In short
Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, discusses how a free, volunteer-edited encyclopedia was conceived and built, and why trust and civility matter for collaborative knowledge.
Guest background
Jimmy Wales grew up in Huntsville, Alabama (born 1966), influenced by a tech-curious mother and a grandmother who ran an independent, Montessori-influenced one-room school. He became a hobbyist builder (later “carpenter, not architect”), studied finance at University of Alabama in Huntsville, and worked in trading before moving into internet projects.
Key claims
Wikipedia succeeded by using “accountability” (easy entry, community review, blocking bad behavior) rather than gatekeeping. A big mission (“free access to all human knowledge”) attracted volunteers. Wikipedia’s rules reflect best practices and “rules of trust” (verifiability, no personal attacks, civility). Trust is social capital; transparency and clear purpose rebuild it.
Notable examples
Newpedia’s failure due to top-down academic review; Wiki software enabling rapid progress; BOMIS link-categories attracting unexpected porn-star interest; Usenet as an early toxic internet example; “random article” browsing; Wikipedia’s “random article” link; civility debates (e.g., Russell’s polite rebuke of Mosley).
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOThe Birth of Wikipedia
0:45 to 2:00
Jimmy Wales shares the inception of Wikipedia and its early challenges.
“You know, 300 languages, you know, we're accessed, you know, billions of times every month.”
Influences and Early Ideas
2:00 to 4:20
Wales discusses his influences and early experiences with technology.
“Like people aren't really going to do this.”
Growing Up in Huntsville
4:20 to 6:40
Wales reflects on his childhood in Huntsville, Alabama and how it shaped him.
“We just didn't know how we were going to pay for anything, didn't know how to do anything.”
Education and Learning Philosophy
6:40 to 10:00
Discussion on the unique educational environment Wales grew up in.
“And we live close enough to where they were testing the Saturn V rockets that sometimes the windows would rattle in the house.”
The Nature of Collaboration
10:00 to 13:20
Wales elaborates on the collaborative model of Wikipedia and community involvement.
“But because of that, there were like, you know, first through fourth grade in one room and fifth through eighth grade in another room.”
Accessibility of Wikipedia
13:20 to 14:00
Wales explains how easy it is for anyone to contribute to Wikipedia.
“And, you know, a lot of the Wikipedians are like that.”
The Beginnings of Wikipedia Editing
14:00 to 17:31
Learn about the community-driven approach to editing Wikipedia and its accountability model.
“And then hopefully what will happen is after you've made a few edits, somebody will pop up on your talk page and say, oh, hi, welcome.”
Toxicity of Early Internet Spaces
17:31 to 19:15
Discover the toxic atmosphere of early internet platforms like Usenet and its implications.
“Before we move forward, just a quick word, if you would, on where your grandmother's motivation came from.”
Grandmother's Educational Passion
19:15 to 24:27
Explore the motivations behind the guest's grandmother starting her own school.
“And early inklings here of because another horribly abused word, of course, is libertarian.”
First Steps into Computers
24:27 to 27:46
Learn about the guest's early experiences with computers and programming in school.
“So we had that at home, and I was, you know, with my uncle.”
Show all 29 chapters
The Allure of the Stock Market
27:46 to 28:00
Delve into the guest's fascination with the stock market and early trading experiences.
“And of course, the natural assumption for someone of a certain age is I'm a genius.”
The Complexity of Trading and Gambling
28:00 to 29:18
Exploration of the challenges of trading and insights into gambling behavior.
“It turns out actually trading is a lot harder than that and markets are more efficient than that.”
Adventures in Internet Portals with BOMIS
29:18 to 31:01
Discussion on the early days of BOMIS and its unexpected audience.
“So I bought a really expensive MacBook and I use it and I'm making stuff and I'm writing scripts.”
Exploring the Evolution of Online Participation
31:01 to 33:19
Insights into the early exploration of online collaboration and participation.
“So this was the interesting thing about it.”
Understanding Social Capital and Trust
33:19 to 35:08
Examining the value of social capital in personal and online communities.
“Like, I trust, like, what you want to do?”
Building Trust through Transparency
35:08 to 36:53
The importance of transparency and purpose in establishing trust.
“Sometimes it's very minor and you just roll your eyes like, yeah, yeah, yeah.”
Self-Help Elements in Trust
36:53 to 38:51
Discussion on the self-help elements within the concept of trust and relationships.
“Like if you look at the numbers and you go, yeah, only 1 % of the customers have a problem, so let's ignore it.”
Relocating to London: A Personal Story
38:51 to 41:00
Personal anecdotes about relocating to London and its cultural diversity.
“Did you have a reader in mind while you were writing it?”
Perceptions of London vs. Reality
41:00 to 42:00
Discussion on the misconceptions about London and its true nature.
“Yeah, I've texted a couple of people I know in the tech industry.”
Perceptions of Violence in Big Cities
42:00 to 43:36
Explore the misconceptions about violence in American cities compared to reality.
“have to understand that's not you know it's not people hundreds of people stabbing each other in the streets.”
The Vision Behind Wikipedia
43:36 to 46:32
Learn how having a big vision attracted volunteers to Wikipedia's creation.
“So you come out of BOMIS with a bit of money in your pocket and experience, which, as we've established, is at least as valuable.”
Rules and Trust in Wikipedia's Community
46:32 to 48:44
Discover the development of Wikipedia's rules and the importance of trust among its contributors.
“Like that's just not nice and it's not helpful.”
Civility in Online Discourse
48:44 to 51:24
Discuss the balance between civility and honesty in conversations, especially in politics.
“Certainly, I think in most people's day-to-day lives, there is a point where you just stop.”
Conflicts and Confidence in American Politics
51:24 to 54:10
Analyze the current state of American politics and the resilience of its systems.
“upset with Amy Comey Barrett when she voted in a way that Trump didn't like.”
The Birth of Wikipedia
54:10 to 56:01
Hear the story of Wikipedia's launch and its early challenges and milestones.
“But, you know, as I say, like we had a community who existed trying to build new Pedia and the process was too hard and not fun.”
Understanding Wikipedia's Evolution
56:01 to 58:02
Explore how Wikipedia has changed and grown over the years, especially in response to global events.
“Yeah, well, except they were filling in stuff because we were so small we didn't have it.”
The Human Element of Wikipedia
58:03 to 1:00:02
Delve into the importance of trust and the human interactions behind Wikipedia's success.
“And so that's, yeah, that's at the heart of it.”
Accessibility in Writing
1:00:02 to 1:02:38
Learn about the challenges of making Wikipedia articles accessible to all readers.
“Like what are they going to be, how are they going to experience that?”
Pride in Wikipedia's Community
1:02:38 to 1:04:54
Hear about the pride Jimmy Wales feels towards the Wikipedia community and its contributors.
“Little things like that where you go like, actually, what does the reader understand and what do they know?”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:02This is a Global Player original podcast.
0:11Hello and welcome to Full Disclosure, a podcast project conceived entirely to let me spend more time with interesting people than I would ever get on the radio. And today that's even truer than usual because about an hour ago I spent about 10 minutes with my guest Jimmy Wales. So this will be an hour. Great. Founder, of course, of Wikipedia. Are you one of the people on the planet who needs no introduction?
