputations.
And you get to watch yourself.
Just all kinds of narratives take hold.
No, I mean, I remember another case that didn't bother me
because it wasn't of that nature.
But somebody was saying,
I'm sure you're making millions off of Wikipedia.
And I'm like, no, actually I don't even work there.
I have no salary.
And they're like, you're lying.
I'm going to check your 990 form,
which is the US form for tax reporting for charities.
Yeah, here's the link, go read it and you'll see.
I'm listed as a board member and my salary is listed as zero.
So things like that, it's like, okay,
that feels like you're wrong, but I can take that
and we can have that debate quite quickly.
And again, it didn't go viral because it was kind of silly.
And if anything would have gone viral, it was me responding.
But that's one where it's like, actually,
I'm happy to respond because a lot of people don't know
that I don't work there and that I don't make millions
and I'm not a billionaire.
Well, they must know that
because it's in most news media about me.
But the other one I didn't respond to publicly
because it's like Barbra Streisand effect.
It's like sometimes calling attention
to someone who's abusing you who basically has no followers
and so on is just a waste.
And everything you're describing now is just something
that all of us have to kind of learn.
Because everybody's in the public eye.
I think when you have just two followers
and you get bullied by one of the followers,
it hurts just as much as when you have a large number.
So it's not your situation I think is echoed
in the situations of millions of other,
especially teenagers and kids and so on.
Yeah, I mean, it's actually an example.
So we don't generally use my picture
and the banners anymore on Wikipedia, but we did.
And then we did an experiment one year
where we tried other people's pictures.
So one of our developers and one guy, lovely,
very sweet guy, and he doesn't look like
your immediate thought of a nerdy Silicon Valley developer.
He looks like a heavy metal dude because he's cool.
And so suddenly here he is with long hair and tattoos
and there's his sort of say,
here's what your money goes for.
Here's my letter asking for support.
He got massive abuse from Wikipedia,
calling him creepy and really massive.
And this was being shown to 80 million people a day.
His picture, not the abuse,
the abuse was elsewhere on the internet.
And he was bothered by it.
And I thought, you know what, there is a difference.
I actually am in the public eye.
I get huge benefits from being in the public eye.
I go around and make public speeches.
Any random thing I think of I can write
and get it published in the New York Times
and have this interesting life.
He's not a public figure.
And so actually he wasn't mad at us.
He wasn't mad, it was just like, yeah,
actually suddenly being thrust in the public eye
and you get suddenly lots of abuse,
which normally think, you know,
if you're a teenager and somebody in your class
is abusing you, it's not gonna go viral.
So you're only gonna, it's gonna be hurtful
because it's local and it's your classmates or whatever.
But when sort of ordinary people go viral
in some abusive way, it's really, really quite tragic.
I don't know, even at a small scale, it feels viral.
When five people, five people at your school
and there's a rumor and there's this feeling
like you're surrounded and nobody,
and the feeling of loneliness, I think,
which you're speaking to when you don't have a plat,
when you at least feel like you don't have a platform
to defend yourself and then this powerlessness
that I think a lot of teenagers definitely feel
and a lot of people.
I think you're right.
And that, I think even when just like two people
make up stuff about you or lie about you
or say mean things about you or bully you,
that can feel like a crowd.
Like that's a, and it's a, I mean,
whatever that is in our genetics and our biology
and the way our brain works,
that just can be a terrifying experience.
And somehow to correct that, I mean, I think,
because everybody feels the pain of that.
Everybody suffers the pain of that.
I think we'll be forced to fix that as a society
to figure out a way around that.
I think it's really hard to fix
because I don't think that problem isn't necessarily new.
Someone in high school who writes graffiti
that says Becky is a slut and spreads a rumor
about what Becky did last weekend,
that's always been damaging.
It's always been hurtful and it's really hard.
Those kinds of attacks are as old as time itself.
They precede the internet.
Now, what do you think about this technology
that feels Wikipedia-like,
which is Community Notes on Twitter?
Do you like it?
Pros and cons?
Do you think it's scalable?
I do like it.
I don't know enough about specifically how it's implemented
to really have a very deep view,
but I do think it's quite, the uses I've seen of it,
I've found quite good and in some cases changed my mind.
It's like I see something and of course,
the sort of human tendency is to retweet something
that you hope is true or that you are afraid is true.
It's like that kind of quick mental action.
And then I saw something that I liked and I agreed with
and then a Community Note under it that made me think,
oh, actually, this is a more nuanced issue.
So I like that.
I think that's really important.
Now, how is it specifically implemented?
Is it scalable?
I don't really know how they've done it,
so I can't really comment on that.
But in general, I do think when you're only mechanisms
on Twitter, and you're a big Twitter user,
we know the platform and you've got plenty of followers
and all of that, the only mechanisms are retweeting,
replying, blocking.
It's a pretty limited scope and it's kind of good
if there's a way to elevate a specific thoughtful response.
And it kind of goes to, again,
does the algorithm just pick the retweet or the,
I mean, retweeting, it's not even the algorithm
that makes it viral.
Like if Paulo Coelho, very famous author,
I think he's got like, I don't know, I haven't looked lately.
He used to have eight million Twitter followers.
I think I looked, he's got 16 million now or whatever.
Well, if he retweets something, it's gonna get seen a lot.
Or Elon Musk, if he retweets something,
it's gonna get seen a lot.
That's not an algorithm,
that's just the way the platform works.
So it is kind of nice if you have something else.
And how that something else is designed,
that's obviously a complicated question.
Well, there's this interesting thing that
I think Twitter is doing,
but I know Facebook is doing for sure,
which is really interesting.
So you have, what are the signals
that a human can provide at scale?
Like in Twitter's retweet, in Facebook,
I think you can share.
I think, yeah, but there's basic interactions.
You can have comments and so on.
But there's also in Facebook, and YouTube has this too,
is would you like to see more of this
or would you like to see less of this?
They post that sometimes.
And the thing that the neural net
that's learning from that has to figure out
is the intent behind you saying, I wanna see less of this.
Did you see too much of this content already?
You like it, but you don't wanna see so much of it.
You already figured it out, great, great.
Or does this content not make you feel good?
There's so many interpretations
that I'd like to see less of this.
But if you get that kind of signal,
this actually can create a really powerfully curated
list of content that is fed to you every day.
That doesn't create an echo chamber or a silo.
It actually just makes you feel good in a good way,
which is like it challenges you, but it doesn't exhaust you
and make you kind of this weird animal.
I've been saying for a long time,
if I went on Facebook one morning and they said,
oh, we're testing a new option,
rather than showing you things we think you're going to like,
we wanna show you some things
that we think you will disagree with,
but which we have some signals that suggests it's of quality.
I'm like, now that sounds interesting.
Yeah, that sounds really interesting.
I wanna see something where like, oh, I don't agree with.
So Larry Lessig is a good friend of mine,
founder of Creative Commons,
and he's moved on to doing stuff about corruption
and politics and so on.
And I don't always agree with Larry,
but I always grapple with Larry
because he's so interesting and he's so thoughtful
that even when we don't agree, I'm like,
actually, I wanna hear him out, right?
Because I'm gonna learn from it.
And that doesn't mean I always come around
to agree with him,
but I'm gonna understand the perspective of it.
And that's really a great feeling.
Yeah, there's this interesting thing on social media
where people kind of accuse others of saying,
well, you don't wanna hear opinions
that you disagree with or ideas you disagree with.
I think this is something that's thrown at me all the time.
The reality is there's literally
almost nothing I enjoy more.
It's an odd thing to accuse you of
because you have quite a wide range of long conversations
with a very diverse bunch of people.
But there is a very,
there is like a very harsh drop-off
because what I like is high quality disagreement
that really makes you think.
And at a certain point, there's a threshold,
it's kind of a gray area
when the quality of the disagreement,
it just sounds like mocking
and you're not really interested
in a deep understanding of the topic
or you yourself don't seem to carry
deep understanding of the topic.
There's something called intelligence-squared debates.
The main one is the British version.
With the British accent, everything always sounds better.
And the Brits seem to argue more intensely,
like they're invigorated, they're energized by the debate.
Those people, I often disagree
with basically everybody involved and it's so fun.
I learned something.
That's high quality.
If we could do that,
if there's some way for me to click a button that says
filter out lower quality, just today,
just sometimes show it to me
because I want to be able to,
but today I'm just not in the mood for the mockery.
Just high quality stuff, even flatter.
I want to get high quality arguments for the flat earth.
It would make me feel good because I'll see,
oh, that's really interesting.
Like I never really thought in my mind
to challenge the mainstream narrative
of general relativity, of a perception of physics.
Maybe all of reality,
maybe all of space-time is an illusion.
That's really interesting.
I never really thought about, let me consider that fully.
Okay, what's the evidence?
How do you test that?
What are the alternatives?
How would you be able to have such consistent perception
of a physical reality if all of it is an illusion?
All of us seem to share
the same kind of perception of reality.
Like that's the kind of stuff I love,
but not like the mockery of it that it seems
that social media can kind of inspire.
Yeah, I talk sometimes about how people assume
that the big debates in Wikipedia
or the sort of arguments
are between the party of the left
and the party of the right.
And I say, no, it's actually the party of the kind
and thoughtful and the party of the jerks is really it.
Left and right, yeah, bring me somebody
I disagree with politically,
as long as they're thoughtful, kind.
We're gonna have a real discussion.
I give an example of our article on abortion.
So, if you can bring together
a kind and thoughtful Catholic priest
and a kind and thoughtful Planned Parenthood activist,
and they're gonna work together on the article on abortion,
that can be a really great thing
if they're both kind and thoughtful.
Like that's the important part.
They're never gonna agree on the topic,
but they will understand, okay,
like Wikipedia is not gonna take a side,
but Wikipedia is gonna explain what the debate is about
and we're gonna try to characterize it fairly.
And it turns out like your kind and thoughtful people,
even if they're quite ideological,
like a Catholic priest is generally gonna be
quite ideological on the subject of abortion,
but they can grapple with ideas and they can discuss
and they may feel very proud of the entry
at the end of the day,
not because they suppress the other side's views,
but because they think the case has been stated very well
that other people can come to understand it.
