第 385 期·中文精讀
吉米·威爾士：維基百科
Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia
維基百科創始人講述眾包百科的起源、中立性原則引發的爭議，以及知識自由共享的理想。
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中文精讀由 AI 基於原始訪談改寫，非官方翻譯，可能存在偏差或錯誤；表述以原音訊與官方文稿為準。說明
Nupedia 從 2000 年 3 月開始運轉，將近兩年時間，釋出出來的條目屈指可數。其中有一篇費盡心力透過了七道稽核，上線幾天之後就得撤下來。讀者很快發現它是抄襲的，質量本身也不怎麼樣。2001 年 1 月，維基百科作為一個附屬實驗專案上線，兩週內完成的工作量超過了前兩年的總和。
吉米·威爾士（Jimmy Wales）在萊克斯·弗裡德曼（Lex Fridman）的播客裡覆盤這段歷史時，語氣很平靜。他說當時意識到一件事：一整套流程之所以讓人退縮，是因為它把寫百科變成了一場答辯。
我記得我想寫一篇羅伯特·默頓（Robert Merton）的短傳記。他在期權定價理論上拿了諾貝爾經濟學獎，那正好是我讀研究生時做的方向。可我一動手就感到巨大的壓迫感，因為草稿會被送去給最權威的金融學教授審讀，然後給我一堆修改意見。那種感覺就像回到研究生院，而且是研究生院最糟糕的那部分。（吉米·威爾士）
他放棄了。那次放棄比任何商業分析都更直接地指向了後來的一切。
七道稽核流程輸給了兩週的混亂
Nupedia 的設計邏輯是防禦性的。一群網際網路上的陌生人寫出來的東西，憑什麼讓人相信？答案是比傳統百科更嚴格。於是有了七階段審稿、學術背景的編輯隊伍、層層修訂。
結果有兩件事同時發生。一是慢，慢到參與者失去熱情。二是有一次，經過完整流程釋出的條目，上線沒幾天被人扒出抄襲，只好撤回。威爾士說，好吧，看來七道稽核也就這樣。
這個細節值得多看一眼。稽核流程防的是「質量不達標」，它防不住「稽核者本身沒看出來」。而後者恰恰是流程最自信的地方。
維基百科後來的做法是把判斷權分散給所有人，讓任何人隨時可以改，讓時間把錯誤磨掉。這個模型在效率上碾壓了 Nupedia，代價是它永遠處於未完成狀態。
一個 Perl 單檔案撐起的第一個版本
維基百科上線時用的是 UseModWiki，一個業餘愛好者的專案。選它的理由很樸素：整個軟體是一個 Perl 指令碼，裝到伺服器上就能跑。
技術上它簡陋到什麼程度？所有內容存在扁平文字檔案裡，沒有資料庫。站內搜尋靠 Unix 的 grep 硬掃檔案。那時候連真正的登入都沒有，你可以把使用者名稱設成「Bob Smith」，另一個人也可以把自己設成「Bob Smith」，系統分不出誰是誰。
威爾士說自己很快寫了個簡單登入，把密碼存下來，讓身份唯一。在別的場合這可能是個小功能，在這裡它是整個信任體系的地基。如果誰都能冒充誰，條目署名、討論記錄、編輯歷史全都沒有意義。
更麻煩的是連結。早期給一個頁面做連結，要用駝峰式寫法，比如 NewYorkCity 這樣把詞黏在一起，首字母大寫。視覺上很難看。於是改成了雙方括號，就是現在這套。
有件事我壓根沒想到要去想。德語標準鍵盤上沒有方括號。所以德語維基百科要發展起來，使用者得學會用 Alt 程式碼打出方括號，或者到處找一個方括號剪貼下來。可德語維基百科後來非常成功，這件事好像根本沒拖慢誰。（吉米·威爾士）
工具的摩擦力，往往沒有設計者想象的那麼致命。真正決定一個社群能不能長起來的，是它想不想做這件事。
什麼才算一條百科條目
早期的爭論比想象中具體。有人把《哈姆雷特》的全文傳上來，社群的反應是等一下，這不算百科條目。可這個判斷本身需要解釋：為什麼關於《哈姆雷特》的詞條是合法的，劇本原文卻不是？
歧義解決的方式是分家。原文放進維基文庫（Wikisource），詞條留在維基百科。這個拆分看起來是行政決定，實際定義了一件事：百科處理的是對事物的描述和綜述，不承載事物本身。
威爾士用了一個詞來形容這個邊界，sum 是 summary 的那個 sum。「人類知識的總和」，總和在這裡是概要的意思。
邊界本身因語言文化而漂移。他提到法語傳統的百科裡，放菜譜很常見，英文百科裡放菜譜就很怪，不列顛百科全書裡不會有一份巧克力蛋糕的做法。主持人聽到這裡裝作憤怒，說自己被深深冒犯了。
威爾士的回應很認真。他說菜譜這個事情其實很難處理，因為「一份中立的菜譜」幾乎不成立。巧克力蛋糕的做法有無數變體，你可以寫「最早的版本之一」或者「最常見的版本之一」，但很多菜沒辦法這樣處理。他引用了一句西班牙俗語：十個西班牙人，十二份海鮮飯食譜。
關注度是個壞詞
截至 2023 年 5 月，英文維基百科有 660 萬條目，超過 43 億詞，把討論頁、分類頁都算上，總頁面數是 5800 萬。威爾士說他知道這些數字，但深想一層仍然覺得不可思議。
數字下面橫著一個哲學問題：還能收哪些？邊界畫在哪裡？
維基百科內部管這個概念叫「關注度」（notability）。威爾士自己不太喜歡這個詞。他拿起主持人手上那支 BIC 圓珠筆舉例。這支筆的型號可以有條目，因為它有歷史、有產量、有辨識度，全世界的人都見過。BIC 這家公司還有意思，它做筆，也做皮划艇，凡是長條形的塑膠製品它都做。
但主持人手上這一支具體的筆，不會有條目。理由很直接：關於它沒什麼可說的。除非它是曾祖母傳下來的，否則它就是一支放在辦公室裡的筆。
德語維基百科以前討論這件事時，會提到某輛腳踏車車輪上的後螺母。意思是你不可能給字面意義上的每樣東西都寫條目。（吉米·威爾士）
威爾士認為「關注度」這個說法容易傷人。他對一位母親說「你不值得關注」，這在人情上完全說不通。他更願意把它理解成可驗證性：有沒有辦法找到足夠的材料，撐起一篇百科條目？
把「關注度」換成「可驗證性」，判斷的動作就變了。關注度是對人的評判，可驗證性是對材料的檢查。前者需要下判斷，後者只需要去找。
只因為一件事出名的人，是最危險的地帶
維基百科內部有一個縮寫，BLP1E，指「僅因單一事件獲得關注的在世人物傳記」。這是他們最警惕的區域。
典型場景是一位犯罪受害者。某個著名連環殺手的受害者，公眾對她的瞭解僅限於受害這件事。她本來不是公眾人物。這種情況下不該有她的條目。案件可以有，兇手可以有，她不該被單獨拎出來做一篇傳記。
「你都不瞭解這個人，怎麼寫她的傳記？」威爾士的這句反問基本概括了判斷標準。
同樣的邏輯，他拿自己的母親舉例。她是教師，後來做藥劑師，一位很棒的女性，但從未上過新聞。所以不會有條目。他開玩笑說，唯一讓她進入公眾視野的方式，就是兒子到處講她為什麼不該有條目。
不同領域的尺度不一樣。學者可以有很完整的學術履歷條目，個人生活一無所知也沒關係，那些資訊在百科意義上不重要。王室成員的條目幾乎全是家族關係，換個領域這種寫法就不成立。
主持人自己那條被改錯的詞條
對話在這裡拐了個彎，變得私人。
萊克斯說前一陣才知道自己有維基百科頁面，第一反應是「我不該夠格吧」，然後是感謝。但他接著講了自己的遭遇：因為採訪過馬斯克，也採訪過極左和極右的人，他踩進了政治這潭水，然後開始收到攻擊。
攻擊的核心之一是：他從沒在 MIT 待過。他澄清自己是 MIT 的研究科學家，2015 年就在，現在還在，所在的實驗室叫 LIDS。這份工作有薪水，沒有爭議，MIT 方面也出面維護過他。詞條裡的另一處錯誤是出生地。他父親生於基輔，他本人出生在 Chkalovsk，那個鎮子現在屬於塔吉克，後來改名叫 Buston。
有意思的是，你花了同樣多的篇幅講 MIT 那件事，那確實關係到你的事業；也講了父親出生在哪，這件事幾乎沒人會注意，但對你意義重大。我跟很多有維基條目的人聊過，他們常常被某個外人根本看不出來的小細節困擾。（吉米·威爾士）
威爾士由此引出一個原則：人的尊嚴。這聽起來像道德口號，在維基百科的編輯實務裡它有非常具體的形態，叫做「不當比重」（undue weight）。
「爭議」這一節本身是個壞設計
他講了一個多年前看到的條目。美國中西部某個小城的市議員，幹了三十年，看起來是個不錯的本地政治家，人也挺無趣。但詞條裡有一整段長文字，寫他兒子因為酒駕被捕。
這跟這個人有什麼關係？他兒子酒駕當然不好，可這算不上他父親的醜聞。我當時就把那段刪了。（吉米·威爾士）
更普遍的問題是結構。很多傳記詞條會單開一節叫「爭議」。威爾士認為這是壞做法，因為它給了人一個明確的目標。一條傳記如果有七節，其中「爭議」那節最短，就總會有人想：「這節有點短，我去找點料補上。」
正確做法是把爭議揉進整篇敘述裡。這樣一來它沒法被當成任務清單，也更容易放進上下文。
這套邏輯不只在處理負面資訊時管用。威爾士一度發現自己被歸進了「美國無神論者」這個分類，他提出異議。理由是，分類頁裡點進去，看到的多是把無神論當作公共主張的人，比如理查德·道金斯，無神論是他們的核心議題和公共身份。而他的立場只是私人信念，從不為此奔走。這個論證最後被接受了。
他順帶提了馬克·沃爾伯格（Mark Wahlberg）。這位演員年輕時犯過相當嚴重的事，但今天沒人會把他歸進「美國罪犯」這個分類。可他的詞條裡該不該寫那段經歷？該寫，因為那是他人生故事的重要部分，一個走得很偏又把自己拉回來的人，這本身有資訊量。
一次關於「把黑人運動員比作蘭博基尼」的討論
威爾士說那天早上他剛看到自己使用者討論頁上有人留言。起因是維基百科首頁的「你知道嗎」欄目，有一則小知識，引用了某位體育名人把一位黑人橄欖球員比作蘭博基尼的話。這明顯是誇獎。
但留言的人提出了另一個角度：有研究指出，黑人運動員被比作無生命物體的頻率明顯偏高。他的措辭很剋制，說自己不是來刪除內容的，只是想把這個疑問擺出來。
接下來的討論很有意思。大家的共識大概是：這算不上什麼「維基百科首頁出現種族主義內容」的驚悚標題，但確實，這類類比不太好，我們應該想想怎麼改進措辭。（吉米·威爾士）
他說自己完全沒有介入的必要，因為討論本身就在健康地進行。沒有人提議封禁誰，也沒有人上綱上線。
這段對話展示了一種被大量討論淹沒的可能性：一個社群可以在不撕裂的前提下，把一個敏感問題推進一小步。它靠的是參與者願意把疑問用「我不是來刪的」這種方式說出來，規則本身做不到這件事。
一臺把叔叔頂上首頁的機器
關於社交媒體，威爾士的比喻比任何學術分析都好懂。他用兩個刻板印象：一個愛發偏激言論的叔叔，一位只會在小孩照片下留祝福的奶奶。
現實裡的家庭聚餐，叔叔說些不著調的話，大家翻個白眼，讓他閉嘴，或者明年乾脆不請他。他有酒館裡的三個朋友聽他說，影響力有限。
到了線上，奶奶有 54 個關注者，那是真正的親密家人。叔叔有 714 個。他不是什麼大人物，可這個差距是怎麼來的？因為奶奶發帖，什麼都沒發生。叔叔發帖，所有人衝進來喊「天啊閉嘴吧」，於是有了互動，有了瀏覽量，有了廣告。
演算法沒有惡意。它只是忠實地學習了一件事：什麼東西能讓人動起來。
社會就是這樣，我們得到更多我們獎勵的東西。（吉米·威爾士）
威爾士說他跟 Facebook 的人講過，如果你們的做法正在讓公眾相信你們在摧毀西方文明，長期看對生意是災難。他給出的具體建議之一是：暫停所有政治廣告。
理由跟錢無關。傳統政治廣告必須找到能說服 60% 人的主流敘事，這個約束天然把宣傳推向中間。定向投放把這個約束拆了。你不需要一致的敘事，只需要針對每個人說他最想聽的那句話。他舉了英國脫歐期間的例子：同一場公投，動物權利活動者收到的廣告說「脫離歐洲後英國終於能透過真正的動物保護立法」，支援獵狐的人收到的廣告說「脫離歐洲後我們能重新放開獵狐」。兩邊都在聽自己愛聽的話。
「Bot for sale」那條推文
威爾士說自己最成功的一條推文，是一個記者在馬斯克抱怨維基百科時建議他「乾脆把維基百科買下來」，他回了一句「機器人出售」。
轉發量驚人，大家都覺得好笑，我也挺得意。可它算不上討論，只是一句漂亮的收尾，是社交媒體真正獎勵的東西：你倆打一架，那更有意思。（吉米·威爾士）
