The Interview: How Wikipedia Is Responding to the Culture Wars  ## Metadata - Author: [[Hard Fork]] - Full Title: The Interview: How Wikipedia Is Responding to the Culture Wars - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/a43a24c8-1ddc-4afe-859f-d6bb84595771 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Trust Through Sources And Transparency** - Wikipedia builds trust by requiring good-quality sources and transparent notices when content is disputed. - Editors tease out agreed facts from opinion to present balanced, cited information. Transcript: Lulu Garcia Navarro I'm Lulu Garcia-Navarro. As one of the most popular websites in the world, Wikipedia helps define our common understanding of just about everything. But recently, the site has gone from public utility to a favorite target of Elon Musk, congressional Republicans, and MAGA influencers, who all claim that Wikipedia is biased. In many ways, those debates over Wikipedia are a microcosm of bigger discussions we're having right now about consensus, civil disagreement, shared reality, truth, facts, all those Little easy topics. A bit of history. Wikipedia was founded back in the Paleolithic era of the internet in 2001 by Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales. It was always operated as a non-profit and it employs a decentralized system of editing by volunteers, most of whom do so anonymously. There are rules over how people should engage on the site, cordially, and how changes are made, transparently. And it's led to a culture of civil disagreement that has made Wikipedia what some have called the last best place on the internet. Now, with that culture under threat, Jimmy Wales has written a book called The Seven Rules of Trust, trying to take the lessons of Wikipedia's success and apply them to our increasingly Partisan trust-depleted world. And I have to say, I did come in skeptical of his prescriptions, but I left hoping he's right. Here's my conversation with Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales. I wanted to talk to you because I think this is a very tenuous moment for trust. And your new book is all about that. In it, you sort of lay out what you call the seven rules of trust based on your work at Wikipedia. And we'll talk about all those as well as some of the threats and challenges to Wikipedia. But big picture, how would you describe our current trust deficit? Jimmy Wales I draw a distinction between what's going on maybe with politics and journalism, the culture wars and all of that, and day-to life. Because I think in day-to life, people still do trust each other. People generally think most people are basically nice. And we're all human beings bumping along on the planet, trying to do our best. And obviously, there are definitely people who aren't trustworthy. But the crisis we see in politics, trust in politicians, trust in journalism, trust in business, that is coming from other places and is something that we can fix. Lulu Garcia Navarro One of the reasons why you can be an authority on this is because you created something that scores very high on trust. You have built something that people sort of want to engage with. Jimmy Wales Yeah, I mean, I do think Wikipedia isn't as good as I want it to be. And so I think that's part of why people do have a certain amount of trust for us, because we try to be really transparent. You know, you see the notice at the top of the page sometimes that says, the neutrality of this page has been disputed, or the following section doesn't cite any sources. People like that. Not many places these days will tell you, hey, we're not so sure here. And it shows that the public does have a real desire for unbiased, neutral information. They want to trust. They want the sources. They want you to prove what you're saying and so forth. Lulu Garcia Navarro How does Wikipedia define a fact? Jimmy Wales Basically, we're very old-fashioned about this sort of thing. What we look for is good quality sources. So we like peer-reviewed scientific research, for example, as opposed to populist tabloid reports. You know, we look for quality magazines, newspapers, etc. So we don't typically treat a random tweet as a fact. And so we're pretty boring on that regard. Lulu Garcia Navarro Yeah, it's sort of like the publication that you cite gets cited by other reputable sources, that it issues corrections when it gets things wrong? Jimmy Wales It's all the old-fashioned sort of good stuff. And I think it's important to say, when we look at different sources, they will often come to things from a different perspective or different political point of view. That doesn't diminish the quality of the source. So for example, I live here in London in the UK. Have The Telegraph, which is a generally right-leaning but quality newspaper. We have The Guardian, generally left-leaning but quality newspaper. Hopefully, the facts, as you read the articles and you glean through it, the facts should be reliable and solid. But you have to be very careful as an editor to tease out, okay, what are the facts that are agreed upon here? And what are the things that are opinions on those facts? ([Time 0:04:56](https://share.snipd.com/snip/000667cc-0cd4-4ee1-880b-74be9aeceb8f)) - **Talk Pages Reveal The