Trust with Jimmy Wales

0:05The internet has a problem. This holder of once-trustworthy information has become anything but. We don't trust social media or even our news if it's on the internet. But there's one glaring exception to this trend. Wikipedia. Wikipedia didn't used to be a trusted source of information, and these days is one of the most trusted sources of information. So I sat down with Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, to talk to him about how Wikipedia has been able to increase its trustworthiness and how we can bring a little more trust back to the internet. It's a particularly special episode because we recorded it in front of a live audience.

0:50This is a bit of optimism. So this is really fun for me because we're doing a live recording of a bit of optimism at Soho Farmhouse at Founders Forum, part of London Tech Week, which is really fun. And I get to sit here with the indefatigable Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia. The thing that I am fascinated about, which is where the rest of the internet, the sort of the big tech companies, are losing trust. You know, we don't trust the pictures we see on Instagram. We definitely don't trust Twitter anymore. Big media is losing credibility in the stuff that they're writing. But Wikipedia, and it has its issues and it has its ups and downs, but Wikipedia, for the most part, has been able to maintain the public trust since you showed up.

1:42Yeah. Why? How has that been possible? Yeah, well, I mean, this is very high on my mind these days. I'm writing a book on trust and thinking about this decline in trust that we've seen across all kinds of sectors of society, trust in politicians, journalism, et cetera, et cetera, and really thinking about, okay, what do you need to do to maintain trust? What have we done that has allowed us to be trusted? And it's really interesting. We're not trusted because Wikipedia is perfect. There are errors in Wikipedia. You can definitely find biased articles or things that have been vandalized and so forth.

2:21But I actually think it's in large part the fact that we are so trusting. we make ourselves vulnerable to the world. Anyone can go and edit Wikipedia. You know, you can go 99.9 % of the pages are completely unlocked. You can go and make a change. It goes live instantly. But there's a lot behind the scenes, a community that's monitoring and checking. And if you do naughty things, you get banned very quickly and so forth. And there's a level of transparency as well. So, you know, everybody's stumbled across a Wikipedia entry that says, You know, the neutrality of this article has been disputed. The following section doesn't cite any sources.

2:58So we give you those warnings right up front, which you think, well, that surely reduces trust. But actually, it increases trust. People are like, oh, OK. So they're being open about, you know, how this works. I always joke, I wish sometimes the New York Times would put a banner at the top saying, you know, we had a big fight in the newsroom as to whether to run this. But we think it's strong enough. but just be aware, you know, there's some dispute about the neutrality of the site. That would be useful. That would actually be a great idea because then you would go into it knowing that there's disagreements before you start reading.

3:29And you get to be a part of that rather than just have it thrust upon you. Yeah, just being told. But Twitter, in some way, shape, or form, has that openness where anybody can contribute. And I know it's slightly different now because they have vastly fewer people monitoring. Right. How many people do you have monitoring at Wikipedia versus what Twitter had? It's hard to make a comparison because it is a bit apples and oranges. Although, as someone pointed out quite amusingly, you can compare apples and oranges.

4:04So in a sense, if you look at the staff at the Wikimedia Foundation who are tasked with monitoring all the content as it comes in, that is zero. No one is doing that. We do have trust and safety people, but they really only take on issues that get escalated to them that are beyond the capacity of the community to deal with. So, for example, a persistent vandal across many, many languages is kind of a pain in the neck. Someone who's posted a suicide threat on a talk page in Wikipedia. The community is not really in a position to sort of call the authorities and do what he's doing. So we do have a small staff.

4:37Those kinds of things are quite rare. One of the big differences is for social media, and I include in this Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, there's sort of a box where it says upload your creativity or what are you thinking and so forth. So it's very much by default wide open free speech forum, which is going to lead to people uploading horrific offensive. There'll be some of that no matter what. whereas Wikipedia there is no place on Wikipedia where you're supposed to just upload whatever's on your mind it's even the talk pages of every entry are talk pages about improving the article so if you go to the Donald Trump talk page and you start you know ranting about how great he is or how horrible he is the people there are going to say hold on like what does this have to do with the article like we're here to talk about improving the article and that actually cuts out a huge swath of community management issues and problems.

