Kind: captions
Language: en
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
we'll knock yourself out you're going to
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 Alex 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 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 going to be rewarded and what
that is but the idea that everyone can
copy it and it just is part of the
commons really empowered a huge wave of
uh 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 and 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 know you should
see a picture a few pictures maybe
history location
something about the architect etc etc 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 new pedia which
was about two years before Wikipedia and
with newpedia we 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 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
um and two two things came with 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 okay well so much for a seven stage
review process but also I decided that I
wanted to try I was frustrated and why
is this taking so long why is it so hard
so I thought 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 I had been a grad student
for a few years then I felt this huge
intimidation because they were going to
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 you know it's like this
really oppressive sort of like you're
gonna submit it for a review and you're
going to get critiques a little bit the
bad part of God 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
um you know potential embarrassment if I
screw something up and so forth and so
that was when I realized okay look this
is never going to work this is not
something that people are really going
to want to do
so Jeremy Rosenfeld one of my employees
had brought and showed me the wiki
Concept in December and then Larry
Sanger brought in uh the same said what
about this Wiki idea and so uh 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 well maybe
these academics are going to 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 you know
you could back then you could be the
first person who typed Africa is a
continent and hit save you know which
isn't much of an encyclopedia entry but
it's true and it's a start and it's kind
of fun like I you know you put your name
down actually a funny story was uh
several years later I just happened to
be online and I saw when um I think his
name is Robert Allman won the Nobel
prize in economics and we didn't have an
entry uh on him at all which was
surprising but it wasn't that surprising
this was still early days you know
um and so I got to be the first person
to type Robert Allman won a 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 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 well what is it
that made that so accessible so fun so
uh so natural to just add something well
I think it's you know especially in the
early days and this by the way has
gotten much harder because there are
fewer topics that are just Green Field
you know available
um but you know you could say oh well uh
you know I I know a little bit about
this and I can I can get it started uh
but then it is fun to to come back then
and see other people have added and
improved and so on and so forth and that
idea of collaborating you know where
people can much like open source
software
um you know you you put your code out
and then people suggest revisions and I
change it and it modifies and it grows
beyond the original Creator
um it's just a kind of a fun wonderful
quite geeky hobby but
um people enjoy it how much debate was
there over the interface over the
details of how to make that well
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 you
know things back then XML was kind of
all the rage and thinking about ah could
we you know shouldn't you have certain
uh data that might be in multiple
articles that gets updated automatically
so for example you know the population
of New York City every 10 years there's
a new official census couldn't you just
up at the update that bit of data in one
place and it would update across all
those 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 yeah there's
some yeah so we can data variables yeah
Wiki data um you can you can link uh you
know 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 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
um you know some guy's hobby project it
was cool but it was just a hobby project
and uh all the data was stored uh in
flat text files so there was no real
database behind it so the to search the
site you basically used graph which is
just like the basic Unix utility to like
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
you know 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 kind of
obvious like you can't go a big website
where everybody can pretend to be
everybody that's that's not going to be
good for trust and reputation and so
forth so quickly I had to write a little
you know login you know store people's
passwords and things like that so you
can have unique identities and then
another example of something you know
quite he 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 uppercase
lowercase and you smash the words
together so maybe uh New York City he
might type new no space capital Y 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 that's just not
going to look nice let's just use square
brackets two square brackets makes a
link that may have been an option in the
software I'm not sure I thought up
Square broadcast but anyway we just did
that
um which worked really well it makes
nice links and you know you can see in
its 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 they a lot
of users cut and paste a square bracket
when they could find one and they just
cut and paste one in and yep German
Wikipedia has been a massive success so
somehow that didn't slow people down
um how is the the German keyboards don't
have a square bracket how do you do
programming how do you how do you live
it's life to its fullest with us we have
a very good question I'm not really sure
I mean maybe it does now because of
keyboard standards have you know 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
um and it wasn't on keyboards or I think
it is now but in in general W is not a
letter in Italian language but it
appears in enough International words
that it's crept into Italians and all of
these things are probably Wikipedia
articles in oh yeah cells oh yeah the
discussion of square brackets whole
discussion I'm sure on both the English
and the German Wikipedia and and then
difference between those two might be
very uh uh very interesting
so wikidata is fascinating but even the
broader discussion of uh what is an
encyclopedia can you go to that sort of
philosophical question of sure what is
what is it what is it what is this
encyclopedia so uh the way I would put
it is uh an encyclopedia or what our
goal is is the sum of all human
knowledge but some meaning summary
so and this was an early debate I mean
somebody started uploading uh the full
text of Hamlet for example and we said
wait hold on a second that's not an
encyclopedia article but why not
um so hence was born wikisource which is
where you put original texts and things
like that out of copyright text uh
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 uh 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 I haven't
thought about that in many many years
now 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'm I'm I love to cook
I'm I'm you know I'm I'm actually quite
a good cook and uh what's interesting is
there's it's very hard to have a neutral
recipe because like a fanatical recipe
for canonical recipes 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
um you know for many many things uh the
variants are as interesting you know as
uh you know 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 million
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 uh does that
blow your mind I mean yes it does I mean
it doesn't because I 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 uh remarkable
I remember when
uh English Wikipedia passed 100 000
articles and when German Wikipedia
passed 100 000 because I happen to be in
Germany with a bunch of wikipedians that
night and
um you know then it seemed quite big I
mean we knew at that time that it it was
nowhere near complete I remember at
wikimania in Harvard uh when we when we
did our annual conference there in
Boston
um someone
who had come to the conference from
Poland had brought along with him a
small encyclopedia a single volume uh
Encyclopedia of biographies so short
biography is 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 you know less than 10 I think he
said and so then you realize yeah
actually you know 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 you know how many could
there be is this very deep philosophical
issue of notability
um which is the question of well how do
you how do you draw the limit how do you
draw you know what 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 you know
billions of those in life classic though
it's a classic clear big pen so could we
have an entry about that big pen oil I
bet we do that type of big pen uh
because it's classic everybody knows it
and it's got a history and
um actually there's something
interesting about the big company they
make pens they also make kayaks
and there's something else they're
famous or basically uh they're they're
sort of a definition by non-essentials
company anything that's long
and plastic that's what they make wow so
if you want to find the time the
platonic form of a big but could we have
an article about that very big pen
in your hand so Lex Friedman's big pen
out of this oh the very this is a very
specific instance and the answer is no
there's not much known about it I dare
say unless you know 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 and
um so that that's just to show there's a
there's there is a limit I mean in
German Wikipedia they used to talk about
the the rear nut of the wheel of
ulifook's bicycle ulifooks the
well-known wikipedian of the time to
sort of illustrate like you can't have
an article about literally everything
and so then it raises the question what
can you have an article about what can't
do and that can vary depending on the
subject matter
um 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
um and somebody tries to create a
Wikipedia there's no way to update it
there's not much now 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 you know there's
not enough known and you could sort of
Imagine a database of genealogy having
date of birth date of death and you know
certain elements like that of of private
people but you couldn't really write a
biography one of the areas this comes up
quite often is
uh what we call blp1a we've got lots of
acronyms biography of a living person
who's notable for only one event there's
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 you know it varies from 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 you know 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
member of a royal family where it's
basically all about the family so you
know we we're fairly nuanced about
notability and where it comes in and
I've always
um thought that they the term notability
I think is a little problematic I mean
it's we we struggle about how to talk
about it the problem with notability is
it's it can feel insulting so no that
you're not noteworthy my mother's
noteworthy it'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 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 uh the
first thought I had when I saw that was
uh 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 uh
we'll talk about the various details of
that but
the the love and care that goes into
creating Pages for individuals for a big
pen for all this kind of stuff is just
it's just really incredible so I just
felt the love when I 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 gone 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
um and because I've become friends with
Elon Musk
and have interviewed him but I've also
interviewed people on the left uh 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 dubs and pulls you right in a
boiling hot pool of politics I guess
it's hot and so I got to experience some
of that uh I think
what you also realize is
um 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
um are cherry picking all the flaws they
can have in a journalistic article for
sure and those can be used as as uh
sources it's like they dance hand in
hand and so
um for me sadly enough there was a
really kind of concerted attack to say
that I was never at MIT I never did
anything in 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 and 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
uh calm and happy and Almost Boring uh
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
uh and I will travel to Russia for some
very difficult conversations uh 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 uh for me I also want to clarify
sort of personally I use this
opportunity of some inaccuracies there
my father was not born in Chicago Russia
he was born in Kiev Ukraine
I was born in Chicago
which is a town not in Russia there is a
town like 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 Allison 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 is as 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 is there's this beautiful kind
of saving that this person existed
like a community that notices you it
says like uh like a little you see like
a like a butterfly that floats and
you're like huh that it's not just any
butterfly it's that one I like that one
but you see a puppy or something or uh
or it's this big pen this one I remember
this one as the scratch and you get
noticed in that way and that I 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 for sure and
not a battleground of attacks of the
kind of stuff we might see on on Twitter