And if you're highly ideological,
you assume, I think naturally,
if people understood as much about this as I do,
they'll probably agree with me.
You may be wrong about that, but that's often the case.
So, that's what I think we need to encourage more of
in society generally is grappling with ideas
in a really thoughtful way.
So, is it possible if the majority of volunteers,
editors of Wikipedia, really dislike Donald Trump,
are they still able to write an article
that empathizes with the perspective of,
for a time at least, a very large percentage
of the United States that were supporters of Donald Trump
and to have a full, broad representation
of him as a human being, him as a political leader,
him as a set of policies promised and implemented,
all that kind of stuff?
Yeah, I think so.
And I think if you read the article, it's pretty good.
And I think a piece of that is within our community,
if people have the self-awareness to understand,
so I personally wouldn't go and edit the entry
on Donald Trump.
I get emotional about it and I'm like,
I'm not good at this.
And if I tried to do it, I would fail.
I wouldn't be a good Wikipedian.
So, it's better if I just step back and let people
who are more dispassionate on this topic edit it,
whereas there are other topics that are incredibly emotional
to some people where I can actually do quite well.
Like, I'm gonna be okay.
Maybe, we were discussing earlier the efficacy of masks.
I'm like, oh, I think that's an interesting problem
and I don't know the answer, but I can help kind of catalog
what's the best evidence and so on.
I'm not gonna get upset.
I'm not gonna get angry.
I'm able to be a good Wikipedian.
So, I think that's important.
And I do think, though, in a related framework,
that the composition of the community is really important,
not because Wikipedia is or should be a battleground,
but because blind spots.
Maybe I don't even realize what's biased.
If I'm particularly of a certain point of view
and I've never thought much about it.
So, one of the things we focus on a lot,
the Wikipedia volunteers are,
we don't know the exact number,
but let's say 80% plus male.
And they're of a certain demographic.
They tend to be college-educated, heavier on tech geeks
than not, et cetera, et cetera.
So, there is a demographic to the community
and that's pretty much global.
I mean, somebody said to me once,
why is it only white men who edit Wikipedia?
And I said, we've obviously not met
the Japanese Wikipedia community.
It's kind of a joke
because the broader principle still stands.
Who edits Japanese Wikipedia?
A bunch of geeky men, right?
And women as well.
So, we do have women in the community
and that's very important.
But we do think, okay, you know what?
That does lead to some problems.
It leads to some content issues
simply because people write more about what they know
and what they're interested in.
They'll tend to be dismissive of things
as being unimportant if it's not something
that they personally have an interest in.
I like the example as a parent.
I would say our entries on early childhood development
probably aren't as good as they should be
because a lot of the Wikipedia volunteers,
actually, we're getting older, the Wikipedians,
so the demographic has changed a bit.
But it's like if you've got a bunch of 25-year-old
tech geek dudes who don't have kids,
they're just not gonna be interested
in early childhood development.
And if they tried to write about it,
they probably wouldn't do a good job
because they don't know anything about it.
And somebody did a look at our entries on novelists
who've won a major literary prize.
And they looked at the male novelists versus the female.
And the male novelists had longer
and higher quality entries.
And why is that?
Well, it's not because,
because I know hundreds of Wikipedians,
it's not because these are a bunch of biased, sexist men
who are like, books by women are not important.
It's like, no, actually,
there is a gender kind of breakdown of readership.
There are books, like hard science fiction's
a classic example, hard science fiction, mostly read by men.
Other types of novels, more read by women.
And if we don't have women in the community,
then these award-winning clearly important novelists
may have less coverage.
And not because anybody consciously thinks,
oh, we don't like what a book by Maya Angelou,
like who cares?
She's a poet.
Like, that's not interesting.
No, but just because people write what they know,
they write what they're interested in.
So we do think diversity in the community
is really important.
And that's one area where I do think it's really clear.
But I can also say, you know what?
Actually, that also applies in the political sphere.
To say, actually,
we do want kind and thoughtful Catholic priests,
kind and thoughtful conservatives,
kind and thoughtful libertarians,
kind and thoughtful Marxists to come in.
But the key is the kind and thoughtful piece.
So when people sometimes come to Wikipedia,
outraged by some dramatic thing that's happened on Twitter,
they come to Wikipedia with a chip on their shoulder,
ready to do battle, and it just doesn't work out very well.
And there's tribes in general where
I think there's a responsibility on the larger group
to be even kinder and more welcoming to the smaller group.
Yeah, we think that's really important.
And so, oftentimes, people come in,
and there's a lot, when I talk about community health,
one of the aspects of that that we do think about a lot,
that I think about a lot, is not about politics.
It's just like, how are we treating newcomers
to the community?
And so, I can tell you what our ideals are,
what our philosophy is, but do we live up to that?
So the ideal is, you come to Wikipedia,
we have rules, like one of our fundamental rules
is ignore all rules, which is partly written that way
because it kind of piques people's attention,
like, what the hell kind of rule is that?
But basically says, look, don't get nervous and depressed
about a bunch of, what's the formatting of your footnote?
So you shouldn't come to Wikipedia, add a link,
and then get banned or yelled at
because it's not the right format.
Instead, somebody should go, oh, hey,
yeah, thanks for helping, but here's the link
to how to format, if you want to keep going,
you might want to learn how to format a footnote.
And to be friendly and to be open and to say,
oh, you're new and you clearly don't know
everything about Wikipedia.
And sometimes, in any community, that can be quite hard.
So people come in and they've got a great big idea
and they're gonna propose this to the Wikipedia community
and they have no idea.
That's basically a perennial discussion
we've had 7,000 times before.
And so then, ideally, you would say to the person,
oh, yeah, great, thanks, a lot of people have,
and here's where we got to,
and here's the nuanced conversation we've had
about that in the past that I think you'll find interesting.
And sometimes people are just like, oh, God, another one
who's come in with this idea which doesn't work
and they don't understand why.
You can lose patience, but you shouldn't.
And that's kind of human.
But I think it just does require really thinking
in a self-aware manner of like, oh, I was once a newbie.
Actually, we do have, we have a great,
I just did an interview with Emily Templewood,
she was Wikipeane of the Year,
but she's just like a great, well-known Wikipeane,
and I interviewed her for my book,
and she told me something I never knew.
Apparently, it's not a secret.
She didn't reveal it to me,
but is that when she started at Wikipedia, she was a vandal.
She came in and vandalized Wikipedia,
and then basically what happened was
she'd done some sort of, vandalized a couple of articles,
and then somebody popped up on her talk page and said,
hey, why are you doing this?
We're trying to make an encyclopedia here,
and this wasn't very kind, and she felt so bad.
She's like, oh, right, I didn't really think of it that way.
She just was coming in as, she was like 13 years old,
combative and having fun and trolling a bit,
and then she's like, oh, actually, oh, I see your point,
and became a great Wikipeane.
So that's the ideal, really,
is that you don't just go, troll, block, fuck off.
You go, hey, you know, like, what gives?
Which is, I think, the way we tend to treat things
in real life, you know, if you've got somebody
who's doing something obnoxious in your friend group,
you probably go, hey, like, really,
I don't know if you've noticed,
but I think this person is actually quite hurt
that you keep making that joke about them,
and then they usually go, oh, you know what,
I didn't, I thought that was okay, I didn't,
and then they stop, or they keep it up,
and then everybody goes, oh, well, you're the asshole.
Well, yeah, I mean, that's just an example
that gives me faith in humanity,
that we're all capable in wanting to be kind to each other.
And in general, the fact that there's a small group
of volunteers that are able to contribute so much
to the organization, the collection,
the discussion of all of human knowledge,
it makes me so grateful to be part
of this whole human project.
That's one of the reasons I love Wikipedia,
is it gives me faith in humanity.
No, I once was at,
Wikimedia's our annual conference,
and people come from all around the world,
really active volunteers, and I was at the dinner,
we were in Egypt, at Wikimedia in Alexandria,
at the sort of closing dinner or whatever,
and a friend of mine came and sat at the table,
and she's sort of been in the movement more broadly,
Creative Commons, she's not really a Wikipedian,
she'd come to the conference
because she's into Creative Commons and all that.
So we have dinner, and it just turned out,
I sat down at the table with most of the members
of the English Language Arbitration Committee,
and there are a bunch of very sweet geeky Wikipedians,
and as we left the table, I said to her,
it's really like, I still find this kind of sense
of amazement, like we just had dinner
with some of the most powerful people
in English language media,
because they're the people who are like
the final court of appeal in English Wikipedia,
and thank goodness they're not media moguls, right?
They're just a bunch of geeks,
who are just like well-liked in the community
because they're kind and they're thoughtful,
and they really sort of think about things.
I was like, this is great, love Wikipedia.
It's like, to the degree that geeks
run the best aspect of human civilization brings me joy,
in all aspects, and this is true in programming,
like Linux, like programmers,
in all, like people that kind of specialize in a thing,
and they don't really get caught up
into the mess of the bickering of society.
They just kind of do their thing,
and they value the craftsmanship of it,
the competence of it.
If you've never heard of this or looked into it,
you'll enjoy it.
I read something recently that I didn't even know about,
but like the fundamental like time zones,
and they change from time to time.
Sometimes a country will pass daylight savings
or move it by a week, whatever.
There's a file that's on all sort of Unix-based computers,
and basically all computers end up using this file.
It's the official time zone file, but why is it official?
It's just this one guy.
It's like this guy and a group, a community around him,
and basically something weird happened,
and it broke something because he was on vacation.
And I'm just like, isn't that wild, right?
That you would think, I mean, first of all,
most people never even think about like,
how do computers know about time zones?
Well, they know, because they just use this file,
which tells all the time zones
and which dates they change and all of that.
But there's this one guy, and he doesn't get paid for it.
It's just, he's like,
with all the billions of people on the planet,
he sort of put his hand up and goes,
yo, I'll take care of the time zones.
And there's a lot, a lot, a lot of programmers
listening to this right now with PTSD about time zones.
And then there, I mean, there's on top of this one guy,
there's other libraries,
the different programming languages
that help manage the time zones for you.
But still, there's just within those,
it's amazing, just the packages, the libraries,
how few people build them out of their own love
for building, for creating, for community and all of that.