他緊接著講了一件更沉重的事。多年前有人在 Twitter 上指控他犯下嚴重罪行，他點了舉報，收到回覆說沒有違反服務條款。他給當時的 CEO 傑克·多西寫了郵件，多西回覆說別擔心，會處理。
幾年後類似的事再發生，這次的文字是「救救我，我才 10 歲，吉米·威爾士上週強姦了我」。他再次舉報，得到的答覆更正式：法務和信任安全負責人回信說，這條推文沒有違反服務條款，並且提到如果禁止指控，會影響 Me Too 運動的表達空間。
我的想法是，如果一個 10 歲孩子說有人強姦了她，正確的回覆應該是「這是報警電話」。Twitter 不是提出這種指控的地方。（吉米·威爾士）
那幾條推文最後被刪了，理由標註為「垃圾資訊行為」，跟他被辱罵這件事完全無關。
他真正的擔憂落在另一個人身上。他說自己是名人，認識傑克·多西，能發郵件，問題可以被解決。那個被網暴的普通青少年呢？他能不能得到同樣的處理？
還有一次，維基百科募款橫幅上放了他們一位開發者的照片。這位開發者留著長髮、有紋身，一天被展示給 8000 萬人看。結果他在站外遭到大量辱罵，說他猥瑣、嚇人。
威爾士說他從中意識到一件事：他自己從公眾視野裡獲得了巨大好處，能演講，能把自己的想法發到《紐約時報》。那位開發者沒有這些。「普通人以一種被羞辱的方式突然走紅，那真的非常悲慘。」
二十年前那個不掛廣告的決定
維基百科是一家慈善機構，網站上沒有廣告，絕大部分收入來自小額捐贈，多數是 25 美元這個量級。每年有幾百萬捐贈者，但相對於讀者仍然是極小的比例。
威爾士承認，當年的決定裡很大一部分是審美。他就是不想在維基百科上看到廣告。那時候還沒有精細的廣告定向，頁面上多是「一拳打中猴子」這類橫幅，視覺上很糟糕。
後來他想得更深了一層。商業模式會在幾十年裡慢慢改寫組織的基因，即使創始人本人強烈反對某個方向，機構也會順著錢走。
如果你在讀日產汽車的詞條，頁面頂端掛著新款日產的廣告，你會不會想：他們是花錢買的位置嗎？廣告主對內容有影響嗎？這種懷疑一旦產生，就很難消除。（吉米·威爾士）
廣告模式的連鎖反應比想象中長。沒有廣告，就沒有做標題黨的理由。維基百科上永遠不會出現「十張最搞笑的貓咪照片，第七張讓你哭」這種標題。也沒有理由做那種把讀者從「維多利亞女王」推向「拉斯維加斯酒店」的演算法，因為後者的廣告單價更高。
這套邏輯現在看是遠見。當年不是。2003 年聖誕節，他們只有三臺伺服器，兩臺前端一臺資料庫。那天壞了兩臺，威爾士在節日裡把倖存的資料庫伺服器臨時改成了前端，網站跑得極慢。
他決定開始募款，目標是一個月籌到 2 萬美元，結果兩三週內拿到接近 3 萬。
募款文案的迭代過程也有意思。有一年他們主打「為撒哈拉以南非洲的語言提供免費百科」這個願景，威爾士說這最貼近他的內心，但效果不好。真正有效的是一個樸素的公平訴求：「你一直在用它，或許該出一點錢。」
「我們從不向政府低頭，也永遠不會」
談到政府壓力，威爾士的回答沒有任何鋪墊。
我們在世界任何地方都沒有向政府壓力低過頭，以後也不會。我們很清楚自己在這件事上很硬。如果他們要封，那就封吧，你們會失去維基百科。（吉米·威爾士）
他說這個策略之所以有效，是因為政府知道封禁威脅不會讓維基百科兩天內妥協換回市場。很多公司會這麼做，維基百科不會，所以威脅本身失去了槓桿。
他也承認這中間有層次。如果一家公司在某個國家有上百名員工，不配合就有人會被抓，那是真實的人身風險，必須放進等式。他對此表示理解。
關於「FBI 要求維基百科修改內容」的傳言，他專門去核實過：基金會層面收到的來自 FBI 或其他政府機構的改稿請求是零。即便收到，基金會也做不到，因為內容由社群寫。強行修改會引發無法想象的爭議。
那他們跟政府談什麼？威爾士見過中國的宣傳部門負責人，也跟世界各地的政府有過對話。目的很明確：去解釋維基百科怎麼運作，順帶讓對方明白封禁的代價。
我跟中國政府說過一個他們沒被說服的論點：封掉維基百科，不只是中國人讀不到維基百科，也堵住了中國人講自己故事的路。某個小鎮有個幾萬人的節日，當地人可以寫進維基百科，然後被翻譯成其他語言。現在他們沒法分享自己的文化。（吉米·威爾士）
他覺得這個論點對中國應該有分量，因為中國確實感到被世界誤解。想讓別人理解，就該把自己放進人們來查資料的地方。
口罩、Fauci 與一次反向說服
疫情是本集裡最長的一段公共討論。威爾士的觀點很少有人講：公共衛生機構失去信任，部分原因是他們不信任公眾。
有些機構和官員覺得，要讓公眾認真對待、採取行動，就得把話說得誇張一點，嚇住他們。短期可能有效，長期一定失敗。（吉米·威爾士）
他描述了口罩建議的完整弧線。最開始說別搶購口罩，理由是醫院會短缺，這個理由可以理解。但同一批表述裡還有「口罩沒用，保護不了你」。幾個月後立場一百八十度反轉，不戴就是不負責。
那個急轉彎，從第一天起就讓人流失了。（吉米·威爾士）
他提到自己在英國的親身經歷。疫情前不久他剛入籍英國，宣誓效忠女王，那種感覺很具體：我們英國人要做對的事，會很難，但我們要扛住。然後爆出高層官員違反自己定的規矩。
那一刻我個人從「即使我不完全認同規則，我也會遵守，因為大家要一起扛」變成了「我要為自己和家人做明智的判斷」。（吉米·威爾士）
萊克斯在這裡補充了他的看法：他因為批評福奇（Fauci）被指責過火，但他的出發點是領導者的責任。疫情本可以是一次科學的高光時刻，快速開發疫苗，拯救文明。結果整個話題被政治化到沒人願意談，一提疫苗就換話題。這本身就是損失。
威爾士說他在英國感受沒這麼強烈，但他認同那個逆轉的代價：反疫苗的人群一直存在，只是現在更大了，因為信任的地基被挖掉了一塊。
把維基百科和所有來源一起丟給模型
談到 ChatGPT，威爾士的態度是罕見的樂觀加罕見的務實。他先講了一個自己做的實驗。
那天他在想「把黑人運動員比作快車」這個類比是否成立，就去問 GPT-4：有沒有白人運動員被比作跑車的例子？模型給了一篇看起來很合理的文章，解釋這類類比在體育報道里為什麼常見。他要求具體例子，模型給了三個，人名、時代、上下文都對得上。他一個一個去搜，沒有一條真實存在。
它被訓練得非常樂於助人、非常和善，但它其實不知道也不在乎真假。（吉米·威爾士）
他想要的東西很具體：一個類似維基百科橫幅
他想要的東西很具體：一個類似維基百科橫幅的誠實標記。維基百科會在條目頂上掛一條「此節中立性存在爭議」，他覺得《紐約時報》也該這麼幹：「我們編輯部為要不要發這篇吵了一架，覺得重要還是發了，但你要知道不是所有記者都同意。」他說自己會因為這種透明而更信任他們。同理，模型應該說「這段內容有 87% 是胡扯」。
更有價值的方向是用模型反過來審計條目。把一篇詞條和它引用的所有來源一起喂進去，讓它找出哪些表述跟來源不符。這個任務不需要完美。
如果它掃一遍，給出 10 條建議，其中 7 條有道理，3 條它沒看懂，那這 10 條裡我已經賺到了。它能讓好編輯更快地去檢查冷門條目。（吉米·威爾士）
他還有一個剛想到的用法：把條目正文和討論頁一起喂進去，讓模型根據討論頁裡的爭論生成提示橫幅。萊克斯說這想法很棒。想想那些戰爭、以巴衝突的條目，有些段落全社群都同意，有些段落吵了七頁。讀者如果能一眼看出哪部分是共識、哪部分是激烈爭議，閱讀體驗會完全不同。
萊克斯補充了另一層：讀者還能看出爭議的情緒濃度。一篇關於烏克蘭戰爭或以巴問題的長條目，前半段可能是所有人都無異議的事實基礎，後半段是七頁吵不完的措辭拉鋸。讓人知道自己在讀哪一段，比讓人從頭到尾以為自己讀的是同一個聲音，誠實得多。
一個被雜誌抄走的假愛好
威爾士講了一個迴圈引用的例子，網際網路上管這個叫 citogenesis。有本叫《Biography》的雜誌（由傳記頻道出版）寫他的小傳，裡面說「他業餘時間喜歡和朋友下棋」。
我當時的想法是，哇，這聽起來不錯，我挺想當那個人的。但我其實只是偶爾跟孩子下下棋，這真不是我的愛好。（吉米·威爾士）
他去問雜誌這條從哪來的，對方說：維基百科。他翻編輯歷史，發現是一次破壞性編輯，內容無害但完全是假的，而且早就被刪掉了。
麻煩在於，只要那本雜誌還在，這條資訊就可能被人當成來源再加回維基百科，然後獲得「可靠來源」的背書，從此有了自己的生命。他專門公開澄清過這件事。多年後他被邀請在世界象棋錦標賽上走第一步禮儀棋，他還在想，會不會是因為那篇文章。
這個迴圈現在又多了一環。主持人提到，他自己遭遇的一篇攻擊性報道里，記者很坦率地承認用 GPT 生成了一部分內容，後來為其中的錯誤道歉。
威爾士在對話裡給維基百科社群提的規則很簡單：你寫進去的東西，責任在你。用模型翻譯、潤色語法，這些用法都很好。用模型生成你以為正確的句子，那就是在給 citogenesis 添磚。
「維基百科偏左」這個指控
威爾士的回答是否認，但否認得很講究。他說具體條目總有具體偏差，那正是維基百科流程要處理的東西。但整體性的左傾指控，他看不到，而且要求舉例的人通常舉不出來。
他給的解釋是：抱怨的人往往持有邊緣觀點，他們不滿的是維基百科沒有把邊緣觀點當主流來報道。他講了一位順勢療法支持者在 TED 大會外攔住他的事，對方認為維基百科說順勢療法是偽科學，這是偏見。威爾士說他幫不上忙，因為條目引用的是高質量來源，而那些來源對順勢療法的科學地位評價確實不高。
真正會長期存在偏差的地方，往往是些冷門話題，或者是跟政治無關的話題。比如日本動漫的條目，普遍寫得非常正面，因為除了粉絲沒人關心這個領域，而寫這些條目的人真心熱愛它。（吉米·威爾士）
他反而認為口罩那個條目處理得不錯。結論大概是：證據是混合的，口罩似乎有幫助，但可能沒有一些官方機構說得那麼確定。他說這個結論會讓爭論雙方都不滿意，而這恰恰說明它可能抓住了複雜性。
如果讀者讀完能說「我有自己的看法，但我理解其他立場，這確實是個複雜問題」，那這個社會就成熟了一點點。（吉米·威爾士）
萊克斯追問：維基百科編輯群體的個人政治傾向大概偏左，這種傾向會不會滲進內容？他舉了個小例子：右派說「民主黨」（Democrat Party），左派說「民主黨的」（Democratic Party），一個字母的差別就是一次 jab。
威爾士承認社群構成會影響內容，但他給出了一個更有說服力的分界線。
人們以為維基百科的大爭論發生在左派和右派之間。我認為不是。真正的分界線是善良深思的人與混蛋之間。給我一個政治上跟我完全不同但思考認真、待人友善的人，我們能進行真正的討論。（吉米·威爾士）
他舉了墮胎條目。一位善良深思的天主教神父和一位善良深思的計劃生育協會活動家，如果他們一起寫這個條目，會是一件很好的事。他們永遠不會在結論上達成一致，但他們會理解：維基百科不站隊，維基百科解釋這場爭論是什麼，並公平地描述各方立場。
他補了一句：如果你是立場鮮明的人，你天然會假設，只要別人瞭解得跟你一樣多，他們就會同意你。這個假設常常是錯的，但它至少能讓人願意把道理講清楚。
威爾士說自己不會去編輯特朗普的條目。他對這個話題有情緒，去了也做不好。這是自我認知的問題，跟道德無關。他能在口罩功效那種題目上做得好，因為他不憤怒，能安靜地整理證據。
寫的人是誰，決定了寫出來是什麼
維基百科的志願者群體，用威爾士的估算，八成以上是男性，普遍受過大學教育，技術極客的比例偏高。這個人口特徵在全球範圍內都成立。
有人問過他，為什麼只有白人男性在編輯維基百科。他回答：你顯然沒見過日語維基百科社群。這是句玩笑，但玩笑底下的原則依然成立：日語維基百科的編輯者也是一群極客男性，加上一部分女性。
社群構成會變成內容問題，機制很樸素：人寫自己知道的和感興趣的，也會下意識把不瞭解的東西判定為不重要。
我作為父親會說，我們關於兒童早期發展的條目大概不夠好。因為如果寫的人是一群二十五歲、沒有孩子的技術極客，他們本來就不會對這個話題感興趣，真去寫也寫不好，因為他們什麼都不懂。（吉米·威爾士）
更具體的證據來自一項對比。有人統計了拿過重要文學獎的小說家條目，男性小說家的條目普遍更長、質量更高。威爾士強調，這跟「這群編輯是一幫歧視女性的男人」沒關係。他認識幾百個維基百科編輯，不是那種人。
