Wikipedia and the Destruction of Trust  ## Metadata - Author: [[YouTube]] - Full Title: Wikipedia and the Destruction of Trust - Category: #articles - Document Tags: [[community]] [[trust]] [[wikipedia]] - Summary: Wikipedia and the Destruction of Trust - URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zi0ogvPfCA So, there's this clip going around ofJimmy Wales, who is the founder orco-founder — we'll get into it — ofWikipedia, walking out of an interviewafter like 50 seconds. And to start out,I got to say that I respectJimmy Wales so much. I see him as overthe last 20 years just having done atremendous amount of behind-the-sceneshard and good work. And Wikipedia isnow better than Google. Like, if I wantto know something, I search Wikipediafirst. And it is a crowdsourcednonprofit. But the thing that happenedin this interview, he starts out sayingthat I'm Jimmy Wales, the founder ofWikipedia. The interviewer says, "Areyou the founder or are you theco-founder?" And Jimmy says that this isthe dumbest question in the world.>> You're the founder or co-founder? Cuz, uh,>> I don't care. It's the dumbest questionin the world. Absolutely. >> There seems to be a dispute.>> There's no dispute. I don't care.>> Then they have a little back and forthand he just gets up and leaves. Thisfeels, as a viewer, petty. It feelsdramatic. Overreacting, and everybody else gets todunk on him. He's saying, "I don'tcare whether I'm the founder orco-founder, but like obviously he does."But here's what I think. I don't thinkthis is petty, and I don't think it'ssimple. And I don't think it is aboutfounder versus co-founder. I think it iswhat happens when you try to build trustin a world that is currently structuredto destroy trust at every opportunity.So on its face, this question is silly.Wikipedia was co-founded by Jimmy Walesand Larry Sanger. You can look that upon Wikipedia. And if you don't knowanything about either of these guys,this is going to look super petty. Like,why is Jimmy detonating because of thisquestion that he supposedly doesn't careabout? This is a trapdoor into 20 years of baggage that has nothing to do withwho registered a domain name andeverything to do with the internet thatwe are trying to survive. Right now,Larry Sanger is on a campaign to try anddestroy people's trust in Wikipedia. Sosaying, "Do you acknowledge that LarrySanger, this guy who hasn't worked onWikipedia since 2002, who now goes onright-wing media to say that WikipediaIs controlled by leftist elites, can wetalk about that guy, that guy who'sdestroying trust instead of the thingthat you're here to talk about, which isthe book that you wrote about how tobuild trust? So yeah, Jimmy Wales iscurrently on book tour. He's headed allover the world to promote this book. It's exhausting to promote a book. Thisis a thing that I can attest to. You getworse and worse as time goes on. But at the same time, he's beingattacked by some of the most powerfulpeople in the world, including therichest men in the world, for doing hisvery hard and thankless job that did notmake him a billion dollars. So, yeah,the guy's exhausted. He walks in and theinterviewer, knowingly or not, stickshis finger into an old bruise. And Icould totally be getting this wrong, butI'm going to attempt like a littleinternet anthropology here. Jimmy Walesfunded Wikipedia's predecessor. He setup the infrastructure. He championed theidea of the open encyclopedia. He keptthe servers on. He kept the lights on. He kept the project alive. Larry Sanger,he coined the name Wikipedia. He wrotethe early rules. He organized the firstContributors. Then he left theorganization with his co-founder statusand then went on to become one ofWikipedia's greatest critics, and thepatron saint of Wikipedia has a liberalbias. These people are obviouslyco-founders. The reason that Jimmy Walesthinks this is a dumb question isbecause the work that they have putinto these things is not equal. SinceLarry Sanger left, the work of buildingthe Wikipedia Foundation, of runningWikipedia, of being the person in chargeof it, and of a community of a bunch of individual volunteers who have built thegreatest resource of information theworld has ever seen, all have theirown personalities and need systemsfor organizing them, are extremelydifficult and thankless jobs. He's beendoing that work. Larry Sanger's beenover here from the sidelines critiquingit. These men are obviously co-founders,but that makes them seem like they haveequal ability to speak to thesituation that Wikipedia is in, whichthey do not. One of them is involvedevery single day. One of them has beencritiquing from the sidelines for 20years. Disagreements that they had in the earlymoments of Wikipedia. This should be ina dusty corner of a mailing