It's, I almost like don't want to interfere
with the natural habitat of the geek.
Like when you spot them in the wild,
you just want to be like, well, careful.
That thing needs to be treasured.
I met a guy many years ago, lovely, really sweet guy.
And he was running a bot on English Wikipedia
that I thought, wow, that's actually super clever.
And what he had done is, his bot was like spell checking,
but rather than simple spell checking,
what he had done is create a database
of words that are commonly mistaken for other words.
They're spelled wrong, so I can't even give an example.
And so the word is, people often spell it wrong,
but no spell checker catches it because it is another word.
And so what he did is he wrote a bot
that looks for these words
and then checks the sentence around it for certain keywords.
So in some context, this isn't correct, but buoy and boy.
People sometimes type B-O-U-Y when they mean B-O-U-Y.
So if he sees the word boy, B-O-Y in an article,
he would look in the context and see,
is this a nautical reference?
And if it was, he didn't autocorrect,
he just would flag it up to himself to go,
oh, check this one out.
And that's not a great example,
but he had thousands of examples.
I was like, that's amazing.
Like I would have never thought to do that.
And I'm glad that somebody did.
And that's also part of the openness of the system.
And also I think being a charity,
being this idea of like actually,
this is a gift to the world that makes someone go,
oh, oh, well, I'll put my hand up.
I see a little piece of things that I can make better
because I'm a good programmer
and I can write this script to do this thing
and I'll find it fun.
Amazing.
Well, I got to ask about this big,
bold decision at the very beginning
to not do advertisements on the website.
And just in general,
the philosophy of the business model, Wikipedia,
what went behind that?
Yeah, so I think most people know this,
but we're a charity.
So in the US, registered as a charity
and we don't have any ads on the site.
And the vast majority of the money is from donations,
but the vast majority from small donors.
So people giving 25 bucks or whatever.
If you're listening to this, go donate.
Donate now.
I've donated so many times.
And we have millions of donors every year,
but it's like a small percentage of people.
I would say in the early days,
a big part of it was aesthetic almost
as much as anything else.
It was just like, I just think,
I don't really want ads on Wikipedia.
Like, I just think it would be,
there's a lot of reasons why it might not be good.
And even back then,
I didn't think as much as I have since
about a business model can tend to drive you
in a certain place.
And really thinking that through in advance
is really important because you might say,
yeah, we're really, really keen on community control
and neutrality.
But if we had an advertising-based business model,
probably that would begin to erode.
Even if I believe in it very strongly,
organizations tend to follow the money
in the DNA in the long run.
And so things like,
I mean, it's easy to think about
some of the immediate problems.
So like, if you go to read about,
I don't know,
Nissan car company.
And if you saw an ad for the new Nissan
at the top of the page, you might be like,
did they pay for this?
Or like, do the advertisers have influence over the content?
Because you kind of wonder about that
for all kinds of media.
And that undermines trust.
Undermines trust, right?
But also things like,
we don't have clickbait headlines in Wikipedia.
You've never seen Wikipedia entries
with all this kind of listicles,
sort of the 10 funniest cat pictures,
number seven will make you cry.
None of that kind of stuff,
because there's no incentive, no reasons to do that.
Also, there's no reason to have an algorithm to say,
actually, we're gonna use our algorithm
to drive you to stay on the website longer.
We're gonna use the algorithm to drive you to,
you know, it's like, oh, you're reading about
Queen Victoria.
There's nothing to sell you
when you're reading about Queen Victoria.
Let's move you on to Las Vegas,
because actually the ad revenue around hotels
in Las Vegas is quite good.
So we don't have that sort of,
there's no incentive for the organization to go,
oh, let's move people around to things
that have better ad revenue.
Instead, it's just like,
oh, well, what's most interesting to the community,
just to make those links.
That decision just seemed obvious to me,
but as I say, it was less of a business decision
and more of an aesthetic.
It's like, oh, this is how I like Wikipedia,
it doesn't have ads.
Don't really want, you know, in these early days,
a lot of the ads, that was well before the era
of really quality ad targeting and all that.
So you got a lot of banners,
punch the monkey ads and all that kind of nonsense.
And so, you know, but there was no guarantee.
There was no, it was not really clear
how could we fund this, you know?
Like it was pretty cheap,
it still is quite cheap compared to, you know,
most, you know, we don't have 100,000 employees
and all of that,
but would we be able to raise money through donations?
And so I remember the first time that we did,
like really did a donation campaign
was on a Christmas day in 2003, I think it was,
there was,
we had three servers, database servers
and two front end servers,
and they were all the same size or whatever.
And two of them crashed, they broke.
Like I don't even know, remember now, like the hard drive,
that was like, it's Christmas day.
So I scrambled on Christmas day
to sort of go onto the database server,
which fortunately survived
and have it become a front end server as well.
And then the site was really slow
and it wasn't working very well.
And I was like, okay, it's time, we need to do a fundraiser.
And so I was hoping to raise $20,000 in a month's time,
but we raised nearly 30,000 within two, three weeks time.
So that was the first proof point of like,
oh, like we put a banner up and people will donate.
Like we just explained we need the money
and people are like, already,
we were very small back then and people were like, oh yeah,
like, I love this, I wanna contribute.
Then over the years, we've become more sophisticated
about the fundraising campaigns
and we've tested a lot of different messaging and so forth.
What we used to think, I remember one year,
we really went heavy with, we have great ambitions to,
the idea of Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia
for every single person on the planet.
So what about the languages of Sub-Saharan Africa?
So I thought, okay, we're trying to raise money,
we need to talk about that,
because it's really important and near and dear to my heart.
And just instinctively knowing nothing
about charity fundraising, you see it all around,
it's like, oh, charities always mention
like the poor people they're helping.
So let's talk about that, didn't really work as well.
The pitch that, like this is very vague
and very sort of broad, but the pitch that works better
than any other in general is a fairness pitch
of like, you use it all the time,
you should probably chip in.
And most people are like, yeah, you know what?
My life would suck without Wikipedia, I use it constantly
and whatever, I should chip in.
Like, it just seems like the right thing to do.
And that, and there's many variants on that, obviously.
And that's really, it works.
And like, people are like, oh yeah, like Wikipedia,
I love Wikipedia and I shouldn't.
And so sometimes people say, you know,
why are you always begging for money on the website?
And, you know, I say, it's not that often,
it's not that much, but it does happen.
They're like, why don't you just get Google
and Facebook and Microsoft, why don't they pay for it?
And I'm like, I don't think that's really the right answer.
Because influence starts to creep in.
Influence starts to creep in and questions start to creep in.
Like the best funding for Wikipedia
is the small donors.
We also have major donors, right?
We have high net worth people who donate,
but we always are very careful about that sort of thing
to say, wow, that's really great and really important,
but we can't let that become influence
because that would just be really quite, yeah,
not good for Wikipedia.
I would love to know how many times I've visited Wikipedia,
how much time I've spent on it,
because I have a general sense
that it's the most useful site I've ever used
competing maybe with Google search,
which ultimately lands on Wikipedia.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But if I were just reminded of like,
hey, remember all those times
your life was made better because of the site?
I think I would be much more like, yeah,
why did I waste money on site XYZ
when I could be like, I should be giving a lot here?
Well, the Guardian newspaper has a similar model,
which is they have ads,
but they also, there's no paywall,
but they just encourage people to donate.
And they do that.
Like I've sometimes seen a banner saying,
oh, this is your 134th article you've read this year.
Would you like to donate?
And I think that's, I think it's effective.
I mean, they're testing,
but also I wonder just for some people,
if they just don't feel like guilty and then think,
well, I shouldn't bother them so much.
I don't know.
It's a good question.
I don't know the answer.
I guess that's the thing I could also turn on
because that'll make me happy.
I feel like legitimately there's some sites
and speaks to our social media discussion.
Wikipedia unquestionably makes me feel better about myself
if I spend time on it.
Like there's some websites where I'm like,
if I spend time on Twitter, sometimes I'm like, I regret.
There's a, I think Elon talks about this,
minimize the number of regretted minutes.
Yeah.
My number of regretted minutes on Wikipedia is like zero.
I don't remember a time.
I've just discovered this.
I started following on Instagram, a page depth of Wikipedia.
Oh yeah.
There's like crazy Wikipedia page.
There's no Wikipedia page.
Yeah, I gave her a media contributor of the year award
this year, cause she's so great.
Depth of Wikipedia is so fun.
So I, yeah, so that's the kind of interesting point
that I don't even know if there's a competitor there.
There may be this sort of programming stack overflow
type of websites, but everything else,
there's always a trade off.
There's a big, it's probably because of the ad driven model
because there's an incentive to pull you into clickbait.
Yeah.
And Wikipedia has no clickbait.
It's all about the quality of the knowledge
and the wisdom and so on.
Yeah, that's right.
And I also like Stack Overflow, although I wonder,
I wonder what you think of this.
I've, so I only program for fun as a hobby
and I don't have enough time to do it, but I do.
And I'm not very good at it.
So therefore I end up on Stack Overflow quite a lot,
trying to figure out what's gone wrong.
And I have really transitioned to using a chat GBT
much more for that because I can often find
the answer clearly explained and it just,
it works better than sifting through threads.
And I kind of feel bad about that because I do love
Stack Overflow and their community.
I mean, I'm assuming, I haven't read anything about,
in the news about it.
I'm assuming they are keenly aware of this
and they're thinking about how can we sort of use
this chunk of knowledge that we've got here
and provide a new type of interface where you can query it
with a question and actually get an answer
that's based on the answers that we've had.
I don't know.
And I think Stack Overflow currently has policies
against using GBT.
Like there's a contentious kind of tension.
Of course, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But they're trying to figure that out.
And so we are similar in that regard.
Like obviously all the things we've talked about,
like chat GBT makes stuff up and it makes up references.
So our community has already put into place
some policies about it, but roughly speaking,
there's always more nuance, but roughly speaking,
it's sort of like you, the human are responsible
for what you put into Wikipedia.
So if you use chat GBT, you better check it.
There's a lot of great use cases of, you know, like,
oh, well, I'm not a native speaker of German
by kind of a pretty good, I'm not talking about myself,
a hypothetical meet, it's pretty good.