真正的原因在讀者結構。硬科幻的讀者以男性為主，其他型別小說的讀者中女性更多。如果社群裡女性比例偏低，那些同樣得過獎、同樣重要的女性小說家，覆蓋就會薄一些。不是因為有人覺得瑪雅·安傑盧（Maya Angelou）不重要，而是因為沒人有興趣去寫。
這個分析比「偏見」二字有力得多。它指出的是一種不需要惡意就能產生的不均衡，而且它不能靠道德譴責修復，只能靠改變參與者的構成。
同樣的邏輯延伸到政治光譜。威爾士說他希望善良深思的天主教神父、保守派、自由意志主義者、馬克思主義者都來參與，關鍵詞是「善良深思」。有些人被推特上的某件事激怒，帶著一肚子火來維基百科準備開戰，那種通常做不成事。
一個十三歲的破壞者，後來成了年度維基人
威爾士在訪談裡提到他寫書時採訪了艾米莉·坦普爾-伍茲（Emily Temple-Woods），她拿過年度維基人。她講了一件威爾士此前不知道的事：她剛接觸維基百科時，是個破壞者。
她那時候十三歲，精力旺盛，喜歡對著幹，在幾個條目上亂改。然後有人在她討論頁留言，大意是：嘿，你為什麼這麼做？我們是在這兒寫百科的，這樣不太友善。
她說自己當時覺得很難受，心想，對啊，我確實沒從這個角度想過。然後就留下來了。（吉米·威爾士）
這件事被威爾士當成社群治理的理想樣本。你看到有人在胡鬧，第一反應不該是封號，而是問一句「怎麼了」。
他說這跟現實生活裡的處理方式是一樣的。朋友圈裡有個人說了句讓人不舒服的玩笑，你大概會說：我猜這個人其實挺受傷的，你可能沒注意到。對方通常會說「我以為這樣沒問題」，然後停下。如果他不改，所有人都會認定他是那個混蛋。
這套方法線上上之所以難，是因為它要求第一條回覆的人是耐心的，而恰恰是耐心的人在處理大量重複問題時會最先耗盡。
威爾士承認這一點。他說社群裡常有新人帶著一個大想法進來，而這個想法在過去二十年被討論過七千次。理想情況下，老編輯會說：這個想法很好，很多人提過，我們走到了這一步，這是當時的討論，你可能會覺得有意思。現實裡有人會說：天啊，又來一個。
你可以失去耐心，但你不應該。（吉米·威爾士）
維基百科有一條規則叫「忽略所有規則」。威爾士說這條規則寫下來有一半是為了讓人愣一下：這算什麼規則？它的實質意思是，不要因為腳註格式不對就緊張，也不要因為格式不對就去罵新人。有人加了個連結，格式不對，正確的回應是給個格式說明的連結，說聲謝謝。
時區由一個不拿錢的人維護
話題轉到極客文化，威爾士講了一件他覺得很有意思的事，是時區資料庫。
所有 Unix 系統、幾乎所有計算機，處理時區時都依賴同一份檔案。哪個國傢什麼時候改夏令時，哪個國家決定換個時區，都記錄在裡面。可它為什麼是權威的？因為歷史上就是一個人在維護，加上他周圍一個小小的社群。
有一次出了點意外，好像是他去度假了，某處就崩了。你想想，全世界幾十億人，竟然是一個人舉手說，好，時區我來管，而且他是不拿錢的。（吉米·威爾士）
萊克斯接了一句，說現在肯定有一堆程式設計師聽到「時區」兩個字就 PTSD。但他也說，這正是他想保護的那種生態：一個人在野外發現了一個極客，最好小心點，那東西得被珍惜。
威爾士接著講了另一個故事。他認識一個人，在英文維基百科上跑一個機器人，做的事很聰明。普通的拼寫檢查抓不到這類錯誤，那個機器人另建了一個易混詞庫，專門抓那些拼錯之後正好是另一個單詞的情況。
它看到某個詞，會檢查上下文裡有沒有相關關鍵詞，再決定要不要標記出來。比如有人想寫 buoy（浮標）卻打成了 boy，機器人在航海相關的條目裡發現這個詞，就標記出來讓人工確認，而不自動改。威爾士說那人手裡有幾千個這樣的例子。
我當時想，這太厲害了，我根本不會想到這麼做。而這也正是開放系統的意義：作為一個慈善專案，它是給世界的禮物，於是有人會舉手說，我看到了一個我能改進的小地方，我寫個指令碼，我覺得這挺好玩。（吉米·威爾士）
「維基百科改了衰退的定義」是怎麼回事
聊到媒體對維基百科的誤讀，威爾士舉了兩個具體案例，都很典型。
第一個是「衰退」的定義。有一陣新聞在傳：維基百科迫於拜登政府壓力，修改了衰退的定義，好讓拜登好看一點。威爾士說他看到標題的第一反應是先接受五秒鐘，然後去查，查完發現完全不是那麼回事。
真實情況是，有條目一直寫著傳統上較寬鬆的定義：連續兩個季度負增長。但經濟學界和一些重要機構、不同國家，長期對這個定義有大量補充和修正，還有別的因素要算進去，這本來就是複雜話題。條目裡這些內容一直都有。
唯一的改動，是一位編輯認為文章結構該調整，把「兩個季度」這個說法從導語段挪到了正文靠後的位置。
然後新聞就出來了，說維基百科改了衰退的定義。接著一大堆人湧進來。我們只好臨時半保護條目，讓他們去討論頁說。（吉米·威爾士）
他的原話是：從一個維基人的角度看，這就是一次極其常規的編輯爭論。
第二個例子是「推特檔案」條目。馬斯克接管推特後放出內部檔案，維基百科上出現了相應條目。有人把它提報刪除。提報門檻極低：地球上任何一個人都能提報刪除，然後觸發討論流程。而這次提報，連提報者自己都寫著：這些內容主要關於亨特·拜登膝上型電腦的爭議，資訊是不是該放在那篇條目裡？
幾小時內，討論被管理員以「雪球關閉」結案，意思是這事透過的可能性跟雪球在火獄裡存活的機率差不多。就這樣，流程結束。
沒有人提議壓制資訊，沒有人說不重要，那只是枯燥的內部編輯問題。可有人讀到這類訊息就想：你看這幫左派，又想掩蓋真相。慢一點，來看看，真的不是那麼回事。（吉米·威爾士）
萊克斯補了一層解釋：右派對審查更敏感，所以「看起來像審查」的事情更容易被放大傳播。而把一段話從導語挪到正文，這種維基百科日常的編輯角力，恰好能做成一條極好的影片或文章。
威爾士順著這個說：也正因為如此，那些故事才顯得特別有吸引力。人們本來是來讀維基百科的，看到的卻是一個相當沉悶、相當極客的地方，突然有人告訴他這底下藏著一個左派小集團，反差本身就成了流量。
萊克斯說他自己讀烏克蘭、以色列巴勒斯坦相關條目，覺得相當平衡，多種視角都在。但他隨即自問：我會不會也是那種「看不見真相的左派怪人」？他說這個問題要一直問，但別問過頭。威爾士的回答很乾脆：是，我們得一直問自己，我可能哪裡搞錯了。
關於「聯合創始人」這個爭議
萊克斯問了一個繞不開的問題：你到底是不是唯一的創始人？這個爭議你覺得荒謬、有趣，還是重要？
威爾士的回答是：不重要，也沒什麼意思。
有件事人們聽我說會有點意外：我認為拉里·桑格（Larry Sanger）在維基百科早期的工作沒有得到足夠承認。但我不認為「聯合創始人」這個頭銜是準確的描述。（吉米·威爾士）
他承認桑格貢獻很大，後來在很多事情上跟他意見不同，但這不妨礙前面的判斷。他說媒體喜歡「反目成仇」的故事，所以要把這事做大。
桑格後來的公開立場是：沒有人該信任維基百科，它似乎假定任何有爭議的問題上只存在一個合法、可辯護的版本，而這不是維基百科本來的樣子。
威爾士說，直接講，我不同意。去讀任何一篇有爭議主題的條目，你會看到的是非常用心的努力，去解釋所有相關立場。
他進一步說，認真對待這件事，就意味著承認：判斷一個少數派觀點是偽科學，還是正在獲得主流接納的新觀點，還是純粹的怪論，這本身就是維基百科編輯大量時間在做的事。這個爭論沒法迴避，只能一個個案例去做。
如果有人說「你們不該再報道這個問題上的少數派觀點」，威爾士認為社群的反應會是：我不明白你為什麼要這麼說，科學和政治裡的少數派觀點，我們必須處理。這件事沒有通用答案，全是具體情境。
十年、一百年、一千年
萊克斯把時間尺度拉開。威爾士的回答分三層。
十年內，維基百科大致還是現在這樣。不會變成 TikTok，不會去做娛樂化的短影片資訊流。變化在於 AI 輔助工具會變多，搜尋體驗會變成「你提一個問題，直接得到答案」，答案來自他們的內容，而不是讓你自己在條目裡找。
還有一件大多數人不會注意到的事：發展中國家語言的維基百科在增長。你不說斯瓦希里語，就不會去看斯瓦希里語維基百科，而它發展得很好。威爾士認為這種增長極其重要，但它在視野之外。
機器翻譯在這裡是關鍵變數。他說過去很多年社群不太用機器翻譯，因為質量不夠。而且質量分佈極不均勻：英語到西班牙語好用，因為兩個語言都大、經濟上都重要、語料充足；英語到祖魯語就很難看，因為沒人為它投入。
我的理解是，新的訓練方法不再需要嚴格對齊的雙語語料，而是透過 token 和大模型去理解和生成，效果提升很大。所以那些小語種社群可能會說：終於，我用英文寫點東西，出來的祖魯語好到我願意分享給社群，或者稍微改改就能用。（吉米·威爾士）
一百年那一層，他講的是錢。維基媒體基金會運轉謹慎，財務上保守，每年往儲備金里加一點。另有一個完全獨立的捐贈基金，剛過一億美元，有獨立董事會。這筆錢不是一個給未來某位揮霍型 CEO 準備的賬戶，基金會要用它，得經過第二層董事會的批准，那個董事會也可以把錢撥給社群做資助。
我希望並且相信，我們是在以一種財務上穩定的方式建設，能扛過各種風暴。如果一百年後還有人存在，維基百科會在。（吉米·威爾士）
他也補了一句：反過來，也不該冒太少的險。這個平衡永遠很難。
假照片、品牌與「我不確定」
聊到 AI 生成內容對資訊生態的衝擊，威爾士給了一個預測：傳統品牌的價值會上升。
邏輯很直接。如果一條新聞來自《華爾街日報》《紐約時報》、福克斯新聞，他知道自己拿到的是什麼，可以按自己對這家媒體的信任度去調整。如果是個看起來像模像樣但從沒聽過的新網站，內容可能是機器生成的、可能滿是錯誤，他會更謹慎。
他拿那張教皇穿昂貴羽絨服的假照片舉例。他說自己看到的第一反應是「這圖做得真厲害」，而不是「教皇動用公款了」，部分原因在於這位教皇看起來不像是會做這種事的人。
人們會在意照片的來源。你給我一張照片說是福克斯新聞的，即便我不認為它水平最高，我也會想，那是一家有新聞編輯部的機構，他們會確認照片是真的。這跟推特上隨便流傳的一張圖，完全是兩回事。（吉米·威爾士）
萊克斯提到他最喜歡的那批假圖：拜登和特朗普親密相處、一起玩得很開心的照片。
威爾士說這類東西太精彩了。他補了一句關於時間變化的觀察：十五年前，推特上流傳的照片最大的問題是張冠李戴，把十年前的舊圖說成是這次的現場。這種事一直有。現在的問題更進一步：照片可以被專門構造出來，看起來極其可信。他說，一張圖給我五分鐘就能做出來。
萊克斯提出另一條路：公民個體記者也可以積累穩定的、可驗證的信任，不必依附大型機構。一個人也可以是一個組織，只要他的記錄經得起時間。
威爾士同意，但加了限定。他說以自己為例，他在世界上的公信力應該跟一個《紐約時報》記者相當。如果他目睹了某件事並寫下來，人們會傾向於相信他沒編。可他隨後自嘲：我身邊從來不會發生什麼有意思的事，我不去戰區，不去大型記者會，不採訪普京和澤連斯基。
但對你這樣的人，我覺得那些傳統的公信力模型很重要。你做長訪談，你說這是我對澤連斯基的採訪，人們不會說：怎麼知道不是深度偽造的？（吉米·威爾士）
他說他已經見過這樣的東西：一段帶英文字幕的影片，烏克蘭語部分聽起來也像那麼回事，內容是澤連斯基在說一些極其出格的話。他的判斷是：我不信，這大概是俄羅斯的宣傳，或者就是有人在釣魚。
萊克斯接著把機制說清楚了。一條資訊出現在維基百科上，意味著某種東西；出現在某個人的推特上，意味著這個具體的人在上面簽了字。信任從人轉移到內容。理想狀態下，有幾百萬個可信度各不相同的人，你能看出自己資訊源的結構性偏差，然後交叉著看，就像同時讀福克斯和《紐約時報》。
堅持，還是轉向
訪談接近尾聲，萊克斯請威爾士給年輕人建議。
第一條是別做冷酷的計算。如果你想做的是一件你並不感興趣、但據說很賺錢的事，你大概做不好。做你真正在意的事。
第二條是在創業語境下最常被引用的那組：要撐住，也要準備好轉向。
會有挺不下去的時刻，不能一遇難就放棄，得熬過一段。但也要準備好掉頭。我從 Nupedia 轉到維基百科的時候就是：這條路不通，我得徹底改。（吉米·威爾士）
他自己指出了這兩條建議的內在矛盾：此刻我該硬扛，還是該掉頭？沒有公式。他給的方法是把問題問出來，而且兩個方向都要問。
問問自己：我是不是因為遇到了一點小坎、情緒上來了，就要過早放棄？也問問自己：我是不是固執地在做一件根本說不通的事？（吉米·威爾士）
