“Imagine: you get into an elevator with complete strangers, and it suddenly stops between two floors,” says Jimmy Wales. “Then you don’t assume that one of the others is going to kill you, do you? You think: oh, we’re stuck in the elevator, how long are we going to be here? How do we get out, and how do we make the best of it? Most people are nice. A small number can be annoying, of course. But the number that are really evil is very, very small.”
Wales, founder of the internet encyclopedia Wikipedia, calls himself a “pathological optimist”. But one that has built up something over the past 25 years that has been declared dead from the start several times, not taken seriously and dismissed, and yet has grown into an iconic website. Wikipedia is consistently one of the most visited and most trusted sites in the world. Although nowadays a large part of the visitors come from bots, and the site is under pressure in all kinds of other ways due to the rise of AI.
Jimmy Wales (59) is having a hasty breakfast of coffee and croissant in an Amsterdam hotel, one of many stops on an international promotional tour for his book that started in October. “New Zealand and Australia next week.” He is an inconspicuous-looking man, with shirt, glasses, and trimmed beard.
In his book, just translated into Dutch as The seven rules of trust (via publisher Maven), he explains what he believes is the secret of Wikipedia. Namely: that it is based on a global network of people who trust each other, who have good procedures to safeguard, monitor and maintain that trust. He sees trust not just as an emotion, or as an outcome, but as a long-term process. “Trust is a living thing that can be cultivated and that can grow, like delicious red tomatoes in a garden,” he writes in the book.
His seven rules can easily be written on a tile: trust is gained one on one; humans are born to connect and collaborate; a strong, clear and positive purpose is essential; to gain trust you have to give trust; politeness gets you further; neutrality is a virtue; Transparency creates trust.
Your lines sound somehow timeless, beautiful and wise. But in the current political climate also a bit too cute, naive. Is the design behind Wikipedia able to withstand the forces that are now being unleashed on it?
“That has to be the case, because if this international crisis of confidence continues, new Dark Ages await us.”
Do you really think so?
“Yes. If we go down a path where the public has no trust in journalism, no trust in politicians, we constantly think we are being lied to and we believe that no one knows what is real and what is not, then we cannot make good decisions. We are already seeing this happening. We are seeing conflict arise because we do not have a shared understanding of facts.
“I also see it in my own environment. An old friend recently posted something on Facebook, and I thought: that doesn’t sound right. I did a quick check and found an article in The New York Times that said pretty much the opposite, and shared that with him. He said to me: ‘I find it incredible that you have a link to the Times places. They just make things up.’
“He literally didn’t believe a word. That’s a big shift compared to a few years ago. Then he might have said: ‘Well, you know that the Times is often left-wing, and that they made major mistakes during the Iraq war regarding weapons of mass destruction.’
“We can talk about that, we would like to, even. But the idea of completely throwing away a usually good source based on deep distrust is a shift that is very unhealthy. It shows that we are in a state of emergency in terms of trust.”
Would Wikipedia survive if it were founded now?
“I think our principles apply in every era. But a lot is indeed changing. Until quite recently, until the emergence of large AI language models, I didn’t think anything fundamental had changed. But now I’m not so sure anymore.
“AI language models are a great, revolutionary technology, although it is in no way good enough to write Wikipedia articles. If you try it, this quickly becomes clear. The hallucinations and other problems are very deeply ingrained, the style of AI is recognizable and does not meet our requirements, with all those typical AI sentence structures and dashes. And while there is some improvement, they are still far from good enough to be relied on.”
Recently, there’s basically a ban on using AI-generated text on Wikipedia, right?
“That’s about right. It’s a bit more subtle, but in broad terms: yes. We don’t want AI to write text on Wikipedia. Especially because the chance of hallucinations and therefore factual inaccuracies is too great.”
If you Google something now, you get AI overviews, often with Wikipedia-like answers. The AI companies use Wikipedia to train their models, and at the same time they compete with Wikipedia. Doesn’t that bother you?