And I kind of just want to run my edit through chat GBT
in German to go make sure my grammar is okay.
That's actually cool.
Does it make you sad that people might use,
increasingly use chat GBT for something
where they would previously use Wikipedia?
So basically use it to answer basic questions
about the Eiffel Tower where the answer really comes
at the source of it from Wikipedia,
but they're using this as an interface.
Yeah, no, no, that's completely fine.
I mean, part of it is our ethos has always been,
here's our gift to the world, make something.
So if the knowledge is more accessible to people,
even if they're not coming through us, that's fine.
Now, obviously we do have certain business model concerns,
right, like if, and we've talked where we've had
more conversation about this, this whole GBT thing is new.
Things like if you ask Alexa, you know,
what is the Eiffel Tower?
And she reads you the first two sentences from Wikipedia
and doesn't say it's from Wikipedia.
And they've recently started citing Wikipedia.
Then we worry like, oh, if people don't know
they're getting the knowledge from us,
are they going to donate money?
Or are they just thinking, oh, what's Wikipedia for?
I can just ask Alexa.
It's like, well, Alexa only knows anything
because she read Wikipedia.
So we do think about that, but it doesn't bother me
in the sense of like, oh, I want people
to always come to Wikipedia first.
But we're also, you know, had a great demo,
like literally just hacked together over a weekend
by our head of machine learning,
where he did this little thing to say,
you could ask any question.
And he was just knocking it together.
So he used the OpenAI's API just to make a demo.
Asked a question, why do ducks fly south for winter?
Which is the kind of thing you think,
oh, I might just Google for that.
I might start looking in Wikipedia, I don't know.
And so what he does, he asks ChatGPD,
what are some Wikipedia entries that might answer this?
Then he grabbed those Wikipedia entries,
said here's some Wikipedia entries,
answer this question based only on the information in this.
And he had pretty good results,
and it kind of prevented them making stuff up.
It's just he hacked together a weekend,
but what it made me think about was,
oh, okay, so now we've got this huge body of knowledge
that in many cases, you're like,
oh, I'm really, I wanna know about Queen Victoria,
I'm just gonna go read the Wikipedia entry,
and it's gonna take me through her life and so forth.
But other times you've got a specific question,
and maybe we could have a better search experience
where you can come to Wikipedia,
ask your specific question, get your specific answer
that's from Wikipedia, including links
to the articles you might wanna read next.
And that's just a step forward.
That's just using a new type of technology
to make the extraction of information
from this body of text into my brain faster and easier.
So I think that's kind of cool.
I would love to see a ChatGPD grounding
into websites like Wikipedia,
and the other comparable website to me
will be Wolfram Alpha for more mathematical knowledge,
that kind of stuff.
So grounding, taking you to a page that is really crafted,
as opposed to, the moment you start actually
taking you to journalist websites, news websites,
it starts getting a little iffy.
It starts getting a little,
because you're now in a land that has a wrong incentive.
Right, yeah, and you need somebody
to have filtered through that
and tried to knock off the rough edges, yeah.
No, it's very, I think that's exactly right.
And I think that kind of grounding is,
I think they're working really hard on it.
I think that's really important.
And that actually, so if you ask me to step back
and be very business-like about our business model
and where's it gonna go for us,
and are we gonna lose half our donations
because everybody's just gonna stop coming to Weeped
and go to ChatGBT.
I think grounding will help a lot
because frankly, most questions people have,
if they provide proper links,
we're gonna be at the top of that,
just like we are in Google.
So we're still gonna get tons of recognition
and tons of traffic, just from,
even if it's just the moral properness of saying,
here's my source.
So I think we're gonna be all right in that.
Yeah, and the close partnership of if the model is fine-tuned
is constantly retrained,
that Wikipedia is one of the primary places
where if you want to change what the model knows,
one of the things you should do is contribute to a Wikipedia
or clarify Wikipedia or elaborate, expand,
all that kind of stuff.
You mentioned all of us have controversies.
I have to ask, do you find the controversy
of whether you are the sole founder
or the co-founder of Wikipedia ironic,
absurd, interesting, important?
What are your comments?
I would say unimportant, not that interesting.
I mean, one of the things that people
are sometimes surprised to hear me say is,
I actually think Larry Sanger doesn't get enough credit
for his early work in Wikipedia,
even though I think co-founder's
not the right title for that.
So he had a lot of impact and a lot of great work,
and I disagree with him about a lot of things since
and all that, and that's fine.
So yeah, no, to me that's like,
it's one of these things that the media love
a falling out story, so they want to make a big deal
out of it, and I'm just like, yeah, no.
So there's a lot of interesting engineering contributions
in the early days, like you were saying,
there's debates about how to structure it,
what the heck is this thing that we're doing,
and there's important people that contributed to that.
Yeah, definitely.
So he also, you said you had some disagreements.
Larry Sanger said that nobody should trust
Wikipedia, and that Wikipedia seems to assume
that there's only one legitimate defensible version
of the truth on any controversial question.
That's not how Wikipedia used to be.
I presume you disagree with that analysis.
Yeah, I mean, just straight up, I disagree.
Go and read any Wikipedia entry on a controversial topic,
and what you'll see is a really diligent effort
to explain all the relevant sides.
So yeah, just disagree.
So on controversial questions,
you think perspectives are generally represented?
Because it has to do with kind of the tension
between the mainstream and the non-mainstream
that we were talking about.
Yeah, no, I mean, for sure.
Like, to take this area of discussion seriously
is to say, yeah, you know what,
actually that is a big part of what Wikipedians
spend their time grappling with,
is to say, you know, how do we figure out
whether a less popular view is pseudoscience?
Is it just a less popular view
that's gaining acceptance in the mainstream?
Is it fringe versus crackpot, et cetera, et cetera?
And that debate is what you've gotta do.
There's no choice about having that debate,
of grappling with something.
And I think we do, and I think that's really important.
And I think if anybody said to the Wikipedia community,
gee, you should stop sort of covering minority viewpoints
on this issue, I think they would say,
I don't even understand why you would say that.
Like, we have to sort of grapple with minority viewpoints
in science, in politics, and so on.
But it's, and like, this is one of the reasons why
there is no magic, simple answer to all these things.
It's really contextual.
It's case by case.
It's like, you've gotta really say,
okay, what is the context here?
How do you do it?
And you've always gotta be open to correction
and to change and to sort of challenge
and always be sort of serious about that.
I think what happens, again, with social media
is when there is that grappling process in Wikipedia
and a decision is made to remove a paragraph
or to remove a thing or to say a thing,
you're gonna notice the one direction
of the oscillation of the grappling
and not the correction.
And you're gonna highlight that and say,
how come this person, I don't know,
I want maybe legitimacy of elections.
That's the thing that comes up.
Donald Trump maybe previous.
I can give a really good example,
which is there was this sort of dust up
about the definition of recession in Wikipedia.
So the accusation was, and accusation was often
quite ridiculous and extreme, which is under pressure
from the Biden administration.
Wikipedia changed the definition of recession
to make Biden look good, or we did it not under pressure
but because we're a bunch of lunatic leftists and so on.
And then when I see something like that in the press,
I'm like, oh dear, what's happened here?
How did we do that?
Because I always just accept things for five seconds first.
And then I go and I look and I'm like, you know what?
That's literally completely not what happened.
What happened was one editor
thought the article needed restructuring.
So the article is always said,
so the traditional kind of loose definition of recession
is two quarters of negative growth.
But there's always been within economics,
within important agencies in different countries
around the world, a lot of nuance around that.
And there's other like factors that go into it and so forth.
And it's just an interesting, complicated topic.
And so the article has always had the definition
of two quarters, and the only thing that really changed
was moving that from the lead, from the top paragraph
to further down.
And then news stories appeared saying,
Wikipedia has changed the definition of recession.
And then we got a huge rush of trolls coming in.
So the article was temporarily protected.
I think only semi-protected and people were told,
go to the talk page to discuss.
So it was a dust up that was,
when you look at it as a Wikipedia and you're like, oh,
like this is a really routine kind of editorial debate.
Another example, which unfortunately our friend Elon fell for,
I would say is the Twitter files.
There was an article called the Twitter files,
which is about these files that were released
once Elon took control of Twitter
and he released internal documents.
And what happened was somebody nominated it for deletion,
but even the nomination said,
this is actually, this is mainly about
the Hunter Biden laptop controversy.
Shouldn't this information be there instead?
So anyone can, like it takes exactly one human being
anywhere on the planet to propose something for deletion.
And that triggers a process where people discuss it,
which within a few hours,
it was what we call snowball closed.
IE, this doesn't have a snowball's chance
in hell of passing.
So an admin goes, yeah, wrong and close the debate.
And that was it, that was the whole thing that happened.
And so nobody proposed suppressing the information.
Nobody proposed it wasn't important.
It was just like editorially boring internal question.
And so sometimes people read stuff like that
and they're like, oh, you see, look at these leftists.
They're trying to suppress the truth again.
It's like, well, slow down a second and come and look.
Like literally it's not what happened.
Yeah, so I think the right is more sensitive to censorship.
And so they will more likely highlight,
there's more virality to highlighting something
that looks like censorship in any walks of life.
And this moving a paragraph from one place to another
or removing it and so on as part of the regular grappling
with Wikipedia can make a hell of a good article
or a YouTube video.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it sounds really enticing
and intriguing and surprising to most people
because they're like, I'm reading Wikipedia.
It doesn't seem like a crackpot leftist website.
It seems pretty kind of dull really in its own geeky way.
Well, that's how that makes a good story.
It's like, oh, am I being misled?
Because there's a shadowy cabal of Jimmy Wales.
You know, I generally, I read political stuff.
I mentioned to you that I'm traveling
to have some very difficult conversation
with high profile figures, both in the war in Ukraine
and in Israel and Palestine.
And I read the Wikipedia articles around that.
And I also read books on the conflict
and the history of the different regions.
And I find the Wikipedia articles to be very balanced
and there's many perspectives being represented.
But then I asked myself,
well, am I one of them leftist crackpots?
They can't see the truth.
I mean, it's something I ask myself all the time,
forget the leftist, just crackpot.
Am I just being a sheep and accepting it?
And I think that's an important question to always ask,
but not too much.