listarchive, but it has been enrolled in themodern war over who gets to definereality. And if you just look at thisfrom a distance, what you see ispeople who want to be able to definereality, but who do not have controlover Wikipedia. Elon Musk is like, "Thisis a disaster of a place." Because, ofcourse, it says things he doesn’t likeabout him. And so Elon is responding bycreating Groipedia, an AI createdversion of Wikipedia that mostly justpulls Wikipedia off of Wikipedia, whichis admittedly in the Creative Commons. So you could do that. That’s fine. It isjust worse in every way because itdoesn’t have all of the amazinginfrastructure behind it of the talkpage of the people who I don’t know if Ican get people to understand this, butholding this community togetherand keeping them maintaining Wikipediafor decades is insane. It’s a miracle.So that’s the mess. That’s why thestupid question is stupid and also notstupid, and also he doesn’t care butobviously cares because we’re asking ifThe people who built Wikipedia can'tagree on its origin story. What doesthat mean for the truth that we all relyon Wikipedia to tell? So imagine you'reJimmy Wales. You built somethingtruly magnificent, truly a greatresource for humanity with a lot of help,of course, but you're doing that everyday and you're not using it to get rich. And the project of Wikipedia is like beinga lovely little place onthe internet, not a place to getoutraged, not a place to getradicalized, not a place to make money,but just a place to learn things, tostart someone's journey intounderstanding in the world, and you canfall down that rabbit hole. And in themeantime, you watch the entire rest ofthe internet slide down intopolarization, misinformation,algorithmic blood sports, filterbubbles, all of that. And then yourformer collaborator who left the projectbefore most of it even existed getsadopted by a political movement thatneeds Wikipedia to be corrupt. Becauseif Wikipedia is neutral and boring and well sourced, then that is a threat toTheir ability to define reality. Andthen you go on and you write a book thatsays, "Hey, can we still build thingsthat work? Can we still trust eachother? It doesn’t have to be like this."And as you’re on book tour for this,Elon Musk launches Grocipedia and theright-wing has a sudden explosion,and then reporters feel like they have arequirement to report on that duringthese interviews. So instead of talkingabout trust and the book, you’re like,"What about your rival? What about thisguy who says, "Oh, this thing that wethink is good is actually evil?" Oh, youwanted to talk about how to build trust. Well, LET'S USE THE SAME SYSTEM THATWE'RE CONSTANTLY USING TO DESTROY TRUSTIN everything, to take your tour abouthow to build TRUST AND MAKE IT ABOUTDESTROYING TRUST IN A THING PEOPLETRUST. AND EVERYBODY knows the wrongdecision to make is to get frustratedand get mad and to storm out of aninterview. Everybody knows it. Butpeople are human. It’s obviously aterrible reaction. It’s just like acompletely to me a completelyunderstandable one. I think that Jimmyis right that this question is dumb. It's not that interestingbecause he's not writing a book aboutWikipedia. He's writing a book abouttrust. He's writing what he's learnedfrom his position, from his seat. But aswith so many founder stories, neither ofthem matter that much anymore. Wikipediais a community of hundreds of thousandsof editors. People don't get this. Youcan go on pretty much any Wikipedia pageand you can make your own corrections.You can make your clarifications. And asa new editor, that might get reversedbecause maybe you don't understand whythe sentence was the way that it was.But I do this all the time. Like I findsomething in Wikipedia that's wrong andthen I change it. Like I fix it. Like Ifind something on a topic that I know alot about. Oftentimes this is likeonline video stuff and I like, you know,I try to find a source for it and I makea change and I include the citation forthat and then the change sticks. Andthat's how for the most part the wholewebsite works. It is transparent. It iscitation-based. It's globally accessible. It's self-correcting. And I cannotemphasize this enough: boring. It'sboring. And in the media landscapeDesigned to amplify the drama and theoutrage and conflict, the fact thatWikipedia is kind of boring is one ofthe most beautiful things about it. Ilove it. I want a place that's not abouttrying to get views. It's God. And it'sso obvious that the people who critiqueit, they love getting views. And like Iknow it because I'm them, right? I lovegetting views. You think I get them byaccident? Wikipedia is a miracle. Likeit is not perfect. But thank God forWikipedia. It's just a bunch of regularpeople who choose for like a few minutesof