like the mockery the derision this kind
of stuff for sure and of course you
don't want to cherry pick all of us have
flaws and so on but it just feels like
um to highlight a controversy of some
sort when that doesn't at all represent
the entirety of the human in most cases
yeah is sad yeah yeah yeah so there's a
few things uh to unpack and all that
um so first one of the things I find
really always find very interesting is
you know your status with MIT okay
that's that's upsetting and it's an
argument and can be sorted out
but then what's interesting is you 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 a biography in
Wikipedia is there often is annoyed by a
tiny error that no one's going to 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
um and so that's that's one of the
reasons you know for biographies we we
say like human dignity really matters
um and so you know some of the things
have to do with and this is this is a
common debate that goes on in Wikipedia
is what we call undue weight so I give
I'll give an example
um
there was a article I stumbled across
many years ago about you know the mayor
I know he wasn't a mayor he was a city
council member of I think it was Peoria
Illinois but some small town in in the
Midwest and the entry you know 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 has 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 uh
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 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 and let's see there's
seven sections so this one's quite short
can I add something right go out and
find some more controversies 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 lie flow and there is a
controversy there's always potential
controversy for anyone uh 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
um
uh uh that's you know part of the whole
process but I think for me one of the
most important things is 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
um 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
um what does it mean uh you know and
sometimes one of the the areas where I
do think there is a very complicated
flaw and and you've alluded to it a
little bit but it's like we know the
media is deeply flawed we know that
journalism uh can go wrong and I would
say particularly in the last whatever 15
years we've seen a real decimation of
local media local newspapers uh we've
seen a real rise in Click bait 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 how do
we sort things out
um when we have a pretty good sense that
that not every source is valid so as an
example
um
a few years ago it's been quite a while
now
um we deprecated uh the mail online as a
source
um and the mail online you know the
digital arm of the Daily Mail it's a
tabloid it it's not completely you know
it's not fake news but it does tend to
run very hyped up stories they 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 ban 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
um 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
that's kind of ridiculous but also for
celebrities and and so forth to sort of
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 daylight mail going on
around and some of that requires a great
Community Health like I mean it requires
massive Community Health even for me for
stuff I've seen as kind of if actually
iffy about people I know things I know
about myself I still feel
like a a love for knowledge emanating
from the article like in LA like I feel
the community health so I will take all
slight inaccuracies I would I I would I
love it because that means there's
people for the most part I feel of
respect and love in this 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 could see you can
feel the Dynamics of the health of the
particular Community yeah and and
sub-communities too like a particularly
c-sharp or Java or python or whatever
like there's little like 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 yeah because of the defensiveness
because when somebody writes an answer
and then somebody else kind of says well
modify it and get defensive and there's
this uh tension that's not conducive to
like uh improving towards a more
truthful depiction of like what with
that topic yeah a great example that I
really loved uh 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 uh racist hook
on front page so we have on the front
page of Wikipedia we have a little
section called did you know it's just
little tidbits and foxes 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 it was comparing a
very well-known uh U.S football player
black uh there was a quote from another
famous sport person uh comparing him to
a Lamborghini clearly a compliment uh
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
um Etc but they said I'm not I'm not
pulling I'm not deleting it I'm not
removing it I just want to 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
like the alarming headline racist thing
on the front page Wikipedia that sounds
holy moly that sounds bad but it's sort
of like um actually yeah this 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 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 like
nobody's saying you know people should
be banned if if they refer to what was
his name the fridge Refrigerator Perry
the you know 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 you know that's good
on the sort of uh deprecation of news
sources is 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 uh
the
there's just a lot of hit pieces written
about uh 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 oh
yeah this is a I I guess as a Wikipedia
contributor
you start to deeply become aware of that
and start to have a sense like a radar
of Click bait versus truth like to to
pick out the truth from the clickbaity
type language oh yeah I mean it's it's
really important and you know we talk a
lot about weasel words
um you know and
um you know actually I'm sure we'll end
up talking about
but just to quickly mention in this area
I think one of the potentially powerful
tools
um
well because it is quite good at this
I've played around with and practiced it
quite a lot but Chad gbt4 is is really
quite able to to take a passage
and
uh
point out potentially biased terms to to
rewrite it to be more neutral now it is
a bit uh hanadine and it's a bit you
know cliched so sometimes it just takes
the spirit out of something that's
actually not bad it's just like you know
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
um you know
can you imagine where you 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 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
um you know really
um more quickly get good people to sort
of review obscure entries uh and things
like that so just as a small aside on
that and we'll probably talk about
language models a little bit uh or a lot
more but one of the Articles uh one of
the head pieces about me uh 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 apologized for the
error the gpt4 generated which has this
kind of interesting Loop which is the
articles are used to write Wikipedia
Pages GPT is trained on Wikipedia and
then there's like this um
interesting
Loop where the weasel words and the
nuances can get lost or can
propagate even though they're not ground
in reality uh somehow in the generation
of the language model new truths can be
created and kind of linger yeah there's
a famous webcomic that's titled
cytogenesis which is about how
something an error is in Wikipedia and
there's no source for it but then a lazy
journalist reads it and writes The
Source yeah and then some helpful
wikipedian spots that it has on the
source finds the source and has it to
Wikipedia and voila magic this happened
to me once it it uh well it nearly
happened
um there was this I mean it was really
brief I went back and researched I'm
like this is really odd so biography
magazine which is a magazine published
by the biography TV channel
um had a profile of me and it said
uh in his spare time I'm not quoting
exactly 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 I'm not it's not a
hobby of mine and
uh I was like where did they get that
and I contacted the magazine said
where'd that come from they said oh it
was in Wikipedia I 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 it's somebody's going
to read that and they're going to add it
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
that problem uh when we think about
large language models and the ability to
quickly generate very plausible but not
true content I think it's something that
there's going to be a lot of ShakeOut 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 just
to make it more convenient
yeah aspire to Aspire to yes but
aspirational
um what if we just talk about that
before we jump uh back to some other
interesting topics on Wikipedia let's
talk about gpt4 and large language
models uh so the AR in part trained on
Wikipedia content yeah uh
what are the pros and cons of of these
language models what are your thoughts
yeah so I mean there's a lot of stuff
going on obviously the Technologies move
very quickly in the last six months and
looks poised to do so for some time to
come
um so first things first I mean part of
our philosophy is
the open licensing the free licensing
the idea that you know this is what
we're here for we we are a volunteer
community and we write this
um encyclopedia we give it to the world
to do what you like with you can modify
it pre-distribute it redistribute
modified versions commercially
non-commercially this is this is the
licensing so in that sense of course
it's completely fine now we do worry a
bit about attribution
um because it is a Creative Commons
attribution sharealike license so
attributes 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
um you know if um
if I
were to write something about my visit
here I might say in a blog post you know
I was in uh
Austin which is a city in Texas I'm not
going to 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
um you know they call it grounding so
particularly people at Google are really
keen on
figuring out grounding aesthetical terms
so ground any any text that's generated
trying to ground it to the Wikipedia
quality source source I mean like the
same kind of standard of what a source
means that Wikipedia uses the same kind
of generating yeah the same kind of
thing and of course one of the biggest
flaws in chargept right now
um is that it just literally will make
things up just to be
like amiable I think it's programmed to
be very hopeful and amiable and it
doesn't really know or care about the
truth and get bullied into uh yeah it
can kind of be convincing too well but
like this morning I I was the story I
was telling earlier about uh 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 church BT
so I sent to church gbt4 I said uh you
know this this happened in Wikipedia can
you think of examples where a white
athlete has been compared to uh
a fast car inanimate object and it comes
back as a very plausible essay where it
tells you know why these analogies are
common and support mobile I said no no I
really uh 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 none of them existed
and so I'm like well that's really not
good like I I wanted to explore a
thought process I was in I thought hi I
thought first I thought how do I Google
and say well it's kind of a hard thing
to Google Because unless somebody's
written about this specific topic it's
you know oh it's large language model it
can it's processed all this data it can
probably piece that together but it just
can't yet so I think
uh I hope that
GPT five six seven you know three to
five years I'm hoping we'll see a much
higher you know level of accuracy
um 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 like
don't know or maybe uh display
the how much might be in this
uh generated text like yeah I'm really
would like to make you happy right now
but I'm really stretched in with this
General well it's it's one of the things
I 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 we'll
we'll be a notice that says the
neutrality of this section has been
disputed or the following section
doesn't cite in these sources
um and I always joke uh you know
sometimes I wish the New York Times
would run a banner saying the neutrality
of this has been disputed they can 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 Ah that's actually interesting and
that's fine I would trust them more for
that level of transparency so yeah
similarly Chad GPT should say yeah 87
um well the neutrality one is
really interesting because uh that's
basically a summary
of the discussions that are going on
underneath it would be amazing if uh
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 the 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 we one of the
things I do spend a lot of time thinking
about these days and you know people
have found it we're moving slowly but
you know 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 we
do approach things in a non-commercial
way in a really deep sense it's like
it's it's been great that Wikipedia has
become very popular but really we're
just 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 and one example I never
thought about I'm gonna start playing
with it is you know feed in the article
and feed in the talk page and say can
you suggest some warnings in the article
based on the conversation to the top
page I think it might 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
um you know 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 what you're
playing with I mean some more color to
the
not neutrality but also
the amount of emotion Laden in the
exploration of this particular part of
the topic yeah it might it might
actually help you look at more
controversial Pages uh like on you know
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 part 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 could 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 the discussion was that
