So, what did you do today? Jimmy Wales of Huntsville invented Wikipedia. How's that for a "mic drop" moment? The online encyclopedia, which is updated by anonymous editors, has its critics. Elon Musk counts himself among them. Authoritarian regimes reportedly hate Wikipedia. However, the website has viewers, a lot of them. By some accounts, billions of people visit Wikipedia, both the English version and in 300 other foreign languages. That's billions with a “B” every month. Jimmy Wales is also out with his first book. It's called the "Seven Rules of Trust." We'll discuss how that's the philosophy behind Wikipedia. Wales also grew up in Huntsville, in the shadow of the Apollo manned moon landings. All of that and more is next on APR notebook.
PAT DUGGINS: Jimmy Wales, thank you so much for talking to me.
JIMMY WALES—Pat, it's good to be here well.
PAT-- As I understand you grew up in Huntsville, and I grew up along Florida's Atlantic coast, south of the Kennedy Space Center, about the time of Apollo. And I remember walking in my backyard in like 1971 and watching Apollo 14 blasting off. So, I was kind of curious. You know, as a youngster in Huntsville about that time, how aware were you of all this NASA stuff?
WALES-- I mean, pretty aware. I mean, I always say it was like our hometown sports team, you know, like everybody was pretty excited about it. Huntsville, of course, is where a lot of the rocket scientists were, Wernher von Braun and all that. And we lived close enough to the to where they would test the Saturn five rockets that sometimes the windows would rattle in the house, you know, when they were testing. It was quite, quite a big deal. So it was all very exciting. And I do think that's a part of why I got into technology. You know, it was just like, Oh, wow. The future is very optimistic, and amazing things can happen.
PAT-- One other thing that we have in common is I recall the day that my dad walked through the front door of our home, and he had this ‘cat that swallowed the canary’ grin on his face because he had just bought the World Book Encyclopedia for me and for my siblings. Now, does that sound remote and familiar?
WALES-- Yeah. I mean, I don't remember the day, because my mother bought the World Book when I was about two, I think. So I didn't know anything about it then. So it was always there when I, you know, when I became aware and learned to read. It was always there on the shelf. There's a great picture of me sitting, you know, next to the the green sort of had a green label on it that the encyclopedia set from when I was a kid.
PAT-- One thing about it was the growing up that I remember, they didn't have an updated information about the death of Harry Truman until the World Book yearbook came in for that year. And so, I mean, how aware were you of those coming in?
WALES-- Oh yeah. Well, they every year. It was kind of an exciting moment when the when the annual update would come in. And I remember, I don't know what year it was exactly, but I remember when they updated the article on the moon, because the moon landing, it had been 1969 I was only three at the time, but it probably took them a couple years to update it. Then maybe, I don't know, maybe I but I do remember, maybe not, when it came in, but I remember going to the article on the moon and then saying, oh, there's an update in, you know, in the 1972 annual, and I had to go and read that one.
PAT-- Instead, I remember putting all my additions to the main books in pen. Now, supposedly, there were stickers that were involved with the yearbooks. I just don't remember those.
WALES-- Yeah, I mean, what we had, they would send out stickers. Then you had to open up and stick the sticker by the old article to say, oh, there's a new update. And I always joke that was my first, my first experience editing the encyclopedia and updating, you know, so it's kind of a joke, but, but it is true that says that's what goes on with Wikipedia every day.
PAT-- I was, I was kind of curious, like chicken eggs sort of a thing for you. What was, was that the inspiration? Or what?
WALES-- Well, I always loved encyclopedias. Growing up. We had world book when I was little, and then later we had a few others, like, really out of date though. You know, we had Britannica, and we had Encyclopedia Americana and so on. And I just always really enjoyed this idea that you could anything that comes across your mind. You could go and look it up and there's an article and you can read about it. And I just thought that was amazing. So I think that definitely appealed to me when I started to work on Wikipedia.
PAT—You started off in finance and then, and then it's at some point you said, Okay, I'm create an online encyclopedia that became Wikipedia. And no, was that? Was that a lightning bolt moment for you, or something that evolved or what?
WALES-- Yeah, I mean, it really was. You know, I worked in finance, and I was futures and ops and trader in Chicago, and got really interested in the internet, and sort of had a lot of different ideas and worked on different things. And you know, when I had the idea of the encyclopedia, I didn't, I didn't know how I was going to do it. And in fact, the first project was called Nupedia. It was very much more of a traditional, top down model, you know, a seven stage review process to get anything published, and so forth. And it didn't really work, because it wasn't fun, you know, it was really tedious and quite intimidating to contribute to. Because I knew, even though I had done all the coursework for PhD in finance, never did the dissertation. But I thought, Oh, I'll write an article about an economist, Robert Merton, and I knew they were going to take my draft and send it to the most prestigious finance professors they could find. And it was like, Ooh, that's scary. And I found myself with a writer's block. I'm like, this isn't fun. And so then, you know, when one of my employees showed me wiki, I was like, oh, okay, yeah, that sounds really interesting.