5:37It's just like, we don't have to worry if you have a horrific opinion. You're not really supposed to come and post your random opinions at all. But another answer to your question is, how many people do we have monitoring? Exactly the same number of people as we have editing at all, because everybody's involved in an open community process. So can any of those formerly trusted places, even all the social media and even the the big news media, can they become trusted, in your opinion, or will they actually have to die off or become something else and be replaced by something else? Well, I mean, I think if we're talking about the news media, I think they have to become trusted again.

6:16Because without a trusted source of ground truth... If they bring you in and say, okay, let's make you... There's a job available. You can actually run CNN, if you like. How do you fix that? Yeah, well, I think there's different answers to this. So I think one of the things to look at is the business models of journalism have been broken for some time. And we're starting to see some resurgence of, for example, subscription models, which I think is very healthy, very good. Because part of the problem is, if your business model is showing as many ads as possible, getting as many clicks to your site as possible.

6:57It does drive you in a certain tabloidy direction of inflammatory content. You want it to go viral as everybody's all upset and debating about what you've written. And that moves you away from a kind of Walter Cronkite-esque, like serious, like we're just going to tell you the facts and we're going to be very clear about it and we're going to acknowledge where we're not sure and so forth. And I do think you have to get back to that. I mean, I think people, I remember during the Trump administration, I read an article in the Washington Post. And the Washington Post was doing some fantastic journalism during that time.

7:33Read an article in the Washington Post. It was not an op-ed piece. It was a straight news piece. And I loved it. But I loved it because it was really a completely biased rant against Donald Trump, which I agreed with. But I didn't feel great when I finished it. I was like, that's not really proper journalism. I loved it. They're pandering to my, you know, sort of, they got me to click on an inflammatory headline that, you know, basically suggested he's about to go to jail. I'm like, yes, let's see about that. Yeah, yeah. But then at the end, I'm like, you know what, that was really one-sided and it didn't really advance my understanding of anything.

8:07And that's a problem. And it's a problem when you don't have subscribers, you know, who are like, I really want to pay for this. I don't think people realize sort of like how we got here, too, which, you know, when the public airways were first made available, when the television airwaves were first made available to commerce, the government made a deal with the broadcasters and said, look, you can make money on the public airwaves, but here's the deal. You're going to offer the news as a public service. And everybody agreed to it. And that's how you could have people like Walter Cronkite because the news was never viewed as money-making.

8:37It was always viewed as just a public service. And it was in 1979 on Nightline during the Iran hostage crisis that the ratings for the first time ever on the news went skyrocketed. And all of a sudden, all the folks, all the executives leaned in and be like, what happened? And they saw the sensationalism, although it was newsworthy, spike. And all of a sudden, they started becoming more interested in the ratings of the news and flash forward a bunch of years. And now selling advertising on the news where you could, the goal was now to maximize your ad dollars from the news. And to your point, what you just said, and the only way you can do that is if you make news sensational or incredibly biased.

9:20Yeah. Because it's not about actually providing the news. It's no longer become a public good. It's now just a business. Yeah. To an extent, though, because I do think there is a business model around being trusted and being serious about journalism. So, you know. But is it an ad-based need to click, need as many eyeballs as possible model? Maybe not. This is why I'm very bullish on subscriber revenue at the major newspapers, because I do think then you sort of take a longer view. Because, you know, if all you're offering is the same clickbait sort of inflammatory stuff you get everywhere, I'm not going to pay for that.

9:55I can get that for free. But I might pay for, you know, if I feel like, oh, actually, now I'm understanding the world. I'm getting fed not just things I agree with, but, you know, things that are helping me, then I'll pay for it. So I think that that's a piece of it that's really important. But also, I think, you know, when we look at, that's just talking about the news media, but we also look at the ecosystem of social media, where you take all of the problems we just discussed, it just explodes. You know, the kinds of things that we've seen so many times. We're here on the YouTube stage. I think YouTube has done a better job than most at recognizing, gee, if we just optimize like in a very simplistic way for time on site, how many minutes of video you're watching, we will prioritize things that are not really healthy.