they're building something in Israel
and for their own political reasons uh
one side calls it a wall hearkening 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 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
Israel is 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 with a concept uh oh okay I
understand what this debate is about now
and uh just the term
israel-palestine conflict
is still the title of a page at
Wikipedia But the word conflict is
something that is a charged word of
course yeah because uh from the
Palestinian side or from uh 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 that to to people that uh discuss
um that challenge the word conflict they
see you know conflict is when there's
two equally powerful sides fighting yeah
yeah no it's it's hard and you know in
in a number of cases so this is 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 pages have a title
um so you know there's that same thing
with
um certain things like photos you know
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
um so at one point I have no idea if
it's in there today but I don't think so
um
I was listed in uh you know kind of
American entrepreneurs 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 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 activist
because that's their big issue so
Madeline Murray O'Hare or various famous
people who uh 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 like
what category would you put you know and
and do you need that guy in this case I
was I argued that doesn't need that kind
of like 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 here today I
hope not just because it was me but
um but categories can be like that where
you know 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 wait uh
you know if
uh someone who is now prominent in
public life and generally considered to
be a good person uh
was convicted of something let's say DUI
when they were young we normally in
normal sort of discourse we don't think
oh this person should be in the category
of American criminals because you think
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 it
just says like example in this area is
um
Mark Wahlberg Marky Mark that's what I
always think of a mask 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 did he was convicted of uh
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 it's actually that's actually
an important part of his life story you
know that he had a very rough use and he
could have you know 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 sign labels to people
into ideas somehow and those labels
stick yeah and there's certain words
that have a lot of power like criminal
um like political Left Right Center
um anarchist
objectivist
uh what other philosophies are there
Marxist communist Social Democrat
Democratic Socialist socialist
and like 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 yeah there's some
definitely some really charged ones uh
like alt-right I think it's quite uh
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 uh you
mentioned the hot water of the pool that
we're both tipping a a toe in uh 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
um
and you know I think you can always
point to specific entries and talk about
specific biases but that that's part of
the process of Wikipedia anyone can come
and Challenge and and to to go on about
that but you know I I see fairly often
on Twitter you know some uh you know
sort of quite extreme accusations of
bias and I think you know actually I
just I don't see it I don't buy that and
if you ask people for an example they
normally struggle
um and depending on who they are and
what it's about
um so it's certainly true that some
people who have quite Fringe viewpoints
um 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
um
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
um and he felt that was biased and I
said well I can't really help you
because you know it cites we cite good
quality sources to talk about the
scientific status and it's not very good
so you know it depends and uh you know I
think it's something that we should
always be vigilant about
um but it's uh you know in general I
think we're pretty good and I think any
time you go to any serious
uh 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
the 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
non-political things so I just give it's
kind of a humorous example but it's it's
meaningful
if you read our entries about uh
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 you
know but in general they're quite
positive because nobody actually cares
on anything that people
quite passionate about then hopefully
you know there's like 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 sort of look at it and that
is the the question about the efficacy
of masks during the covet pandemic and
that's an area where I would say the
public authorities really kind of jerked
us all around a bit you know in the very
first days they said whatever you do
don't rush out and buy masks
um and their concern was
uh shortages in hospitals okay but fair
enough later it's like no everybody's
got to wear a mask everywhere it's it
really works really well and it's you
know then now I think it's the evidence
is mixed right Mass seemed to help in my
personal view Mass seemed 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
um but it's very politicized that one
and it's very politicized where uh
certainly in the U.S you know much more
so I mean I live in 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
um that sort of thing in public
um
and so because it became very
politicized then clearly if if Wikipedia
no 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 um actually after it's all you know
to this point in history it's mixed
evidence like Mass seemed to help but
maybe not as much as some of the
authorities said and 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 you know if
you can get to the point of saying okay
this is 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 yeah to me
it's almost more interesting than what
the masks work or not as at least at
this point is 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 of stereo of an
authoritarian regime and if you don't
wear a mask then you're a science denier
anti-vaxxer a um alt-right probably a
Nazi yeah so exactly and that that whole
politicization of society is it's just
so damaging
um and I don't I don't know in broader
in the broader world like 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 attention here and I
wonder what your philosophy is on it
because there's mainstream ideas and
there's Fringe ideas uh you look at lab
leak Theory uh for this virus that could
be other things we can discuss
where there's a mainstream narrative
well if you just look at the percent
of the population
or the population with platforms what
they say and then uh what is a small
percentage in opposition to that and
what does Wikipedia's responsibility to
accurately represent both the mainstream
and the French do you think well I mean
I I think we we have to try to do our
best to 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
um I'll give a simpler example because
there's not a lot of emotion around it
like our entry on the moon doesn't say
some say the moon's made of rocks some
say cheese you know 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
um 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 or thing that
children say or that people tell to
children or whatever you know it's just
a thing it's everybody's heard Moon's
made of cheese
um but
nobody thinks wow like Wikipedia is so
one-sided it doesn't even acknowledge
the cheese Theory
um I say the same thing about Flat Earth
you know again it's exactly what I'm
looking up right now very little
controversy uh we will have an entry
about Flat Earth Theory theorizing Flat
Earth people
um my personal view is most the people
who claim to be flat earthers are just
having a laugh trolling and more power
to them have some fun but uh let's not
be you know ridiculous
but of course for mostly 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 incentive good
disproven conception of the Earth's
shape as a plane or disc many ancient
cultures subscribed to a flat Earth
cosmography with pretty cool pictures of
what a flat Earth would look like
with dragon is that Dragon No Angels on
the on the edge
there's a lot of controversy about that
what is in the edge is it the wall is it
Angels dragons is there a dome and how
can you fly from
uh South Africa to Perth because on a
flat Earth
view that's really too far for any plane
to make it what I want to know 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
um
so there's some I presume there's
probably a small section about the
conspiracy theory of Flat Earth because
I think there's a sizeable percent of
the population who at least will say
they believe in a flat Earth yeah I I
think it is a movement
um 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 it's part of the
scientific process but you can get a
little silly and ridiculous with it yeah
I mean yeah it it it's exactly right and
so
um you know I I think I find on 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
um sort of willingness and indeed
eagerness to say oh let's 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 uh people who
um
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 as a fair conversation to have and
actually address which authorities have
said what and so on and so forth
um and then you know there are other
cases where it's not meaningful
opposition you know like you just
wouldn't say if I I mean I
I doubt if the main article Moon
it may mention
cheese 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
um so this you know this goes into uh
all kinds of uh things about politics
um you want to be really careful really
thoughtful about uh not getting caught
up in the anger of our times and really
recognize yes I I always thought
I remember being really kind of proud of
the us at the time when it was uh McCain
was running against Obama because oh
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
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 has also
represented that
I hope so yeah and I think so in in the
main obviously you can always find uh
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
um let me know but the personal
political leaning of the group of people
who added 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 right even though there is a bias
for the engineers who create it and I
think I believe it's possible to do that
I you know there's kind of conspiracy
theories that it somehow is impossible
and there's this whole conspiracy where
the left is controlling it so on I think
I think Engineers for the most part when
to create platforms that are open and
unbiased that are that create all kinds
of perspective because that's super
exciting to have all kinds of
perspectives battle it out but yeah
still is there 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 uh I
think hopefully I'm correct in saying
this but the right will call
it's the Democrat Party
and the left will call it the Democratic
party right yeah like subtle it always
hits my ear weird like are we children
here we're like we're literally taking
words and like just jabbing at each
other like yeah I could I could like
capitalize a thing in a certain way or I
can like just just take a war to mess
with them that's a small way of how you
use words but you can also you know have
a a bigger way about uh about beliefs
about various perspectives on political
events and uh Hunter Biden's laptop on
how big of a story that is or not I've
been 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 they I mean it's very sizable
percent of the population believes the
two narratives that compete with each
other yeah I mean it's
it's really interesting
um and it feels but I it's hard to judge
you know the The Sweep of History within
your own lifetime yeah but it feels like
it's gotten much worse uh that this idea
of two parallel universes
um where people kind of agree on certain
basic facts uh feels uh worse than it
used to be and I'm not sure if that's
true or if it just feels that way but I
also I'm not sure what the causes are I
think I I would lay a lot of the blame
um in 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 it Elon Musk
because he was complaining about
Wikipedia or something you should buy
Wikipedia and I just wrote not for sale
and you know 90 zillion retweets and
people liked it and it was all very good
but I'm like you know what it's cute
line right and it's a good like mic drop
and all that and I was pleased with
myself like it's not really discourse
right it's not really sort of the what I
like to do but it's what social media
really rewards which is kind of uh lets
you and him have a fight right and
that's more interesting I mean it's
funny because at the time I was I was
texting with Elon who very pleasant to
me and all of that he might have been a
little bit shitty the reporter might
have been a little bit shitty but you
fed into the shitty snarky funny of a
response not for sale and like where do
you like what so that's a funny little
exchange and you could probably after
that laugh it off and yeah fun well like
that kind of mechanism that rewards the
snark yeah can go into viciousness yeah
yeah well and we certainly see it
um online you know I like a a a series
of tweets you know sort of a a a tweet
thread of 15 tweets that assesses the
quality of the evidence for masks pros
and cons and and sort of where this
that's not going to go viral you know
um but you know a Smackdown for
a famous politician who is famously in
favor of masks who also went to a dinner
and didn't wear a mask that's going to
go viral and you know that that's partly
human nature
um you know people love to call out
hypocrisy and all 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
a very large following and you're really