PAT-- 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?
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, you know, to distinguish it from Nupedia, the old version.
PAT-- Now, depending on who you ask, Wikipedia is like one of the top what is it? The top 10 most visited websites in the world, with like, billions of visitors. But I'm kind of wondering, starting out, did you think it would be anything close to that?
WALES-- Well, I was, I was always, I always say, I'm a pathological optimist, you know, I think everything is going to be great. So it's just my nature. And I remember seeing a list of the top 100 websites at the time and seeing an encyclopedia reference style site at number 50. And I thought, Oh, well, if we do a really good job, we could make it into the top 100 or maybe even top 50. Never really thought about getting into the top five, but we did, and that's kind of amazing. And you know, the impact it's had all around the world is, you know, phenomenal. It's, it's really an amazing thing.
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 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, Oh, 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-- So, you know, getting back to the, you know, "The Seven Rules of Trust," as in the as the title of your book, and you touched on some of them, like, you know, neutral, neutral point of view, accountability, constructed, dialog, open, transparent process. I'm kind of curious about the civility and respect, because, like that. That's really, as you say, that's, that's not what online is known for.
WALES—No, it’s not. But I think it's something that's really important in our culture, and we really need to emphasize it, bring it back, and it's exhausting. I think for most normal people, you're like, Well, you know, I've got this friend, and we don't agree about, you know, I support Alabama. My friend supports Auburn. We nearly came to fisticuffs over it once or twice, but he's still my friend. You know, it's fine. And you know, for lots of things, I think it's it's just really important that we have civility, that we say, Okay, right? I disagree with you, but let's have a dialog. Let's have a discussion. Let's try and understand each other a little bit better. Because, you know, the alternative where we get to and we are seeing this is to violence, you know, I mean people, I mean, it's this enormous tragedy of Charlie Kirk being assassinated. And you know, what did Charlie Kirk do? He made a lot of arguments. He said things people disagreed with. But you know, if we can't have that kind of dialog and discourse where you have a debate with someone, and you put your best ideas forward, you know, well, we're really sunk, like we're going to end up in a really bad place. And I just think it's time to sort of take a deep breath say, You know what, social media isn't reality that we need to think together, like, let's engage our brains and think and try to solve problems.
PAT-- So you write in your book about how, like, only 16% of Americans believe government's doing the right thing, and 40% don't trust the media. For a website like Wikipedia that that basically trust is how it operates. How difficult is that for you to conduct your business at such a fractured time?
WALES-- You know, we all get in our normal day to day life that pretty much everybody is decent, you know, basic decent human interactions, inter interactions, you know. And I can give some examples, you know, I was just thinking about this today, like, you know, people go into McDonald's, and when they finish eating, they they take their trash and they put it in the bin, they put the tray on top. And nobody makes you do that. Nobody, you know, you don't have to do that. I mean, you walk out like a jerk, you know. But mainly, people are pretty decent. They're like, yeah, yeah, that. It would kind of be annoying if everybody left trash laying around everywhere, and that's kind of the tradition, and that's what you do, and it's fine, and we know that about our fellow human beings. They're basically decent people, and so within our community, there is a real sense of that. But of course, you know, people come in, they're all wound up because they've been on Twitter too much, and, you know, they think we're going to have a fight, and best thing to do is scream at people. And it's like, Nah, hold on, hold on a second. Like, actually, that's not very helpful. Like, let's have a let's have a discussion. Let's, let's try and figure out how we can make things better.
PAT-- You mentioned in your book one of your “Seven Rules of Trust” is neutrality. And I was wondering, because this, this has come up, this is, this is critics of Wikipedia talking. Is what they claim is the lack of women editors, which I think has been measured like maybe 1% African American editors, which I think critics say is about maybe one half of 1% what do you think they have a point?