0:32Jimmy Wales:Well, we just did the introduction. So, okay, probably Wikipedia needs no introduction. Yes. But I definitely do. Which is a behemoth. I mean, there's not really a word to describe its size and importance, is there? Yeah, it's pretty enormous. You know, 300 languages, you know, we're accessed, you know, billions of times every month. And, yeah, it's become part of the infrastructure of the world, I would say. Tell me about the moment you first conceived of it. Well, I was in California. I was working on Internet stuff. And, well, I had the idea for a free encyclopedia about two years before Wikipedia.
1:17Jimmy Wales:But I didn't really know how to go about doing it. I've been watching the growth of open source software, free software, and seeing programmers coming together to collaborate in new ways. And I thought, OK, there's probably other ways people would collaborate and had the idea for an encyclopedia. Created Newpedia, the predecessor. Didn't really know much about online communities or how to organize it. It didn't work. It was way too top down, too academic. I knew it wouldn't work when I tried to write an article myself. and felt very intimidated because they were going to take my article and send it to the most prestigious professors they could find to review it.
1:58Jimmy Wales:And I was like, you know what, this isn't fun. Like people aren't really going to do this. So a guy, Jeremy Rosenfeld, came to me and showed me Wiki, which is a software concept that existed a few years before Wikipedia, meaning a website anybody can edit. And I was like, oh, no, that's interesting, right? Then we could just get started. So we did. We just got started. And we had more work done in two weeks than in almost two years. So it was amazing. I still want you to back up further because I don't see the spark. You said quite in passing, you said, I had an idea that I wanted a free encyclopedia.
2:34When did that moment occur?
2:37Jimmy Wales:Childhood or later? Much later, much later, yeah. No, it was the early days of the Internet. And I had started a search engine, a web directory. We were doing some early blogging. We tried to do a baseball blog. That didn't really work. And, you know, just testing a lot of different ideas. And really, you know, really, I don't remember the moment when, you know. Actually, I do remember one thing. Tim Schell had, he was my partner at the time. And he had this sort of, he was obsessed with the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. and he had this idea of some sort of collaborative note-taking system and, you know, people could add stuff.
3:20Jimmy Wales:We never really went anywhere with that, but then later I think that did influence my thinking around Wikipedia. Douglas Adams was a bit of a visionary, wasn't he, in so many ways. Yeah, I never got to meet him. You know, he passed before I was anybody. No drive. I mean, one of the most interesting things about Wikipedia, of course, but under the bonnet, is the business model. So none of this ambition was driven by a desire to make a ton of money. No, and it's funny because early in my career, I would get interviews by journalists who were probing me, assuming I was going to be some sort of raging communist who hates money and thought business is evil.
3:59Jimmy Wales:I don't think any of those things. I like making money and, you know, nothing wrong with that. But Wikipedia was, you know, it's just like the nature of what we're doing with all volunteers and being very educational. It just felt to me like, well, this should be in a nonprofit. And so and it wasn't at first. At first, you know, we were just a project. We just didn't know how we were going to pay for anything, didn't know how to do anything. And then later decided, yeah, let's let's move it into a nonprofit. Let's back right up then to Huntsville, Alabama in August of 1966. just after England won the World Cup, although not many people in Huntsville, Alabama would have been aware of that.
4:39Jimmy Wales:Yeah, well, and actually, I'm always afraid someone's going to, you know, blame me. Like, literally, you won the World Cup, I was born, and that was the end of that. So I'm a massive England fan. Football is coming home. I'm just not sure when. It's an interesting childhood, which, obviously, sort of amateur psychologists will see a lot of the seeds that would later blossom professionally. But your dad was a grocery store manager. It was your mother's side of the family that had the kind of passion for illumination that came to define much of your life. Yeah, I mean, dad too, but yeah. Of course.
5:17Jimmy Wales:Mom's pretty geeky. You know, like a fun story about mom is we were the first people that I knew of who had a videotape recorder, a Betamax. She was always interested in the latest tech gadgets. We had a computer at home very early. My uncle ran a local computer store. But mom was always sort of like, you know, I mean, we had maybe the first eight-track player. I don't know. You know, it was like that. She was a tech geek. Yeah, sort of. But, I mean, she isn't really. But she just likes new things. And she always, you know, thought that would be really cool to have. And so, yeah, yeah. So we, you know, and my uncle was very influential as well.
6:03Jimmy Wales:Like he, because he had started really the first pure computer store in town. And when I was a teenager, I would work for him on the weekends, you know, and he would, you know, he taught me a little bit of programming and things like that. And it was all very exciting. And of course, Huntsville, for those that don't know, is where the after World War Two, they brought all the German rocket scientists and the space program and all the science behind it was really coming out of Huntsville. So people are, you know, they more know Cape Canaveral, Cape Kennedy and, you know, Houston, we have a problem.
6:37Jimmy Wales:But Huntsville is where the science was. And so we thought of the space program as like our hometown sports team. And we live close enough to where they were testing the Saturn V rockets that sometimes the windows would rattle in the house. So it was exciting times. And, of course, this is pre-home computers and all of that when the space program stuff was going on. But, you know, I was just I do think I was like primed to think, wow, like going into computers would be cool. And also that anything is possible. And anything is possible. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That optimism is is from that era. Yeah, you think so?
7:11I mean, I mean, you've described yourself as pathologically optimistic. Not everyone growing up in that town at that time would have been. But you think there was something in the air?
7:20Jimmy Wales:I do. I do. And, you know, also, I also think this is a funny sort of thing, but people in the Deep South are very friendly. And I did sort of inherit that. I'm like a very friendly person. And I just like people and I like meeting people. And that's been a huge help in what I've been doing because it's all volunteers and you can't boss them around. You know, you just have to, like, have people feel like, hey, yeah, like, yeah, Jimmy's working on this fun thing. Let's do that. That sounds fun. I mean, it's intrinsic, isn't it, to the new book, The Seven Rules of Trust, that people are inherently decent.
7:59Yeah. And that, given the opportunity, they'll be nice to each other. Yeah. It's a pretty hard log to cling on to in the current world.
8:08Jimmy Wales:It feels that way sometimes, for sure. And, you know, I'm like anybody else. You sort of look around and, you know, I mean, just post, wow, I really like this new TV show on Twitter and see what kind of abuse you get. It could be any random thing. But that isn't reality. That isn't how most people are. And, of course, you know, we're as a species. There's a lot about us. We're very social. And we like to be around other people. and we like to collaborate and do positive things together. And, of course, we're human, so we've got a lot of bad sides as well. It's a timely reminder, actually, of the importance, not just of trust, but of giving people the benefit of the doubt and presuming the best of each other rather than the worst, which seems to be the order of the day.
9:03Back to Huntsville. So what did surprise me when I was researching this was the fact that your mom and your grandma ran a kind of tiny school.
9:13Jimmy Wales:Yeah, yeah. No, I went to – it sort of – if you think of Abraham Lincoln in a one-room schoolhouse, it was that sort of thing. It was influenced by Montessori. It has sometimes been reported that I went to a Montessori school. It wasn't actually Montessori. But my grandmother and mother were both influenced by the ideas of Maria Montessori, which is all about independence and independent learning and sort of, you know, they do things like even for very little kids, they give them glass plates instead of plastic ones, even though they might break them. But it's to teach responsibility and to trust the kids and see what comes of that.
