My guest tonight on APR notebook is Jimmy Wales. He's from Huntsville, and he created Wikipedia. No, I'm not kidding. Okay, raise your hand if you've ever been to this online encyclopedia. If your hand didn't go up, it's okay, but it's a fair bet you're in the minority. Published reports put the number of people who visit Wikipedia, the one in English and the 300 other foreign language editions in the billions every month. That's billions with a B. Those people apparently like Wikipedia, but Elon Musk reportedly doesn't. Authoritarian regimes aren't fans either. We'll go into that tonight, along with Jimmy Wales' new book, "The Seven Rules of Trust." For this Morning Edition preview….what is it with that name?
PAT DUGGINS-- I can only imagine this. You're at a cocktail party. Somebody says, Oh, how are you? Oh, I invented Wikipedia. And the first question, invariably, I would guess would have to be, where did the name come from?
JIMMY WALES-- Well, so there's a Hawaiian word “wiki, wiki,” which means quick. If you go to Maui, the bus at the airport is called the “Wiki Wiki Bus”, meaning quick. And the idea of wiki didn't come from me. There was Ward Cunningham invented the idea of wiki, which is the software that we use, it just means a website anyone can edit. And so I was like, Great, yeah, let's call it Wikipedia.
PAT-- I've read that at the beginning of Wikipedia, you were really worried about what the the online editors were doing when they did the rewrites that Wikipedia is so well known for, and that you'd wake up in the middle of the night to kind of check out what was going on. How long, you know, the base, the time of your book, you know, "The Seven Rules of Trust." How long did it take you before you trusted your own system that Wikipedia was built on?
WALES-- Yeah, I mean, it was pretty quick. Because, you know, like, very quickly I would realize, you know, I get up and I say, Hmm, you know, I don't know, I'm asleep. Who knows what people are going to do? And then, you know, I found there was this guy in Australia, and he was always on at night, and it was not night for him, and he would look after things. And I was like, Ah, this is great. Like, actually, we can have a global community, and there will always be somebody on. And, you know, it's a very friendly environment, and just try to get people together. And, yeah, it was like, Okay, wow, this could work.
PAT-- In terms of the international impact. I wanted a zero in on one meeting that you had, and I don't want to get too in the weeds on this, so I hope I can express myself clearly. It was the meeting that you had with Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya. She's referred to as the President-in- Exile of the former Soviet nation of Belarus. You know, she ran against Alexander Lukashenko. Reportedly, she won. He claimed fraud, and seized power. I was kind of curious that that meeting with her over Wikipedia, what was that like?
WALES-- It was great. I don't even know how you knew about that. I didn't know that was even in the news. You've done your homework, good journalism. Yeah, you know what? I met with her. She lives in, I think, Lithuania, Lithuania and Poland. And you know, had run for office, and many would argue, she won. And you know, she was therefore forced into exile by the regime. And it's a very authoritarian, you know, it's, it's the kind of the last real dictatorship in Europe, if we don't count Russia, which is or is not in Europe, depending on how you look at it. But, yeah, I mean, what was interesting about her is, like, she's like, Yeah, we know the Wikipedians. And, you know, we, we, you know, we, we've met a lot of the Wikipedians. We love what you're doing. She wanted to learn more about Wikipedia. And obviously, we've had a one of our volunteers was arrested in Belarus, and is, you know, he was convicted and lives under house arrest. And, you know, like, it's not easy, like some of these people are really brave who are working in difficult places. So, yeah, it was interesting. And, you know, I find it's very often the case that politicians are very interested in Wikipedia. Sometimes because they're like, how do I make sure my profile is good, you know? But in other cases, they're just interested. They're like, wow, this is kind of amazing. And I'd like to know more about how this works. Because, you know, if you think about, you know, what makes a good municipal government work, you know, it's a lot about cooperation. So a lot about listening. I mean, I think some of the lessons that I talked about in the book about transparency. Currency and delivering on what you've promised, these are things that would help to increase our trust in government. You know, when politicians promise, you know, pie in the sky and a free chicken, well, they're not going to deliver that. And people are like, well, they're all liars, okay? Well, that's not great, right? You know, actually, I'd rather have a politician who comes out and honestly says, Yeah, you know what, we're, this is going to be tough, like, we've got these problems, and we got to figure out how to sort them out. And I can't promise you, we're going to, you know, everything's going to be perfect, but we're going to try our best, and we need help. Great. That's amazing. You know, even if I disagree with a policy proposal they're making, I'm like, Well, yeah, but you're, you're approaching it like a proper person. That's great.
WALES-- Well, the reason I brought up Belarus was because I was asked by the it was the Congressional Office of International Leadership to talk to a whole roomful of Belarusian reporters who reported on their country from outside the nation, because they were afraid of being arrested for insulting Lukashenko. And I'm kind of curious with Wikipedia, how do you, how do you arrest an online editor who was kind of like living somewhere else and you don't even, maybe know, even know who they are? Maybe that's why those politicians didn't like them.
WALES-- Very much. Yeah. I mean, well, one of the things that is very interesting is that, you know, I believe that the ability to edit anonymously is often very important. A lot of our volunteers are working from, you know, quite dangerous places. I mean, you know, authoritarian countries, and you know, a lot of the people who are reading Wikipedia actually, it's important. Like, privacy is really important.
PAT-- I'm Pat Duggins. You can join me tonight on APR notebook for my complete conversation with Jimmy Wales of Huntsville, the man who created Wikipedia. That's tonight at 7pm on Alabama Public Radio.