their day. Maybe more than thatbecause a lot of people are like storiedWikipedia editors who spend a lot of timedoing it, but they just spend that timebeing careful and helpful and trying tobe factual, which I know is hard. It'shard to be nonpartisan. It's hard tohave that neutral point of view, but theattempt is there. And of course peopleare going to disagree, but like we gotto try. And fine, if you want to buildanother version of it, that's fine. Butthe attacks are ridiculous. They try sohard. And I'm sitting here watching asone of the few people who hassuccessfully laid a foundation of trust. Tries to go on a book tour talking abouthow that might be replicated and isbeing used as an opportunity to tear atthe foundation of trust that he's built.Oh my God. And if I can use this as anopportunity for anything, it's to notlose sight of what Wikipedia actuallyis. It's one of the only places on theinternet where you can see how thesausage is made. You can read the realarguments. You can check the sources.You could decide for yourself how youfeel. And it is not designed to getclicks. What was that thing? Null. LikeGoogle made a Wikipedia competitorcalled Null, K N O L. And it failedbecause it was about rewarding thepeople who wrote the pages. Like they'dget money based on the impressions andthen they'd run ads on it. So just likeYouTube, I make the video, YouTubeshares the revenue from the ads thatthey sell. They wanted to do that butwith like a Wikipedia clone, and it bombedbecause everybody was trying to make thepages that would get the most views and it tore itself apart. I mean, if youspend any time on the internet, you findhow tremendously useful it is and it ismaintained quietly by people who getNothing from doing that except thesatisfaction of making the world alittle more accurate. And maybe thesepeople can't believe that, and so theythink that they're a bunch of wokesterstrying to lie and form theirown version of reality. But it's justnot what's going on. Like if they weretrying to get attention, you'd know whothey were. Cynicism and nihilism are sohigh, and that matters way more than twofounders who do not like each other, andI am so worried about it. But what I see— like I don't know that much about JimmyWales. I don't know that much aboutLarry Sanger. But I do see one personwho's trying to say we need to buildtrust, and I see one person who's doingthe same thing as everybody else whowants to get attention on the internet. And I know this because I write YouTubetitles. They are asking. One of the bestways to get attention is to tell peoplethat they are being lied to. And it'salso a great way to get people to leavebehind some system over here and see youas one of the only sources for goodinformation, which obviously Elon Muskleans into that really hard. Heobviously very clearly wants to be inThe charge of defining reality for, you know,a large group of people, if not everyone. We are so hungry for conflict that weturn something as boring as Wikipediainto a part of the culture war. But weare also so hungry for good informationthat Wikipedia gets billions of pageviews a month. Wikipedia is as good andas successful as it has ever been. Andit is actually new knowledge beingsynthesized by people, not justregurgitations of that by an AIoverview. The fight is always going tobe the loud thing, but like the actualuseful things in the world are quiet andinvisible. And I hate that, like thequiet invisible usefulness of Wikipedia is getting dragged into this fight. Andthe rebuilding of trust,it’s so hard. I hate watching a personwho's like trying to think honestly andopenly about how to rebuild trust andthen the systems of the internet, boththe people who know what they’re doingand then all the structures that rewardthat behavior, they tear it down. Theyturn that conversation into yet moredestruction of trust. But if you lookpast this drama, which is likemomentary, this is of this moment. If you're on Wikipedia and if you're aWikipedia editor, Wikipedia is working.It's still being improved. It is stillteaching us things and it is not done.And it is more necessary now than it hasever been. And I just want to say howmuch I appreciate your work. I know thisand I want everyone to know this. Youare not trying to define reality. You’rejust trying to give us all a sharedstarting point. And we need that and itis so worth celebrating and I celebratethe [ \_\_ ] out of you. Thank you. It’s sogood and it is so dumb but sopredictable that these people would dragthis into their discourse becauseanything, anything that they don’tcontrol somehow, just by pure luck, Iguess is wrong and bad and woke andneeds to be attacked. What a surprise., Wikipedia and the Destruction of Trust, YouTube, 01ka78j2k26v1hc226npfny1fr.