這兩句互相打架，可他覺得知道「擺在面前的就這兩種選擇」本身就有用。人被卡住的時候，往往連自己在選什麼都沒想清楚。
他講 MySpace 的例子來說明「成功怎麼定義」。MySpace 當年有機會成為 Facebook，體量巨大，增長兇猛，娛樂化、輕內容，某些方面甚至預示了 TikTok。默多克買下它，幾年內它崩了，原因之一是對廣告的壓榨超過了對使用者體驗的照顧。威爾士記得那時候接受一個好友請求要點三次，看三條廣告；在 Facebook 上接受好友請求不用離開頁面。
他以前常拿這事當反面教材。後來有人提醒他：默多克買它花了 8 億美元，而它在衰落過程中一直很賺錢，錢早就賺回來了，還多賺了。從「本可以成為 Facebook」的角度看是失敗，從平常的商業指標看是成功。
所以還是要看你如何定義成功。這也是給年輕人的建議。我們腦子裡的創業成功樣本是比爾·蓋茨、扎克伯格，很小年紀一個想法直衝雲霄，成為世界首富。這種情況極其罕見。（吉米·威爾士）
對絕大多數創業者來說，路徑是失敗、重啟、從失敗裡學東西、換個方向再來。如果成功的標準設成「我沒馬斯克有錢所以我難過」，那麼除了馬斯克，所有人都該難過。
他提到記者常問他「不是億萬富翁是什麼感覺」。他的回答通常是：我不知道你是什麼感覺。畢竟記者也不是。他說倫敦有一大群沒人聽說過的銀行家，賺的錢比他多得多，他不願意跟他們換人生，因為自己的人生太有意思了。
「吉米，我們需要你去見一下中國的宣傳部長。」「好啊，這挺有意思。」「吉米，情況是這樣，你去這個國家，總統想見你。」這也太有意思了。「吉米，你要去這個地方，當地一位維基人問你要不要住在他家。」好啊，我很想去。（吉米·威爾士）
他說他不常這麼做，但做過，感覺很好。把自己的生活安排成能遇到有意思的事，這本身就是一種成功。
意義不在外面
萊克斯最後問了那個大問題：人類文明為什麼在這裡？生命的意義是什麼？
威爾士的回答很短：我不認為這個問題有外部答案。
它是內部的。我們自己決定自己的生命有什麼意義，決定要拿自己做什麼。（吉米·威爾士）
萊克斯順勢提了一句，維基百科上關於「生命意義」的條目寫得很好，從尼采到存在主義到波伏娃，二十世紀哲學在這件事上掙扎得很系統。他開玩笑說，希望那條目是中立地呈現了各種立場。
威爾士說他得去讀一讀。
他提到尤里·米爾納（Yuri Milner）那本書，主張人類應該探索宇宙、離開這顆行星，並且出資用鐳射推動微型探測器。米爾納在書裡談意義，認為人類物種的目的就是廣泛生存下去、走出地球。
威爾士說他不是全都同意。理由是這不是一種能驅動大多數人日常生活的意義。宇宙的尺度實在太大了，就算他是馬斯克，把全部財富投進去造飛船，他也會死在半路上。
但那本書確實讓他想到別的事。想到人類一千萬年後在哪裡，會讓人回過頭來看地球，然後說：那我們別把這兒毀了，我們至少還得在這兒待一陣子，所以得認真考慮可持續性，一百萬年尺度的可持續性。
他在這裡表達了對 AI 的樂觀，同時明確加了個括號：他知道有風險，也知道很多人害怕 AI。但他認為未來五十年，我們可能真的解決一些長期問題，比如健康。癌症治療的進展之所以快，是因為我們能大規模地建模分子、建模基因。如果人類能再撐一陣子，一些今天看起來無解的問題，比如氣候變化，可能沒有那麼難。
萊克斯接著把這個想法推向另一個方向：如果人類最終把自己毀了，那麼讓人類知識留存下來，多少會是一種安慰。
威爾士由此講了一個他喜歡的故事。
他曾在挪威卑爾根，那裡每年有個鼓樂節，城裡十七個區組隊比賽，已經辦了兩百年。當地人用挪威的三種語言寫了這件事，然後從那裡被翻譯成英語、德語等等。
我喜歡這個故事，因為它提醒我機器翻譯是雙向的。談到人類文化的豐富和廣博，我們已經看到一些很好的例子。（吉米·威爾士）
他舉了韓劇。他說自己不看，但很多人看。設想一部非常有名的韓國電視劇，技術上我們差不多到了這個點：用機器自動重新配音成英語，同時用數字方式調整口型，讓觀眾看不出是配音。於是你突然能接觸到一件在韓國影響了很多人、他們深愛的東西，而你此前完全不知道它講什麼。
音樂也一樣。世界任何角落的街頭音樂，都可能以新的方式被所有人聽見。他說這事太酷了。
他把這個話題繞回了中國。他說自己跟中國政府爭論過但沒成功的一個論點是：封掉維基百科，不只是讓中國人讀不到中文維基百科和其他語言版本，也堵住了中國人講自己故事的通道。某個小鎮可能有個延續幾百年的節日，如果它進不了維基百科，就沒法被翻譯、被其他地方的人看到。那裡的五萬居民沒法分享自己的文化和知識。
我覺得這個論點對中國應該有分量，因為中國確實覺得在世界上被誤解。想讓別人理解，就把內容放進維基百科。人們想了解一件事的時候，去的就是那裡。（吉米·威爾士）
萊克斯把這句話補完：也就是給中國那些了不起的人一個聲音。威爾士說：正是。
整場對話裡，萊克斯反覆說自己對維基百科有一種感情，說這是他最喜歡的網站，說他數不清自己用過多少次，說他在維基百科上花的時間從沒後悔過。他還提到 Instagram 上一個叫 Depths of Wikipedia 的賬號，專發維基百科裡那些奇奇怪怪的條目，運營者安妮·勞維爾達（Annie Rauwerda）拿了威爾士頒的年度媒體貢獻獎。
他念了幾條。Octopolis 和 Octlantis，澳大利亞賈維斯灣兩種憂鬱章魚建起的水下聚居地，2009 年由一位生物學家命名，聚居結構圍繞著一塊被認為是人類廢棄金屬的物體。還有「最不受關注物種」條目裡的冷知識：人類在 2008 年被正式評估為「無危物種」。以及友誼悖論：1991 年社會學家斯科特·菲爾德發現，平均而言，一個人的朋友擁有的朋友數量，比這個人自己更多。
威爾士聽到最後一條的反應是：這挺有意思。乍聽起來不太可能，因為所有人朋友數量的平均值不該都差不多嗎？於是你就想去挖背後的數學，想明白它為什麼成立。萊克斯補了一句：這也是一種用數學嚴謹的方式感到更孤獨的方法。
他最喜歡的一篇條目叫「天生好笑的詞」。這條目早期是個垃圾場，誰想到一個覺得好笑的詞就寫進去。後來有人提報刪除，理由是這純粹是亂堆。討論中有個人站出來說：等一下，這在幽默理論裡是個正當概念，很多著名喜劇演員和幽默作家都寫過。
於是社群把裡面每個詞逐條核對了來源，刪掉一批沒有依據的。它變成了一篇真正有質量的條目。
我最大的遺憾是那張配圖被刪了。一頭奶牛，頭上用繩子綁了一對角，看起來像公牛，其實就是普通奶牛。下面的說明寫著：「據一些人說，cow 是一個天生好笑的詞。」這太好笑了，尤其「據一些人說」聽起來特別維基百科。可惜沒有來源，所以它消失了。（吉米·威爾士）
他說自己一直喜歡這篇條目，而 Depths of Wikipedia 之所以讓他覺得有趣，正是因為它把那些冷門又古怪的東西撈出來，讓人感嘆：真不敢相信有人為這個寫過維基百科。
《大英百科》不會給你這些。搜尋引擎的答案框也不會。它們只給你最可能被需要的那一小塊。而維基百科的 5800 萬個頁面裡，絕大多數是沒人在意的角落，恰恰是這些角落，讓「人類知識的總和」這個說法不至於只是修辭。
- 下次查資料別隻看條目正文，點開討論頁。任何一段讓你覺得「這寫得有點怪」的內容，討論頁裡大機率有過一場爭論，讀完你會知道這個表述是怎麼妥協出來的，比結論本身更有資訊量。
- 遇到自己不認同的條目，先問「來源是什麼」，而不是「誰在操控」。維基百科的爭議絕大多數落在來源質量上，不在立場上。去看引用的原始材料，你能判斷的東西比在推特上爭論多得多。
- 如果你是某個冷門領域的從業者，去補你那一塊。威爾士講得很清楚，條目質量的短板由沒人寫造成，跟偏見關係不大。兒童早期發展、女性小說家、小語種話題，缺的都是願意動手的人。
- 帶新人時，第一條回覆決定他會不會留下。那位十三歲破壞者變成年度維基人的故事，轉折點是有人在她討論頁問了一句「你為什麼這麼做」。這條原則在任何社群都成立，包括你自己的團隊和社群。
- 用 AI 時先讓它做審計，別讓它憑記憶做創作。把一篇文章和它的所有來源一起餵給模型，問「哪些表述跟來源不符」，這個用法容錯率高、收益實在。讓它憑空舉例，它會給得又流暢又假，威爾士親自驗證過。
- 給維基百科捐一次錢，哪怕 25 美元。它沒有廣告，也不打算有。這個模式能撐二十多年，靠的是幾百萬人的小額捐贈。你用得越多，越該往裡放一點。
文稿來自 Lex Fridman 官網公開發布的官方 Transcript（含說話人與時間戳）。
Jimmy Wales (00:00:00): We’ve never bowed down to government pressure anywhere in the world, and we never will. We understand that we’re hardcore, and actually, there is a bit of nuance about how different companies respond to this, but our response has always been just to say no. If they threaten to block, well, knock yourself out. You’re going to lose Wikipedia.
Lex Fridman (00:00:21): The following is a conversation with Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, one of, if not the most impactful websites ever, expanding the collective knowledge, intelligence, and wisdom of human civilization. This is Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. Now, dear friends, here’s Jimmy Wales.
Lex Fridman (00:00:47): Let’s start at the beginning. What is the origin story of Wikipedia?
Jimmy Wales (00:00:51): The origin story of Wikipedia, well, so I was watching the growth of the free software movement, open-source software, and seeing programmers coming together to collaborate in new ways, sharing code, doing that under free license, which is really interesting because it empowers an ability to work together. That’s really hard to do if the code is still proprietary, because then if I chip in and help, we have to figure out how I’m going to be rewarded and what that is. But the idea that everyone can copy it and it just is part of the commons really empowered a huge wave of creative software production. I realized that that kind of collaboration could extend beyond just software to all kinds of cultural works.
