Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia co-founder: We’re living in an era of a massive lowering of trust

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1:15Hello, I'm BBC presenter Sean Lay and this is The Interview from the BBC World Service. The best conversations coming out of the BBC. People shaping our world from all over the world. There have been so many disagreements between me and my family. Putting on a show, that is what it means to be Lady Gaga. Only the things that you can't solve with government and private sector is where you bring philanthropy in. There's no place in the world where women are equal. Every generation, every generation has to fight to maintain democracy. For this interview, I met Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, the world's largest open source encyclopedia.

1:59Built on the principle that knowledge should be free and created collectively, Wikipedia is written and updated by a global community of volunteer editors who add, verify and moderate entries based on reliable sources. With over 300 language editions, it's become one of the most visited websites in the world and to this day remains free to use, relying on donations from readers. Wikipedia faces mounting challenges, navigating a world awash with misinformation, accusations of bias from the right and resisting efforts by authoritarian regimes trying to limit information. We speak to Jimmy Wales about trust in the digital age, the pressures facing open knowledge platforms and his new book, The Seven Rules of Trust, a blueprint for building things that last where he shares the lessons that transformed Wikipedia and could transform our relationship with information too.

2:56When you're in an environment where trust has already fallen a lot, just saying, trust me, hey, trust me, I promise, that actually makes people more suspicious. It's like a shady used car salesperson. Oh, you can trust me, I'm Bob the good guy. Maybe not Bob the good guy. However, showing your work and showing your flaws a bit, saying, oh, look, we got this story wrong, running corrections. You know, all that kind of stuff is super important, I think.

3:25Welcome to the interview from the BBC World Service with Jimmy Wales. Wikipedia has been around now for almost 25 years. And every day we see, you know, lovely, nice people coming together and writing about all kinds of topics, everything under the sun and beyond. It is a community and a system that's based on trust. Obviously, Wikipedia is very trusting and lets anybody come and join us and help us. Through our work, which is never perfect, but we're always plugging away, trying to make it better, we've become pretty well trusted, and I think that's kind of cool. How do you deal with bad actors?

3:59So with Wikipedia, it turns out only a very small number of people are bad actors. I mean, some people are a little bit annoying and some people need to learn. We don't have that big of a problem with it, but obviously we do have to deal with it. So, you know, if you're misbehaving in Wikipedia, hopefully you get a very nice warning first that says, hey, you know, what are you doing? Knock it off. You know, that's not OK. But then you can get blocked. You can get banned. But, you know, most people are pretty decent and just are like, oh, I'm just trying to help. But, you know, that's not the thing that most people worry about.

4:29They worry about the conscious attempts to introduce perspective, bias, whatever else you want to call it to entries. Sure. How do you deal with that? I mean, you know, we have a lot of rules around reliable sources. So that's a really important piece of things is like, where's your source? You know, we have a community that is very committed to the idea of neutrality. Are we perfect at it? No, I would say we're not perfect at it. It's all part of a discourse, a conversation that we're having. What is a fact? Fact. A fact is an identification of a fact of reality, of it's something real in the world that you can talk about.

5:06And that's what makes a statement true. Plenty of people can test it, though, don't they? in some areas. They put it down, they'll say, well, look, you're saying, let's say online, this is a far right party. Well, that's not a fact. That's a perspective. That's an opinion. That's a view. And yet it's tied to a fact. So how do you disambiguate that? Yeah, I mean, I think what you have to do is you have to take the preponderance of the reliable sources. I mean, words have meanings. And just saying that something is far right or far left or whatever it might be without any context or meaning wouldn't be useful.

5:43But on the other hand, if it's an accurate description and it's been reported in many sources, then it's perfectly fine to use it. And we do have in the community a lot of discussion and debate, like when is it appropriate to use certain terminology? You know, when do we call something pseudoscientific versus less well-confirmed and so on? And that discourse, there's no avoiding it. You know, if you're going to be thoughtful and reasonable about trying to document and explain the world, you've got to grapple with some really hard editorial issues. Where editors disagree about that, and the editors are after all just your users, then people like you and me, how is that resolved?

6:21So a typical way of resolving a conflict is what we call going meta. It's sort of stepping up a level. And so you say, look, we're not going to settle this. But we can describe the controversy in a way that people on both sides would say, yeah, that's a good description of the controversy. I always like to get people to imagine a very kind and thoughtful Catholic priest and a very kind and thoughtful Planned Parenthood activist. And because I've said kind and thoughtful, you can imagine them coming together to write about abortion, realizing, well, we're never going to agree on the fundamental issue.