Debate** - Talk pages record debates and enable readers to see editorial reasoning and history. - This transparency invites participation and helps resolve disputes through sourcing and compromise. Transcript: Lulu Garcia Navarro How do you negotiate those differences? Jimmy Wales Well, in the best cases, what happens and what should happen always is take a controversial issue like abortion. Obviously, if you think about a kind and thoughtful Catholic priest and a kind and thoughtful Planned Parenthood activist, they're never going to agree about abortion, but probably They can come together, because I said they're kind and thoughtful, and say, okay, but we can report on the dispute. So, rather than trying to say abortion is a sin or abortion is a human right, you could say Catholic church position is this, and the critics have responded thusly. You'll start to hear a little of the Wikipedia style, because I believe that that's what a reader really wants. They don't want to come and get one side of the story. They want to come and say, okay, wait, hold on. I actually want to understand what people are arguing about. I want to understand both sides. What are the best arguments here? Yeah. Lulu Garcia Navarro And basically every page has what's called a talk tab where you can see the history of the discussions and the disputes, which relates to another principle of the site, which is transparency. You can look at everything and see who did what and what their reasoning was. Yeah, exactly. Jimmy Wales So, you know, oftentimes if you see something repeating, you think, huh, okay, well, why does it say that? Often you'll be able to go on the talk page and read sort of what the debate was and how it was, and you can weigh in there and you can join and say, oh, actually, I still think you've got it Wrong. Here's some more sources. Here's some more information. Maybe propose a compromise, that sort of thing. ([Time 0:10:31](https://share.snipd.com/snip/fb0a3fb1-33f6-4def-b5b0-d4db2edf13da)) - **Calm Editing Surges With Protections** - Use short-term page protections like semi-protection to calm edit wars during news spikes. - Require minimal account age and edit history to reduce vandalism while keeping most pages open. Transcript: Jimmy Wales Typically, the subjects that are restricted are, we try to keep that as short as we can. The most common type of case is if something's really big in the news, or if some big online influencer says, ah, Wikipedia is wrong, go and do something about it. And, you know, we get a rush of people who don't understand our culture, don't understand the rules, and they're just vandalizing, or they're just sort of being rude, and so on and so Forth. And we just, as a calming down, just like, okay, hold on, just slow down. We're going to protect the page. And then there are pages where, you know, the most common type of protection we call semi-protection, which just means you have to have had an account for, I forget the exact numbers, It's something like four days and you have made 10 edits without getting banned. Percent of the pages, maybe more than 99 percent, you can edit without even logging in and it goes live instantly. ([Time 0:13:28](https://share.snipd.com/snip/30190628-ecf0-4c32-aa2c-c6f7d157cb94)) - **Volunteer Safety And Editorial Independence** - Authoritarian pressure on volunteers is rising globally and threatens contributor safety. - Wikimedia's decentralized community structure gives editors independence from the Foundation's control. Transcript: Lulu Garcia Navarro You say this is an expanding problem? Jimmy Wales Yeah, I would. I think that we are seeing all around the world a rise of authoritarian impulses towards censorship, towards controlling information. And very often, these come, you know, as a wolf in sheep's clothing, because it's all about protecting the children or whatever it might be that, you know, you move forward in these kind Of control ways. But at the same time, you know, the Wikipedians are very resilient, and they're very brave. And one of the things that we believe is that in many, many cases, what's happened is a real lack of understanding by politicians and leaders of how Wikipedia works. A lot of people really have a very odd assumption that it's somehow controlled by the Wikimedia Foundation, which is the charity that I set up that owns and operates the website. Therefore, they think it's possible to pressure us in ways that it's actually not possible to pressure us. The community has real intellectual independence. But yeah, I do worry about it. I mean, it's always something that weighs very heavily on us is volunteers who are in dangerous circumstances and how do they remain safe is like critically important. ([Time 0:15:25](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4626e15d-1aae-4649-adaa-8e7f77bea766)) - **Contentions Around Charlie Kirk's Page** - On Charlie Kirk's page, labels like 'conspiracy theorist' appeared briefly and were then adjusted. - Wales says Wikipedia should document such controversies and present supporters' and critics' views. Transcript: Lulu Garcia Navarro Example of a controversy surrounding Wikipedia, and that's the assassination of Charlie Kirk. You know, Senator Mike Lee called Wikipedia wicked