spouting hatred or or misinformation
disinformation they've kicked people off
they've done you know some reasonable
things there but actually the deeper
issue is
um of this this um the anger we're
talking about of the the contentiousness
of everything
I make of a family example
um with two great stereotypes um so one
the the the crackpot Racist uncle and
one the sweet grandma
and I always want to point out my all of
my uncles and my family were wonderful
people so I didn't have a crackpot races
there but everybody knows the stereotype
yes well so Grandma she just posts like
sweet comments on the kids pictures and
congratulates people on their wedding
anniversary and crackpot uncles posting
his nonsense
and normally sort of at Christmas dinner
everybody rolls their eyes oh yeah uncle
Frank's here he's probably going to say
some racist comment and we're going to
tell him to shut up or you know maybe
let's not invite him this year the
normal human drama
he's got his three mates down at the pub
who listen to him and and all of that
but now
Grandma's got you know 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 when she posts
nothing happens he posts and then
everybody jumps in to go gosh shut up on
Uncle Frank you know like that's
outrageous
and it's like oh there's engagement
there's page views there's ads right and
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
um 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 bannable 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 I think that's a
piece of what's gone on well if we could
just uh take that tangent I'm having a
conversation with uh 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
network can do and what you have been
trying to do so a piece of it is
um
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 business they're
making money that's not that's not where
I come from
but certain business models mean you are
going to prioritize
things that maybe aren't that long-term
healthful and so that's a big piece of
it so certainly for Facebook you could
say you know uh with vast resources
start to prioritize content that's
higher quality that's healing that's
kind
uh 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 going to increase
page views to the maximum extent right
now and I've said this to people at at
Facebook it's like
you know it
if if your actions are you know
convincing people that you're breaking
Western Civilization that's really bad
for business in the long run
um 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
um 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 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
rein 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
um you know ads that are run by
questionable people that push false
narratives or you know the classic kind
of thing is you run uh I saw a study
about brexit in in the UK where people
were talking about there were ads run
um
to
uh 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 we can re-implement
so you're telling people what they want
to 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 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 an a tiny little one-on-one
conversation with them because you're
able to Target using targeted
advertising suddenly you don't need uh
consistent you just need a really good
uh 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 going
to cost us x amount but it's going to be
worth it to kind of say you know what we
actually think our political advertising
policy hasn't really helped uh
contribute to dot discourse and dialogue
and finding reasoned you know middle
ground and compromised solution so let's
just not do that for a while until we
figure that out so that's maybe a piece
of advice and and coupled with as you
were saying recommender systems for the
news feed and other contexts
that don't always optimize engagement
but optimize the long-term mental
well-being and balance and growth of a
human being yeah but it's very difficult
problem it's a difficult problem yeah
and you know so in in with uh WT social
Wiki screen 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 let's focus on
trust
people can rate each other as
trustworthy rate content is 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
say okay we're not going to pursue an
advertising business model but
a you know membership model where you
know you can you don't have to be a
member but you can pay to be a member uh
you maybe get some benefit from that but
in general to say actually the problem
with and actually the 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
you know if you think about it what what
is your incentive as uh
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 you know 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 in 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 Gotta
not offend anybody in the world it's got
to be for everybody which is really hard
so same thing you know 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 I actually and I
said this to Elon
um about Twitter blue which I think
wasn't rolled out well and so forth but
it's like 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
um 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 uh but I do
think it's interesting to think about
just in in Broad terms
business model drives outcomes in
sometimes surprising ways unless you
really pause to think about it so if we
can uh 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 let's since you
mentioned Twitter what do you think
works what do you think is broken about
Twitter
oh I mean it's a long conversation but
to 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 you know the old
ownership of Twitter and the new
ownership of Twitter
because unlike Wikipedia and this is
true actually for 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
for YouTube I mean the boxes 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 really toxic really bad you know
some people are very aggressive they're
actually stalking they're actually you
know 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 will 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 somehow is fun on Twitter well
also on Wikipedia people are going to
say stop yeah and actually are you here
to tell us like how can we improve the
article 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
um I'm I'm writing a book on trust so
the idea is
um you know in the last 20 years we've
lost trust you know uh in all kinds of
Institutions and politics you know the
the Adelman trust barometer survey has
been done for a long time and you know
trust in politicians trust in journalism
it's it's come declined substantially
and I think in many cases deservedly
so how do we restore trust and how do we
think about that and uh does that also
include
trust and the idea of Truth
trust in the idea of Truth like even the
concept of facts and Truth is really
really important and the and the idea of
uncomfortable truth is is really
important now so when we when we look at
um Twitter right and we say we can see
okay this is really hard
so here here's my my story about Twitter
it's a two-part story
um and it's all pre-elon musk ownership
so many years back somebody uh accused
me of horrible crimes on on Twitter and
I you know like anybody would I was like
you know I'm in the public eye people
say bad things I don't really you know I
brush it off whatever but I'm like this
is actually really bad like accusing me
of pedophilia like that's just not okay
so I thought I'm gonna report this so I
click report I report the tweet and
there's five others and I go through the
process and then I get an email it says
you know whatever a couple hours later
saying uh 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
okay so I emailed jock and I said Jack
come on like this is ridiculous and he
emails back roughly saying
um yeah sorry Jimmy don't worry we'll
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 uh and is
getting abuse right and getting
accusations that aren't true are they
getting the same kind of like really
poor result in that case so fast forward
a few years
same thing happens
um the the exact quote only goes
um
please help me I'm only 10 years old and
Jimmy Wells raped me last week it's like
come on off like that's ridiculous
so I report 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 metoo
movement if we didn't allow accusations
the metoo 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 it'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 us a spammy behavior
right 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
um 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 have
huge scales is really something and I
don't know the full answer to this I
mean a piece of it could be
um you know to say actually making
specific allegations of crimes uh 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's your
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 metoo movement and people coming
forward in public and all of that but
it's again it's like probably you should
talk to a journalist right probably
there are better Avenues than just
tweeting uh from an account that was
created 10 days ago obviously set up to
abuse someone so I think they could do a
lot better
um but I also admit it's a hard problem
and there's also ways doing directly 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 and uh meme it somehow
yeah yeah sometimes actually indirectly
for sure make an accusation versus
directly making the accusation that can
go viral and they can destroy
reputations and yeah and you you get to
watch yourself
uh just all kinds of narratives takes
take hold yeah no I mean I remember
another uh case that didn't bother me
because it wasn't of that nature
uh but somebody was saying you know I'm
sure you you're making millions off of
Wikipedia and I'm like no actually I
don't even work there I have no salary
um and they're like you're lying I'm
gonna check your 990 form which is the
U.S form for
tax reporting for Charities
yeah here's the link go go read it and
you'll see I'm listed as a board member
and my salary is listed as zero so
um you know so you know things like that
it's like okay that one that feels
like you're wrong but I can take that
and I can 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
don't make millions uh and I'm not a
billionaire well they must know that
because it's in most news media about me
but uh the other one I didn't respond to
publicly because it's like
Barbra Streisand effect you know it's
like sometimes calling attention to
someone who's abusing you who basically
has no followers and so on it's just a
waste and everything you describing now
is just something that all of us have to
kind of learn
um because everybody's in the public eye
I think uh when you have just two
followers and you get bullied by one of
the followers it hurts just as much as
we 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
um
uh an example uh so we don't generally
use my picture in the banners anymore on
Wikipedia but we did
um and then we did an experiment one
year where we tried other people's
pictures so one of our developers
and you know one got 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 uh so
suddenly here he is with long hair and
tattoos and and there's there's his sort
of say here's what your money goes for
here's my my letter asking for support
and he got massive abuse from Wikipedia
like calling him creepy and you know
like really massive
and this was being shown to 80 million
people a day his picture not the abuse
right the abuse was Elsewhere on the
internet
and he he was bothered by it and I
thought you know what there is a
difference I actually am in the public
eye yeah I get huge benefits from being
in the public eye I go around and make
public speeches if any random thing I
think of I can write and get it
published in the New York Times and you
know I have this interesting life he's
not a public figure and so actually he
wasn't mad at us he wasn't you know it
was just like yeah actually suddenly
being thrust in the public eye and you
get suddenly lots of abuse which
normally I think you know if you're a
teenager and somebody in your class is
abusing you it's not going to 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 when sort of ordinary people go
viral in some abusive way it's really
really quite tragic I don't know and
even at a small scale it feels viral
when uh right yeah five people 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 plot when you at least feel like
you don't have a platform to defend
yourself yeah 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 I
think even when just like two people
make up stuff about you or lie about you
or say mean things about your bully you
that can feel like a crowd yeah yeah
that's it and it's a I mean whatever
that is in our genetics and our biology
and our the way our brain works it just
can be a terrifying experience and
um
somehow to correct that I mean I think
because everybody feels the pain of that
everybody suffers the pain that I think
will 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
um you know someone
in
High School who writes
graffiti that says Bucky has a and
spreads a rumor about what Becky did
last weekend that's always been damaging
it's always been hurtful and that's
really hard those kinds of attacks
there's uh all the time itself they
never see the internet now what do you
think about this technology that feels
Wikipedia like which is community notes
on Twitter do you like it uh yeah 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 it's the uses I've seen
of it I've I've found quite good and in
some cases uh
changed my mind uh you know it's like I
see something and of course you know the
the sort of human tendency is
uh to retweet something
that you
hope is true or that you are afraid is
true or you know it's like that kind of
quick mental action
and then you know I saw something that I
liked and 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