“No. The interesting thing about Wikipedia is that everyone is free to copy, adapt and reuse it. We do ask for source attribution. Google does a pretty good job with source attribution in those summaries, because they often link to us. Not all companies do that so neatly.”
That seems to be seriously undermining the Wikipedia model.
“Exactly. It’s not about the content: feel free to take it, that’s exactly what we want. But the fact that bots are raiding Wikipedia en masse to train language models is a major burden on our technical infrastructure. It costs us high costs. Wikipedia exists thanks to donations from users. The average donation is about ten dollars. That money is not intended to subsidize OpenAI.”
Which of your seven rules of trust is the most difficult to maintain in the current situation?
“Be transparent. It becomes difficult, especially when you have something to hide, when you have messed up something. Because your vulnerability can be used against you by opponents to undermine confidence in you. This happens more now than before.
“It is very painful to say: we made a mistake and we now have to correct it. But it is worth it. It is essential for the trust that people have in your organization.”
What was the most difficult moment for you to be transparent about something that went wrong with Wikipedia?
“There’s a fairly recent example. I was on CNN and the interviewer, Walter Isaacson, started reading an article from Wikipedia to me. As a good TV journalist, he had already pinned me down by saying, ‘Oh, tell me about neutrality. How important it is that Wikipedia should always try to be neutral?’ Well, crucial, I said of course. And then: ‘Well, let me read you this entry about genocide in Gaza. Does that sound neutral?’
“I said: no, that doesn’t sound neutral. I had read it myself the week before, because there was a lot of fuss about it. I then said on the broadcast that the article was not fair, not neutral, and that Wikipedia should have done better.”
It concerned an entry in which, according to Wales, the war in Gaza was called a genocide too emphatically and without sufficient substantiation. His statement caused a stir, including in the Wikipedia community itself. But he maintains his view that the Wikipedia article in question was not prepared properly.
What does it take to make it a fact in Wikipedia terms that it is a genocide? Should it go further? Is more distance in time necessary? Why isn’t it a fact yet?
“For us, the biggest point is: it is not for us to decide. The real question for Wikipedia is: what do the reliable sources say? How do they characterize it? Do the sources report it as claims and counterclaims, or do they report it as fact? Do they simply say ‘Gaza genocide this and that’, or do they say: ‘This UN body said this, and the Israelis responded to it’. It is not up to us to determine that. Not even if you personally have an opinion there you have left.”
Doesn’t this show how, especially in times of war and great polarization, neutrality in itself is becoming an increasingly difficult concept?
“That is correct, but it remains an essential principle. A classic example is the issue of abortion: a controversial topic in many countries. Wikipedia does not say: abortion is a sin. Or: abortion is a right. The approach is different.
“Imagine a kind and thoughtful Catholic priest, and a kind and thoughtful pro-abortion activist. Kind and thoughtful, that’s crucial. Those two people can understand: we’ll never agree on the subject of abortion, but we can write about it together, and we can explain what’s so complex about it. That’s the attitude of Wikipedians. When you come to Wikipedia, regardless of your position, the controversy is explained to you. You should never feel like Wikipedia is putting you in the trying to convince one direction or the other.”
Unfortunately, there are not only thoughtful and kind people.
“That is also the most difficult question I received regarding my book. The famous Israeli thinker Yuval Noah Harari read it and sent me a friendly email. He said: ‘I think there is one thing missing: what do you do when you realize that you really cannot trust someone?’ I think he was mainly referring to people like Donald Trump.
“It was a good question, I didn’t have an answer to it quickly. In personal life, my advice would often be: cut that person out of your life. If someone writes nonsense on Wikipedia, they will simply be banned. But if it is the president of the US, what should you do: don’t vote for him? That doesn’t sound sufficient. Then it is much more difficult. I don’t have a simple answer to that.
“But looking at it from the Wikipedia context, what we do in clear cases of abuse is ban people. No matter how tolerant we are, there is no unlimited, permanent right to edit Wikipedia. The network of Wikipedians is strong enough to decide that.
“Of course, things sometimes go wrong. But you have to continue to assume good will among most people. If that stops, we simply would not be able to live in a society.”