because of the way it had described Kirk on its page as a far right conspiracy theorist, among other complaints that they had about The page. And I went to look at the time that we're speaking, and that description is now gone from Wikipedia. Those on the left would say that that description was accurate. Those on the right would say that that description was biased all along. How do you see that, that tension? Jimmy Wales The correct answer is you have to address all of that. You have to say, look, this was a person, I think the least controversial thing you could say about Charlie Kirk is that he was controversial. I don't think anybody would dispute that. And to say like, okay, this was a figure who was a great hero to many people and treated as a demon by others. He had these views, many of which are out of step with say mainstream scientific thinking, many of which are very much in step with religious thinking and so on and so forth. And those are the kinds of things that if we do our job well, which I think we have in this case, we're going to describe all of that. Like, maybe you don't know anything about Charlie Kirk. You just heard, oh my God, this man was assassinated. Who was he? What's this all about? Well, you should come and learn all that. You should learn like who his supporters were and why they supported him and what are the arguments he put forward and what are the things he said that upset people? That's just part of learning what the world is about. Lulu Garcia Navarro So those words that were there, far right and conspiracy theorists, those were, in your view, the wrong words and that the critics of Wikipedia had a point. Jimmy Wales Well, I don't, it depends on what they, depends on the specific criticism. So if the criticism is this word appeared on this page for 17 minutes, I'm like, you know what, that's, you got to understand how Wikipedia works. It's a process. It's a discourse. It's a dialogue. But to the extent that he was called a conspiracy theorist by prominent people, that's part of his history. That's part of what's there. And Wikipedia shouldn't necessarily call him that. ([Time 0:20:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/402db45b-451d-40eb-8e05-107f3c5edde7)) - **Attacks Drive Away Moderates** - Public attacks (e.g., Elon Musk calling it 'Wokipedia') can deter thoughtful contributors and attract extreme editors. - Wales warns such rhetoric harms the community's ideological balance. Transcript: Lulu Garcia Navarro I wonder what you think attacks like his do for people's trust in your platform writ large. Because as we've seen in the journalism space, if enough outside actors are telling people not to trust something, they won't. Jimmy Wales Well, you know, it's very hard to say. I mean, I think for many people, their level of trust in Elon Musk is extremely low. Because he says wild things all the time. So to that extent, when he attacks us, people donate more money. So that's not my favorite way of raising money. But the truth is, a lot of people are responding very negatively to that behavior. One of the things I do say in the book, and I've said to Elon Musk is that type of attack is, counterproductive, even if you agree with Elon Musk, because to the extent that he has convinced People falsely that Wikipedia has been taken over by woke activists, then two things happen. Thoughtful conservatives who we very much welcome and we want more people who are thoughtful and intellectual and maybe disagree about various aspects of the spirit of our times, Come and join us and let's make Wikipedia better. But if those people think, oh no, it's just going to be a bunch of crazy woke activists, they're going to go away. And then on the other side, the crazy woke activists are going to be like, great, I found my home. I don't have to worry about whatever. I can come and write rants against the things I hate in the world. ([Time 0:22:31](https://share.snipd.com/snip/377b0505-baa2-4809-a1c8-8d67a09589a9)) - **Use AI To Support, Not Replace, Editors** - Treat AI as a tool to assist editors, not replace them, by checking entries against sources to flag unsupported claims. - Use models for suggestions while retaining human review to avoid hallucinations. Transcript: Jimmy Wales You know, we've got this rise of the large language models, which are an amazing but deeply flawed technology. And so, the way I think about that is to say, okay, look, I know for a fact, like, no AI today is competent to write a Wikipedia entry. It can do a passable job on a very big famous topic, but anything slightly obscure and the hallucination problem is disastrous. But at the same time, I'm very interested in how can we use this technology to support our community? One idea is, you know, take a short entry and feed in the sources. Maybe it's only got five sources and it's short and just ask the AI, is there anything in the entry that's not supported by the sources? Or is there anything in the sources that could be in Wikipedia but isn't? And give me a couple suggestions if you can find anything. As I've played with that, it's pretty okay. It needs work and it's not perfect. But if we react with just like, oh my God, we hate AI, then we'll miss the opportunity to do that. ([Time 