Yeah, no, I agree completely.
A little bit, but not too much.
No, I think we always have to challenge ourselves
of like, what do I potentially have wrong?
Well, you mentioned pressure from government.
You've criticized Twitter for the allowing,
giving in to Turkey's government censorship.
There's also conspiracy theories or accusations
of Wikipedia being open to pressure
from government to government organizations,
FBI and all this kind of stuff.
What is the philosophy about pressure
from government and censorship?
So we're super hardcore on this.
We've never bowed down to government pressure
anywhere in the world and we never will.
And we understand that we're hardcore.
And actually there is a bit of nuance
about how different companies respond to this,
but our response has always been just to say no.
And if they threatened to block,
well, knock yourself out, you're gonna lose Wikipedia.
And that's been very successful for us as a strategy
because governments know they can't just casually threaten
to block Wikipedia or block us for two days
and we're gonna cave in immediately
to get back into the market.
And that's what a lot of companies have done.
And I don't think that's good.
That we can go one level deeper and say,
I'm actually quite sympathetic.
Like if you have staff members in a certain country
and they are at physical risk,
you've got to put that into your equation.
So I understand that.
Like if Elon said, actually I've got 100 staff members
on the ground in such and such a country
and if we don't comply, somebody's gonna get arrested
and it could be quite serious, okay, that's a tough one.
That's actually really hard.
But yeah, no.
And then the FBI one, no, the criticism I saw,
I kind of prepared for this
because I saw people responding
to your request for questions and I was like,
somebody's like, oh, well, don't you think
it was really bad that you da-da-da-da-da and I said,
I actually reached out to staff saying,
can you just make sure I've got my facts right?
And the answer is we received zero requests of any kind
from the FBI or any of the other government agencies
for any changes to content in Wikipedia.
And had we received those requests
at the level of the Wikimedia Foundation,
we would have said, it's not our, like we can't do anything
because Wikipedia is written by the community.
And so the Wikimedia Foundation can't change the content
of Wikipedia without causing, I mean, God,
that would be a massive controversy, you can't even imagine.
What we did do, and this is what I've done,
I've been to China and met with the minister of propaganda.
We've had discussions with governments all around the world,
not because we wanna do their bidding,
but because we don't wanna do their bidding,
but we also don't wanna be blocked.
And we think actually having these conversations
are really important.
Now, there's no threat of being blocked in the US.
That's just never gonna happen.
There is the First Amendment.
But in other countries around the world, it's like, okay,
what are you upset about?
Let's have the conversation.
Let's understand and let's have a dialogue about it
so that you can understand where we come from
and what we're doing and why.
And then sometimes it's like, gee,
if somebody complains that something's bad in Wikipedia,
whoever they are, don't care who they are,
could be you, could be the government,
could be the Pope, I don't care who they are.
It's like, oh, okay, well,
our responsibility as Wikipedia is to go,
oh, hold on, let's check, right?
Is that right or wrong?
Is there something that we've got wrong in Wikipedia?
Not because you're threatening to block us,
but because we want Wikipedia to be correct.
So we do have these dialogues with people.
And a big part of what was going on with,
you might call it pressure on social media companies
or dialogue with, depending on,
as we talked earlier, grapple with the language,
depending on what your view is.
In our case, it was really just about, oh, okay, right?
They want to have a dialogue about COVID information,
misinformation.
We are this enormous source of information,
which the world depends on.
We're going to have that conversation, right?
We're happy to say, here's, if they say,
how do you know that Wikipedia is not going to be pushing
some crazy anti-vax narrative?
First, I mean, I think it's somewhat inappropriate
for a government to be asking pointed questions
in a way that implies possible penalties.
I'm not sure that ever happened because we would just go,
I don't know, the Chinese blocked us and so it goes, right?
We're not going to cave in
to any kind of government pressure,
but whatever the appropriateness of what they were doing,
I think there is a rule for government in just saying,
let's understand the information ecosystem.
Let's think about the problem of misinformation,
disinformation in society,
particularly around election security,
all these kinds of things.
So, I think it would be irresponsible of us
to get a call from a government agency and say,
yeah, why don't you just fuck off?
You're the government.
But it would also be irresponsible to go,
oh dear, government agent's not happy.
Let's fix Wikipedia so the FBI loves us.
So, when you say you want to have discussions
with the Chinese government or with organizations
like CDC and WHO, it's to thoroughly understand
what the mainstream narrative is
so that it can be properly represented
but not drive what the articles are.
Well, it's actually important to say,
whatever the Wikimedia Foundation thinks
has no impact on what's in Wikipedia.
So, it's more about saying to them,
right, we understand you're the World Health Organization
or you're whoever and part of your job
is to sort of public health is about communications.
You want to understand the world.
So, it's more about, oh, well,
let's explain how Wikipedia works.
So, it's more about explaining how Wikipedia works
and like, hey, it's the volunteers.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
It's a battle of ideas and here's how the sources are used.
Yeah, exactly.
What are the legitimate sources
and what are not the legitimate sources.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, I suppose there's some battle
about what is a legitimate source.
There could be statements made that CDC,
I mean, like there's government organizations in general
have sold themselves to be the place
where you go for expertise.
And some of that has been to a small degree
raised in question over the response to the pandemic.
I think in many cases,
and this goes back to my topic of trust.
So, there were definitely cases of public officials,
public organizations where I felt like
they lost the trust of the public
because they didn't trust the public.
And so, the idea is like we really need people
to take this seriously and take actions.
Therefore, we're gonna put out some overblown claims
because it's gonna scare people into behaving correctly.
You know what, that might work for a little while,
but it doesn't work in the long run.
Because suddenly people go from a default stance
of like the Center for Disease Control,
very well respected scientific organization,
sort of, I don't know, they've got a fault in Atlanta
with the last file of smallpox or whatever it is
that people think about them.
And to go, oh, right, these are scientists
we should actually take seriously and listen to.
And they're not politicized.
And it's like, okay.
And if you put out statements,
and I don't know if the CDC did,
but health organization, whoever,
that are provably false and also provably,
you kind of knew they were false,
but you did it to scare people
because you wanted them to do the right thing.
It's like, no, you know what,
that's not gonna work in the long run.
Like you're gonna lose people
and now you've got a bigger problem,
which is a lack of trust in science,
a lack of trust in authorities who are by and large,
they're like quite boring government bureaucrat scientists
who just are trying to help the world.
Well, I've been criticized and I've been torn on this.
I've been criticized for criticizing Anthony Fauci too hard.
The degree to which I criticized him
is because he's a leader
and I'm just observing the effect in the loss of trust
in the institutions like the NIH,
that where I personally know
there's a lot of incredible scientists
doing incredible work.
And I have to blame the leaders for the effects
on the distrust and the scientific work that they're doing
because of what I perceive as basic human flaws
of communication, of arrogance, of ego, of politics,
all those kinds of things.
Now you could say you're being too harsh, possible,
but I think that's the whole point of free speech
is you can criticize the people who lead.
Leaders, unfortunately, are fortunately responsible
for the effects on society.
To me, Anthony Fauci or whoever in the scientific position
or on the pandemic had an opportunity
to have a FDR moment or to get everybody together,
inspire about the power of science
to rapidly develop a vaccine
that saves us from this pandemic and future pandemic
that can threaten the wellbeing of human civilization.
This was epic and awesome and sexy.
And to me, when I'm talking to people about science,
it's anything but sexy in terms of the virology
and biology development because it's been politicized,
it's inky, and people just don't want to,
don't talk to me about the vaccine.
I understand, I understand.
I got vaccinated, let's switch topics, quick.
Yeah, well, it's interesting because as I say,
I live in the UK and I think all these things
are a little less politicized there.
And I haven't paid close enough attention to Fauci
to have a really strong view.
I'm sure I would disagree with some things.
I definitely, you know, I remember hearing
at the beginning of the pandemic
as I'm unwrapping my Amazon package with the masks I bought
because I heard there's a pandemic and I just was like,
I want some N95 mask, please.
And they were saying, don't buy masks.
And the motivation was because they didn't want there
to be shortages in hospitals, fine.
But they were also statements of masks won't,
they're not effective and they won't help you.
And then the complete about face to,
you're ridiculous if you're not wearing them.
You know, it's just like, no,
like that about face just lost people from day one.
The distress and the intelligence of the public
to deal with nuance, to deal with uncertainty.
Yeah, this is exactly what, you know,
I think this is where the Wikipedia neutral point of view
is and should be an ideal in obviously every article
and everything we could, you know me now
and you know how I am about these things.
But like ideally is to say, look,
we're happy to show you all the perspectives.
This is Planned Parenthood's view
and this is Catholic church view.
And we're gonna explain that
and we're gonna try to be thoughtful
and put in the best arguments from all sides.
Cause I trust you, like you read that
and you're gonna be more educated
and you're gonna begin to make a decision.
I mean, I can just talk in the UK, the government,
dah, dah, dah, dah.
When we found out in the UK
that very high level government officials
were not following the rules they had put on everyone else,
I moved from, I had just become a UK citizen
just a little while before the pandemic.
And you know, it's kind of emotional.
Like you get a passport in a new country
and you feel quite good and I did my oath to the queen
and then they dragged the poor old lady out
to tell us all to be good.
And I was like, we're British
and we're gonna do the right things
and you know, it's gonna be tough, but we're gonna, you know.
So you have that kind of Dunkirk spirit moment
and you're like following the rules to a T
and then suddenly it's like,
well, they're not following the rules.
And so suddenly I shifted personally from,
I'm gonna follow the rules
even if I don't completely agree with them,
but I'll still follow
cause I think we've got all chipped in together
to like, you know what?
I'm gonna make wise and thoughtful decisions
for myself and my family.
And that generally is gonna mean following the rules,
but it's basically, you know, when they're, you know,
at certain moments in time,
like you're not allowed to be in an outside space
unless you're exercising.
I'm like, I think I can sit in a park and read a book.
Like it's gonna be fine.
Like that's irrational rule,
which I would have been following just personally of like,
I'm just gonna do the right thing.
Yeah.
And the loss of trust I think at scale
was probably harmful to science.
And to me, the scientific method
and the scientific communities
is one of the biggest hopes, at least to me,
for the survival and the thriving of human civilization.