10:43Because people, you know, we're human beings. And so we do, we kind of follow, everybody turns their head to see what's happened at the at the car crash it's digital rubbernecking yeah digital rubbernecking and you know that's problematic you end up prioritizing extremist content things that are outrageous i mean i've watched a couple at least uh flat earth videos mainly just because i'm like really like come on let me let me see this can't be real that somebody and you know that's just sort of human and so youtube i think has done a good job of saying okay, we need to think a little bit more in a more subtle way about what are we optimizing for.

11:21But they have the same problem. That's always going to be a difficult problem in social media that is advertising-based. So we're talking about the companies and we're talking about business models. But then what about us, the consumers? I think we all, to some degree, we're all kind of full of it, right? Which is we say we want unbiased news. We say we want just the facts. But we don't really. because when we read something that we disagree with, we dismiss it and call it biased. If you ask folks on the left to read Fox, even if there's some good journalism in there that skews one way, they'll dismiss all of it as biased.

11:56And conversely, if you ask people on the right, too. So how do we actually get... We want to read things that we agree with. Are we as a society, or at least an entire generation, so far gone that we can't even... We don't even, despite what we say, we don't actually want unbiased news anymore. So how do we get us back to neutral? Yeah, so my counter to that is that Wikipedia is more popular than the top 50 newspapers in the world combined. Yeah. And people do like Wikipedia quite a lot. They love it. And I just think humans are multilayered and multifaceted. We are both. We both want a bit of sensationalism.

12:34But we also have a more Aristotelian brain as well, where we say, no, actually, I want to be well-informed. I want to understand what people on the opposite side are saying. I want to get their arguments, and I want to grapple with ideas. And this is, of course, not everybody. But I think most people can see both of those things in themselves. and where we can get better as consumers is to really be very conscious about this and also to recognize the addiction nature of some of this stuff. There's a very famous XKCD comic, somebody saying, come on, honey, it's time to go to bed. And the partner says, I can't, someone is wrong on the internet.

13:16And that's very, I was like, well, there's Twitter for you. It's like, I can't sleep right now. There's this idiot here and somebody's got to straighten this out. Right. But a big part of that is, you know, like the design of social media, the way it's managed and so forth is, you know, so I say this about Twitter in particular. It's like, okay, if you see somebody doing something bad on Twitter, whatever that might be, you know, being abusive to another person, spreading misinformation, you basically have three choices. So one, you can block them. that helps you, it doesn't help anybody else.

13:54And sometimes it doesn't even help you if they're saying something horrific about you and you block them. That's not stopping everybody else from seeing, which is actually what bothers you. You can block them, you can report them, which if you've ever reported anything on Twitter, even pre-Elon, that's not a very useful avenue. Or you can yell at them, which is the most popular choice. So people yell at each other. And that's kind of the design of the platform. And there is really no community norms, community standards where people are debating and discussing and thinking about how do we deal with this, which is really like how do we handle that kind of thing in our real life social networks?

14:32Well, it's complicated and nuanced, right? You've got this one friend who's unfortunately kind of a jerk to this other person. And so you think about, oh, do we invite them back again? And, you know, really don't like them over at dinner because they get drunk and they get annoying, et cetera, et cetera. And we do manage these kinds of conflicts. And in social media, what I would say is we have come to this point where the model doesn't really have any kind of genuine community controls. It's a model of, I call it a feudal model. Everybody using the site is a serf on the master's estate, and the master sets the rules and enforces the rules.

15:07And there's not really much you can do. You're very powerless. Whereas at Wikipedia, although I do acknowledge the problem is vastly simpler. writing an encyclopedia. The community manages all of that. How many people are, I don't know what you call them, super users, but the people who are mostly maintaining Wikipedia. What's that number? So it depends on how you count it. So if you look at the number of people who edit at least five times a month, that's like 70 ,000 to 80 ,000. That's pretty active, but five times a month, you're not really daily engaged. And the people who are editing at least 100 times a month is 3 ,000 to 5 ,000.