um I think that's really important now
how is it specifically implemented is it
scalable that I don't really know how
they've done it so I can't really
comment on that but in general I do
think it's
um you know when you're when you're only
mechanisms on Twitter uh and you're a
big Twitter user you know we know the
platform and 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 like does the
algorithm just pick the retweet or the I
mean retweeting it's not even the
algorithm that makes it viral like you
know if uh Palo cuello
um very famous author I think it'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 going to get
seen a lot or Elon Musk if you retweets
something it's going to 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
complicated question well there's a 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
um in Facebook I think you can share I
think yeah but there's basic
interactions you can have comment and so
on yeah but there's also in Facebook and
YouTube has this too is um
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 the neural net that's learning from
that has to figure out is the intent
behind you saying I want to see less of
this did you see too much of this
content already uh you like it but you
don't want to see so much of it uh
you've already figured it out good great
or does this content not make you feel
good there's so many interpretations
that I'd like to see all this but if you
get that kind of signal this actually
can create a really
um
powerfully curated
uh list of content that is fed to you
every day that doesn't it doesn't create
an echo chamber or Silo that actually
just makes you feel good yeah in the in
the good way which is like it challenges
you but it doesn't exhaust you it'll
make you kind of this this is a 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 want to show you
some things that we think you will
disagree with but which we have some
signals that suggest it's of quality
like now that sounds interesting yeah
that sounds really interesting I want to
see something where you know like oh I
don't I don't agree with so uh 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 want to
hear him out right because I'm going to
learn from it and that doesn't mean I
always come around to agreeing with him
but I'm going to understand a
perspective and that's really great
feeling yeah there's this interesting
thing on social media where people kind
of accuse others of saying well you
don't want to hear opinions do you
disagree with their ideas you disagree
with I think this is something that's
thrown in me all the time the reality is
there's literally almost nothing I enjoy
more
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 a very harsh drop off
because what I like is high quality
disagreement that really makes you think
yeah and at a certain point there's a
threshold it's a kind of a gray area
when the quality of the disagreement it
just sounds like mocking and you're not
really interested in uh a deep
understanding of the topic or you
yourself don't seem to carry deep
understanding of the topic like uh
there's something called uh intelligent
Square debates yeah 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 uh 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
um
filter out lower quality just today
sometimes show it to me because I want
to be able to but today I'm just not in
the mood for the mockery yeah just high
quality stuff even because even flatter
I wanna I wanna 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 uh uh uh of
general relativity right of uh of a
perception of physics maybe all of
reality maybe all of 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 is uh
what are the Alternatives how would you
be uh able to have such consistent
perception of a physical reality if it's
all of it is an illusion uh all of us
seem to share the same kind of
perception or reality like what like
that's the kind of stuff I love but not
like the mockery of it you know that uh
the the cheap that it seems that uh
social media can kind of inspire yeah I
I talk sometimes about how
people assume that like the big debates
in Wikipedia or the the sort of
arguments are between the party of the
left and the party the right and I say
no it's actually the party of the kind
and thoughtful in the party of the jerks
is really is really it I mean left and
right like yeah bring me somebody I
disagree with politically as long as
they're thoughtful kind we're gonna have
a you know a real discussion I I give an
example of
um our article on abortion
so you know if you can bring together a
kind and thoughtful Catholic priest and
a kind and thoughtful Planned Parenthood
activist
and they're going to work together on
the Oracle on abortion
uh that can be a really great thing if
they're both kind and thoughtful like
that's the important part they're never
going to agree on the topic but they
will understand okay like Wikipedia is
not going to take aside but Wikipedia is
going to explain what the debate is
about and we're going to try to
characterize it fairly and it turns out
like you're kind and thoughtful people
even if they're quite ideological like a
Catholic priest is generally going to be
quite ideological on the subject of
abortion
but they can grapple with ideas and they
can discuss and they 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 so that's where you know that's
what I think we need to encourage more
of in society generally is is grappling
with ideas in a really
um
in a 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 time at least a very large
percentage in 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
um and I think if you read the article
it's pretty good
um and I think a piece of that is within
our community
uh if people have the 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 I can actually do quite well
like I'm gonna be okay maybe
um 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 going to get upset I'm
not going to get angry I'm able to be a
good wikipedian so I think that's
important and I do think though in in a
uh related framework that the
composition of the community is really
important uh not because Wikipedia is or
should be a Battleground but because
blind spots like maybe I don't even
realize what's biased if I'm if I'm
particularly of a certain point of view
and I've never thought much about it so
one of the things we we focus on a lot
the Wikipedia volunteers are we don't
know the exact number but let's say 80
percent plus mail and there are a
certain demographic they tend to be
college educated heavier on Tech Geeks
than not you know etc etc so it it 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
you've obviously not met the Japanese
Wikipedia Community it's kind of a joke
because the broader principle still
stands who had its 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
um they'll tend to be dismissive of
things as being unimportant if it's not
something that they personally have an
interest in
um I you know 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 and actually
we're getting older the Wikipedia so the
demographic has changed a bit but you
know it's like if you've if you've got a
bunch of 25 year old Tech geek dudes
um who don't have kids they're just not
going to 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 on novelists
who've won a major literary prize and
they looked at the male novelist versus
the female and the male novelist 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 a gender kind of
breakdown of readership there are books
I'm going to click hard science fiction
is a classic example hard science
fiction mostly read by men uh 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 uh 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 well 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 like to say actually we
do want kind and thoughtful uh Catholic
priests kind and thoughtful
conservatives kind and thoughtful
Libertarians kind and thoughtful
marxists you know to come in but the key
is the kind and thoughtful piece so when
people sometimes come to Wikipedia
outraged by some
you know 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 you know 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 you know
oftentimes uh people come in and you
know there's a lot when I talk about
Community Health one of the aspects of
that that we do think about a lot 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
um but do we live up to that so you know
the ideal is you come to Wikipedia you
know we have uh rules like one of our
fundamental rules is ignore all rules
which is partly written that way because
it piques people's attention like what
what the hell kind of rule is that you
know but basically says look don't get
nervous and depressed about a bunch of
you know what's the formatting of your
footnote right so you shouldn't come to
Wikipedia add a link and then get banned
or yelled at because it's not the right
format
uh instead somebody should go oh hey ah
Thanks for for helping but you know
here's the link to how to format uh you
know if you want to keep going you might
want to learn how to format a footnote
um and and to be friendly and to be open
and to say oh right oh you're new and
you clearly don't know everything about
Wikipedia
and you know sometimes in any community
that can be quite hard so people come in
and they've got a great big idea and
they're going to propose this to the
Wikipedia community and they have no
idea that's basically a perennial
discussion we've had seven thousand
times before
and so then ideally you would say to the
person oh yeah great thanks like 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 you know who's come in with
this idea which doesn't work and they
don't understand why I can lose patience
but you shouldn't and that's kind of
human you know but I think it just does
require really thinking you know uh in a
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 the
uh
uh Emily Temple Woods who she was
Wikipedia of the year she's just like a
great well-known wikipedian and I
interviewed her for my book and she told
me something I never knew apparently
it's not secret like 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 uh vandalized a couple of
Articles and then somebody popped up on
a talk page and said hey like why are
you doing this like we're trying to make
an encyclopedia here and this wasn't
very kind yeah 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 you know like having fun
and trolling a bit and then she's like
oh actually oh I see your point and
became a great wikipedian so that's the
ideal really is that you don't just go
throw a block off you go hey you
know like what what goes you know which
is I think uh 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 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 it was okay
I didn't and then they stop or they keep
it up and then everybody goes well
you're the
well it yeah I mean that's just an
example that gives me Faith in humanity
that uh that we're all capable and um
wanting to be kind to each other and in
general this the fact that there's a
small group of volunteers
they're able to contribute so much to
the organization The Collection uh the
uh the discussion of all of human
knowledge it's so it makes me so
grateful to be a part of this whole
human project I that's one of the
reasons I love Wikipedia it gives me
Faith in humanity no I I once was
um
at uh Wikipedia is our annual conference
and people come from all around the
world like really active volunteers
I was at the dinner we were in Egypt at
wikimanian Alexandria at the sort of
closing dinner or whatever and a friend
of mine came inside at the table and
she's sort of been in the movement more
broadly Creative Commons she's not
really a Wikipedia she 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 medium 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 you know sort
of think about things I was like this is
great
to the degree that Geeks
run the best aspect of human
civilization
um brings me joy in all aspects and this
is true in programming like Linux yeah
uh like programmers in all like people
that kind of specialize in a thing
and they don't really get caught up in
into the mess of the bickering of of uh
Society they just kind of do their thing
yeah and they value the craftsmanship of
it yeah the confidence of it if you 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 the the fundamental like time zones
and and they change from time to time
you know sometimes a country will pass
daylight savings or move it by a week
whatever there's a file
uh that's done all you know 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 yeah
it's like this guy and a group a
community around him and basically
something 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
um well they know because they just use
this file which tells all the time zones
and 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 you know 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 you know and there's a
lot a lot a lot of programmers listening
to this right now with PTSD about time
zones and then there uh 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 there's it's amazing just
the packages the libraries how few
people build oh yeah out of their own
love for building for creating for
community and all of that yeah it's uh I
honestly don't want to to interfere with
the natural habitat of the geek like
when you spot them in the wild you just
want to be like yeah well careful yeah
that thing no I treasured I met a guy
many years ago
um lovely really sweet guy and he's
running a bot on English Wikipedia that
I thought wow that's actually super
clever and what he had done is
his butt 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 in some context
uh
this isn't correct but buoy and boy
people sometimes type Boi when they mean
b-o-u-y so if he sees the word boy be a
y in an article he would look in the
context and see is this a nautical