Absolutely.
And I, you know, I think you see
some of the ramifications of this.
There's always been like pretty anti-science,
anti-vax people.
Okay, that's always been a thing,
but I feel like it's bigger now
simply because of that lowering of trust.
So a lot of people, yeah, maybe it's like you say,
a lot of people are like, yeah, I got vaccinated
and I really don't wanna talk about this
because it's so toxic, you know?
And that's unfortunate,
because I think people should say, what an amazing thing.
And you know, there's also a whole range of discourse
around if this were a disease that were primarily,
that was primarily killing babies,
I think people's emotions about it
would have been very different, right or wrong,
than the fact that when you really looked at
the sort of death rate of getting COVID,
wow, it's really dramatically different.
If you're late in life, this was really dangerous.
And if you're 23 years old, yeah, well, it's not great.
Like, and long COVID's a thing and all of that,
and I think some of the public communications,
again, were failing to properly contextualize,
not all of it, you know, it's a complicated matter,
but yeah.
Let me read you a Reddit comment that received two likes.
Oh.
Two whole people liked it.
Yeah, two people liked it.
And I don't know, maybe you can comment on
whether there's truth to it,
but I just found it interesting
because I've been doing a lot of research
on World War II recently.
So this is about Hitler.
Here's, it's a long statement.
I was there when a big push was made
to fight bias at Wikipedia.
Our target became getting the Hitler article
to be Wiki's featured article.
The idea was that the voting body only wanted articles
that were good PR and especially articles
about socially liberal topics.
So the Hitler article had to be two to three times better
and more academically researched to beat the competition.
This bias seems to hold today.
For example, the current list of political featured articles
at a glance seems to have only two books,
one on anarchism and one on Karl Marx.
Surely we're not going to say
there have only ever been two articles
about political non-biography books worth being featured,
especially compared to 200 plus video games.
That's the only topics with good books
are socialism and anarchy.
Do you have any interesting comments on this kind of,
so featured, how the featured is selected,
maybe Hitler, because he's a special figure,
you know, Nazism.
I love that.
No, I love the comparison to how many video games have been.
And that definitely speaks to my earlier as like,
if you've got a lot of young geeky men
who really like video games,
that doesn't necessarily get you to the right place
in every respect.
Certainly, yeah, so here's a funny story.
I woke up one morning to a bunch of journalists in Germany
trying to get in touch with me
because German language Wikipedia
chose to have as the featured article of the day, Swastika.
And people were going crazy about it.
And some people were saying, it's illegal,
has German Wikipedia been taken over by Nazi sympathizers
and so on.
And it turned out, it's not illegal,
like discussing the Swastika, using the Swastika
as a political campaign and using it in certain ways
is illegal in Germany in a way that it wouldn't be in the US
because of the First Amendment.
But in this case, it was like,
actually part of the point is the Swastika symbol
is from other cultures as well.
And they just thought it was interesting.
And I did joke to the community, I'm like,
please don't put the Swastika on the front page
without warning me, cause I'm going to get a lot.
Now it wouldn't be me, it's the foundation.
I'm not that much on the front lines.
So I would say that to put Hitler
on the front page of Wikipedia, it is a special topic.
And you would want to say, yeah, let's be really careful
that it's really, really good before we do that.
Because if we put it on the front page and it's got,
and it's not good enough, that could be a problem.
There's no inherent reason, like clearly World War II
is a very popular topic in Wikipedia.
It's like they're on the History Channel.
Like people, it's a fascinating period of history
that people are very interested in.
And then on the other piece,
like Anarchism and Karl Marx?
Karl Marx, yeah.
Oh yeah, I mean, that's interesting.
I'm surprised to hear that not more political books
or topics have made it to the front page.
Now we're taking this Reddit comment.
I mean, as if it's completely of value.
Yeah, but I'm trusting.
So I think that probably is right.
They probably did have the list up.
No, I think that piece, the piece about how many
of those featured articles have been video games,
and if it's disproportionate, I think we should,
the community should go, actually, what's gone,
like that doesn't seem quite right.
You know, I mean, you can imagine
that because you're looking for an article
to be on the front page of Wikipedia,
you wanna have a bit of diversity in it.
You want it to be not always something
that's really popular that week.
So like, I don't know, the last couple of weeks,
maybe Succession, a big finale of Succession
might lead you to think, oh, let's put Succession
on the front page.
That's gonna be popular.
In other cases, you kind of want,
pick something super obscure and quirky
because people also find that interesting and fun.
So yeah, don't know, but you don't want it
to be video games most of the time.
That sounds quite bad.
Well, let me ask you just for,
as somebody who's seen the whole thing,
the development of the millions of articles,
big impossible question.
What's your favorite article?
My favorite article?
Well, I've got an amusing answer,
which is possibly also true.
There's an article in Wikipedia
called Inherently Funny Words.
And one of the reasons I love it is
when it was created early in the history of Wikipedia,
it kind of became like a dumping ground.
People would just come by and write in any word
that they thought sounded funny.
And then it was nominated for deletion
because somebody's like, this is just a dumping ground.
Like people are putting all kinds of nonsense in.
And in that deletion debate,
somebody came forward and said, essentially,
wait a second, hold on.
This is actually a legitimate concept
in the theory of humor and comedy.
And a lot of famous comedians and humorists
have written about it.
And it's actually a legitimate topic.
So then they went through
and they meticulously referenced every word
that was in there and threw out a bunch that weren't.
And so it becomes this really interesting.
Now, my biggest disappointment,
and it's the right decision to make
because there was no source,
but it was a picture of a cow,
but there was a rope around its head,
tying on some horns onto the cow.
So it was kind of a funny looking picture.
It looked like a bull with horns,
but it's just like a normal milk cow.
And below it, the caption said,
according to some cow is an inherently funny word,
which is just hilarious to me,
partly because the according to some
sounds a lot like Wikipedia, but there was no source.
So it went away and I feel very sad about that,
but I've always liked that.
And the reason Depths of Wikipedia amuses me so greatly
is because it does highlight
really interesting obscure stuff.
And you're like, wow, I can't believe somebody wrote
about that in Wikipedia, it's quite amusing.
And sometimes there's a bit of wry humor in Wikipedia.
There's always a struggle.
You're not trying to be funny,
but occasionally a little inside humor
can be quite healthy and fun.
Apparently words with the letter K are funny.
There's a lot of really well-researched stuff on this page.
It's actually exciting.
And I should mention for Depths of Wikipedia,
it's run by Annie Raworda.
That's right, Annie.
And let me just read off some of the pages.
Octopolis and Octolantis are two separate
non-human underwater settlements
built by the gloomy octopuses in Jervis Bay, East Australia.
The first settlement named Octopolis by biologists
was founded in 2009.
The individual structures in Octopolis consist of burrows
around a piece of human detritus
believed to be scrap metal.
And it goes on in this way.
Satiric misspelling, least concerned species.
Humans were formally assessed as a species
of least concern in 2008.
I think Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
would slightly disagree.
And last one, let me just say friendship paradox
is the phenomena first observed by the sociologist
Scott Feld in 1991, that on average,
an individual's friends have more friends
than that individual.
Oh, that's very lonely.
Isn't that, that's the kind of thing that makes you want to,
like it sounds implausible at first,
because shouldn't everybody have, on average,
about the same number of friends as all their friends?
So you really want to dig into the math of that
and really think, oh, why would that be true?
And it's one way to feel more lonely
in a mathematically rigorous way.
Somebody also on Reddit asks,
I would love to hear some war stories from behind the scenes.
Is there something that we haven't mentioned
that was particularly difficult in this entire journey
you were on with Wikipedia?
I mean, it's hard to say.
I mean, so part of what I always say about myself
is that I'm a pathological optimist.
So I always think everything is fine.
And so things that other people might find a struggle,
I'm just like, oh, well, this is the thing we're doing today.
So that's kind of about me.
And it's actually, I'm aware of this about myself.
So I do like to have a few pessimistic people around me
to keep me a bit on balance.
Yeah, I mean, I would say some of the hard things,
I mean, there were hard moments
like when two out of three servers crashed on Christmas Day
and then we needed to do a fundraiser
and no idea what was gonna happen.
I would say as well, like in that early period of time,
the growth of the website and the traffic to the website
was phenomenal and great.
The growth of the community,
and in fact, the healthy growth of the community was fine.
And then the Wikimedia Foundation,
the nonprofit I set up to own and operate Wikipedia
as a small organization, it had a lot of growing pains.
And that was the piece that's just like many companies
or many organizations that are in a fast growth.
It's like, you've hired the wrong people
or there's this conflict that's arisen
and nobody's got experience to do this and all that.
So no specific stories to tell,
but I would say growing the organization was harder
than growing the community and growing the website,
which is interesting.
Well, yeah, it's kind of miraculous and inspiring
that a community can emerge and be stable
and that has so much kind of productive, positive output.
Kind of makes you think, I mean, I don't,
it's one of those things you don't want to analyze too much
because you don't want to mess with a beautiful thing,
but it gives me faith in communities
that they can spring up in other domains as well.
Yeah, I think that's exactly right.
And at Fandom, my for-profit Wiki company,
where it's like all these communities about pop culture
mainly, sort of entertainment, gaming and so on,
there's a lot of small communities.
And so I went last year to our Community Connect Conference
and just met some of these people and like,
here's one of the leaders of the Star Wars Wiki,
which is called Wookiepedia, which I think is great.
And he's telling me about his community and all that.
And I'm like, oh, right, yeah, I love this.
So it's not the same purpose as Wikipedia
of a neutral high quality encyclopedia,
but a lot of the same values are there of like,
oh, people should be nice to each other.
It's like, when people get upset, it's like,
just remember, we're working on Star Wars Wiki together.
Like there's no reason to get too outraged
and just kind people,
just like geeky people with a hobby.
Where do you see Wikipedia in 10 years,
100 years and 1000 years?
Right, so 10 years, I would say pretty much the same.
Like we're not gonna have, we're not gonna become TikTok,
with entertainment, scroll by video humor and blah, blah,
blah, an encyclopedia.
I think in 10 years, we probably will have
a lot more AI supporting tools, like I've talked about.