9:53Jimmy Wales:And my, you know, so there were four kids in my class in my grade year. But because of that, there were like, you know, first through fourth grade in one room and fifth through eighth grade in another room. So you were with kids of all different age levels. And my grandmother had an expression, each one teach one. And so the older kids would sometimes sit with the younger kids and, you know, do the reading lessons and things like that. So it was a very different environment, I would say, from what you might think of as factory models of schools with kids in rows and desks and all that. So, again, that early introduction to the idea that you don't have to do things on rails or you don't have to do things conventionally even.
10:42Jimmy Wales:Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. And also, you know, we because of the way the school was, we we the kids, we had a lot of time to do whatever we wanted. Not it wasn't. I mean, they were a bit strict, you know, as adults can be. But, you know, like we like for example, for our math, we had these workbooks we had to get through one per year. and another kid and I got super obsessed one year that we were just going to bang through the math as fast as possible. And we had it done by Christmas. And we're like, great, we don't have to do any more math for the rest of the year. I mean, we ended up, it was really unfair they assigned us more math.
11:23Jimmy Wales:That's cruel. But they did let us have a little bit of a lighter load on the math because we're like, well, we already finished it. But we also, it meant we had encyclopedias and we had a huge library there. Not huge by, you know, not like the British Library. but for kids it was a big library and so I was able to just spend a lot of time reading whatever random things in the encyclopedia which also I think is an obvious Is it true your mum had bought it from a door to door salesman? Yeah, really old school I love that. The World Book Encyclopedia We had one called the Children's Encyclopedia edited by a bloke called Arthur Mee and I'd like you say there's something indescribably wonderful about opening it up at random Yeah, isn't there?
12:05Jimmy Wales:Who knows what thing there might be I mean, I still have that. You know, there's a little link on the side of Wikipedia for a random article. I mean, for me, that one, it doesn't work for me so well because it's too random. It's too big as well. And it's always some random insect. I mean, there's millions of insects nobody's ever heard of. But what I do is I like to go, I mean, it's related to that. There's a list of cities in China, and I like to go down the list to the first one that I don't know anything about. and I know a little bit more now I've been doing this for a while but I just remember that you know the first time I'm like wow there's a city that I've never heard of in my life that's bigger than Chicago which is like 10 million people I'm like that's awesome what do they do there it turns out they just do stuff like every other city in the world but they're just there being Chinese people doing Chinese things do you remember that film Short Circuit do you remember Short Circuit with the robot that achieved sentience and it just number five is alive.
13:06Number five, yes, yes. And it kept going more input, more input, more input. I see you perhaps as being a tiny bit like that as you just had a voracious appetite for information and knowledge, whether it served any purpose or not.
13:18Jimmy Wales:Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think that's exactly right. And, you know, a lot of the Wikipedians are like that. Yes. I can tell you here's something you really don't want to do. Go up against some Wikipedians in a pub quiz. They're unbelievable. They know everything. They're unbelievable. How does one become a Wikipedia? You just get started. You know, it's really easy to, you know, like 99 percent. I'm making up the number, but it's in that order of magnitude of the pages of Wikipedia. You can just click edit and make a change and it goes live immediately, even if you're not even logged in. So, I mean, people then review it and all of that happens.
13:59Jimmy Wales:But we try to make it really open and really welcoming. And then hopefully what will happen is after you've made a few edits, somebody will pop up on your talk page and say, oh, hi, welcome. And here's some pointers and here's some things you might want to do and get started. If you've edited a few articles in a certain area, then maybe somebody from that area will come and say, oh, I see you're interested in trains. Well, here's where the train community meets up and all that. So it's fun stuff. And, you know, what happens, what we believe in is we call it an accountability model rather than a gatekeeper model.
14:38Jimmy Wales:So gatekeeping is, in many contexts, you know, the right thing to do. You know, you can't let people come in and have no idea what they're doing. But in our context, it's like, yeah, get started. And if you're not doing it right, then somebody will sort of help you and tell you what to do. And if you refuse and you start being badly behaved, then you'll get yourself blocked eventually. because we can't be, you know, it's like our friendliness and openness has to have some limits because otherwise we just get abused by trolls. But, you know, generally speaking, we hope it's quite easy for people to get started.
15:10I think it's a much maligned word these days, wholesome, isn't it? Because it's a wonderful notion. And I think people look at the Internet very much through the lens of their own age and experience. So a lot of people now think it's a force for terrible things. But in its early days, it was very wholesome. And Wikipedia is a very wholesome project.
15:32Jimmy Wales:Yeah, although the thing I like to remind people of or teach them about if they aren't really aware. So long before Wikipedia, long before any of the websites you ever heard of, there was something called Usenet, which was a very distributed system of message boards that would be, you know, lots of different computers involved. It wasn't centrally managed like a website. It was just on all these sort of internet-connected computers. And it was pretty unmoderated, and it was unbelievably toxic. It was like flame wars and people screaming at each other. And, you know, I remember somebody joked it's where graduate students go to fight to the death over very, very small stakes, you know.
16:19Jimmy Wales:And, you know, so that aspect of things isn't like a brand new invention of social media, right? Like the fact that if you get people anonymous behind the screen interacting in certain contexts, they can be quite horrible. And some of it is, I would say, deliberate trolling. Some of it is just, you know, there's a great webcomic, XKCD, which is like a really funny comic that's online. and in one of the panels they've got they showed uh two people it's kind of stick figure comics you know two people and um one of them saying you know honey come to bed and then the person on the computer says i can't someone is wrong on the internet i love that and that sort of is a lot of you know like people is and it's quite easy you know like a very early internet expression is don't feed the trolls like which we all need to take a deep breath and learn that sometimes yeah Yeah, it would be better late than never, I suppose.
17:23So you've got this early exposure to both doing things unconventionally and having a sort of intellectual independence, having your creativity indulged. Before we move forward, just a quick word, if you would, on where your grandmother's motivation came from. What made Irma decide that she wanted to run a little school?
17:42Jimmy Wales:You know, it's a really good question. You know, I think that she was very passionate about education and she was very, I would say, I can't say I've met too many more people who were more independently minded than my grandmother, who was a real character. I remember we were so small that we fit in some sort of loophole for regulations of private schools. But we couldn't get accredited because in order to be accredited, a school had to have five acres of land. And we just had our little small house and all that. And so people would come out from the state to inspect. And she would basically harangue them until they left.
18:23Jimmy Wales:She would go into the office and basically yell at them about what was wrong with the public school system. and all of that. She thought the quality of education was way too low. And I'm sure in Alabama at that time, it probably was to some extent. Although Alabama, Huntsville, where I grew up, had attracted a lot of interesting talent. The town went from, so I was born in 1966, as we've said. So I only know the numbers from 1960, was about 20 ,000 people. 1980, it was 200 ,000 people. Gosh, that's an explosion. So the time, you know, when I was growing up, it was really a boom town. And that was because of the space program.
19:01Jimmy Wales:So they brought in all these scientists from all over the country. This is one of the reasons I don't have a very strong southern accent. Because when I went to high school, I lost my southern accent, which my mother is still like, she comes over here every year for Christmas. And I mean, people, people just love her accent you know you know how hi y 'all i did wonder about that but it's because of the incoming population yeah yeah of course in high school you know when you're a teenager uh everything is embarrassing so having a a funny southern accent with a bunch of kids from all over the country i lost that quite quickly yeah i mean normally it'd be the other way around wouldn't it is that the incomer would be trying to adapt to fit in with the people that were already there Yeah, but the numbers were the opposite way around.