Jimmy Wales (00:01:38): The first thing that I thought of was an encyclopedia and thought, “Oh, that seems obvious that an encyclopedia, you can collaborate on it.” There’s a few reasons why. One, we all pretty much know what an encyclopedia entry on say, the Eiffel Tower should be like. You should see a picture, a few pictures, maybe, history, location, something about the architect, et cetera, et cetera. So we have a shared understanding of what it is we’re trying to do, and then we can collaborate and different people can chip in and find sources and so on and so forth. So set up first Nupedia, which was about two years before Wikipedia.
Jimmy Wales (00:02:18): With Nupedia, we had this idea that in order to be respected, we had to be even more academic than a traditional encyclopedia because a bunch of volunteers on the internet getting it right out of an encyclopedia, you could be made fun of if it’s just every random person. So we had implemented this seven-stage review process to get anything published, and two things came of that. So one thing, one of the earliest entries that we published after this rigorous process, a few days later, we had to pull it because as soon as it hit the web and the broader community took a look at it, people noticed plagiarism and realized that it wasn’t actually that good, even though it had been reviewed by academics and so on. So we had to pull it. So it’s like, “Oh, okay. Well, so much for a seven-stage review process.”
Jimmy Wales (00:03:07): I was frustrated, “Why is this taking so long? Why is it so hard?” So I thought, “Okay.” I saw that Robert Merton had won a Nobel Prize in economics for his work on option pricing theory. When I was in academia, that’s what I worked on was option pricing theory, had a published paper. So I’d worked through all of his academic papers, and I knew his work quite well. I thought, “Oh, I’ll write a short biography of Merton.” When I started to do it, I’d been out of academia, I hadn’t been a grad student for a few years then. I felt this huge intimidation because they were going to take my draft and send it to the most prestigious finance professors that we could find to give me feedback for revisions. It felt like being back in grad school. It’s like this really oppressive, like, you’re going to submit it for a review and you’re going to get critiques.
Lex Fridman (00:03:59): A little bit of the bad part of grad school.
Jimmy Wales (00:04:01): Yeah, yeah, the bad part of grad school. So I was like, “Oh, this isn’t intellectually fun, this is like the bad part of grad school. It’s intimidating, and there’s a lot of potential embarrassment if I screw something up and so forth.” So that was when I realized, “Okay, look, this is never going to work. This is not something that people are really going to want to do.” So Jeremy Rosenfeld, one of my employees had brought and showed me the Wiki concept in December, and then Larry Sanger brought in the same, said, “What about this Wiki idea?” So in January, we decided to launch Wikipedia, but we weren’t sure. So the original project was called Nupedia. Even though it wasn’t successful, we did have quite a group of academics and really serious people.
Jimmy Wales (00:04:45): We were concerned that, “Oh, maybe these academics are going to really hate this idea, and we shouldn’t just convert the project immediately. We should launch this as a side project, the idea of here’s a Wiki where we can start playing around.” But actually, we got more work done in two weeks than we had in almost two years because people were able to just jump on and start doing stuff, and it was actually a very exciting time. Back then, you could be the first person who typed Africa as a continent and hit Save, which isn’t much of an encyclopedia entry, but it’s true, and it’s a start and it’s kind of fun, like put your name down.
Jimmy Wales (00:05:20): Actually, a funny story was several years later, I just happened to be online and I saw when, I think his name is Robert Aumann, won the Nobel Prize in economics. We didn’t have an entry on him at all, which was surprising, but it wasn’t that surprising. This was still early days. So I got to be the first person to type Robert Aumann, won Nobel Prize in economics and hit Save, which again, wasn’t a very good article. But then I came back two days later and people had improved it and so forth. So that second half of the experience where with Robert Merton, I never succeeded because it was just too intimidating. It was like, “Oh, no, I was able to chip in and help, other people jumped in. Everybody was interested in the topic, because it’s all in the news at the moment.” So it’s just a completely different model, which worked much, much better.
Lex Fridman (00:06:03): Well, what is it that made that so accessible, so fun, so natural to just add something?
Jimmy Wales (00:06:09): Well, I think, especially in the early days, and this, by the way, has gotten much harder because there are fewer topics that are just greenfield available. But you could say, “Oh, well, I know a little bit about this, and I can get it started.” But then it is fun to come back then and see other people have added and improved and so on and so forth. That idea of collaborating where people can, much like open-source software, you put your code out and then people suggest revisions. They change it, and it modifies and it grows beyond the original creator, it’s just a fun, wonderful, quite geeky hobby, but people enjoy it.
Lex Fridman (00:06:51): How much debate was there over the interface, over the details of how to make that, seamless and frictionless?
Jimmy Wales (00:06:57): Yeah, not as much as there probably should have been, in a way. During that two years of the failure of Nupedia where very little work got done, what was actually productive was, there was a huge long discussion; email discussion, very clever people talking about things like neutrality, talking about what is an encyclopedia, but also talking about more technical ideas. Back then, XML was all the rage and thinking about shouldn’t you have certain data that might be in multiple articles that gets updated automatically? So for example, the population of New York City, every 10 years there’s a new official census, couldn’t you just update that bit of data in one place and it would update across all languages? That is a reality today. But back then it was just like, “Hmm, how do we do that? How do we think about that?”
Lex Fridman (00:07:47): So that is a reality today where it’s-
Jimmy Wales (00:07:48): Yeah-
Lex Fridman (00:07:49): … there’s some-
Jimmy Wales (00:07:50): Yeah, so Wikidata-
Lex Fridman (00:07:50): … universal variables? Wikidata.
Jimmy Wales (00:07:56): Yeah, Wikidata. From a Wikipedia entry, you can link to that piece of data in Wikidata, and it’s a pretty advanced thing, but there are advanced users who are doing that. Then when that gets updated, it updates in all the languages where you’ve done that.
Lex Fridman (00:08:07): That’s really interesting. There was this chain of emails in the early days of discussing the details of what is. So there’s the interface, there’s the-
Jimmy Wales (00:08:14): Yeah, so the interface, so an example, there was some software called UseModWiki, which we started with. It’s quite amusing actually, because the main reason we launched with UseModWiki is that it was a single Perl script, so it was really easy for me to install it on the server and just get running. But it was some guy’s hobby project, it was cool, but it was just a hobby project. All the data was stored in flat text files, so there was no real database behind it. So to search the site, you basically used Grab, which is just the basic Unix utility to look through all the files. So that clearly was never going to scale. But also in the early days, it didn’t have real logins. So you could set your username, but there were no passwords. So I might say Bob Smith, and then someone else comes along and says, “No, I’m Bob Smith,” and they both had it. Now that never really happened.
Jimmy Wales (00:09:10): We didn’t have a problem with it, but it was obvious, you can’t grow a big website where everybody can pretend to be everybody. That’s not going to be good for trust and reputation and so forth. So quickly, I had to write a little login, store people’s passwords and things like that so you could have unique identities. Then another example of something you would’ve never thought would’ve been a good idea, and it turned out to not be a problem. But to make a link in Wikipedia in the early days, you would make a link to a page that may or may not exist by just using CamelCase, meaning it’s like upper case, lowercase, and you smash the words together. So maybe New York City, you might type N-E-W, no space, capital Y, York City, and that would make a link, but that was ugly. That was clearly not right. So I was like, “Okay, well that’s just not going to look nice. Let’s just use square brackets, two square brackets makes a link.”
Jimmy Wales (00:10:04): That may have been an option in the software. I’m not sure I thought up square brackets. But anyway, we just did that, which worked really well. It makes nice links and you can see in its red links or blue links, depending on if the page exists or not. But the thing that didn’t occur to me even to think about is that, for example, on the German language standard keyboard, there is no square bracket. So for German Wikipedia to succeed, people had to learn to do some alt codes to get the square bracket, or a lot of users cut and paste a square bracket where they could find one and they would just cut and paste one in. Yet. German Wikipedia has been a massive success, so somehow that didn’t slow people down.
Lex Fridman (00:10:40): How is that that the German keyboards don’t have a square bracket. How do you do programming? How do you live life to its fullest without square brackets?
Jimmy Wales (00:10:48): It’s a very good question. I’m not really sure. Maybe it does now because keyboard standards have drifted over time and becomes useful to have a certain character. It’s same thing, there’s not really a W character in Italian, and it wasn’t on keyboards or I think it is now. But in general, W is not a letter in Italian language, but it appears in enough international words that it’s crept into Italian.
Lex Fridman (00:11:12): All of these things are probably Wikipedia articles in themselves.
Jimmy Wales (00:11:17): Oh, yes. Oh, yeah.
Lex Fridman (00:11:17): The discussion of square brackets-
Jimmy Wales (00:11:17): That is a whole-
Lex Fridman (00:11:17): … in German-
Jimmy Wales (00:11:19): … whole discussion, I’m sure.
Lex Fridman (00:11:20): … on both the English and the German Wikipedia. The difference between those two might be very-
Jimmy Wales (00:11:27): Interesting.
Lex Fridman (00:11:27): … interesting. So Wikidata is fascinating, but even the broader discussion of what is an encyclopedia, can you go to that philosophical question of-
Jimmy Wales (00:11:37): Sure.
Lex Fridman (00:11:37): … what is an encyclopedia?
Jimmy Wales (00:11:39): What is an encyclopedia? So the way I would put it is an encyclopedia, or what our goal is is the sum of all human knowledge, but sum meaning summary. This was an early debate. Somebody started uploading the full text of Hamlet, for example, and we said, “Mmm, wait, hold on a second. That’s not an encyclopedia article, but why not?” So hence was born Wikisource, which is where you put original texts and things like that, out of copyright text, because they said, “No, an encyclopedia article about Hamlet, that’s a perfectly valid thing. But the actual text of the play is not an encyclopedia article. “So most of it’s fairly obvious, but there are some interesting quirks and differences. So for example, as I understand it, in French language encyclopedias, traditionally it would be quite common to have recipes, which in English language that would be unusual. You wouldn’t find a recipe for chocolate cake in Britannica. So I actually don’t know the current state, haven’t thought about that in many, many years now.
Lex Fridman (00:12:44): State of cake recipes in Wikipedia, in English, Wikipedia?
Jimmy Wales (00:12:47): I wouldn’t say there’s chocolate cake recipes. You might find a sample recipe somewhere. I’m not saying there are none, but in general, no, we wouldn’t have recipes-
Lex Fridman (00:12:55): I told myself I would not get outraged in this conversation, but now I’m outraged. I’m deeply upset.
Jimmy Wales (00:13:00): It’s actually very complicated. I love to cook. I’m actually quite a good cook. What’s interesting is it’s very hard to have a neutral recipe because [inaudible 00:13:12]
Lex Fridman (00:13:12): Like a canonical recipe for cake-
Jimmy Wales (00:13:13): A canonical recipe is-
Lex Fridman (00:13:14): … chocolate cake.
Jimmy Wales (00:13:15): … is kind of difficult to come by because there’s so many variants and it’s all debatable and interesting. For something like chocolate cake, you could probably say, “Here’s one of the earliest recipes,” or, “Here’s one of the most common recipes.” But for many, many things, the variants are as interesting as somebody said to me recently, 10 Spaniards, 12 paella recipes. So these are all matters of open discussion.
Lex Fridman (00:13:44): Well, just to throw some numbers, as of May 27, 2023, there are 6.6 million articles in the English Wikipedia containing over 4.3 billion words. Including articles, the total number of pages is 58 million.
Jimmy Wales (00:14:05): Yeah.
Lex Fridman (00:14:06): Does that blow your mind?
Jimmy Wales (00:14:08): Yes, it does. It doesn’t, because I know those numbers and see them from time to time. But in another sense, a deeper sense, yeah, it does. It’s really remarkable. I remember when English Wikipedia passed 100,000 articles and when German Wikipedia passed 100,000, ’cause I happened to be in Germany with a bunch of Wikipedians that night, and then it seemed quite big. We knew at that time that it was nowhere near complete. I remember at Wikimania in Harvard when we did our annual conference there in Boston, someone who had come to the conference from Poland had brought along with him a small encyclopedia, a single volume encyclopedia of biographies, so short biographies, normally a paragraph or so about famous people in Poland, and there were some 22,000 entries. He pointed out that even then, 2006, Wikipedia felt quite big.
Jimmy Wales (00:15:12): He said in English Wikipedia, there’s only a handful of these, less than 10%, I think he said. So then you realized, yeah, actually, who was the mayor of Warsaw in 1873? Don’t know. Probably not in English Wikipedia, but it probably might be today, but there’s so much out there. Of course, what we get into when we’re talking about how many entries there are and how many could there be, is this very deep philosophical issue of notability, which is the question of, well, how do you draw the limit? How do you draw what is there? So sometimes people say, “Oh, there should be no limit.” But I think that doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny if you really pause and think about it. So I see in your hand there you’ve got a BIC pen, pretty standard. Everybody’s seen billions of those in life.
Lex Fridman (00:16:05): Classic though.