6:54But we can, you know, with sincerity and humility and a little collaborative spirit, we can describe what the debate is about in a way that people coming into it can read it and say, OK, now I understand what this debate is about. The Manhattan Institute did some research back in 2024 into how Wikipedia's entries about politicians and others described them. You've probably seen it. The report's author wrote, Wikipedia entries are more likely to attach negative sentiment to terms associated with a right-leaning political orientation than to left-leaning terms. He added, Wikipedia is not entirely living up in his view to its neutral point of view policy, an unbiased and balanced manner, which is what you are aiming for, what you genuinely want.

7:37He says he's a supporter of the idea of Wikipedia. He just thinks you could do a lot better. Yeah. So I, you know, I've seen this criticism. It's right wing motivated criticism. It's not a neutral report in any way. So to some degree, it's just not true. It's cherry-picked examples and so on. But to another degree, I think we have to say, look, if you look at the descriptions of various people in reliable sources in the mainstream media, you do find there is this sort of bias in the language that we use in the world. And that will naturally filter through into Wikipedia. And I think hopefully what we're doing is we're knocking off the rough edges from both sides.

8:20You know, a lot of times bias, it's often hard for people to detect if they're so soaked in a certain outlook or they've read certain media over and over and over. And so you do have to take a real effort to sort of step back and say, OK, maybe it's not really accurate. And, you know, we do see over time the way media describe various figures does tend to change and fluctuate. Because we all bring our own bias to it. We all bring our own bias to it. We bring our own bias to the passing. But that's the problem that you've got to find some way of mitigating or overcoming. And I'm still not clear from what you're saying that you have a solution to that.

8:59And if you don't have a solution to that, isn't Wikipedia still ultimately only as good as its weakest link? So all human endeavor has this challenge and this issue. And I think we do have the best solution that anybody's come up with, which is to say, let's have an open dialogue and discourse in good faith and an effort to be as neutral as we can. And all you can do is try. If you give up on trying because it's impossible to be perfect, you'll never get anywhere. Given what you've said about the whole concept of Wikipedia, that after all, it is supposed to appeal to everybody, certainly the majority of people and lots of people use it.

9:36Millions of people use it. You've talked about it's more widely used than any other encyclopedia or equivalent that there's ever been. Not surprising because it's online. But nonetheless, given that that is the case, why do you think those on the political right seem so keen to find Wikipedia to be a problem? I think that right now we are living in an era of a massive lowering of trust in the mainstream media, and that's mainly exhibited on the right for whatever historic reasons. And we're not immune from that. I think it's important for us to say, actually, what we really want are more kind and thoughtful conservatives to come and join our community and edit Wikipedia and help us make sure we're not being biased.

10:22I mean, this idea that Wikipedia has been hijacked by far-left activists is just not true. I mean, I know the Wikipedians. They're really nice people. You can be nice but wrong. You could definitely be nice but wrong. Absolutely. And you've got to be ready to go, OK, hold on. Let's listen to the other side. And that's super important. You are making an appeal there for people from the right of good intent to come and join. Wikipedia depends on voluntary contributions. Elon Musk, who is a popular figure, not least among supporters of President Trump in the United States, albeit despite their falling out, he suggested the conservatives should stop giving until your editorial authority acts to ensure the original aspiration of impartiality is restored again.

11:05So he's saying don't join in, boycott it. Yeah, that's not going to help. Why not? Well, because if you don't come and join the conversation, then how are you going to impact that conversation? No, but he's saying if you stop giving them money, they will get their act together. Oh, well, that will have zero impact. And certainly every time he attacks us, we raise more money. So if we wanted to just maximize revenue, we would just get into a big fight with Elon. We're not funded by billionaires. We're funded by ordinary people who think his criticisms are ridiculous. I mean, people love Wikipedia and use it all the time.

11:36Elon will be Elon. We can't really worry ourselves too much about him.

11:45You're listening to The Interview from the BBC World Service, people shaping our world from all over the world. If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

12:28With the European Athletics Championships, the Men's FIFA World Cup and the Commonwealth Games all taking place, 2026 is shaping up to be a terrific year for global sport. And the More Than The Score podcast will be following all the action, bringing you interviews with sports stars and exploring the stories beyond the score sheets with the BBC's expert sports journalists. More Than The Score from the BBC World Service. Listen now. Search for More Than The Score wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

13:05For this episode of The Interview, I'm speaking to Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia. Now, he could be forgiven for being stressed. Trying to ensure an encyclopedia remains accurate and up-to-date is the intellectual equivalent of nailing jelly to a wall. Yet the word which best sums up the Jimmy Wales I sat down with is genial. Like the candy-striped shirt he was wearing, his demeanour was bright and straightforward. He had a strong belief that disputes can be resolved through goodwill, and that's despite the pressure he described Wikipedia was facing, from conservative political figures, authoritarian governments, and the current deficit of trust in the world.