19:47And early inklings here of because another horribly abused word, of course, is libertarian. But you are you're the good kind. An early indication. Well, a lot of people it's like woke, isn't it? A lot of people who use the word don't seem to have the first idea what they mean by it. But that that interference from the authorities interfering with your grandma's probably had some some impact.
20:08Jimmy Wales:You know, it's it's, you know, the idea that for certain areas of life in particular, we should follow some sort of a strict scrutiny standard before the state gets involved. And I think in this country right now, we're struggling with interesting issues around, you know, there's just been this Graham Lynham thing. He was arrested at the airport, and now they've completely dropped the charges and said they're not going to do that sort of thing anymore. He's also got a separate court case, which shows how that's going to go. I'm not trying to take sides on anything about him in particular, but the point is, And, you know, I would – you could firmly put me in the camp of saying, you know, somebody tweeted something stupid on Twitter.
20:52Jimmy Wales:Probably the cops don't need to rock up at their house. Like that seems a bit much. And you can say, well, what about such and such? Yeah, OK. Like what about – you know, somebody is issuing a particularized threat or something. Like fine, fine, fine. All I'm saying is we should be pretty careful about state intervention into the realm of ideas. And discreet. I mean, discretionary. You're saying absolutely. I agree with everything you've said, because there are some things you go and set fire to that building full of people there now. It's very, very different from making jokes about kicking people in the balls.
21:28Yeah. We'll get on to that. How old were you when you went to, what can I say, proper school, normal school, traditional, conventional school? I was 13 when I went to high school.
21:42Jimmy Wales:I had to count. I hear the accent sometimes. I hear the accent. Oh, probably. Yeah, well, you know what my wife says. She says, when you're on the phone talking to your mother, you sound like Bill Clinton. Yeah, so I was 13, went to a school. It's still a small school, but by normal standards, there were like 40 kids in my class. you know so just it was Was it an easy transition? No it was really hard I was going to say because you've gone from chalk to cheese really Yeah it was very difficult and I was a full year younger than the youngest person in the class because of my when I was young my grandmother and my mother were running the school before I was school age So I just, when it was time for kindergarten or reception, as we would call it here, actually, it's before.
22:39Jimmy Wales:I can't, the numbers are, I can't keep this straight. But I just joined in with the other kids because whatever, I was there and they were starting to do stuff. And I like learning to read and stuff like that. So I just joined in. So then I was always a year ahead. So then that was pretty hard. like my uh my sporting ambitions were close to zero but were squashed by being very tiny in that uh in that era so did you find a tribe did you find people that shared your enthusiasms and your yeah yeah you know i i still have some uh friends who i i mean it's one of the great things about facebook i lost track with a lot of those high school friends and then uh sort of re-found them and uh you know i you know todd's great friend and we chat on facebook from time to time do they express surprise at the direction your life has taken or do they stroke their beards and go i always knew you were destined for greatness i'm not sure they would tell me i mean you know they've got to have a whack at me for fun anyway of course um and they had computer classes as well at this school as they did yeah we we had uh because it was there was a tech component in town.
Read the full transcript
23:52Jimmy Wales:There was a local computer company. I think it was called Silicon Graphics. And a lot of engineers had been brought in for the space program. And so a parent donated a PDP-11 mini computer, which seemed like a massive thing. And it was kind of a big beast in the computer lab. And then we had terminals. And we could send emails to each other and do some programming lessons and things like that. It was sort of like a mainframe, but small. it's actually I was just looking recently because I was wondering how much more powerful is my mobile phone compared to that which seemed like an amazing thing but it was actually one of the things you know just going thinking about that history so I had the in high school I had that to PDP 11 experience and then my uncle had the computer store so we had a IBM PC one of the earliest, you know, the beginning of windows, you know.
24:48Jimmy Wales:So we had that at home, and I was, you know, with my uncle. And then I went to university at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, so local. My parents, I was too young. My parents wouldn't let me go away. Because you always stayed ahead of your year. Yeah, so I graduated at 16, and they were like, there's no way you're going away. No, it was probably wise. It was probably wise, yeah. At the time, I bristled. Yeah, I bet you did. But they were like, no, no, we don't think you're mature enough. And I was like, yeah, but I want to go get smashed. And, yeah, no, actually, you're right. I should probably not be allowed out of the house.
25:19Jimmy Wales:I'm 16. I'm an idiot. But anyway, when I started at university, I took a computer class, and they made us – we had to do the Hollerith punch card code. We literally had to make punch cards on these teletype machines and feed in a batch of them. You would hand them over the counter and they would run it on the mainframe to do things like add 7 plus 14 and get the answer 21. And I was like, this is unbelievably out of date already. Like, it's not even just this is going to go away soon. This already has gone away. And I complained to the professor and he's like, no, no, this is integral to computer science.
25:56Jimmy Wales:You have to know the Hall of Earth code. And I'm like, I don't think you have any idea what's going on. So I didn't major in computers because I was like, well, that's a waste of my time. Like, that's completely ridiculous. But you'd do that in your own time, would you? I did that in my own time, yeah. So I've always been a very bad programmer and just a hobbyist. Even today I love – I code things that will never see the light of the day. Because it's fun. It's fun to build stuff. I like making things, yeah. Yeah, exactly that. And that's actually – I always say I'm a carpenter, not an architect.
26:29Jimmy Wales:And I guess what I've done really is there is some architecture and thinking about how do you design the community and the system and all that. But really, I just like making things, and that is what I still go back to from time to time. So you majored in finance. I did. But not obvious. I mean, if I was second-guessing this chronology, I wouldn't necessarily have opted for that. Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I can tell you the reason for that. I was interested in business, and I got interested in the stock market because when – so in 1974 was the oil embargo, and there was a big oil crisis. And I saw a story on TV about Winnebago, these huge RV caravans, and that Winnebago was on the edge of bankruptcy because nobody was – Because you need so much petrol.
27:20Jimmy Wales:You need so much fuel. Gas, yeah, yeah, yeah. And nobody was buying them. Also, there was a big recession, and obviously one of the first things to go, like, you don't really need a 30-foot RV. And then when the oil crisis broke, I remember that, and I thought, oh, I bet Winnebago is going to do really well now because there's all the pent-up demand. Nobody was really buying them for a couple years. There were news stories about, yeah, people are going driving, and they're going to go travel this summer. And so I started watching the stock and it went from, as I remember it, from like$3 a share to$21 over the next whatever year.
27:55Jimmy Wales:And of course, the natural assumption for someone of a certain age is I'm a genius. It turns out actually trading is a lot harder than that and markets are more efficient than that. But I was always fascinated by that and how do you value things and what's it worth and all that. So I sense it was more that you wanted to understand and perhaps beat the system or the house than wanting to be rich. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Actually, here's a funny story about being the house. When I later, we were skipping ahead a little bit, but later I was a futures and options trader in Chicago. And every year our company, we would take a trip, like a company trip.