Jimmy Wales (00:16:05): It’s a classic, clear, BIC pen. So could we have an entry about that BIC pen aisle? I bet we do, that type of BIC pen because it’s classic. Everybody knows it, and it’s got a history. Actually, there’s something interesting about the BIC company. They make pens, they also make kayaks, and there’s something else they’re famous for. Basically, they’re a definition by non-essentials company. Anything that’s long and plastic, that’s what they make.
Lex Fridman (00:16:33): Wow, that’s very-
Jimmy Wales (00:16:34): If you want to find the common ground-
Lex Fridman (00:16:36): … platonic form, the platonic form of a BIC.
Jimmy Wales (00:16:37): But could we have an article about that very BIC pen in your hand, so Lex Fridman’s BIC pen as of this week?
Lex Fridman (00:16:45): Oh, the very, this instance-
Jimmy Wales (00:16:45): The very specific instance, and the answer is no, there’s not much known about it. I dare say, unless it’s very special to you and your great-grandmother gave it to you or something, you probably know very little about it. It’s a pen. It’s just here in the office. So that’s just to show there is a limit. In German Wikipedia, they used to talk about the rear nut of the wheel of [inaudible 00:17:10] bicycle [inaudible 00:17:11] a well-known Wikipedian of the time, to sort of illustrate, you can’t have an article about literally everything. So then it raises the question, what can you have an article about? What can’t you? That can vary depending on the subject matter. One of the areas where we try to be much more careful would be biographies. The reason is a biography of a living person, if you get it wrong, you can actually be quite hurtful, quite damaging.
Jimmy Wales (00:17:38): So if someone is a private person and somebody tries to create a Wikipedia entry, there’s no way to update it. There’s not much done. So for example, an encyclopedia article about my mother, my mother, school teacher later, a pharmacist, wonderful woman, but never been in the news, other than me talking about why there shouldn’t be a Wikipedia entry, that’s probably made it in somewhere, standard example. But there’s not enough known. You could imagine a database of genealogy having date of birth, date of death, certain elements like that of private people. But you couldn’t really write a biography. One of the areas this comes up quite often is what we call BLP1E. We’ve got lots of acronyms. Biography of a living person who’s notable for only one event is a real danger zone.
Lex Fridman (00:18:27): Oh.
Jimmy Wales (00:18:28): The type of example would be a victim of a crime, so someone who’s a victim of a famous serial killer, but about whom really not much is known. They weren’t a public person, they’re just a victim of a crime, we really shouldn’t have an article about that person. They’ll be mentioned, of course, and maybe this specific crime might have an article. But for that person, no, not really. That’s not really something that makes any sense because how can you write a biography about someone you don’t know much about? It varies from field to field. So for example, for many academics, we will have an entry that we might not have in a different context because for an academic, it’s important to have sort of their career, what papers they’ve published, things like that.
Jimmy Wales (00:19:13): You may not know anything about their personal life, but that’s actually not encyclopedically relevant in the same way that it is for member of a royal family where it’s basically all about the family. So we’re fairly nuanced about notability and where it comes in. I’ve always thought that the term notability, I think, is a little problematic. We struggled about how to talk about it. The problem with notability is it can feel insulting. Say, “Oh no, you’re not noteworthy.” Well, my mother’s noteworthy. She’s a really important person in my life, so that’s not right. But it’s more like verifiability. Is there a way to get information that actually makes an encyclopedia entry?
Lex Fridman (00:19:56): It so happens that there’s a Wikipedia page about me as I’ve learned recently, and the first thought I had when I saw that was, “Surely I am not notable enough.” So I was very surprised and grateful that such a page could exist and actually, just allow me to say thank you to all the incredible people that are part of creating and maintaining Wikipedia. It’s my favorite website on the internet. The collection of articles that Wikipedia has created is just incredible. We’ll talk about the various details of that. But the love and care that goes into creating pages for individuals, for a BIC pen, for all this kind of stuff is just really incredible.
Lex Fridman (00:20:43): So I just felt the love when I saw that page. But I also felt just because I do this podcast and I just through this podcast, gotten to know a few individuals that are quite controversial, I’ve gotten to be on the receiving end of something quite … to me as a person who loves other human beings, I’ve gotten to be at the receiving end of some attacks through Wikipedia. Like you said, when you look at living individuals, it can be quite hurtful, the little details of information. Because I’ve become friends with Elon Musk and I’ve interviewed him, but I’ve also interviewed people on the left, far left, people on the right, some would say far right, and so now you take a step, you put your toe into the cold pool of politics and the shark emerges from the depths and pulls you right in.
Jimmy Wales (00:21:41): Yeah, the boiling hot pool of politics.
Lex Fridman (00:21:43): I guess it’s hot, and so I got to experience some of that. I think what you also realize is there has to be, for Wikipedia credible sources, verifiable sources, and there’s a dance there because some of the sources are pieces of journalism. Of course, journalism operates under its own complicated incentives such that people can write articles that are not factual or are cherry-picking all the flaws they can have in a journalistic article-
Jimmy Wales (00:22:18): For sure.
Lex Fridman (00:22:18): … and those can be used as-
Jimmy Wales (00:22:20): For sure.
Lex Fridman (00:22:21): … as sources. It’s like they dance hand-in-hand. So for me, sadly enough, there was a really concerted attack to say that I was never at MIT, never did anything at MIT. Just to clarify, I am a research scientist at MIT. I have been there since 2015. I’m there today. I’m at a prestigious, amazing laboratory called LIDS, and I hope to be there for a long time. I work on AI, robotics, machine learning. There’s a lot of incredible people there. By the way, MIT has been very kind to defend me. Unlike Wikipedia says, it is not an unpaid position. There was no controversy.
Jimmy Wales (00:23:03): Right.
Lex Fridman (00:23:03): It was all very calm and happy and almost boring research that I’ve been doing there. The other thing, because I am half-Ukrainian, half-Russian-
Jimmy Wales (00:23:14): Oh.
Lex Fridman (00:23:15): … and I’ve traveled to Ukraine and I will travel to Ukraine again, and I will travel to Russia for some very difficult conversations. My heart’s been broken by this war. I have family in both places. It’s been a really difficult time. But the little battle about the biography there also starts becoming important for the first time for me. I also want to clarify personally, I use this opportunity of some inaccuracies there. My father was not born in Chkalovsk, Russia. He was born in Kiev, Ukraine. I was born in Chkalovsk which is a town not in Russia. There is a town called that in Russia. But there’s another town in Tajikistan, which is the former republic of the Soviet Union. That town is now called B-U-S-T-O-N, Buston, which is funny because we’re now in Austin, and I also am in Boston, it seems like my whole life is surrounded by these kinds of towns.
Lex Fridman (00:24:13): So I was born in Tajikistan, and the rest of the biography is interesting, but my family is very evenly distributed between their origins and where they grew up between Ukraine and Russia, which adds a whole beautiful complexity to this whole thing. So I want to just correct that. It’s like the fascinating thing about Wikipedia is in some sense, those little details don’t matter. But in another sense, what I felt when I saw a Wikipedia page about me or anybody I know is there’s this beautiful saving that this person existed, like a community that notices you that says, “Huh.” You see a butterfly that floats, and you’re like, “Huh?” That it’s not just any butterfly, it’s that one. “I like that one,” or you see a puppy or something, or it’s this BIC pen. “I remember this one, it has this scratch. You get noticed in that way and I know it’s a beautiful thing. Maybe it’s very silly of me and naive, but I feel like Wikipedia, in terms of individuals, is an opportunity to celebrate people, to celebrate ideas-
Jimmy Wales (00:25:26): For sure. For sure.
Lex Fridman (00:25:26): … and not a battleground of the kind of stuff we might see on Twitter, like the mockery, the derision, this kind of stuff.
Jimmy Wales (00:25:35): For sure.
Lex Fridman (00:25:36): Of course, you don’t want to cherry-pick. All of us have flaws and so on, but it just feels like to highlight a controversy of some sort, when that doesn’t at all represent the entirety of the human, in most cases, is sad.
Jimmy Wales (00:25:50): Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So there’s a few to unpack and all that. So first, one of the things I find really, always find very interesting is your status with MIT. Okay, that’s upsetting, and it’s an argument and can be sorted out. But then what’s interesting is you gave as much time to that, which is actually important and relevant to your career and so on to also where your father was born, which most people would hardly notice, but is really meaningful to you. I find that a lot when I talk to people who have a biography in Wikipedia is they’re often as annoyed by a tinier that no one’s going to notice like this town in Tajikistan’s got a new name and so on. Nobody even knows what that means or whatever, but it can be super important. So that’s one of the reasons for biographies, we say human dignity really matters. So some of the things have to do with, and this is a common debate that goes on in Wikipedia, is what we call undue weight. So I’ll give an example.
Jimmy Wales (00:26:59): There was a article I stumbled across many years ago about the mayor, or no, he wasn’t a mayor, he was a city council member of, I think it was Peoria, Illinois, but some small town in the Midwest. The entry, he’s been on the city council for 30 years or whatever. He’s frankly, a pretty boring guy and seems like a good local city politician. But in this very short biography, there was a whole paragraph, a long paragraph about his son being arrested for DUI, and it was clearly undue weight. It’s like, “What has this got to do with this guy if it even deserves a mention?” It wasn’t even clear had he done anything hypocritical, had he done himself anything wrong, even was his son, his son got a DUI.
Jimmy Wales (00:27:44): That’s never great, but it happens to people, and it doesn’t seem like a massive scandal for your dad. So of course, I just took that out immediately. This is a long, long time ago. That’s the sort of thing where we have to really think about in a biography and about controversies to say, “Is this a real controversy?” So in general, one of the things we tend to say is any section, so if there’s a biography and there’s a section called controversies, that’s actually poor practice because it just invites people to say, “Oh, I want to work on this entry.” It’s either seven sections. “Oh, this one’s quite short. Can I add something?”
Lex Fridman (00:28:23): Right?
Jimmy Wales (00:28:24): Go out and find some more controversies. Now that’s nonsense, right?
Lex Fridman (00:28:24): Yeah.
Jimmy Wales (00:28:26): In general, putting it separate from everything else makes it seem worse, and also, it doesn’t put it in the right context. Whereas, if it’s a live flaw and there is a controversy, there’s always potential controversy for anyone, it should just be worked into the overall article, ’cause then it doesn’t become a temptation. You can contextualize appropriately and so forth. So that’s part of the whole process. But I think for me, one of the most important things is what I call community health. So yeah, are we going to get it wrong sometimes? Yeah, of course. We’re humans and doing good, quality reference material is hard. The real question is, how do people react to a criticism or a complaint or a concern? If the reaction is defensiveness or combativeness back, or if someone’s really in there being aggressive and in the wrong, like, “No, no, no, hold on, we’ve got to do this the right way.” You got to say, “Okay, hold on. Are there good sources? Is this contextualized appropriately? Is it even important enough to mention? What does it mean?”
Jimmy Wales (00:29:40): Sometimes one of the areas where I do think there is a very complicated flaw, and you’ve alluded to it a little bit, but it’s like we know the media is deeply flawed. We know that journalism can go wrong. I would say particularly in the last whatever, 15 years, we’ve seen a real decimation of local media, local newspapers. We’ve seen a real rise in clickbait headlines and eager focus on anything that might be controversial. We’ve always had that with us, of course, there’s always been tabloid newspapers. But that makes it a little bit more challenging to say, “Okay, how do we sort things out when we have a pretty good sense that not every source is valid?” So as an example, a few years ago, it’s been quite a while now, we deprecated the MailOnline as a source and the MailOnline, the digital arm of the Daily Mail, it’s a tabloid.
Jimmy Wales (00:30:46): It’s not fake news, but it does tend to run very hyped-up stories. They really love to attack people and go on the attack for political reasons and so on, and it just isn’t great. So by saying deprecated, and I think some people say, “Oh, you banned the Daily Mail? No, we didn’t ban it as a source. We just said, “Look, it’s probably not a great source. You should probably look for a better source.” So certainly if the Daily Mail runs a headline saying, “New Cure for Cancer,” it’s like probably there’s more serious sources than a tabloid newspaper. So in an article about lung cancer, you probably wouldn’t cite the Daily Mail. That’s kind of ridiculous. But also for celebrities and so forth to know, “Oh, well, they do cover celebrity gossip a lot, but they also tend to have vendettas and so forth.” You really have to step back and go, “Is this really encyclopedic or is this just the Daily Mail going on a rant?”
Lex Fridman (00:31:39): Some of that requires a great community health.
Jimmy Wales (00:31:41): It requires massive community health.
Lex Fridman (00:31:43): Even for me, for stuff I’ve seen that’s kind of, if actually iffy about people I know, things I know about myself, I still feel like a love for knowledge emanating from the article. I feel the community health, so I will take all slight inaccuracies. I love it because that means there’s people, for the most part, I feel of respect and love in this search for knowledge. Sometimes, ’cause I also love Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange for programming-related things. They can get a little cranky sometimes to a degree where it’s like it’s not as … you could could feel the dynamics of the health of the particular community and sub communities too, like a particular C Sharp or Java or Python or whatever, there’s little communities that emerge. You can feel the levels of toxicity, ’cause a little bit of strictness is good, but a little too much is bad because of the defensiveness, ’cause when somebody writes an answer and then somebody else says, “We’ll modify it,” and then get defensive, and there’s this tension that’s not conducive to improving towards a more truthful depiction of that topic.