reference and if it was he didn't auto
correct 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 and 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 you know this idea
of like actually this is a gift to the
world uh 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 gotta ask about this big bold
decision at the very beginning to not do
advertisements on the website and uh
just in general the philosophy of the
business model Wikipedia what went
behind that yeah so
um I think most people know this but
we're a charity so in the U.S
you know registered as a charity and uh
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 five bucks I've
donated so many times and we have you
know 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 in
Wikipedia like I just think it would be
there's a lot of reasons why it might
not be good and even back then
um 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
uh to read about
um
I don't know
um
uh 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 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
you know we don't have click bait
headlines in Wikipedia you've never seen
you know Wikipedia entries with all this
kind of uh listicles you know sort of
the 10
10 funniest cat pictures number seven
make you cry you know none of that kind
of stuff because there's no incentive no
reason to do that also you know there's
no reason to have an algorithm
to say actually we're going to use our
algorithm to drive you to stay on the
website longer we're going to 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 they had 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 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 so
that um
decision uh 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 like this is how I I like
Wikipedia it doesn't have ads don't
really want you know in these early days
like a lot of the ads that was well
before the era of really quality ad
targeting and all that so you get a lot
of banners 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 uh you know we
don't have a hundred thousand employees
and all of that
but would we be able to raise money
through donations and so I remember
the the first time that we did like
really did a a donation campaign
was on a Christmas day uh in 2003 I
think it was there was uh
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 it 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 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
um twenty thousand dollars in a month's
time but we raised nearly thirty
thousand 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 want to 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
um you know I remember one year we
really went went heavy with we have a
great Ambitions to you know the 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 the pitch that like this is very
vague and very sort of raw 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
you know I shouldn't and so sometimes
people say
um
you know ah why are you always begging
for money on the website and you know
it's not that often it's not that much
but it does happen uh they're like why
don't you just get Google and uh
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 it 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 quite
yeah not good for Wikipedia I would love
to know how many times I've visited
Wikipedia how much time I spent on it
because I have a general sense that is
the most useful site I've ever used
competing maybe with Google search yeah
which ultimately Atlanta
yeah yeah yeah all right but I if I was
just reminded of like hey remember all
those times your life was me better
because of the site yeah 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 um you
know 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
um and they do that like I've sometimes
seen a banner saying
um 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 uh 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 would
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 have regret there's
uh I think Elon talks about this
minimize a number of regretted minutes
yeah my number of regretted minutes on
Wikipedia
is like zero like I don't remember a
time
uh I've just discovered this uh uh I
started following on Instagram a page
depth of Wikipedia oh yeah there's like
crazy Wikipedia pics there's no
wikipedia page yeah I gave her a media
contributor of the Year award this year
because she's so great depth of
Wikipedia is so fun uh so I yeah so
that's that's the kind of interesting
point that I
um I don't even know if there's a
competitor 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 click bait yeah and Wikipedia has
no clickbait it's all about the quality
of the knowledge and the wisdom and so
on no that's right and I I also like
stack overall although I wonder I wonder
what you think of this
I've I 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 uh chat gbt yeah
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 in 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 I and I think uh stack Overflow
currently
uh has policies against using GPT like
there's a contentious kind of tension
yeah yeah yeah but they're trying to
still figure that out and so we we are
similar in that regard like obviously
all the things we've talked about like
trashy PD 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 to Beauty you you better check
it because there's a lot of great use
cases of you know like oh well I'm I'm
not a native speaker of German but I
kind of I'm pretty good I'm not talking
about myself a hypothetical meat 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
uh increasingly use chat GPT for
something where they would previously
use Wikipedia so basically
use it to answer basic questions about
the Eiffel Tower
yeah and 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 of 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 GPT thing is new
things like if you ask Alexa
um you know what 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 do they just
thinking oh what's Wikipedia for I can
just ask Alexa it's like well Alex 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
it 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
um you could ask any question and he was
just knocking it together so he used uh
the open ai's API just to make a demo
ask a question
um why do ducks fly South for winter
which is the kind of thing you think oh
I I might just Google for that I might
start looking in Wikipedia I don't know
and so what he did is he asks judge me
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
the making stuff up not it's just a he
hacked together a weekend but what it
made me think about was okay so now
we've got this huge body of knowledge
that in many cases you're like oh I'm
really I want to know about Queen
Victoria I'm just going to go read the
Wikipedia entry and it's going to take
me through
her life and 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 want to read next and
that's just a step forward like that's
just using 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 I would love to see a Chad GPT
grounding into websites like Wikipedia
and the other comparable website to me
will be like wolf from Alpha for more
mathematical knowledge that kind of
stuff so grounding like taking you to a
page that is really crafted as opposed
to like the moment you start actually
taking you to like journalist websites
like uh news websites it starts getting
a little iffy yeah it's getting a little
yeah yeah yeah because they have you're
now in a land that has a wrong incentive
right yeah you pulled in and you need
somebody to have filtered through that
and sort of tried to knock off the rough
edges yeah no it's it's very uh I think
that's exactly right and I think
um
you know I 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 when I so if
we if you asked me to step back and be
like very business-like about our
business model and where is it going to
go for us and are we going to lose half
our donations because everybody's just
going to stop coming to repeat and go to
charge BT I think well grounding will
help a lot because
frankly most questions people have if
they provide proper links we're going to
be at the top of that just like we are
in Google so we're still going to get
tons of recognition and tons of traffic
just from even if it's just the moral
properness of saying here's my source
um so I think I think we're going to be
all right in that in that yeah in 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
clarifying Wikipedia yeah yeah or
elaborate expand all that kind of stuff
yeah uh 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
um what are your comments so I would say
unimportant
um not that interesting I mean one of
the things that uh
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 is not the right title for
that so you know like he had a lot of
impact and a lot of uh great work and I
disagree with 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 them yeah definitely uh
so he also he said you've 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 let me just straight up I just
agree like 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 uncontroversial
questions you think perspectives are
generally represented I mean because it
has to do with the kind of the tension
between the mainstream and the
non-mainstream that we were talking
about yeah no I mean for sure
um like to take
this area of uh 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
um 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 etc etc and that debate is what
you've got to do there's no choice about
having that debate of grappling with
something
um and I think we do and I think that's
really important and I think if anybody
said uh to the Wikipedia community
gee you should stop you know sort of
covering minority viewpoints uh 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 and
politics and so on
um but it's and and like this is one of
the reasons why you know there is no
magic simple answer to all these things
it's really uh
contextual it's Case by case it's like
you know you've got to really say okay
what is the context here how do you do
it and and you've always got to 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 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 going to notice
of the one One Direction of the
oscillation of the grappling and not the
correction and you're going to highlight
that and say how did how come this
person yeah um I don't know I want maybe
uh legitimacy of Elections that's the
thing that comes up Donald Trump maybe
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 the 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 you
know when I see something like that in
the Press I'm like oh dear like 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 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 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 uh 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 Pace
to discuss so it was a dust up that was
you know 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 that the Twitter files so
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 the 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 I.E this doesn't have a
snowball's chance and Hell of of passing
so an admin goes yeah wrong and closed
the debate and that was it that was the
whole thing that happened
um and so nobody proposed suppressing
the information nobody suppose it wasn't
important it was just like editorally
boring internal question
and you know 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
yes I think the right is more sensitive
to censorship
uh and so yeah they will more likely
uh 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 of removing it and so on as part
of the regular grappling of Wikipedia
can make a hell of a good article a
YouTube video yeah yeah no it sounds
really uh 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 so 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
um traveling to uh uh have some very
difficult conversation with high profile
figures both in the war in Ukraine and
in Israel and Palestine
and
you know 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 left this
crackpots
they can't see the truth I mean it's
something I ask myself all the time
forget the leftist just crackpotting am
I 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 a little bit
right but not too much no I think we
always have to challenge ourselves of
like what what do I potentially have
wrong what you mentioned uh pressure
from government
uh you've you've criticized Twitter for
uh the allowing giving in to turkey's
government censorship there's also
conspiracy theories or accusations of
Wikipedia
being
um open to pressure from government to
government organizations FBI and all
this kind of stuff uh is that right what
is the philosophy about pressure from
governments and censorship so so we're
super hardcore on this we've never bowed
down to government pressure anywhere in
the world and we never will
um 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 threaten to
block
well knock yourself out you're going to
lose Wikipedia and that's been very
successful for us as a strategy
um because governments know they can't
just casually threaten to block
Wikipedia or block us for two days and
we're going to 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
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 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 going
to get arrested and it could be quite
serious
okay that's a tough one right that's
that's actually really hard
um
but yeah no and then the FBI one no no
we like the criticism I saw I kind of
prepared for this because I saw people
responding to your requests for
questions and I was like
somebody's like oh don't you think it
was really bad that you know I actually