28:35Jimmy Wales:We were a small firm, probably 25 people. and we would take a trip from Chicago, we would go to Vegas. And all these traders I worked with, most of them floor traders, I was upstairs doing mathematical arbitrage and stuff. These floor traders would go to Vegas and these guys were wild anyway and they're the kind of guys who in the pits, they'd make or lose whatever in a day. And they would go and they would gamble in the casino and be playing craps and whatever. And I was like, you guys are idiots because in Chicago, we are the house. like we're the floor traders right we we are the house and we we make an edge on every trade and here you're not the house you're just gambling like idiots anyway some of them made money and they're like yeah i made a lot of money this weekend what'd you do i'm like i went to see a show
29:26i noticed as i read through your biography that the word bored crops up quite often you get bored
29:31Jimmy Wales:things happen when you get bored uh yeah that's interesting uh yeah i don't like being bored and I this is why I think I like making things you know if I've got some time I'll just go oh like right now I do a lot I bought the most expensive laptop I've ever bought after years of saying I don't need a good computer I work on the internet so I just do emails and get on the web like you don't I don't do computation on my machine now you can run local large language models, but you have to have a pretty powerful computer to do it. So I bought a really expensive MacBook and I use it and I'm making stuff and I'm writing scripts.
30:17Jimmy Wales:And I think some of it might see the light of day at some point. I made a, like a, just for fun, I made like a TV show recommendation website and got nearly to the point I'm like, oh, I could probably put this out. And then I got bored. Also got really busy working on the book and doing other things. Maybe I'll go back to that next year when things quieten down. We're edging towards the point at which people, if they don't know you, they become aware of the work that you were doing. It reaches out of trading floors and into people's homes. So we come to Bowmas next, do we? Yeah. I think so. So in 1996, you set up an internet portal and platform aimed very much at male audiences.
31:00Jimmy Wales:Not intentionally. So this was the interesting thing about it. And there's a bit of a precursor to Wikipedia here, which is with BOMIS, what you could do is you could create a category. It was like a search engine, but the users could add links. So it was more like it wasn't like a search like we know with algorithms and Google. It was more like Yahoo had a directory. And the Yahoo directory was they had hired thousands of people to research the web and make lists of links and categories. So it was like that. And so we were like, oh, well, let's see if people will make lists of links. So I remember one of the first ones we made was about Jupiter, just a list of 10 links about Jupiter.
31:42Jimmy Wales:I'm like, oh, that's cool. But when we opened it up to let people do it, it was a lot of male tech geeks who were interested. and they like women and porn stars. And so suddenly it was like, oh, like we've got this huge index of female movie stars and, you know, all this kind of stuff. And it was not intentional. So we were like, okay, well, that's fine. Like that is what it is. That's who we are. So then we started doing early blogging and we tried a lot of different things. but we generally tried like we did baseball we had a baseball blog and you know this that and the other none of that really ever took off but you know we were we were modestly successful for a while what was the unifying theme if you'd been ordered to like I don't know tell potential backers what you were trying to do what would you have said I mean we didn't really know we never became whatever we were just exploring things and in fact I mean I would say the I was already at that time very interested in more, and this is pre when people started talking about Web 2.0, but like, oh, lists of links, and they're hiring people to make lists of links, but maybe other people could just do that, and we could share the links, and there's this world of participation that's possible, and blogging is really not about sort of top-down publishing.
33:05Jimmy Wales:These are like group blogs, and we're like, oh, maybe people could come, and if they're good commenters, we could invite them to post, and it was that kind of early exploration of like oh what could what could ordinary people do online and uh yeah so that and so then naturally the something about the encyclopedia tickled my fancy yeah clearly and and i mean i don't know why the phrase social capital just came into my mind you're describing things that are of value but not of pecuniary value yeah no that that's true i mean certainly that was one of the things that was a learning, you know, which is like people are willing to contribute time and passion and energy if, A, if you trust them and sort of show that and say, yeah, if you want to do something, I'm here to support you.
33:57Jimmy Wales:Like, I trust, like, what you want to do? What are you going to do? And if they find it fun and if they find it useful, maybe not directly useful to them in a transactional sense. But, you know, it's like, all right, look, if you spend four hours on a Saturday afternoon and you've been editing Wikipedia or you spend four hours playing Grand Theft Auto, probably you're going to feel a little bit better having edited Wikipedia because you'll say, all right, yeah, you know, I chatted with this other person who's interested in my topic and we fixed some things in this article. And by the way, the world's just ever so slightly better.
34:33Jimmy Wales:And that's social capital. It's social capital. Yeah, it's sort of some meaningful and productivity as a virtue. And trust, which is the subject of the new book, it runs through all of this. It does. That's a social capital as well in a way, a thing of value that you can't put a price on. Yeah, exactly. And, I mean, we all, we definitely all understand and know this. You know, when we think about our relationships with our friends and things like this and, you know, We think less of a friend if they've somehow broken our trust. Sometimes it's very minor and you just roll your eyes like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
35:12Jimmy Wales:Bob's always 15 minutes late. He said he was going to be on time, but he's never here on time. It's a little bit annoying, but whatever. That's just Bob. We put up with it. Other transgressions are much more serious. You're like, oof, I don't really know about this person. It's not just about truth, is it? Trust is more than truth. Because as you say, if someone is late habitually, it feels disrespectful and that diminishes trust. It's as if you've got a pool, a reserve that is finite. Yeah, yeah, it's finite and can be replenished. Of course it can. And I think that's the other kind of the lessons of the book.
35:47Jimmy Wales:But it could also be depleted. It could be, yeah. And so, like, what do we need to think about in society? What do we need to think about in organizations and politics and so on? And how do we rebuild trust or build trust in new ways? And, you know, a lot of it, a lot of the seven rules are pretty obvious. Give me an obvious one. Transparency. Yeah. You know, it's sort of like be clear. Purpose is another one. Like having a clear purpose is really helpful for trust because everybody knows where you're coming from. If we're working together in a business and we know what the purpose of the business is, it just becomes a lot easier to make decisions and we all know kind of what we're going to do.
36:34Jimmy Wales:And, you know, that's not rocket science, but I think it's worth sort of saying a few words about in these times. So, I mean, people seeing it in the bookshops may not immediately appreciate that it has an element. it's another it's the third phrase or word that is much maligned but there's a bit of self-help here i mean it is a guide to living a better life and being a happier person yeah yeah actually when i when i was going around and pitching to publishers one of them got very excited about turning it into a self-help book i'm like not really what i'm doing exactly but i can see that right there is a a bit of that um and it's micro and macro isn't it so yeah you're doing a little bit of both that publisher wanted you to go full micro that's right but you wanted to stay yeah mostly macro or largely macro largely macro yeah but i do think you know like rule number one keep it personal is really uh both macro and micro in other words it's like for for uh a business or uh whatever it's sort of like it's really about really think about that customer and put yourself in their shoes and don't just look at the numbers.
37:44Jimmy Wales:Like if you look at the numbers and you go, yeah, only 1 % of the customers have a problem, so let's ignore it. It's like, yeah, but that 1%, they're going to get really mad and they're going to talk to people and it's going to cause you a lot of damage. Probably you shouldn't think that way. You probably go, like, we really want the product to work for people. And if it doesn't, we want to make it right for them. And then over time, people will be like, yeah, you know what? I bought this thing. I actually think Amazon does a pretty good job of this. I bought this thing on Amazon. It came in. It was shoddy.
38:15Jimmy Wales:I complained. They gave me a refund. Sometimes they don't even ask you to send it back. No, they don't. That's true. And obviously, if you abuse that, they're going to not do it. But I think their view has always been, you know, we want to make people happy. Like, we want to treat our customers well. And I'm not defending all of Amazon.