Jimmy Wales (00:33:02): Yeah, a great example-
Lex Fridman (00:33:00): … truthful depiction of that topic.
Jimmy Wales (00:33:02): Yeah, a great example that I really loved this morning that I saw someone left a note on my user talk page in English Wikipedia saying it was quite a dramatic headline saying racist hook on front page. So we have on the front page of Wikipedia, we have little section called Did You know? And it’s just little tidbits and facts, just things people find interesting. And there’s a whole process for how things get there. And the one that somebody was raising a question about was, it was comparing a very well known US football player, Black. There was a quote from another famous sport person comparing him to a Lamborghini. Clearly a compliment. And so somebody said, “Actually, here’s a study, here’s some interesting information about how Black sports people are far more often compared to inanimate objects. And given that kind of analogy, and I think it’s demeaning to compare a person to a car, et cetera, cetera.”
Jimmy Wales (00:34:01): But they said, “I’m not pulling, I’m not deleting it, I’m not removing it. I just want to raise the question.” And then there’s this really interesting conversation that goes on where I think the general consensus was, you know what, this isn’t like the alarming headline racist thing on the front page of Wikipedia, holy moly, that sounds bad. But it’s sort of like, actually yeah this probably isn’t the sort of analogy that we think is great. And so we should probably think about how to improve our language and not compare sports people to inanimate objects and particularly be aware of certain racial sensitivities that there might be around that sort of thing if there is a disparity in the media of how people are called.
Jimmy Wales (00:34:40): And I just thought, you know what, nothing for me to weigh in on here. This is a good conversation. Like nobody’s saying people should be banned if they refer to, what was his name, The Fridge, Refrigerator Perry. Very famous comparison to an inanimate object of a Chicago Bears player, many years ago. But they’re just saying, hey, let’s be careful about analogies that we just pick up from the media. I said, “Yeah, that’s good.”
Lex Fridman (00:35:06): On the deprecation of news sources is really interesting because I think what you’re saying is ultimately you want to make a article by article decision, use your own judgment. And it’s such a subtle thing because there’s just a lot of hit pieces written about individuals like myself for example, that masquerade as an objective thorough exploration of a human being. It’s fascinating to watch because controversy and hit pieces just get more clicks.
Jimmy Wales (00:35:41): Oh yeah, sure.
Lex Fridman (00:35:41): This is, I guess, as a Wikipedia contributor, you start to deeply become aware of that and start to have a sense, a radar of clickbait versus truth to pick out the truth from the clickbaity type language.
Jimmy Wales (00:35:58): Oh, yeah. I mean it’s really important and we talk a lot about weasel words. And actually I’m sure we’ll end up talking about AI and ChatGPT.
Lex Fridman (00:36:10): Yes.
Jimmy Wales (00:36:10): But just to quickly mention in this area, I think one of the potentially powerful tool, because it is quite good at this, I’ve played around with and practiced it quite a lot, but ChatGPT-4 is really quite able to take a passage and point out potentially biased terms, to rewrite it to be more neutral. Now it is a bit anodyne and it’s a bit cliched, so sometimes it just takes the spirit out of something that’s actually not bad. It’s just like poetic language and you’re like, okay, that’s not actually helping. But in many cases I think that sort of thing is quite interesting. And I’m also interested in… Can you imagine where you feed in a Wikipedia entry and all the sources and you say, help me find anything in the article that is not accurately reflecting what’s in the sources? And that doesn’t have to be perfect. It only has to be good enough to be useful to community.
Jimmy Wales (00:37:17): So if it scans-
Lex Fridman (00:37:19): Beautiful.
Jimmy Wales (00:37:19): … an article and all the sources and you say, oh, it came back with 10 suggestions and seven of them were decent and three of them it just didn’t understand, well actually that’s probably worth my time to do. And it can help us really more quickly get good people to review obscure entries and things like that.
Lex Fridman (00:37:41): So just as a small aside on that, and we’ll probably talk about language models a little bit, or a lot more, but one of the articles, one of the hit pieces about me, the journalist actually was very straightforward and honest about having used GPT to write part of the article.
Jimmy Wales (00:37:59): Interesting.
Lex Fridman (00:37:59): And then finding that it made an error and apologized for the error, that GPT-4 generated. Which has this kind of interesting loop, which is the articles are used to write Wikipedia pages, GPT is trained on Wikipedia, and there there’s like this interesting loop where the weasel words and the nuances can get lost or can propagate, even though they’re not grounded in reality. Somehow in the generation of the language model, new truths can be created and kind of linger.
Jimmy Wales (00:38:35): Yeah, there’s a famous web comic that’s titled cytogenesis, which is about how an errors in Wikipedia and there’s no source for it, but then a lazy journalist reads it and writes the source, and then some helpful Wikipedia spots that it has no source, finds a source and adds it to Wikipedia, and voila, magic. This happened to me once it, well, it nearly happened. There was this, it was really brief. I went back and researched it, I’m like, this is really odd. So Biography Magazine, which is a magazine published by the Biography TV channel, had a pressor profile of me, and it said, “In his spare time,” I’m not quoting exactly, it’s been many years, but, “In his spare time he enjoys playing chess with friends.” I thought, wow, that sounds great. I would like to be that guy. But actually, I play chess with my kids sometimes, but no it’s not a hobby of mine.
Jimmy Wales (00:39:31): And I was like, where did they get that? And I contacted the magazine and said, where did that come from? They said, “Oh, it was in Wikipedia.” And I looked in the history, there had been vandalism of Wikipedia, which was not damaging, it’s just false. And it had already been removed. But then I thought, “Oh gosh, well I better mention this to people because otherwise it’s somebody’s going to read that and they’re going to add it, the entry, and is going to take on a life of its own. And then sometimes I wonder if it has, because I’ve been… I was invited a few years ago to do the ceremonial first move in the world chess championship. And I thought, I wonder if they think I’m a really big chess enthusiast because they read this Biography Magazine article.
Jimmy Wales (00:40:10): But that problem, when we think about large language models and the ability to quickly generate very plausible but not true content, I think is something that there’s going to be a lot of shakeout and a lot of implications of that.
Lex Fridman (00:40:25): What would be hilarious is because of the social pressure of Wikipedia and the momentum, you would actually start playing a lot more chess. Not only the articles are written based on Wikipedia, but your own life trajectory changes because of the Wikipedia, just to make it more convenient. Aspire to.
Jimmy Wales (00:40:45): Aspire to, yes. Yeah, aspirational.
Lex Fridman (00:40:48): If we could just talk about that before we jump back to some other interesting topics in Wikipedia. Let’s talk about GPT-4 and large language models. So they are in part trained on Wikipedia content. What are the pros and cons of these language models? What are your thoughts?
Jimmy Wales (00:41:07): Yeah, so I mean, there’s a lot of stuff going on. Obviously the technology has moved very quickly in the last six months and looks poised to do so for some time to come. So first things first, part of our philosophy is the open licensing, the free licensing, the idea that this is what we’re here for. We are a volunteer community and we write this encyclopedia. We give it to the world to do what you like with, you can modify it, redistribute it, redistribute modified versions, commercially, non-commercially. This is the licensing. So in that sense, of course it’s completely fine. Now, we do worry a bit about attribution because it is a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License. So attribution is important, not just because of our licensing model and things like that, but it’s just proper attribution is just good intellectual practice.
Jimmy Wales (00:42:02): And that’s a really hard complicated question. If I were to write something about my visit here, I might say in a blog post I was in Austin, which is a city in Texas, I’m not going to put a source for Austin as a city in Texas. That’s just general knowledge. I learned it somewhere, I can’t tell you where. So you don’t have to cite and reference every single thing. But if I actually did research and I used something very heavily, it’s just proper, morally proper, to give your sources. So we would like to see that. And obviously they call it grounding. So particularly people at Google are really keen on figuring out grounding.
Lex Fridman (00:42:48): It’s such a cool term. So any text that’s generated trying to ground it to the Wikipedia quality-
Jimmy Wales (00:42:57): A source.
Lex Fridman (00:42:57): … a source. The same kind of standard of what a source means that Wikipedia uses, the same kind of source-
Jimmy Wales (00:42:57): The same kind.
Lex Fridman (00:42:57): … would be generated but with a graph.
Jimmy Wales (00:43:05): The same kind of thing. And of course, one of the biggest flaws in ChatGPT right now is that it just literally will make things up just to be amiable. I think it’s programmed to be very helpful and amiable and it doesn’t really know or care about the truth.
Lex Fridman (00:43:21): Can get bullied into… it can be convinced into…
Jimmy Wales (00:43:25): Well, but this morning, the story I was telling earlier about comparing a football player to a Lamborghini, and I thought, is that really racial? I don’t know, but I’m mulling it over. And I thought, oh, I’m going to go to ChatGPT. So I sent to ChatGPT-4, I said, “This happened in Wikipedia. Can you think of examples where a white athlete has been compared to a fast car inanimate object?” And it comes back with a very plausible essay where it tells why these analogies are common in sport, blah, blah. I said, “No, no, could you give me some specific examples?” So it gives me three specific examples, very plausible, correct names of athletes and contemporaries and all of that could have been true. Googled every single quote and none of them existed. And so I’m like, “Well, that’s really not good.”
Jimmy Wales (00:44:14): I wanted to explore a thought process I was in. First I thought, how do I Google? And it’s like, well, it’s kind of a hard thing to Google because unless somebody’s written about this specific topic, it’s large language model, it’s processed all this data, it can probably piece that together for me, but it just can’t yet. So I think, I hope that ChatGPT 5, 6, 7, three to five years, I’m hoping we’ll see a much higher level of accuracy where when you ask a question like that, I think instead of being quite so eager to please by giving you a plausible sounding answer, it’s just like, I don’t know.
Lex Fridman (00:44:55): Or maybe display how much bullshit might be in this generated text. I’m really would like to make you happy right now, but I’m really stretched thin with this generation.
Jimmy Wales (00:45:07): Well, it’s one of the things I’ve said for a long time. So in Wikipedia, one of the great things we do may not be great for our reputation, except in a deeper sense for the long term I think it is. But we’ll all be on notice that says the neutrality of this section has been disputed or the following section doesn’t cite in these sources. And I always joke, sometimes I wish the New York Times would run a banner saying the neutrality of this has been disputed. They could give us a… We had a big fight in the newsroom as to whether to run this or not, but we thought it’s important enough to bring it to. But just be aware that not all the journalists are on board with it. Ah, that’s actually interesting, and that’s fine. I would trust them more for that level of transparency. So yeah, similarly ChatGPT should say, yeah, 87% bullshit.
Lex Fridman (00:45:51): Well, the neutrality one is really interesting because that’s basically a summary of the discussions that are going on underneath. It would be amazing if… I should be honest, I don’t look at the talk page often. It would be nice somehow if there was a kind of summary in this banner way of like, this, lots of wars have been fought on this here land for this here paragraph.
Jimmy Wales (00:46:16): That’s really interesting, I hadn’t thought of that. Because one of the things I do spend a lot of time thinking about these days, and people have found it, we’re moving slowly, but we are moving. Thinking about, okay, these tools exist, are there ways that this stuff can be useful to our community? Because a part of it is we do approach things in a non-commercial way, in a really deep sense. It’s like it’s been great, that Wikipedia has become very popular, but really we’re a community whose hobby is writing an encyclopedia. That’s first, and if it’s popular, great. If it’s not okay, we might have trouble paying for more servers, but it’ll be fine.
Jimmy Wales (00:46:53): And so how do we help the community use these tools? One of the ways that these tools can support people, and one example I never thought about, I’m going to start playing with it, is feed in the article and feed in the talk page and say, can you suggest some warnings in the article based on the conversations in the talk page? I think it might-
Lex Fridman (00:46:53): That’s brilliant.
Jimmy Wales (00:47:12): … be good at that. It might get it wrong sometimes. But again, if it’s reasonably successful at doing that, and you can say, oh, actually, yeah, it does suggest the neutrality of this has been disputed on a section that has a seven-page discussion in the back that might be useful, don’t know, worth playing with.
Lex Fridman (00:47:30): Yeah, I mean some more color to the, not neutrality, but also the amount of emotion laden in the exploration of this particular part of the topic. It might actually help you look at more controversial pages, like on a page on the war in Ukraine or a page on Israel and Palestine. There could be parts that everyone agrees on and there’s parts that are just like-
Jimmy Wales (00:47:58): Tough.
Lex Fridman (00:47:59): … tough.
Jimmy Wales (00:47:59): The hard parts.
Lex Fridman (00:48:00): It would be nice to, when looking at those beautiful long articles to know, all right, let me just take in some stuff where everybody agrees on.