WALES-- Well, I do. I think for women, I think it's more like 20% not 1% so still not great, still not great. But, and, you know, why does that matter? Well, it doesn't matter for some kind of woke reasons. It matters for really practical reasons. You know, it's, it's like, great, you know, I always give the example our article on the USB standard, you know, the you plug things into your computer, and the all that it's really good. It's good in multiple ways. It starts out, it's got a really clear explanation of the USB standard. It's got a clear explanation of history. If you really are interested, you can dig further down, and you can find out what each pen inside does. Oh, this one carries data that one's for power. And so it's amazing, right? It's really great. I'm like, Well, that's the kind of good work you can get when you got a bunch of geeks, tech geeks, editing, and they tend to be male and all that. You go on our entries on early childhood development, and maybe they're not quite as good, and why is that? Well, you know, a lot of the a lot of our volunteers, I mean, they're getting better because we're getting older, so more of us have kids and things like that, and people are more interested, but people write about what they know and what they're interested in. And if there are areas of human life that, for whatever reason, aren't that interesting to men and are more interesting to women, then great. We need more women to help us with those things. And you know that could be anything from, you know, stereotypically female topics, which, I mean, I once gave an example of fashion, and then somebody accused me of being sexist. So you just think women are only interested in fashion. I'm like, that's totally not my point. I actually think fashion is a huge industry. It's part of culture, and I can tell you, badly dressed geeks like me don't know much about it, right? And we need help, and that's going to be more likely to be women, gay men. I don't know. Let's, let's go into all the stereotypes.
WALES— But the point is, we want that diversity, not just to do it. We want it because we need people who know different things than we do. And that's, like, super important. And, you know, the same thing, there's a there's this lovely guy who's working really hard, like, one of his big passions is African American history, and one of the things he struggles with is a lot of it actually isn't documented that well, for reasons out of our control. You know, I gave an example. I'll give you an example. So I went to Randolph school in Huntsville, Alabama, private school. It's had some prominent graduates. The Wikipedia entry is pretty good. It's been covered in news. And, you know, there's enough information, then there's a, what was originally an all black high school in Birmingham, that was due to segregation. Was all black, but it was a real it was the heart of a certain community, and it was a really meaningful, you know, part of people's lives. And it was a good school, and it was really fantastic. It got shut down eventually, for possibly not great reasons. And you know what? He was trying to research this, and I tried to help him. Man, it was hard to find sources like there were just not that much written about it. There was a documentary about it, which I've tried to track down. I still haven't found it. So that's a hard problem to solve, right? If, if people in a certain area didn't, sort of think it was important to write certain things down. It's hard to write about it, but I think it's important that we think about it. So sometimes some of the criticisms right about Wikipedia is, you say, Okay, if you look at the number of entries about female scientists, it's lower than the number of entries about men scientists. And I'm like, Okay, well, in certain cases, that's valid. So right now, in as I understand it, in biology, the number of PhD professors in biology is actually slightly majority female these days. Like, that's that's an area where there is really close to equality. But if you say, Well, gee, for 19th century chemists, you have almost nothing about women. I'm like, yeah, that nothing I can do to fix that, because women were systematically not allowed to be chemistry professors back then, you know, at the same time, like, we do have to say, okay, like, right? Where might we have some blind spots? Where might we be biased? How do we find people to help us? And by the way, you know, we get a lot of criticism these days that Wikipedia is, you know, Elon Musk calls us Woke-ee-Pedia and so forth, that we're left leaning and all of that. And I'm like, Okay, if we are, we need to fix that. If we are, we need to reach out to kind and thoughtful conservatives to say, yeah, come and help us. Come and edit Wikipedia, because it's not out of maliciousness, and we're not CO or crazy activists. But do we have blind spots? I'm sure we do. Like, let's, let's get more people involved, because that's really the answer.
PAT-- Speaking of Elon Musk, he apparently does not have a tremendous opinion of Wikipedia and the work that went into it. So am I? Am I right? Because what I've read, it's almost like it all centered on published reports about a certain salute that was interpreted one thing. He says it was something else, not Nazi. It was that was at the center of it, or what?