And probably your search experience will be,
you can ask a question and get the answer
rather than from our body of work.
So search and discovery, a little bit improved interface,
some of that.
I always say one of the things that people,
most people won't notice,
because already they don't notice it,
is the growth of Wikipedia in the languages
of the developing world.
So you probably don't speak Swahili,
so you're probably not checking out
that Swahili Wikipedia is doing very well.
And it is doing very well.
And I think that kind of growth is actually super important,
super interesting, but most people won't notice that.
If we can just look on that, if we could,
do you think there's so much incredible translation work
is being done with AI, with language models,
do you think that can accelerate Wikipedia?
So you start with a basic draft of the translation
of articles and then build on top of that.
So what I used to say is machine translation
for many years wasn't much use to the community,
because it just wasn't good enough.
As it's gotten better, it's tended to be a lot better
in what we might call economically important languages.
That's because the corpus that they train on
and all of that, so to translate from English to Spanish,
if you've tried Google Translate recently,
Spanish to English is what I would do, it's pretty good.
Like it's actually not bad.
It used to be half a joke, and then for a while
it was kind of like, well, you can get the gist of something
and now it's like, actually it's pretty good.
However, we've got a huge Spanish community
who write in native Spanish, so they're able to use it
and they find it useful, but they're writing.
But if you tried to do English to Zulu,
where there's not that much investment,
like there's loads of reasons to invest in English
to Spanish because they're both huge,
economically important languages, Zulu not so much.
So for those smaller languages, it was just still terrible.
My understanding is it's improved dramatically
and also because the new methods of training
don't necessarily involve identical corpuses
to try to match things up, but rather reading
and understanding with tokens and large language models
and then reading and understanding
and then you get a much richer.
Anyway, apparently it's quite improved,
so I think that now it is quite possible
that these smaller language communities are going to say,
oh, well, finally I can put something in English
and I can get out Zulu that I feel comfortable sharing
with my community because it's actually good enough
or I can edit it a bit here and there.
So I think that's huge.
So I do think that's going to happen a lot
and that's going to accelerate,
again, what will remain to most people in an invisible trend,
but that's the growth in all these other languages.
So then move on to 100 years.
I was starting to get scary.
Well, the only thing I'll say about 100 years is like,
we've built the Wikimedia Foundation
and we run it in a quite cautious
and financially conservative and careful way.
So every year we build our reserves,
every year we put aside a little bit more money.
We also have the endowment fund,
which we just passed 100 million.
That's a completely separate fund with a separate board
so that it's not just like a big fat bank account
for some future profligate CEO to blow through.
The foundation will have to get the approval
of a second order board to be able to access that money
and that board can make other grants through the community
and things like that.
So the point of all that is I hope and believe
that we're building in a financially stable way,
that we can weather various storms along the way
so that hopefully we're not taking the kind of risks.
And by the way, we're not taking too few risks either.
That's always hard.
I think the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikipedia
will exist in 100 years.
If anybody exists in 100 years, we'll be there.
You think the internet just looks unpredictably different,
just the web.
I do, I do.
I mean, I think right now,
this sort of enormous step forward we've seen
has become public in the last year
of the large language models really is something else.
It's really interesting.
And you and I have both talked today
about the flaws and the limitations,
but still, as someone who's been around technology
for a long time, it's sort of that feeling
of the first time I saw a web browser,
the first time I saw the iPhone,
the first time the internet was really usable on a phone.
And it's like, wow, that's a step change difference.
There's a few other.
Maybe a Google search.
Google search was actually one.
I remember if the first search.
Because I remember AltaVista was kind of cool for a while,
then it just got more and more useless
because the algorithm wasn't good.
And it's like, oh, Google search,
now the internet works again.
Yeah.
And so large language model, it feels like that to me.
Like, oh, wow, this is something new
and really pretty remarkable.
And it's going to have some downsides.
You know, the negative use case.
People in the area who are experts,
they're giving a lot of warnings,
and I don't know enough to, I'm not that worried,
but I'm a pathological optimist.
But I do see some really low-hanging fruit
bad things that can happen.
So my example is, how about some highly customized spam
where the email that you receive
isn't just like misspelled words
and trying to get through filters,
but actually is a targeted email to you
that knows something about you
by reading your LinkedIn profile
and writes a plausible email
that will get through the filters.
And it's like suddenly, oh, hmm, that's a new problem.
That's going to be interesting.
Is there, just on the Wikipedia editing side,
does it make the job of the volunteer,
of the editor, more difficult if in a world
where larger and larger percentage of the internet
is written by an LLM?
So one of my predictions, and we'll see,
ask me again in five years how this panned out,
is that in a way, this will strengthen the value
and importance of some traditional brands.
So if I see a news story,
and it's from the Wall Street Journal,
from the New York Times, from Fox News,
I know what I'm getting,
and I trust it to whatever extent I might have trust
or distrust in any of those.
And if I see a brand new website that looks plausible,
but I've never heard of it,
and it could be machine-generated content
that may be full of errors, I think I'll be more cautious.
I think I'm more interested.
We can also talk about this around photographic evidence.
So obviously, there will be scandals
where major media organizations get fooled by a fake photo.
However, if I see a photo of,
the recent one was the pope
wearing an expensive puffer jacket,
I'm gonna go, yeah, that's amazing
that a fake like that could be generated,
but my immediate thought is not,
oh, so the pope's dipping into the money, eh?
Partly because this particular pope
doesn't seem like he'd be the type.
My favorite is extensive pictures
of Joe Biden and Donald Trump hanging out
and having fun together.
Yeah, brilliant.
So I think people will care
about the provenance of a photo.
And if you show me a photo and you say,
yeah, this photo is from Fox News,
even though I don't necessarily think that's the highest,
but I'm like, well, it's a news organization,
and they're gonna have journalists,
and they're gonna make sure the photo
is what it purports to be,
that's very different from a photo
randomly circulating on Twitter,
whereas I would say 15 years ago,
a photo randomly circulating on Twitter,
in most cases, the worst you could do,
and this did happen, is misrepresent the battlefield.
So like, oh, here's a bunch of injured children.
Look what Israel's done.
But actually, it wasn't Israel.
It was another case 10 years ago.
That has happened.
That has always been around.
But now we can have much more specifically constructed,
plausible-looking photos
that if I just see them circulating on Twitter,
I'm gonna go, just don't know, not sure.
Like, I can make that in five minutes, so.
Well, I also hope that it's kind of like
what you're writing about in your book,
that we could also have citizen journalists
that have a stable, verifiable trust that builds up.
So it doesn't have to be New York Times
or this organization.
It could be an organization of one,
as long as it's stable and carries through time
and it builds up or builds up.
Now, I agree, but the one thing I've said in the past,
and this depends on who that person is
and what they're doing, but I think my credibility,
my general credibility in the world
should be the equal of a New York Times reporter.
So if something happens and I witness it
and I write about it, people are gonna go,
well, Jimmy Wells said it.
That's just like if a New York Times reporter said it.
I'm gonna tend to think he didn't just make it up.
Truth is, nothing interesting ever happens around me.
I don't go to war zones.
I don't go to big press conferences.
I don't interview Putin and Zelensky, right?
So just to an extent, yes, whereas I do think
for other people, those traditional models
of credibility are really, really important.
And then there is this sort of citizen journalism.
I don't know if you think of what you do as journalism.
I kind of think it is, but you do interviews.
You do long-form interviews, and I think people,
if you come and you say, here's my tape,
but you wouldn't hand out a tape.
I just gestured to you as if I'm handing you a cassette tape.
If you put it into your podcast,
here's my interview with Zelensky,
and people aren't gonna go, yeah, how do we know?
That could be a deep fake.
You could've faked that, because people are like,
well, no, you're a well-known podcaster
and you do interview interesting people,
and yeah, you wouldn't think that.
So your brand becomes really important,
whereas if suddenly, and I've seen this already,
I've seen sort of video with subtitles in English,
and apparently the Ukrainian was the same,
and it was Zelensky saying something really outrageous,
and I'm like, yeah, I don't believe that.
I don't think he said that in a meeting with whatever.
I think that's Russian propaganda or probably just trolls.
Yeah, and then building platforms and mechanisms
of how that trust can be verified.
If something appears on a Wikipedia page,
that means something.
If something appears on, say, my Twitter account,
that means something, that means I, this particular human,
have signed off on it, and then the trust you have
in this particular human transfers to the piece of content,
and then hopefully there's millions of people
with different metrics of trust,
and then you could see that there's a certain kind of bias
in the set of conversations you're having.
So maybe, okay, I trust this person
to have this kind of bias, and I'll go to this other person
with this other kind of bias, and I can integrate them
in this kind of way, just like you said with Fox News
and whatever else.
Yeah, the Wall Street Journal, New York Times,
they've all got their, where they sit, yeah.
So you have built, I would say, one of, if not the most
impactful website in the history of human civilization.
So let me ask for you to give advice to young people
how to have impact in this world.
High schoolers, college students,
wanting to have a big positive impact in the world.
Yeah, great.
If you want to be successful,
do something you're really passionate about,
rather than some kind of cold calculation
of what can make you the most money.
Because if you go and try to do something,
and you're like, I'm not that interested,
but I'm going to make a lot of money doing it,
you're probably not going to be that good at it.
And so that is a big piece of it.
I also like, so for startups, I give this advice.
So young, and this is a career startup,
any kind of like young person just starting out,
is like, be persistent, right?
There'll be moments when it's not working out
and you can't just give up too easily.
You've got to persist through some hard times.
Maybe two servers crash on a Sunday
and you've got to sort of scramble to figure it out,
but persist through that.
And then also be prepared to pivot.
That's a newer word, new for me.
But when I pivoted from Newpedia to Wikipedia,
it's like, this isn't working,
I've got to completely change.
So be willing to completely change direction
when something's not working.
Now, the problem with these two wonderful pieces of advice
is which situation am I in today, right?
Is this a moment when I need to just power through
and persist because I'm going to find a way
to make this work?
Or is this a moment where I needed to go,
actually, this is totally not working
and I need to change direction?
But also, I think for me, that always gives me a framework
of like, okay, here's a problem.
Do we need to change direction
or do we need to kind of power through it?