15:45So that 3 ,000 to 5 ,000 is the core who really maintain Wikipedia. And I think that's the big difference, right? Even if you take the bigger number, the number of people who engage with Wikipedia, which is colossal, it's a minuscule number who are actually using it. Whereas for all of social media, everybody, that colossal number, is the group maintaining it. And I think that's... It's one of the challenges. It's kind of like democracy, right? We don't really want a democracy. We like representatives. It actually works better. And so Wikipedia is a representative government rather than a complete democracy.

16:19That's right. It's an analogy, but yeah, definitely. So, yeah, I mean, one of the things, one of my side projects is WikiTribune Social, WT Social. It's a pilot project, social network, where the users can trust each other. And it's really focused on gaining trust from other users and so forth. Will it work? I don't know. But the concept is to say, how can we democratize? How can we broaden out? So rather than simply having a model where Twitter hires 30 ,000 people, very horrible jobs in low-wage countries to look at horrific content and deal with it, can we actually devolve that power into the community in a completely new way?

17:00Here's one of my canonical examples is on Facebook. So Facebook's done a pretty good job of these disinformation accounts that have millions of followers, and they deal with that once it gets to millions of followers. So you could complain about that. But actually, I think there's a deeper problem, which is everybody's got the stereotype of the racist uncle. And I always say, all my uncles are wonderful and don't have a racist uncle. But we know what that is. The blowhard uncle who, at Thanksgiving dinner, Christmas dinner, everybody's like, oh, God, Uncle Ralph again. Here we go. Right? Every family's got one.

17:33Every family's got one, and you just sort of manage it and deal with it. What if you were that one? Maybe that, because I don't know if we've got one. It must be you, exactly. But he's always banging on about social media and knowledge, you know, what an annoying guy. But anyway, and then another stereotype is the very sweet grandma, right, who just wants the grandkids to be happy and wants to congratulate and love everybody. So on Facebook, your annoying uncle posts his sort of bigoted opinions. And the algorithm notices people jump in and go, Uncle Ralph, shut up. And it's like, ooh, engagement, right?

18:09So suddenly, you know, Uncle Ralph has 900 followers on Facebook. And grandma, who just posts heart emojis when there's a kid picture and says sweet things, doesn't get a rise out of anybody. It's less fun. It's less fun. Well, it's less engaging. I don't know if it's less fun, but it's less engaging. What's the rubbernecking? It's less ad revenue. And so then you just sort of get this deep problem where it's like, oh, actually the people in real life who we all just roll our eyes and don't listen to have an audience. And the people who are really sweet who we think, oh, yeah, great role model.

18:43I love that she's so supportive to the kids and so on gets nothing. And so that deeper problem is really a structural design problem that comes directly from an advertising-based business model where you just say, oh, well, how do we get more people looking at more ads? Turns out Uncle Ralph is a goldmine because he stirs up controversy and gets people back to the point. Someone is wrong on the internet. It's Uncle Ralph. Right, right, right, right. And so that deeper problem, I think, has to be solved by moving to platforms that have a different model. So the big difference here is we're asking a community to manage an online encyclopedia.

19:22Yeah. Right? Versus asking a community to manage people's opinions. It's hard. It's hard. Absolutely. It's a much more complicated question. Here I can, and Wikipedia requires, you know, citation. Like where's the evidence that you're going to change somebody else's post? Yeah. Versus if it's an opinion economy. Like I just disagree and think you're wrong. Yeah. I'm going to change your post. So if the algorithm is based on trust, so you've got whatever signals you've got and you're saying, actually, we're going to optimize to show people more trusted content rather than more engaging content.

19:59Well, it's not going to work very well for an advertising-based business model because you're probably going to get fewer page views total and so forth. But it may create a space that people feel more authentically enriching to their lives. So the business model of Wikipedia is just purely donations. And we've done loads of A-B testing over the years on different kinds of messages. I mean, in the early days, I remember one of our fundraisers, I wrote a letter specifically talking about, because I didn't know any better, but I thought, oh, we're a charity and what do charities do? I wrote a long letter about what we want to accomplish in sub-Saharan Africa to bring free education and so forth.