13:46Okay, let's return to my conversation with Jimmy Wales. What about the more formal pressure that you come under or your editors come under, particularly when they live in countries where the state is inclined to take quite a lot of active interest in people's online activity? How much of a problem is that? Well, we've had editors who were arrested. We've had demands for personal data on editors who haven't done anything wrong, which we don't give into. And, you know, a lot of the editors in places like Russia have, many of them, abandoned their old account, which was too tied to their real-life personality, and they've started a new account where they're a little more discreet and careful.

14:26I mean, fortunately, we do live in a world where technology can be quite a protective shield. So people are using VPNs and they're being very careful with their identity in order to be safe in editing Wikipedia, which is a shocking thing to contemplate. But we do live in that world where the authoritarian impulse to threaten people who are speaking simple truths is there and it's being acted upon and we have to resist it. Your book in many ways is a reflection of the fact that these problems appear to be getting worse, although even you acknowledge that actually a lot of this predates the world of the internet.

15:03There's evidence that in terms of polling that trust in media and in government and politics has been in decline, certainly in Western countries since the 1960s. But do you think it is a growing problem? Has the Internet in some ways accelerated it? It definitely feels that way. Certainly the kinds of things we are seeing, like we had this strange letter from a D.C. prosecutor asking us all kinds of questions that, in my opinion, were inappropriate. I mean, there is the First Amendment in the U.S. It's not the business of the U.S. government to harangue us about what content we're publishing. And so that's odd, you know, particularly from – How did you reply to that?

15:38What did you say to them? I'm not sure on the radio I can say what I wanted to say. But no, we just – very calm. It was sort of this sort of hostile demand to know how it all works. And we're like, well, OK, here's how it all works. Here's how it works. Here's how we monitor content. Here's what we do. It never went anywhere beyond that. I think it was, in my opinion, showboating in the first place. So showboating or an attempt to intimidate, because what sometimes governments do is they it's the modern equivalent of of raiding an office. You don't prosecute anyone. You raid an office. You take some bits of paper.

16:12You throw a few things about you make people a bit nervous. Yeah. And therefore it it it leads them to self-censor. Chilling effects. Yeah. I mean, to some extent, possibly I don't really know. But the truth is, it doesn't really work to intimidate us. What's interesting about Wikipedia is we've designed everything to have a really high degree of intellectual independence. We're not funded by the U.S. government or any governments. We're not funded by a handful of philanthropic foundations. We're funded by small donors like ordinary people giving their 20 quid. And that's really important because it means you can't sort of threaten our funding.

16:47I mean, a lot of organizations in recent times have really found themselves in a really hard bind because of the USAID funding cuts. We're lucky we didn't have to sort of panic because you would panic. I mean, you would start to reconsider some of the things you're doing. And certainly there are philanthropic foundations in the U.S. who ought to be independent but who have sufficient concerns that they are beginning to pull back on funding certain types of things because they don't want to have that fight and so on. One of the solutions you've talked about in your book to this kind of issue about how did you decide to say, to give the example again, since I've used it once already in this interview, this is a far right political party.

17:26We said, well, let people see because they can read the log of how these decisions were made. It's quite hard to read. So you're talking about using AI tools to speed read it. That gets us into a fascinating area, which is machines are now doing the reading for us. So what do we do about that? We are very transparent. You can see everything. But sometimes that level of transparency, we're like so transparent. It's like a mountain of glass is the expression I use. So we do need to summarize better so you can quickly go in and go, oh, why does this say this? And even like for working editors, you go, okay, I see there's been a huge debate, but I'm trying to understand it.

18:02Can you summarize who said what? What are the main arguments and who's on what side? Just so I orient it so I can join in in a useful way. AI could be helpful for that. I mean, we're testing and playing with, and AI makes a lot of mistakes, so it's not really good enough yet. By the very nature of the way large language models work, which involves probabilistically guessing what the next most plausible thing is, does lead to a certain type of problem that's actually quite annoying and quite tricky. So if we're thinking about using it to help write Wikipedia entries, it's very bad, very dangerous, because you could easily see it making things up.

18:38So in other words, AI itself becomes a bad actor in the whole process. It becomes a bad actor, yeah. And so we're very cautious and very skeptical about that. And we definitely believe very strongly in human in the loop, you know. And really, though, saying, well, let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Let's also say, well, what is it good at? And if it's good at making suggestions and you sort of force it to say, quote me where you got that from, which it's not very good at, then, you know, I think there could be some possibilities. Just on AI, I wanted to ask you about a kind of specific problem which comes from the dominance of the English language online.