restart to Stefan 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 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 want to do their bidding
but because we don't want to do their
bidding but we also don't want to be
blocked and we think actually having
these conversations are really important
there's no threat of being blocked in
the U.S like that's just never going to
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 like 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
you know some sometimes it's like
gee like if somebody complains that
something's bad in Wikipedia whoever
they are don't care who they are it
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 is
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
um you know a big part of
like what was going on with
you might call it pressure on social
media companies or dialogue with
depending on you know as we talked
earlier grapple with the language
depending on what your view is
um in our case it was really just about
oh okay right they want to have a
dialogue about a covered information
misinformation
we're 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 you know
if they say how do you know uh that
Wikipedia is not going to be pushing
some crazy anti-vaxx narrative
um 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 so it goes right we're not going to
Cave into any kind of government
pressure but
um whatever the appropriateness of what
they were doing I think there is a role
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
um all these kinds of things so you know
I think it would be irresponsible of us
to get a call from a government agency
and say yeah why don't you just off
you're the government uh but it would
also be irresponsible to go oh dear
government age it's not happy let's fix
Wikipedia so the FBI loves this 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 I
it's actually important to say like
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 it's a
it's a battle of ideas and here's how
yes the sources are used yeah what are
legitimate source is and what not a
legitimate source is 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 uh government organizations
in general have sold themselves to be
the place where you go for expertise and
some of that has been uh to 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 yeah 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 going to 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 uh fault in Atlanta
with the last vial 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
um and they're you know it's like okay
and if you put out statements 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 people because you wanted them to
do the right thing
it's like no you know what that's not
going to 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 you know by and
large they're like quite boring
government bureaucrat scientists who
just are trying to help the world well I
I've been criticized
and I've been torn on this I've been
criticized for criticizing Anthony fauci
too hard uh 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 yeah and I have to
blame the leaders for the effects on the
distrust and the scientific work that
they're doing because
um of what I perceive as basic human
flaws of communication of arrogance of
the 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 lead people who lead
leaders unfortunately or 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 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 well-being of
human civilization this was epic and
awesome and sexy and to me when I talk
to people about science it's anything
but sexy in terms of the virology and
biology development
um because it's been politicized it's
icky and people just don't want to like
I don't talk to me about the vaccine I
understand I got vaccinated just let's
switch topics
yeah well it's interesting because I as
I said I live in the UK and I think it's
all these things are a little less
politicized there and I I haven't played
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 this 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
mass school they're not effective and
they won't help you and then the
complete about phase two
you're you're ridiculous if you're not
wearing them you know it's just like no
like that that about face
just lost people from day one the
distrust and the and the intelligence of
the public to deal with Nuance to deal
with these Services yeah this is exactly
what you know I think this is where the
Wikipedia neutral point of view
uh is and and should be an ideal and
obviously every article and everything
we could you 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 going to
explain that and we're going to try to
be thoughtful and and
put in the best arguments from all sides
because I trust you like you read that
and you're going to be more educated and
you're going to begin to make a decision
I mean I can just talk in the UK
the government
when we found out in the UK that very
high level government officials were not
following the rules they put on everyone
else yeah 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
drag the poor old lady out to tell us
all to be good and I was like We're
British and we're going to do the right
things and and you know it's going to be
tough but we're going to 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 going to follow the rules even if I
don't completely agree with them but
I'll still follow because I think we've
got all chip in together to like you
know what I'm going to make wise and
thoughtful decisions for myself and my
family
and that generally is going to 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 the park and read a
book yeah like it's gonna be fine like
that's irrational rule which I would
have been following just personally of
like I'm just going to 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 Community is is uh 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 uh 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 want to talk about
this because it's so toxic you know and
that's unfortunate because I think
people should say what 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
the sort of death rate of getting
covered wow it's really dramatically
different if you're if you're late in
life
um this was a really dangerous and if
you're 23 years old yeah well it's not
great like and Long Cove is a thing and
all of that but and I think some of the
public Communications again were failing
to properly
contextualize it not all of it you know
but it's a complicated matter but yeah
let me uh read you a Reddit comment that
received two likes and
two whole people liked it yeah two
people liked it uh
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
okay here's it's a long 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 with
good books or socialism and Anarchy uh
would do you have any interesting
comments on this kind of uh so featured
how the features are selected maybe
Hitler because he's a special uh he's a
special figure you know I love that I
love that no I I love the comparison to
how many video games and that definitely
speaks to my earlier as like if you've
got a lot of young geeky men yeah who
really like video games that doesn't
necessarily really give get you to the
right place in every respect
um certainly
um
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 in certain
ways is illegal in Germany in a way that
it wouldn't be in the U.S 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
comedian like please don't put the
swastika on the front page without
warning me because I'm gonna get along
now it wouldn't be me it's the
foundation I'm not that much on the
front lines
and 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 turn 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 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 that's completely yeah
but I'm trusting so I think that's
probably is right they probably did have
the list up no I think it's I think that
piece the piece about how many of those
featured articles have been video games
and if it's disproportionate yeah I
think we should the community should go
actually what's gone like that doesn't
seem quite right
um
you know I mean you can imagine uh
that because you're looking for an
article to be on the front page of
Wikipedia
um you you want to 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
think oh let's put succession on the
front page that's going to be popular in
other cases you 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 uh
for uh as somebody who's seen the whole
thing the the development of the
millions of Articles uh
big impossible question uh what's your
favorite article my favorite article
well I've got a uh an amusing answer
um which is possibly also true
um there's a an article in Wikipedia
called inherently funny words
and one of the reasons I love it is
when it was created early in 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 you know 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
um 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 you know like a bull you
know 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 Psalm sounds a lot like
Wikipedia but there was no source so it
went away and I I feel very sad about
that but I've always liked that and I
actually the reason depths of Wikipedia
amuses me so greatly is because it does
like 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 raw 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 in 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 four ducks with Wikipedia uh is
run by
Annie Roberta that's right Annie and uh
let me just read off some of the pages
uh uh octopolis and octalantis oh yeah
that was our two separate non-human
underwater settlements built by the
gloomy octopuses in Jervis Bay east
Australia the first settlement named
octopolis by biologist was founded in
2009 the individual structures in
octopus consist of burrows around a
piece of human uh to treat us believed
to be scrap metal and it goes on in this
way
um
uh satiric misspelling least concerned
species humans were formally assessed as
a species of least concern in in
in 2008 uh I think uh Hitchhiker's Guide
to the Galaxy uh would slightly disagree
and last one let me just say friendship
Paradox is the phenomena
first observed by the sociologist Scott
felled in 1991 that on average an
individual's friends have more friends
than that individual oh that's really
lonely isn't that that's the kind of
thing that makes you wanna 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 uh it's
one way to feel more lonely in a
mathematically rigorous way uh somebody
else 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're
on with with Wikipedia I mean yeah 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
um
yeah I mean I would say some of the some
of the hard things I mean they were
there were hard moments like when two
out of three servers crash on Christmas
Day and then we needed to
do a fundraiser and no idea what was
going to happen
um I would say as well the
like in 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
non-profit I set up to own and operate
Wikipedia as a small organization it had
a lot of growing pains
um and you know that was it was like
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 you know
like I would say growing the
organization was harder than growing the
community growing the website which is
interesting well yeah it's kind of a
miraculous and inspiring that a
community can
emerge and be stable and that that has
so much kind of uh 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 uh because like
you don't you don't want to mess with a
beautiful thing but it gives me Faith in
communities yeah yeah that they can
spring up in other domains as well yeah
I think that's exactly right and you
know at uh fandom my for-profit Wiki
company where you know it's like all
these communities about pop culture
mainly
um sort of entertainment gaming and so
on there's a lot of small communities
and so I I went last year to our
community connect conference and just
met some of these people and like you
know here's one of the leaders of the
Star Wars Wiki which is called Wikipedia
which I think is great and you know he's
telling me about his community and all
that and I'm like oh right yeah I love
this like so it's not 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 a Star Wars
Wiki together like there's no reason to
get too outraged and just kind people
just like geeky people with a hobby
uh where do you see Wikipedia
in 10 years 100 years and one thousand
years
right so 10 years
um I would say pretty much the same like
we're not going to have we're not going
to become Tick-Tock you know with
entertainment you know scroll by video
humor and blah blah blah uh an
encyclopedia I think in 10 years we
probably will have
um a lot more AI supporting tools like
I've talked about and probably your
search experience would be you can ask a
question and get the answer rather than
you know from our body of work so search
and Discovery a little bit improved yeah
to face some of this all that uh I
always say one of the things that people
most people won't notice
um because already they don't notice it
is the growth of Wikipedia and 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
um and it is doing very well and I think
that kind of growth is actually super
important it's super interesting but
most people won't notice that if we can
just learn that yeah if it could do you
think there's so much incredible
translation work is being done with with
AI with language models do you think
that can accelerate yeah uh Wikipedia so
you start with the basic draft of the
translation of Articles and then so so
what I
used to say is like machine translation
for many years wasn't much used 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 are writing
but if you tried to do English to Zulu
um 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
uh 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