20:39It performed okay, but it wasn't really great. It turns out what really performs the best in terms of messaging is kind of an equity argument. Basically, you use it all the time. You should probably chip in. Like, you love Wikipedia. Why don't you chip in and help out? And that performs really well. People are like, you know what? I do love Wikipedia, and I really should give them some money because I've benefited so much of my life. And so how do you get to a place where people are like, yeah, am I actually willing to send in my 20 quid? And it's because you have to meaningfully impact their life in a positive way.

21:09I don't think anybody's ever thought, gosh, I mean, Twitter has changed my life for the better so much, I just want to send them some money. And hence why Twitter Blue has had a very relatively low uptake. Don't know exactly, but seems to be relatively low. And they keep changing to make it more transactional. In other words, if you pay, you get promoted up in the algorithm and you show up first and so on, which has empowered a lot of really dumb people, as it turns out. I want to go deeper on the trust because you're, I mean, one thing you said, which sort of, I sort of sort of repelled a little bit from it.

21:47You said the algorithm for trust. Yes. Right. Trust is a feeling. Yeah. Well, yeah. People can say things to me that, but I might get a bad feeling or conversely, you know, I get a good feeling about something. And we're highly attuned social animals who need to have this mechanism work for us because our survival depends on our ability to go to sleep at night and rely on somebody else to watch for danger. So we've learned to feel trust. And so how can we develop an algorithm for a human emotion? Yeah, well, we clearly have algorithms for human emotions already. Sentiment analysis and things like that and looking at even engagement is largely about certain emotional reactions.

22:29Fear. Fear, yes. Paranoia. And hope. Yeah. So, you know, I think it really is about, so there's some interesting research that's been coming out that in a mock social network type of thing these experimenters looked at where people rated whether or not news postings were trustworthy or not trustworthy rather than like and dislike. performed quite well compared to like and dislike in terms of elevating higher quality content, in terms of how people behaved. So if you go on Twitter and you want to get a big following, don't behave like the sweet grandma who's just lovely to everybody. Behave like the bigoted uncle because that gets you followers.

23:11It gives you traction and so forth. Whereas if instead of like and dislike on your Facebook post or the information you're sharing, if people could say, oh, this was trustworthy or not trustworthy, then you get signals, different signals that will tend to be, I think, higher quality. The right would say that Fox is more trustworthy and the left would say that, you know, MSNBC is more trustworthy. Yeah. Right. No, exactly. But I think I think both like I personally believe and this is my experience with the Wikipedia community. People of different political viewpoints can distinguish between higher and lower quality output.

23:46So for example, in this country, I would say, compare the Telegraph and the Guardian. So you've got a left-leaning and a right-leaning paper. They're both quality newspapers. And you can critique them on this and that. And then you've got very low-quality media. I'm not going to mention the Mail Online. But if I were, and actually, there was a great survey that came out just a couple days ago. I saw like the most trusted, I think it was The Economist and the BBC scored very high, FT, very high. Whereas, you know, the mail scored quite low in people's estimate of trust. And yet it's incredibly popular.

24:26And so I think we can make those distinctions. I mean, I can say, I can talk about various commentators on the internet. And there are those who I disagree with, but who I rate, who I say, okay, you have to grapple with their ideas. they're serious thinkers putting forward arguments that have to be grappled with and then there's just blowhards who have no idea what they're talking about right like one of the things i've always said is like if i went on facebook one morning and they said oh we're trying a new feature instead of showing you the things we think are going to engage you the most or so forth we're going to show you things that we have signals that are of quality that we think you might disagree with oh that sounds interesting like show me something quality that i don't agree with yeah that's actually very interesting to me it might it might change my mind yeah or i might improve my own thinking and so forth.

25:11And if you only show me things that just flatter my own preconceptions, I kind of like that too, of course. I'm a human being, but I really want, in a deeper sense, something more interesting, more engaging, more thoughtful, which is what I hope to get. When I go to Wikipedia on a complex topic, I hope to actually learn about what are the various sides saying? How can I grapple with those ideas? Wasn't that the goal of some of the aggregators, though? Some of the news aggregators, it's kind of their goal, which is like, we'll show you everything. Yeah. No, I think there have been a lot of people who've experimented with different kinds of ideas of what sorts of things.