19:13In a sense, it is the language of the Internet. However, it may frustrate people who speak other languages. It's still the language that most of the AI tools use. So lots of things subsequently go through translation. How do you ensure Wikipedia's continued growth in smaller languages and in underrepresented regions of the world? because you are trying to be universal, not an American or Western European perspective on the world. Yeah. We think about this a lot. How do we encourage growth in the languages of the developing world? I mean, one thing that is good and is happening, as long as you have humans in the loop, is that people are using machine translation, AI, which has gotten much, much better than it used to be.

19:55But I do think it's very interesting. And we just want to say, look, we're here. We're ready. We want you to come and join us. But of course, there are deeper questions in a lot of languages. So small languages have a real problem with accessibility of information. There's not a huge book market there. I think the situation has improved recently, but traditionally, compared to the number of speakers of Arabic, the number of books translated into Arabic was quite low. And I think some philanthropists have been trying to work to correct that. But that means, okay, well, people don't really have that access in their mother tongue and that's really important so that's obviously i don't know how to fix that let's talk about the overall theme of your book and in a sense the overall theme of what wikipedia exists for which is trust you put it in that such a simple sounding word and yet a word that has come to be under attack in so many ways as we've said already predating social media We know what the challenge is.

20:56What are the potential solutions? I think one of the things that I would focus on in the media, for example, is neutrality as being quite important. We talk in the book about the famous incident when The Washington Post decided not to endorse a presidential candidate. I think the only thing they really got wrong about that was the timing, because by doing it just before the election, it seemed like Jeff Bezos had intervened to help Trump, even though I don't think Bezos is a fan of Trump. But was it politically motivated and tight? And that was unfortunate. People did feel that, okay, maybe if the newspaper is supporting one political candidate as an editorial page thing, maybe the news stories are biased and slanted and maybe I shouldn't trust all that.

21:41So anyway, in that case, I thought, OK, yeah, actually, it's not like the Washington Post editorial is actually persuading anybody. So what's the point of it? And so I think those are the kinds of things. Again, another element would be transparency. Is it weakening the defenses to say, actually, no, there might be a problem? You know, not saying we don't have a problem. We're robust. We're independent. We're impartial, which is a mantra you often hear from news organizations. Yes. No, I have to acknowledge there might be a problem. And for a lot of organizations, it's hard to swallow because that's not the traditional way.

22:19You know, at least at Wikipedia, we put these banners at the top that say, the neutrality of this article has been disputed, right? That's not something you normally see. I always joke, sometimes I wish the New York Times would run something like that. You know, a little note at the top that says, we actually had a big fight in the newsroom. You know, not everybody was on board with the story. We think it's valuable enough to run, but just a little warning sign. Some people thought this wasn't good enough. Oh, that's actually interesting. I actually trust you more that you've shown your work a little bit rather than pretend that everything is the gospel truth.

22:48Because, you know, when you're in an environment where trust has already fallen a lot, just saying, trust me, hey, trust me, I promise, that actually makes people more suspicious. Like, you know, it's like a shady used car salesperson. Oh, you can trust me. I'm Bob the good guy. You know, maybe not, Bob, the good guy. However, you know, showing your work and showing your flaws a bit and saying, oh, look, we got this story wrong, running corrections. You know, all that kind of stuff is super important, I think. Trust isn't just an issue for the modern age or for democracies. You quote the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu two and a half thousand years ago saying this, to give trust is to get trust.

23:28Are you an optimist about trust actually recovering, being restored, that there may be some revival in it, that people will become more willing to give trust into institutions, into organizations, into the media, into politics maybe? I think so. I mean, I think we're going through a particular swing of the pendulum that's pretty bad at the moment. But actually, the public cares about trust. They care about trustworthy politicians. And, you know, I remember being really proud of the U.S. when it was Obama versus McCain because you thought, OK, I've got policy disagreements with either of them. They're both really smart, really reasonable people.

24:09And if I find out you voted for the different one, OK, well, we're different in politics. That's OK. As opposed to the incredibly toxic environment we've gotten to where, you know, you're just not sure. I mean, even I would say the Democrats and the state of Biden's health feels like there was a little dishonesty and a little bit of covering up for problems that they got really burned for. And OK, like the public is like, no, actually, we really do want trustworthy politicians who thoughtfully disagree about political matters. And that's fine. At least I hope so. And I hope to encourage people to say, you know, actually, you should care.

24:48Like if you say, you know, well, I know he's a lying scoundrel, but he's my lying scoundrel. That's going to bite you. It's going to bite all of us. So don't do that.