38:35Jimmy Wales:There's a lot that's irritating about everything in the world if you dig hard enough. But in general, that has been their philosophy. And you do – like whatever you may worry about, you buy something off of Amazon. You don't worry that they're ripping you off and they're going to steal your money. And that's trust. That's trust, yeah. Did you have a reader in mind while you were writing it? Did you – Not really, although I now have my favorite reader is my daughter who came to me last night. I'd given her the book a while back and she's like, well, I finished the book. and she had made notes and she had all these questions.
39:11Jimmy Wales:It's a chip off the old block. Yeah, and the questions were mostly about expressions, sort of slang expressions used in the book that she hadn't heard. Either they were slightly too American, which made me think, oh, maybe that was slightly American, or they're just things she hadn't heard about. So Watergate, she said, what's Watergate? I'm like, oh, well, I'm sure you'll study it in school, but in the meantime, here's what Watergate was about. And so I didn't have her in mind specifically as an audience, but I thought it's great that it was approachable to her. And I don't know, she seems to love it, but I'm her dad, so of course she's not going to tell me otherwise.
39:46Well, you never, it could be the opposite way around. She's 10 times more likely than anybody else to tell you otherwise. To have a whack cut out. Exactly, it cuts both ways.
39:53Jimmy Wales:That'd be my other daughter. She'd be the one to wind me up. You mentioned that she doesn't have the frame of reference. Why did you decide to sort of relocate to Britain? Yeah, well, my wife is English. My wife's a Londoner. And when we first met and started dating, she had just landed the job. She worked for Matthew Freud here at Freud's PR. And she had landed the job to do PR for the London Olympics for the torch relay. So she needed to be here and I can be anywhere. So I was like, oh, well, great. I'll just come to London. And I love London. I always say to people in the U.S., if I lived in Silicon Valley, I would pretty much only know tech people.
40:39Jimmy Wales:In the U.S., you know, you've got tech in San Francisco. You've got movies in Hollywood. You've got whatever, finance in New York, politics in Washington. All that's in London. And so, you know, my friends in London, I mean, it's all kinds of different people. I still don't know any bankers, but other than that, it's just a great city with a great culture, and I love it. Well, it occurs to me as you say that, and you describe the city I've lived in since I was 19 and the city I know well, but it's a city that is horribly misrepresented by a lot of your countrymen, particularly online, that this mythology of insecurity and violence and hideousness and proper senior politicians and people like Elon Musk describing our home city as Sodom and Gomorrah.
41:31Jimmy Wales:Yeah, I've texted a couple of people I know in the tech industry. I see them tweet something about London being a completely lawless hellhole, and I'm like, my kids walk to school. Come and visit me. I even looked up this I mean I live in a nice part of town but I looked up the stats and it's like the third highest for crime and I was surprised to hear that but I'm like we can go to the worst part of London not at 2 a.m. mind you sure because it's a big city fair enough but like you can go anywhere in London and it's it's not a lawless hellhole and you know we that's not to say oh okay like when when there's a rise in knife crime okay we got to be serious about that but we also have to understand that's not you know it's not people hundreds of people stabbing each other in the streets.
42:19Jimmy Wales:It's just like there are these problems that any big city would have. And it's lovely. And a murder rate that's a tiny fraction of all America. Also, I particularly chuckle hearing this from anyone who lives in San Francisco where there's a serious problem with mentally ill homeless people. I mean, you're not likely in London, it can happen in any big city, to be accosted on the street by someone screaming at the sky. that's day to day in san francisco so i mean this is trust again because these are people that's why i asked you about it actually whether or not people in your milieu have fallen for it because they are trusting someone who is lying to them or they are trusting i think some of them have fallen for it and some of them have uh you know they need to get out of silicon valley a bit and come out and see it's actually quite nice out here and uh you know uh but yeah i mean and i I think that's a risk for all of us.
43:13Jimmy Wales:I mean, certainly, you know, I meet people in the UK who are absolutely terrified of the gun violence in America. And I'm like, yeah, you know what? America has a gun violence problem. I assure you, when you go to Florida on your vacation, you're not going to see a single gun. Sure. And, like, it's not, even though there's a problem, it's still lovely in America. People are very nice and all that.
43:41So you come out of BOMIS with a bit of money in your pocket and experience, which, as we've established, is at least as valuable. Experience is also social capital. You have a crack at Newpedia, as you mentioned earlier. This is where you, I think you actually said, imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. You weren't aiming small, were you?
44:05Jimmy Wales:Well, what I always say, so that vision statement actually came a little later. That was early days of Wikipedia. But, you know, I would say, like, oddly enough, having a big idea made it easier to get people to volunteer than if it had been small. If I'd said, I would like to write a biography of every U.S. president, people might have gone, yeah, okay, like, whatever. Have fun. But when you say this sort of big thing, you know, a free encyclopedia for every single person on the planet, like imagine that world. What would it be like if you could do that? Let's do that. Then people are like, yeah, like that sounds exciting.
44:51Jimmy Wales:Like that sounds like world changing and interesting and fun to work on. And you can sort of see, OK, well, I can't I can't do that all by myself. I know there's one little part I can work on. And so even in the very early days, people would make lists like what are the thousand articles that every encyclopedia should have first? And they would go like the moon. Yes, the moon. We need an article about the moon. And people just had fun doing that. And we also had all kinds of debates about what can and can't have an encyclopedia article. And how do you draw the line? and it took us a while to sort of figure out, okay, well, it has to do with verifiability, notability.
45:38Jimmy Wales:Who's we? Who was in the room where it happens at this point? I mean, there's a bunch of early Wikipedians who are still around, some really great people. They just got it. Yeah, yeah. And they were like, oh, yeah, yeah, let's do that. And so, yeah, so we grew and we kind of made up the rules as we went along. And what's interesting is our rulemaking has always generally been not about coming up with the rule and then enforcing it. It's about just writing down the best practices that we're already doing. Because a lot of it, and I always say, like, the best sort of elements of the rules of Wikipedia should be very intuitive and kind of obvious.
46:22Jimmy Wales:You know, things like you need a good quality source. Like, okay, yeah, obviously. You didn't need to sort of surprisingly tell me that. Like when you're working collaboratively with other people to try to improve an article, no personal attacks. Like you don't attack the other person. Like that's just not nice and it's not helpful. It just causes trouble in the process. So those kinds of things, although we didn't have them written down at the beginning, it was kind of intuitive of like, well, yeah, you've got to behave yourself. It's best practice. But these are rules of trust as well, aren't they?
46:56Jimmy Wales:They are rules of trust. Yeah, exactly. And that civility, that's a big piece of it, which is interesting because some of these things, they were debated. I mean, sometimes people say to me, well, has your community ever thought of? And I'm like, stop right there. The answer is yes. There's a lot of them and they write a lot. They talk a lot. So yeah, we probably have thought about it. But, you know, there are people in the world who think civility is just some form of polite dishonesty. And I'm like, hmm, not really. Sometimes it's just holding your tongue. But oftentimes it's you can disagree with someone even about their behavior or whatever without insulting them and without being uncivil about it.