And just knowing those are the choices.
And they're not always the only choices,
but those are choices I think can be helpful to say,
okay, am I checking it out
because I'm having a little bump
and I'm feeling an emotional
and I'm just going to give up too soon?
Okay, ask yourself that question.
And also, it's like, am I being pigheaded
and trying to do something that actually doesn't make sense?
Okay, ask yourself that question too.
Even though they're contradictory questions,
sometimes it'll be one, sometimes it'll be the other
and you got to really think it through.
I think persisting with the business model
behind Wikipedia is such an inspiring story
because we live in a capitalist world.
We live in a scary world, I think, for an internet business.
And so to do things differently
than a lot of websites are doing,
Wikipedia has lived through the successive explosion
of many websites that are basically ad-driven.
Google is ad-driven, Facebook, Twitter,
all of these websites are ad-driven.
And then to see them succeed
become these incredibly rich, powerful companies
that if I could just have that money,
you would think as somebody running Wikipedia,
I could do so much positive stuff, right?
And so to persist through that is,
I think is, from my perspective now,
Monday night quarterback or whatever,
is the right decision, but boy, is that a tough decision.
Mm, it seemed easy at the time, so.
And then you just kind of stay with it, stick with it.
Yeah, just stay with it, it's working.
So on that one, you chose persistent.
Yeah, well, yeah.
I mean, I always like to give an example of MySpace
because I just think it's an amusing story.
So MySpace was poised, I would say, to be Facebook, right?
It was huge, it was viral, it was lots of things.
Kind of foreshadowed a bit of maybe even TikTok
because it was like a lot of entertainment content, casual.
And then Rupert Murdoch bought it
and it collapsed within a few years.
And part of that, I think,
was because they were really, really heavy on ads
and less heavy on the customer experience.
So I remember to accept a friend request
was like three clicks where you saw three ads.
And on Facebook, you accept the friend request,
you didn't even leave the page, that just accepted.
But what is interesting,
so I used to give this example of like,
yeah, well, Rupert Murdoch really screwed that one up.
And in a sense, maybe he did,
but somebody said, you know what, actually,
he bought it for, and I don't remember the numbers,
he bought it for 800 million and it was very profitable
through its decline.
And he actually made his money back and more.
So it wasn't like, from a financial point of view,
it was a bad investment in the sense of
you could have been Facebook,
but on sort of more mundane metrics,
it's like, actually it worked out okay for him.
It all matters how you define success.
It does, and that is also advice to young people.
One of the things I would say,
when we have our mental models of success,
as an entrepreneur, for example,
and your examples in your mind are Bill Gates,
Mark Zuckerberg, so people who at a very young age
had one really great idea that just went straight
to the moon and became one of the richest people
in the world, that is really unusual,
like really, really rare.
And for most entrepreneurs,
that is not the life path you're gonna take.
You're gonna fail, you're gonna reboot,
you're gonna learn from what you failed at,
you're gonna try something different.
And that is really important
because if your standard of success is,
well, I feel sad because I'm not as rich as Elon Musk,
it's like, well, so should almost everyone,
possibly everyone except Elon Musk
is not as rich as Elon Musk.
And so that, like realistically,
you can set a standard of success,
even in a really narrow sense, which I don't recommend
of thinking about your financial success.
It's like if you measure your financial success
by thinking about billionaires,
like that's heavy, like that's probably not good.
I don't recommend it.
Whereas like I personally, you know, like for me,
when people, when journalists say,
oh, how does it feel to not be a billionaire?
I usually say, I don't know, how does it feel to you?
Because they're not.
But also I'm like, I live in London,
the number of bankers that no one's ever heard of
who live in London, who make far more money
than I ever will is quite a large number.
And I wouldn't trade my life for theirs at all, right?
Because mine is so interesting.
Like, oh, right, Jimmy, we need you to go
and meet the Chinese propaganda minister.
Oh, okay, that's super interesting.
Like, yeah, Jimmy, you know, like, here's the situation.
Like you can go to this country and while you're there,
the president has asked to see you.
I was like, God, that's super interesting.
Jimmy, you're going to this place
and there's a local Wikipedia who said,
do you wanna stay with me and my family?
And I'm like, yeah, like that's really cool.
Like I would like to do that, that's really interesting.
I don't do that all the time, but I've done it
and it's great.
So like, for me, that's like arranging your life
so that you have interesting experiences is just great.
Well, this is more to the question
of what Wikipedia looks like in a thousand years.
What do you think is the meaning of this whole thing?
Why are we here, human civilization?
What's the meaning of life?
Yeah, I don't think there is
external answer to that question.
And I should mention that there's a very good Wikipedia page
on the different philosophies of the meaning of life.
Oh, interesting, I have to read that and see what I think.
It's actually neutral and gives a wide frame.
Oh, it's a really good reference
to a lot of different philosophies about meaning.
In the 20th century, philosophy in general,
from Nietzsche to the existentialist to some other bar,
all of them have an idea of meaning.
They really struggle with it systematically and rigorously,
and that's what the page.
And obviously, a shout out to the Hitchhiker's Guide
and all that kind of stuff.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, I think there's no external answer to that.
I think it's internal.
I think we decide what meaning we will have in our lives
and what we're gonna do with ourselves.
And so when I think, if we're talking about 1,000 years,
millions of years, Yuri Milner wrote a book.
He's a big internet investor guy.
He wrote a book advocating quite strongly
for humans exploring the universe and getting off the planet.
And he funds projects to like using lasers
to send little cameras and interesting stuff.
And he talks a lot in the book about meaning.
It's like his view is that the purpose of the human species
is to broadly survive and get off the planet.
Well, I don't agree with everything he has to say,
because I think that's not a meaning
that can motivate most people in their own lives.
It's like, okay, great.
Like the distances of space are absolutely enormous,
so I don't know, should we build generation ships
to start flying places?
Well, I can't do that, and I'm not,
even if I'm Elon Musk and I could devote all my wealth
to building, I'll be dead on the ship on the way.
So is that really meaning?
But I think it's really interesting to think about.
And reading his little book,
it's quite a short little book, reading his book,
it did make me think about, wow, like this is big.
Like this is not what you think about
in your day-to-day life, is like,
where is the human species going to be in 10 million years?
And it does make you sort of turn back to Earth and say,
gee, let's not destroy the planet.
We're stuck here for at least a while,
and therefore we should really think about sustainability.
And I mean, one million years sustainability.
And we don't have all the answers,
we have nothing close to the answers.
I'm actually excited about AI in this regard,
while also bracketing.
Yeah, I understand there's also risks
and people are terrified of AI.
But I actually think it is quite interesting,
this moment in time that we may have in the next 50 years,
to really, really solve some really long-term human problems,
for example, in health.
I think the progress that's being made in cancer treatment,
because we are able to at scale,
model molecules and genetics and things like this,
it gets huge, it's really exciting.
So if we can hang on for a little while,
and certain problems that seem completely intractable today,
like climate change,
may end up being actually not that hard.
And we just might be able to alleviate
the full diversity of human suffering.
For sure, yeah.
And in so doing, help increase the chance
that we can propagate the flame of human consciousness
out into, towards the stars.
And I think another important one,
if we fail to do that, for me,
is propagating and maintaining the full diversity
and richness and complexity and expansiveness
of human knowledge.
So if we destroy ourselves,
it would make me feel a little bit okay.
Yeah, you just.
If the human knowledge.
Yeah, just triggered me to say something really interesting,
which is, when we talked earlier about translating
and using machines to translate,
we mostly talked about small languages
and translating into English,
but I always like to tell this story
of something inconsequential, really.
But there's, I was in Norway, in Bergen, Norway,
where every year they've got this annual festival
called Buikor, which is young groups drumming,
and they have a drumming competition.
It's the 17 sectors of the city,
and they've been doing it for a couple hundred years
or whatever.
They wrote about it in the three languages of Norway,
and then from there, it was translated into English,
into German, et cetera, et cetera.
And so what I love about that story is what it reminds me is,
like, this machine translation goes both ways.
And like, when you talk about the richness
and broadness of human culture,
we're already seeing some really great pieces of this.
So like Korean soap operas, really popular,
not with me, but with people.
And the ability to, you know,
imagine taking a very famous, very popular,
very well-known Korean drama, and now,
I mean, and I literally mean now,
we're just about there technologically,
where we use a machine to redub it in English
in an automated way,
including digitally editing the faces
so it doesn't look dubbed.
And so suddenly you say, oh wow,
here's a piece of, you know,
it's the Korean equivalent of maybe it's Friends
as a comedy, or maybe it's Succession,
just to be very contemporary.
It's something that really impacted a lot of people
and they really loved it,
and we have literally no idea what it's about.
And suddenly it's like, wow, you know, like music,
street music from wherever in the world
can suddenly become accessible to us all in new ways.
It's so cool.
It's really exciting to get access
to the richness of culture in China,
in the many different subcultures of Africa, South America.
One of my unsuccessful arguments
with the Chinese government is by blocking Wikipedia, right?
You aren't just stopping people in China
from reading Chinese Wikipedia
and other language versions of Wikipedia.
You're also preventing the Chinese people
from telling their story.
So is there a small festival in a small town in China
like Buay Corp?
I don't know, but by the way,
the people who live in that village,
that small town of 50,000,
they can't put that in Wikipedia
and get it translated into other places.
They can't share their culture and their knowledge.
And I think for China,
this should be a somewhat influential argument
because China does feel misunderstood in the world.
It's like, okay, well, there's one way,
if you want to help people understand, put it in Wikipedia.
That's what people go to when they want to understand.
And give the amazing, incredible people of China a voice.
Exactly.
Jimmy, thank you so much.
I'm such a huge fan of everything you've done.
Oh, thank you.
I keep saying Wikipedia.
I'm deeply, deeply, deeply, deeply,
deeply grateful for Wikipedia.
I love it.
It brings me joy.
I donate all the time.
You should donate too.
It's a huge honor to finally talk with you.
And this is amazing.
Thank you so much for today.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for listening
to this conversation with Jimmy Wales.
To support this podcast,
please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now, let me leave you with some words
from the world historian, Daniel Boorstin.
The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance.
It is the illusion of knowledge.
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Thank you.