WALES— I mean, that's one thing. I mean, that he was upset about that. But, you know, I was like, I mean, I said to any of us all on Twitter, you can see the whole dialog. I'm like, here's what the article says. It said, You made this gesture. Many people interpret it as a Nazi salute. He denied it, like all those are facts, like, that's just simple. It doesn't say it was or wasn't. We're not accusing you of being a Nazi. I frankly, don't think Elon Musk is a Nazi. I think that's kind of ridiculous. Got some criticisms or disagreements with him, but, but you know, like, it's a piece of history. It happened. There was a lot of commentary about it, and we've just documented that commentary, and it would be a real mistake for us to say, come down on one side or the other, like, if we said, oh, look, Elon's a Nazi, he did this salute. Now that would be wrong if we sort of ignored it, or said, Oh, it didn't happen. Now that would be wrong. It's like, it's part of history and, you know, whatever, maybe he regrets doing the gesture because it was so misinterpreted. I don't know, you know, but yeah, so you know, there are a lot of cases like that where I'm like, Yeah, you know that that particular criticism, I've looked into, that one, I think I'm comfortable with what we wrote about that. Other cases, I might be like, hmm, yeah, actually, that's a bit one sided. I think we should make an adjustment. But of course, it's a big process. You know, 1000s of people involved, volunteer community. They're, you know, generally working in good faith to try to make things better. Is it perfect? Of course not. But you know, I think we have to always double down. And you know, when I talk about neutrality, I'm as much talking to my fellow wikipedians as I am trying to convince anybody of anything. I'm just like, hey, like wikipedians, if people say we're left leaning now, let's take a look. Like, let's make sure. Like, let's let's dig in. Let's look at the topics that people are concerned about and try and make them better. That's really important.
PAT—In terms of the international impact. I wanted to talk about 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, 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. Or 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, you know, 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, Steve is 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 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.
PAT-- 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 that very much.
WALES-- 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. I always give the example of, imagine that there's a young person in Iran and they are having some questions about their own sexuality, and they think they may be gay or whatever, and they just want to learn more. Maybe in Iran, you might not want to be sort of researching that online if you don't have a secure connection, you know, VPN, whatever you might need, because that's a private and I think it's a really fundamental human right, that's, it's the right of freedom of speech, really, to say, Gee, I want to be able to learn something without a government knocking on my door saying, Oh, what Have you been reading? Like, oof, that's bad. That's very un American. And we're very American about these things. And, you know, I think it matters. And I think again, you know, when we think about trust, like, one of the things that we've always done is we don't cave in to government censorship. We fought in the supreme we fought all the way to the Supreme Court in Turkey when they blocked us, and we won in the Supreme Court in Turkey, which I'm very proud of, and set a precedent that they can't block websites just because the president orders it. That's great. That's a huge victory for freedom of expression in Turkey, and people do count on us, like they know, like, Okay, well, a lot of internet platforms are willing to sort of censor things to please the local government, and Wikipedia won't. And that's, you know, that's like important to people like it means something to them that, okay, I can trust Wikipedia isn't gonna do the bidding of the government. It. You know, whatever that might be.
PAT-- We could talk forever, but I know we have to start wrapping up. Here I was, I wanted to take a look at the future, and one concept that you're working on as we wrap up, called Glass mountain. Now for the uninformed, down there, what would that be?
WALES-- Well, so the the idea here, and this is in the in a chapter on transparency in the book, is just the idea like for Wikipedia. Wikipedia is very, very transparent. You can go on any article, and you can see the whole debate, the whole history of the debate. So you say, Oh, why does this article say that? I don't know. Why did they write it that way? Often, there'll be a big discussion about it, but it might go on for 50 pages. And so your ability to, you know, like that. Excessive transparency might actually make it really hard for people to follow, which is then the opposite of transparency. And a lot of times, okay, yeah, we published 10,000 documents. There it all is, okay, I can't read that like that. Who's got time to go? And so my idea is, like, maybe this is one of the areas where AI might be able to help us. Maybe an AI summary, if it's quality, we have to check that, and we have to make sure it's doing a fair job. Could be very useful, so that someone can look at Wikipedia and say, right, I want to join in this debate. I'm a newcomer. I'm a thoughtful, kind person, but I see a lot of people debating and discussing. Can you just lay out for me the argument. Who are the different people on different sides? You know, what has been said before? What are some of the things they open questions? You know, that sounds great, because you could do that yourself, right? It might take you several hours, or maybe you might read a summary in 20 minutes and get what you needed out of that. I just think that's just one idea of like maybe a way that we could be more transparent going forward
PAT-- Huntsville’s own, Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and author of the new book “The Seven Rules of Trust.” Thank you so much for talking to me.
WALES-- Great. Well, thanks for having me. It's great.
PAT-- You can find all the episodes of APR notebook at APR dot, O, R, G, and wherever you get your podcasts while you're there, leave a nice rating or review. It helps other people find the show. The student interns in the APR newsroom are Samantha Triana, Mallory Cook, Alex Schoenfeld, Torin Daniel, Toni- Christian Ford, Logan Fitzpatrick, Matt Moran, Cooper Townsend, Emily Ahearn, Lourdes Duran, and Chris Alf. The theme music for APR notebook is "Sunny Days." I'm Pat Duggins. We'll see you next time on APR notebook.