47:41Jimmy Wales:You know, like there's no reason to not be nice to people because it doesn't do any good to not. There's a line, though. I'm not on Twitter anymore, so I don't really have unpleasant online experiences. But I had a little flirtation with one on Blue Sky yesterday. I just quoted a Bertrand Russell letter to Oswald Mosley, which is a model of civility. But in it, he is telling Oswald Mosley in no uncertain terms to go fuck himself. But he does it very politely and he does it very civilly. And I posted that as something to aspire to, partly because I've been influenced by preparing for this interview.
48:15and quite a lot of small number of people but an interestingly unified number of people got very angry and pointing out no you have to punch nazis you have to attack fascists you can't there comes a point where i think it's reasonable to suggest that we've civility has run out and possibly we're still being too civil to people like donald trump and his closest supporters i mean yes and no like
48:39Jimmy Wales:I mean, it's a nuanced question. Certainly, I think in most people's day-to-day lives, there is a point where you just stop. Yeah, cut and run. You just, like, this is not, particularly on social media, you know, I think we've all been there where we responded to someone who was attacking, thinking, oh, maybe I can convince them. Those were the days. After a while, you're like, yeah, actually, there's no further talking to you. And I'm wasting my time, right? And so stopping a conversation. Also, you know, I think you can, you know, with someone like Donald Trump, it's perfectly fine to be very, very critical.
49:20Jimmy Wales:And, I mean, I'm really happy that, you know, we are much more seeing a little bit stronger language here and there from a lot of journalistic outlets who I thought were really too, is it too civil, though? It's too deferential. Maybe child, actually. Yeah. Yeah, but, you know, it's like it's one thing to say, you know, Donald Trump said without citing any evidence. You know, it's like, yeah, not only without citing any evidence, but he's absolutely contradicting every known fact of reality. You know, like, let's just say that as well. You know, that he, you know, he lies a lot and he lies about lying and he lies about what he said yesterday.
50:01Jimmy Wales:You know, like he's completely. It's extraordinary. It's extraordinary. and um you know i it it is extraordinary uh you know we we've always had politicians who lie but they at least pretended to apologize that's gone you know something that's gone out the window how worried are you about the state of the nation um i mean fairly i mean i uh i remain confident in the american system so like if someone says to me but what what are people going to do if he cancels the election well he he actually doesn't he can't cancel the election it's not run by the federal government at all it's run by the states and they will carry the election whether he likes it or not and the only way to stop them from doing that would be literally call out the national guard and there are rules against doing that although by the way he's just called out the national guard i was going to say a lot of people listening will be shouting no no no and you know there are there are those kinds of concerns where you say well like I mean, look, if you were really planning something terrible, he would probably, you know, far half the joint chiefs of stuff.
51:06Jimmy Wales:Oh, he did that. Yeah. You know, he would. Oh, yeah, he did that. Oh, well, no, it's not great. And yeah. So there's something to worry about. But it would it would, you know, at least there's not, you know, even, for example, the some of the the MAGA, right, like the sort of diehard Trump supporters were very upset with Amy Comey Barrett when she voted in a way that Trump didn't like. And they said, oh, she's disloyal. She's this and that. And I'm like, she's actually a principled conservative who I would have plenty of disagreements with. But she's a proper person and isn't going to just say, well, Trump says the election's canceled.
51:51Jimmy Wales:That's fine. You know, he's a good guy, whatever. I support Donald Trump. So I'm going to say yes. No way. Absolutely not. So you're going to have to arrest the Supreme Court. It just it goes very deep. And the checks and balances in the Constitution are pretty good. It's sort of like here, obviously, a completely different system. but it's sort of and I think this is a weird thing to even contemplate and easier to contemplate when Her Majesty was around because we just don't know Charles well enough yet but you know if a Prime Minister said when the time is up I've decided not to hold elections anymore I think the Queen would have said I don't think so and obviously the military would go with the Queen and all of that like it's an odd system to have one person in charge of this but But it would work.
52:40Jimmy Wales:And, you know, I think I always talk about, you know, Spain in this context, you know, when they had a coup and the king, this is decades ago, said no. And that kind of ended it. So I'm like, it's a pretty thin system to rely on one person. Didn't work in Greece and so on. But still, I do have a bit of confidence that, you know, we're unlikely to go down a path where, you know, the worst path, the worst path. So this is the pathological optimist has a bit of confidence. Yeah. No, I like I did an interview recently where at this point the the you know, the interviewer said, so you're telling me you think probably Trump isn't going to have a coup.
53:28Jimmy Wales:Yeah, probably. I thought you were about to cheer me up. Jimmy, you need to work on your cheering up skills. I know how she feels. So January 2001, Wikipedia goes live. What went live that day, Jimmy? What exactly went live? So, yeah, so the software then, I downloaded an open source Perl script. I used that software because it existed and it was one script to install. and I typed hello world, which was the first words in Wikipedia, which is a thing that programmers always do. When you learn a new programming language, you make a program to print out hello world, which just shows you, you know how to get it running and you can print something out.
54:06Jimmy Wales:So I just typed hello world. I wasn't really trying to be poetic, but now it does feel like that's kind of poetic for Wikipedia to say hello world. And, you know, there wasn't much there. But, you know, as I say, like we had a community who existed trying to build new Pedia and the process was too hard and not fun. And they just were like, oh, okay, let's turn in. And so people started writing things and, you know. How quickly? I mean, when did you realize it? So that was January. When did you think this could be absolutely epic? Well, I mean, there were a couple of moments. You know, I remember Larry wrote a letter to the main list.
54:44Jimmy Wales:Yeah, who said, you know, wow, actually, after, I'm going to get the numbers wrong, but it's like, And after three months, we've already got this many. I think by the end of the year, we could have 3 ,000 or 4 ,000. I mean, by the end of the year, we had 20 ,000. It was much better than that. Again, I'm making them all. I can't have looked at this for years, but it was something like that. But there were a couple moments. So one, September 11th, 2001, when the terrorist attacks happened in the U.S. That was a moment when I knew there was something interesting and different because on that day, there was a lot of activity on the site of people writing about what had happened in Wikipedia.
55:30Jimmy Wales:And if you turn on the TV that day, what you saw were bewildered pundits because nobody knew anything, but they had to fill the air. You saw the video of the planes going in the towers over and over. A lot of fear, a lot of concern, a lot of speculation. Meanwhile, on Wikipedia, people were expanding the article about the World Trade Center, the building. Like, who was the architect who made it? Really background information that was kind of hard to come by that day. And I was like, oh, that's different. Like, that's interesting. Well, that's like a live history book. Like a live history book, yeah.
56:06Jimmy Wales:Not an encyclopedia. Yeah, well, except they were filling in stuff because we were so small we didn't have it. So it was kind of encyclopedic information you would expect. And we've seen the same. Like in – I forget what year it is now. But there was a big tsunami in the South Pacific. And, you know, like the villages that were impacted. We had very small articles in Wikipedia. So people were like, oh, let's write more about that. Like people are going to be very curious. Like, oh, what are these people like? What are their lives like? And this would surprise you and delight you. I mean, not the tsunami.
56:38Jimmy Wales:It's great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's great to say, like, oh, right. Like, this is the kind of information that people wonder about. Yeah. Is the kind of information that we're going to put out there. And that's actually cool and really interesting. And then, I mean, the rest actually is history. 25th anniversary next year. Are you going to do anything? Yeah. 25th anniversary is coming up. Yeah. No, it's interesting to me because for the 10th anniversary of Wikipedia, I was in London I had moved to London by then and I did a party here and it was kind of fun and then for the 20th anniversary I was in London but we were all in lockdown so it didn't really do anything so now the 25th so I've been in London more of the life of Wikipedia than not so yeah we've got events planned all over the world my book has been sold in 18 languages so everybody's excited that you know oh great, Jimmy's going to come to all the events everywhere because he's got to go around and do his book stuff.