can 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 an invisible
Trend but that's the growth in 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
um 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 of
more money we also have the endowment
fund which we've 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 profligence a year to blow
through that you know 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 you know in
a financially stable way that we can
weather various storms along the way so
that hopefully we we're not 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 we'll the
Wikimedia foundation and Wikipedia will
exist in 100 years if anybody exists in
100 years you will be there do you think
the internet just looks unpredictably
different just the the web I do I do I
mean I think uh right now
uh this sort of enormous step forward
we've seen has become public in the last
year of the large language models
um really is something else right it's
really interesting and you and I have
both talked today about the flaws and
the limitations but still it's as
someone who's been around technology for
a long time
I it's sort of that feeling of the first
time I saw a web browser the first time
I saw the iPhone like the first time the
internet was like really usable on a
phone and it's like wow that's that's a
step change difference there's a few
other you know maybe a Google search
Google 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 like the
internet works again yeah
um and so large language model it feels
like that to me like oh wow this is this
is something new and like really pretty
remarkable and it's going to have some
downsides like you know the the
negative use case I'm you know people in
the area who are experts they're 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 I do see some like really low
hanging fruit bad things that can happen
so my example is
um how about some highly customized spam
um where the the email that you receive
isn't just like
misspelled words and like trying to get
through filters but actually as I
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 that's that's
a new problem that's going to be
interesting
um is there uh 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 percentages of
the internet is written by an llm so one
of my predictions and we'll see you know
ask me again in five years how this
panned out
is that
um
in a way this will strengthen the value
and importance of some traditional
Brands so if I see a 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 you know
trust or distrust on 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 and 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 was the 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 I don't know so
the Pope's dipping into the money eh um
partly because this particular Pope
doesn't seem like he'd be the type
um my favorite is uh extensive pictures
of Joe Biden and Donald Trump uh hanging
out and having fun together
brilliant so I think I think
people will care about the provenance of
a photo and if if you show me a photo
and you say yeah this this photo is from
uh uh 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 going to have journalists
and they're going to make sure the photo
is what it purports to be
uh 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 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 going to go
just don't know not sure like I can make
that in five minutes so but 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
uh trust that builds up yeah so it
doesn't have to be New York Times or
this organization that you could be in
an organization of one as long as it's
stable and Carries through time and it
builds up no I I agree but the one thing
I've I've said in the past and this it
just depends on who that person is and
what they're doing but it's like I think
my credibility my general credibility in
the world should be the equal of a New
York Times Reporter yeah so if something
happens and I witness it and I Write
About It people are gonna go well Jimmy
well said it that's just like if a New
York Times Reporter said it like 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 zielinski right so just to an
extent yes whereas I do think for other
people those those traditional models of
credibility
um
are really really important and then
there there is this sort of Citizen
journalism I don't I don't know if you
think of what you do as journalism I
kind of think it is but yeah you do
interviews you do long-form interviews
and I think people you know like if you
come and you say right here's my tape
but you wouldn't hand out a tape like I
just gestured you as if I'm handing you
a cassette tape but if you put it into
your podcast here's my interview with
zelinski and people aren't going to go
yeah how do we know that could be a deep
fake like you could have faked that
because people are like well no like
you're a well-known podcaster and you do
interview interesting people and yeah
you like you wouldn't think that so that
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
zelinski saying something really
outrageous and I'm like yeah I don't
believe that like I don't think he said
that in a meeting with you know 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 whether you
know if something appears in a Wikipedia
page that means something if something
appears on um like say my Twitter
account that means something that mean
yes I this particular human have signed
off on it yeah and then and then you the
the the the the trust you have in this
particular human uh transfers to the
piece of content and then each hopefully
there's millions of people with
different metrics of trust yeah 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 have this kind of bias and I'll
go to this other person of this other
kind of bias that I can integrate them
in this kind of ways just like you said
with Fox News and whatever sometimes
like they've all got their like where
they sit
um yeah so you have built
uh I would say one of if not the most
impactful website in the history of
human civilization so let me ask uh 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 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 gonna make a lot of money doing it
you're probably not going to be that
good at it and so that that is a big
piece of it
um I I also like you know so for
startups I I give this advice so yeah
and this is a career startup any kind of
like young person just starting out is
like
um
you know 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
um and then also
um 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 need 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 let's okay here's
a problem
do we need to change direction or do we
need to kind of power through it and
just knowing like 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 am I am I
am I checking it out like because I'm
having a little bump and I'm feeling
emotional and I'm just gonna give up too
soon okay ask yourself that question and
also it's like am I being pig-headed and
trying to do something that actually
doesn't make sense okay ask yourself
that question too even though they're
contradictory questions
um sometimes it'll be one sometimes
it'll be the other and you gotta really
think it through I think persisting with
the business model behind Wikipedia
is uh such an inspiring story because
um we're living in a capitalist world
we live in a in a scary world I think
for an internet business and so yeah and
so like to do things differently than a
lot of websites are doing like what
Wikipedia has lived through the
successive explosion of many websites
that are basically adriven Google is
adriven uh Facebook Twitter all of these
websites are ad driven and and to see
them succeed become these like
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 uh
I think is from my perspective now my uh
Monday night quarterback or whatever uh
is the right decision but boy is that a
tough decision what seemed easy at the
time so and then you just kind of stay
with it yeah just stay with it it's
working so now when you chose persistent
yeah well
um
yeah I mean I I always like to give an
example of Myspace because I just think
it's an amusing story so my space 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
Tick Tock because it was like a lot of
entertainment content casual
um 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 it just like that just accepted
but was it's interesting so I used to
give this example of like yeah well
Rupert Murdoch really screwed out 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
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 worked out okay for it all
matters how you define success it does
and that that is also advice to young
people
um one of the things I I would say like
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 going to take
you're going to fail you're going to
reboot you're going to learn from what
you failed at you're going to 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 you know like realistically
you can set a standard of success even
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 that's heavy like that's
probably not good I don't recommend it
um whereas like I personally I 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
um but also I'm 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 I
mine is so interesting like oh right
um 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 and while
you're there
um the president has asked to see you
it's like God that's super interesting
Jimmy you're going to this place and
there's a local wikipedian who said do
you want to 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
um 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 it's
just great
well this is more to the question of
what Wikipedia looks like in a thousand
years uh 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 uh 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 it's neutral and gives a wide
oh it's a really good reference to a lot
of different philosophies about meaning
uh the 20th century philosophy in
general uh from from nature to the
existentialist uh all summer all of them
have an idea of meaning they really
struggle with it systematically
rigorously and that's what the page and
obviously a shout out to The
Hitchhiker's Guide and all that yeah
yeah yeah uh no I I think there's no
external answer to that I think it's
internal I think we decide
um what meaning we will have in our
lives and what we're going to do with
ourselves
um and so when I think you know if we're
talking about Thousand Years millions of
years
um
Yuri Milner wrote a book he's a big
internet investor guy he wrote a book
um advocating quite strongly
for humans
exploring the universe and getting off
the planet and he funds projects to like
send like using lasers to send little
cameras and interesting stuff
and he talks a lot in the book about
meaning it's like his thing 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
you know like the distances of space are
absolutely enormous so I don't know what
should we build generation ships to
start flying places well that I can't do
that and I'm not even if I could even if
I'm Elon Musk and I could devote all my
wealth to Bill I'll be dead on the ship
on the way so is that really meaning but
I think it's really interesting uh to
think about and and reading his little
book is quite a short little book
reading his book it made me 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 like we
kind of we're stuck here for at least a
while uh and therefore we should really
think about
um sustainability
um and I mean
one million year sustainability
um and we don't have all the answer 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
like the the progress that's being made
in cancer treatment because we are able
to at scale you know uh model molecules
and and genetics and things like this it
gets huge it's really exciting
um you know so if
um you know if we can hang on for a
little while
and you know certain problems that seem
completely intractable today like
climate change may end up being actually
not that hard and we might just might be
able to alleviate the full diversity of
human suffering
for sure yeah and uh and so doing uh
help increase the chance that we can
propagate the flame of human
consciousness out into the towards the
stars and I think another important one
if we fail to do that
for me it's propagating maintaining the
uh the full diversity and richness and
complexity and expansiveness of human
knowledge so if we destroy ourselves it
would it would make me feel a little bit
okay yeah you just if the human now just
triggered me to say something really
interesting which is uh 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 uh I was in Norway in
Bergen Norway where every year they've
got this Annual Festival called buekor
which is Young uh 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 uh the three
languages of Norway and then from there
it was translated into English into
German etc etc
and so what 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 like here's here's a
piece of you know it's 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 yeah and suddenly
it's like wow
um you know like music uh 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 the richness of culture in 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 bue 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 uh people of
China voice exactly
Jimmy I thank you so much I'm such a
huge fan of everything you've done oh
thank you yeah right deeply deeply
deeply deeply grateful for Wikipedia I
love it it brings me joy I donate all
the time you should donate too uh 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
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and now let me leave you with some words
from the world historian Daniel borsten
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