0:27:43](https://share.snipd.com/snip/13998805-ad8c-47c9-a106-2980b2e97509)) - **AI-Churn Threatens Quality Journalism** - Low-quality, automated content and AI-churn flood the web and threaten high-quality human content business models. - Wales worries this undermines journalism and local news more than it directly displaces Wikipedia. Transcript: Lulu Garcia Navarro And for 2025, it wrote, quote, we are seeing that low quality content is being churned out, not just to spread false information, but as a get rich quick scheme. And it is overwhelming the Internet. High quality information that is reliably human produced has become a dwindling and precious commodity. End quote. I read that crawlers from large language models have basically crashed your servers because they use so much of Wikipedia's content. And it did make me wonder, will people be using these large language models to answer their questions and not going to the source, which is you? Jimmy Wales Well, you know, this has been a question since they began. We haven't seen any real evidence of that. And I use AI personally quite a lot. And I use it in a different way, different use cases. How? See, I like to cook. It's my hobby. I fancy myself as being quite a good cook. And I will often ask Chajubiti for a recipe. I also ask it for links to websites with recipes. It sometimes makes them up. So that's a bit hilarious. And I also suggest be careful using Chajubiti for cooking unless you actually already know how to cook, because when it's wrong, it's really wrong. But Wikipedia would be useless for that. Wikipedia doesn't have recipes. It's a completely different realm of knowledge than encyclopedic knowledge. So, yeah, I'm not that worried about it. ([Time 0:29:04](https://share.snipd.com/snip/cd4631dd-9c10-4936-a35d-a51df0fce83d)) - **Keep Independence By Avoiding Profit Pressure** - Preserve nonprofit status to protect intellectual independence and long-term trust instead of chasing profit. - Design governance and funding to prioritize community values over investor returns. Transcript: Jimmy Wales I mean, I do think it made a difference in lots of ways, and I'm not against for-profit. You know, I'm not, you know, there's nothing wrong with for-profit companies. But even as a nonprofit, you do have to have a business model, so to speak. You've got to figure out how you're going to pay the bills. And for Wikipedia, that's not too bad. The truth is we don't require billions and billions and billions of dollars in order to operate Wikipedia. It's, you know, we need servers and database and we need to support the community and all these kinds of things. I would say in terms of the development of Wikipedia and how we're so community first and community driven, you wouldn't really necessarily have that if the board were made up largely Of investors who were worried about the profitability and things like that. Also, I think it's important today for our intellectual independence. We're under attack in various ways, as we've talked about. And, you know, what's interesting is, you know, one of the things that isn't going to happen, actually, the most successful tweet I ever had, I think it was a New York Post journalist Tweeted to Elon, you should just buy Wikipedia when he was complaining something about Wikipedia. And I just wrote not for sale. That was very popular. But it isn't for sale. And, you know, I just thought, you know what, you know, I would like to imagine myself as a person who would say to Elon, no, thank you for a $30 billion offer if I owned the whole thing. But would I, you know, actually 30 billion, you know, 30 million? Yeah, I'm not interested. 30 billion, you know, and so that's not going to happen because we're a charity and I don't get paid and the board doesn't get paid and all of that. And I do think that's important for that independence that we're not we don't think in those terms. ([Time 0:41:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7e79b9f8-0d55-4331-863a-3465822f8575)) - **Researching His House's Former Owner** - Jimmy Wales recently looked up Admiral Sir Hugo Pearson after discovering he once owned Wales's country house. - He bought a photograph from eBay and joked about making a ghost-voice assistant from the admiral. Transcript: Jimmy Wales Oh, that's a good question. Can I take a second to look? Sure. Show full history. Search Wikipedia. Now, I'm going to skip over list of Wikipedians by number of edits. That's just me doing work. I'm going to look. Oh, I know. This is fun. Admiral Sir Hugo Pearson, who died in 1912, used to own my house in the countryside. And I found this out, and there's a picture of him, which I found on eBay and ordered. And I was trying to remember something. There's nothing about my house in the article because he was there and then he moved away. But I love it. And I'm thinking of replacing the AI voice assistant. I use Alexa. People use, okay, Google or whatever. I want to make my own, and want to have it be a character and the character will be the ghost of Hugo Pearson. Anyway, that's what I was researching. I'm not sure I'll ever get around to it. I'm like really busy promoting my book and things like that. ([Time 0:46:57](https://share.snipd.com/snip/74ccab86-b404-4cb3-9cd0-ed92f1971078))