57:38He's got books to sell. And oddly, I don't generally write questions down before I sit down with people. But I did have in the back of my mind a question is, what is it about founding and running in the early years Wikipedia that qualifies you to write a book about trust? But I think almost every part of this conversation has answered that question.
57:58Jimmy Wales:Oh, well, thank you. Well, it's all trust. Yeah, it's all trust. Yeah, it's all trust. And it's, you know, the whole thing is based on people being trustworthy and people trusting other people. And so that's, yeah, that's at the heart of it. That's a magical thing. Yeah, it's kind of cool. And also, it's worth hitting people over the head with. Because, you know, I use Wikipedia every day like most people do. I also donate just before you. Thank you. Before you rattle the tin. and i hadn't properly acknowledged or even noted how what what a triumph of humanity it is yeah i mean it's interesting because the the articles and and the the house style if you will right it's very dry it's very of course impersonal in a way uh it doesn't read like a personality-filled blog or whatever.
58:54Jimmy Wales:It's just Wikipedia. And so it is easy to sort of forget the human conversation that led to it. And all the people who, you know, in some really fantastic cases where it's a really controversial topic, a hard topic to write about, and you sometimes go to the talk page and you see people in good faith really working hard to word that sentence exactly right and really agonizing over every single word and how to phrase it so that it's fair and neutral and so forth that that's in the best cases and the worst cases it sort of descends into a bit of an ugly fight and then people get upset and we're humans after all but you know those are the the great things so you're like wow okay this is great i understand this and it's written in a way that's really nice and it does have i mean you do feel a personal connection with it a personal which is one of the rules, one of the seven rules.
59:51Yeah, yeah. You do have that. Even though it's dry. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You do feel a personal.
59:56Jimmy Wales:Well, you know, that's one of the things that, you know, one of the things that we always encourage each other to keep foremost in mind when you're writing is the reader. Like what are they going to be, how are they going to experience that? So actually one complicated thing is there are certain complicated topics in science or whatever, where, in my opinion, our article is way too technical, way too soon. And so that I sometimes, you know, will say to people, I'm like, yeah, that article, like, I tried to read it and I didn't understand the first three sentences. Like, that's not great. Like, this is an encyclopedia for everyone.
1:00:38Jimmy Wales:And that is an encouragement to people to say, let's keep it personal. Like, think about your reader. This isn't a specialist encyclopedia. and you're clearly an expert in this field, but what we've got to figure out is, like on Reddit, they have a ELI 5, explain like I'm 5. Well, maybe not explain like I'm 5, maybe explain like I'm an adult, but I'm not a scientist, and I'm not an expert in this field, and I'm just a generally interested person. And if I go to the article about coal, that was one I remember. I actually at a school in South Africa, visiting a school of teenagers, you know. And I felt bad because they made these poor kids stay after school to meet me.
1:01:20Jimmy Wales:And I was like, I'm sure they've got better things to do than meet me. And they had them in the computer lab and they were working on the article, coal, not to edit it, but they were downloading it and they were learning about coal in school. And I just happened to, I like read the first three sentences. I'm like, wow, there's like the chemical name of coal and a formula. And if I were a teenager learning about coal, I would find that first few sentences quite off-putting. And then later on it was better. Like I'm not suggesting you dumb it down, but I'm saying make it accessible, bring people in a bit so that, and that's keep it personal.
1:01:53Jimmy Wales:That's like, really think about that reader as opposed to just thinking about the facts. Like, okay, it's not just the facts. It's like, we have to explain it to people sort of like, we don't really like the community is using more, machine language than we used to. But one of the reasons we don't just wholesale go in for machine language is oftentimes you need to explain certain context in some languages, but not in others. So like if there's an entry about you in, let's say, Japanese Wikipedia, well, we can probably mention, you know, I don't know if you've worked at the BBC, You mentioned the BBC and the English language speakers are going to know that.
1:02:36Jimmy Wales:But maybe in Thailand you have to say BBC, the national broadcaster. Little things like that where you go like, actually, what does the reader understand and what do they know? Similarly, they'll have – actually, a fun thing to do is go and read about Bollywood stars in Wikipedia. And what's fun about it is we've gotten better over the years. It was mainly written by people in India speaking English. but they have numbers Locke and Crore Locke is 10 ,000 and Crore is 10 million so they put the commas in a different place so where we say thousands and millions they say Locke and Crore so you would start reading it and it's like yes and he was paid only 5 ,000 Locke for this movie I'm like what the hell is Locke?
1:03:21Jimmy Wales:Was that a donkey? I don't know this is kind of strange no no it's a number and so now we've gotten better we say both because actually for the Indian readers and also for people who are into Bollywood movies they enjoy learning that yeah of course it makes perfect sense when you say it final question how proud are you of what you've achieved with Wikipedia I'm proud yeah it's such a great honour to be part of this community and sort of get to play my role you're more than that though more than what? just a part of the community Yeah, I am, you know, well, am I? I actually, one of the things I do say, I have taken, you know, the late Her Majesty as a kind of a role model in the sense that I'm not the boss of anybody.
1:04:13Jimmy Wales:I'm not in charge of anything. Do I have power? Maybe, theoretically, but would I ever use it? Probably shouldn't. And I'm kind of here to remind people of the values and to kind of stand for something and be proper and coach people and get people motivated. I don't make decisions. I remind people of the decisions that we should make. And so that is a leadership role in a certain sense. But I don't take – it's like really all these people are just doing such incredible work that it's amazing. I'm just like any other reader. I sometimes go to a Wikipedia entry and I'm like, this is blowing my mind how great this is on this completely random, obscure topic.
1:04:59Jimmy Wales:I'm like, who the hell wrote this? It's amazing. And I go to the talk page and I go and see who's done it. And I'm like, that's just incredible. I mean, just amazing. The seven rules of trust. Why it is today's most essential superpower by Jimmy Wales is out now. Buy it. Read it. Absorb it and act on it. Jimmy Wells thank you thank you thanks for having me
1:05:29this has been a Global Player original production
From the publisher
Long before it became one of the most visited websites on Earth, Wikipedia began as a radical idea from a curious boy in Huntsville, Alabama. Raised by a father who managed a grocery store and a mother and grandmother who ran a tiny, Montessori-inspired school where “each one teach one” was the guiding principle, Wales grew up surrounded by early computers, space rockets and encyclopaedias bought from door-to-door salesmen. It was there he developed both a fascination with information and a belief that learning should be open to all.
In this episode of Full Disclosure, James O’Brien sits down with the founder of Wikipedia to trace the unlikely journey from small-town America to one of the most visited websites on the planet. Wales recalls the early days of the internet, the chaotic birth of Wikipedia, and how a community of volunteers built something that “became part of the world’s infrastructure.”
It’s a conversation about trust, optimism and collaboration- from a man who still believes that most people, given the chance, will choose to build something good together.
Find out more about The Seven Rules of Trust: Why It Is Today's Most Essential Superpower by Jimmy Wales here