Jimmy Wales (00:48:09): I could give an example that I haven’t looked at in a long time, but I was really pleased with what I saw at the time. So the discussion was that they’re building something in Israel and for their own political reasons, one side calls it a wall hearkening back to Berlin Wall, apartheid, the other calls it a security fence. So we can understand quite quickly if we give it a moment’s thought like, okay, I understand why people would have this grappling over the language. Like, okay, you want to highlight the negative aspects of this and you want to highlight the positive aspects, so you’re going to try and choose a different name. And so there was this really fantastic Wikipedia discussion on the talk page. How do we word that paragraph to talk about the different naming? It’s called this by Israeli, it’s called this by Palestinians. And how you explain that to people could be quite charged. You could easily explain, oh, there’s this difference and it’s because this side’s good and this side’s bad and that’s why there’s a difference. Or you could say, actually, let’s just try and really stay as neutral as we can and try to explain the reasons. So you may come away from it with a concept. Oh, okay, I understand what this debate is about now.
Lex Fridman (00:49:26): And just the term Israel- Palestine conflict is still the title of a page in Wikipedia, but the word conflict is something that is a charged word.
Jimmy Wales (00:49:41): Of course.
Lex Fridman (00:49:42): Because from the Palestinian side or from certain sides, the word conflict doesn’t accurately describe the situation. Because if you see it as a genocide one way, genocide is not a conflict because to people that discuss the challenge, the word conflict, they see conflict is when there’s two equally powerful sides fighting.
Jimmy Wales (00:50:05): Sure, yeah, yeah. No, it’s hard. And in a number of cases, so this actually speaks to a slightly broader phenomenon, which is there are a number of cases where there is no one word that can get consensus. And in the body of an article, that’s usually okay, because we can explain the whole thing. You can come away with an understanding of why each side wants to use a certain word, but there are some aspects, like the page has to have a title, so there’s that. Same thing with certain things like photos. It’s like, well, there’s different photos, which one’s best? Lot of different views on that. But at the end of the day, you need the lead photo because there’s one slot for a lead photo. Categories is another one. So at one point, I have no idea if it’s in there today, but I don’t think so. I was listed in American entrepreneurs fine.
Jimmy Wales (00:51:03): American atheist, and I said, that doesn’t feel right to me, just personally it’s true. I mean, wouldn’t disagree with the objective fact of it, but when you click the category and you see a lot of people who are, you might say American atheist activist because that’s their big issue. So Madalyne Murray O’Hair or various famous people who… Richard Dawkins, who make it a big part of their public argument and persona. But that’s not true of me. It’s just my private personal belief, it doesn’t really… it’s not something I campaign about. So it felt weird to put me in the category, but what category would you put? And do you need that? In this case I argued that doesn’t need that. I don’t speak about it publicly, except incidentally, from time to time, I don’t campaign about it. So it’s weird to put me with this group of people.
Jimmy Wales (00:51:54): And that argument carried the day, I hope not just because it was me. But categories can be like that where you’re either in the category or you’re not. And sometimes it’s a lot more complicated than that. And is it, again, we go back to, is it undue weight? If someone who is now prominent in public life and generally considered to be a good person was convicted of something, let’s say DUI when they were young, we normally in normal discourse, we don’t think, oh, this person should be in the category of American criminals because you think, oh, a criminal. Yeah, technically speaking, it’s against the law to drive under the influence of alcohol and you were arrested and you spent a month in prison or whatever. But it’s odd to say that’s a criminal.
Jimmy Wales (00:52:45): So just as an example in this area is Mark Wahlberg, Marky Mark is what I always think of him as, because that was his first sort of famous name, who I wouldn’t think should be listed as in the category, American criminal. Even though he did, he was convicted of quite a bad crime when he was a young person, but we don’t think of him as a criminal. Should the entry talk about that? Yeah, it’s actually an important part of his life story that he had a very rough youth and he could have gone down a really dark path and he turned his life around. That’s actually interesting. So categories are tricky.
Lex Fridman (00:53:20): Especially with people because we like to assign labels to people into ideas somehow, and those labels stick. And there’s certain words that have a lot of power, like criminal, like political left, right, center, anarchist, objectivist. What other philosophies are there? Marxist, communist, social democrat, democratic socialist, socialist, and if you add that as a category, all of a sudden it’s like, oh boy, you’re that guy now. And I don’t know if you want to be that guy.
Jimmy Wales (00:53:58): Well, there’s definitely some really charged ones like alt-right, I think it’s quite complicated and tough. It’s not completely meaningless label, but boy, I think you really have to pause before you actually put that label on someone, partly because now you’re putting them in a group of people, some of whom are quite, you wouldn’t want to be grouped with.
Lex Fridman (00:54:20): Let’s go into some, you mentioned the hot water of the pool that we’re both tipping a toe in. Do you think Wikipedia has a left leaning political bias, which is something it is sometimes accused of?
Jimmy Wales (00:54:31): Yeah, so I don’t think so, not broadly. And I think you can always point to specific entries and talk about specific biases, but that’s part of the process of Wikipedia. Anyone can come and challenge and to go on about that. But I see fairly often on Twitter, some quite extreme accusations of bias. And I think actually I don’t see it. I don’t buy that. And if you ask people for an example, they normally struggle and depending on who they are and what it’s about. So it’s certainly true that some people who have quite fringe viewpoints and who knows the full rush of history in 500 years, they might be considered to be pathbreaking geniuses. But at the moment, quite fringe views. And they’re just unhappy that Wikipedia doesn’t report on their fringe views as being mainstream. And that, by the way, goes across all kinds of fields.
Jimmy Wales (00:55:36): I was once accosted on the street outside the TED Conference in Vancouver by a guy who was a homeopath who was very upset that Wikipedia’s entry on homeopathy basically says it’s pseudoscience. And he felt that was biased. And I said, “Well, I can’t really help you because we cite good quality sources to talk about the scientific status, and it’s not very good.” So it depends, and I think it’s something that we should always be vigilant about. But in general, I think we’re pretty good. And I think any time you go to any serious political controversy, we should have a pretty balanced perspective on whose saying what and what the views are and so forth. I would actually argue that the areas where we are more likely to have bias that persists for a long period of time are actually fairly obscure things, or maybe fairly non-political things.
Jimmy Wales (00:56:40): I just give, it’s kind of a humorous example, but it’s meaningful. If you read our entries about Japanese anime, they tend to be very, very positive and very favorable because almost no one knows about Japanese anime except for fans. And so the people who come and spend their days writing Japanese anime articles, they love it. They kind of have an inherent love for the whole area. Now they’ll of course, being human beings, they have their internal debates and disputes about what’s better or not. But in general, they’re quite positive because nobody actually cares. On anything that people are quite passionate about, then hopefully there’s quite a lot of interesting stuff.
Jimmy Wales (00:57:20): So I’ll give an example, a contemporary example where I think we’ve done a good job as of my most recent sort of look at it, and that is the question about the efficacy of masks during the COVID pandemic. And that’s an area where I would say the public authorities really jerked us all around a bit. In the very first days, they said, “Whatever you do, don’t rush on and buy masks.” And their concern was shortages in hospitals, fair enough. Later it’s like, no, everybody’s got to wear a mask everywhere. It really works really well. And then now I think it’s, the evidence is mixed, right? Masks seem to help, in my personal view, masks seem to help. They’re no huge burden. You might as well wear a mask in any environment where you’re with a giant crowd of people and so forth.
Jimmy Wales (00:58:13): But it’s very politicized, that one, and it’s very politicized, where certainly in the US, much more so. I live in the UK, I live in London, I’ve never seen on the streets the kind of the thing that there’s a lot of reports of people actively angry because someone else is wearing a mask, that sort of thing in public. So because it became very politicized, then clearly if Wikipedia… No, so anyway, if you go to Wikipedia and you research this topic, I think you’ll find more or less what I’ve just said. Oh, actually after it’s all to this point in history, it’s mixed evidence like masks seemed to help, but maybe not as much as some of the authorities said. And here we are.
Jimmy Wales (00:58:56): And that’s kind of an example where I think, okay, we’ve done a good job, but I suspect there are people on both sides of that very emotional debate who think, this is ridiculous. Hopefully we’ve got quality sources. So then hopefully those people who read this can say, oh, actually it is complicated. If you can get to the point of saying, okay, I have my view, but I understand other views and I do think it’s a complicated question, great, now we’re a little bit more mature as a society.
Lex Fridman (00:59:24): Well, that one is an interesting one because I feel like I hope that that article also contains the meta conversation about the politicization of that topic. To me, it’s almost more interesting than whether masks work or not, at least at this point. It’s like why masks became a symbol of the oppression of a centralized government. If you wear them, you’re a sheep that follows the mask control the mass hysteria of an authoritarian regime. And if you don’t wear a mask, then you are a science denier, anti- vaxxer, an alt-right, probably a Nazi.
Jimmy Wales (01:00:07): Exactly. And that whole politicization of society is just so damaging, and I don’t know, in the broader world, how do we start to fix that? That’s a really hard question.
Lex Fridman (01:00:21): Well, at every moment, because you mentioned mainstream and fringe, there seems to be a tension here, and I wonder what your philosophy is on it because there’s mainstream ideas and there’s fringe ideas. You look at lab leak theory for this virus. That could be other things we can discuss where there’s a mainstream narrative where if you just look at the percent of the population or the population with platforms, what they say, and then what is a small percentage in opposition to that, and what is Wikipedia’s responsibility to accurately represent both the mainstream and the fringe, do you think?
Jimmy Wales (01:01:05): Well, I think we have to try to do our best to recognize both, but also to appropriately contextualize. And so this can be quite hard, particularly when emotions are high. That’s just a fact about human beings. I’ll give a simpler example, because there’s not a lot of emotion around it. Like our entry on the moon doesn’t say, some say the moon’s made of rocks, some say cheese, who knows? That kind of false neutrality is not what we want to get to. That doesn’t make any sense, but that one’s easy. We all understand. I think there is a Wikipedia entry called something like the moon is made of cheese, where it talks about this is a common sort of joke or thing that children say or that people tell to children or whatever. It’s just a thing. Everyone’s heard moon’s made of cheese, but nobody thinks, wow, Wikipedia is so one-sided it doesn’t even acknowledge the cheese theory. I say the same thing about flat Earth, again, very-
Lex Fridman (01:02:08): That’s exactly what I’m looking up right now.
Jimmy Wales (01:02:09): … very little controversy. We will have an entry about flat Earth, theorizing, flat Earth people. My personal view is most of the people who claim to be flat earthers are just having a laugh, trolling and more power to them, have some fun, but let’s not be ridiculous.
Lex Fridman (01:02:31): Then of course, for mostly human history, people believe that the Earth is flat, so the article I’m looking at is actually kind of focusing on this history. Flat Earth is an archaic and scientifically disproven conception of the Earth’s shape as a plain or disc, meaning ancient cultures subscribe to a flat Earth cosmography with pretty cool pictures of what a flat Earth would look like, with dragon, is that a dragon no angels on the edge. There’s a lot of controversy about that. What is it the edge? Is it the wall? Is it angels, is it dragons, is there a dome?
Jimmy Wales (01:03:00): And how can you fly from South Africa to Perth? Because on a flat Earth view, that’s really too far for any plane to make it because-
Lex Fridman (01:03:09): What I want to know-
Jimmy Wales (01:03:10): It’s all spread out.
Lex Fridman (01:03:11): What I want to know is what’s on the other side, Jimmy, what’s on the other side? That’s what all of us want to know. So I presume there’s probably a small section about the conspiracy theory of flat Earth, because I think there’s a sizeable percent of the population who at least will say they believe in a flat Earth.
Jimmy Wales (01:03:31): Yeah.
Lex Fridman (01:03:32): I think it is a movement that just says that the mainstream narrative to have distrust and skepticism about the mainstream narrative, which to a very small degree, is probably a very productive thing to do as part of the scientific process. But you can get a little silly and ridiculous with it.
Jimmy Wales (01:03:49): Yeah, I mean it’s exactly right. And so I think I find on many, many cases, and of course I, like anybody else, might quibble about this or that in any Wikipedia article, but in general, I think there is a pretty good sort of willingness and indeed eagerness to say, oh, let’s fairly represent all of the meaningfully important sides. So there’s still a lot to unpack in that, right? So meaningfully important. So people who are raising questions about the efficacy of masks, okay, that’s actually a reasonable thing to have a discussion about, and hopefully we should treat that as a fair conversation to have and actually address which authorities have said what and so on and so forth. And then there are other cases where it’s not meaningful opposition, you just wouldn’t say. I doubt if the main article Moon, it may mention cheese, probably not even because it’s not credible and it’s not even meant to be serious by anyone, or the article on the Earth certainly won’t have a paragraph that says, well, most scientists think it’s round, but certain people think flat.
Jimmy Wales (01:05:12): That’s just a silly thing to put in that article. You would want to sort of address that’s an interesting cultural phenomenon. You want to put it somewhere. So this goes into all kinds of things about politics. You want to be really careful, really thoughtful about not getting caught up in the anger of our times and really recognize. Yes, I always thought… I remember being really kind of proud of the US at the time when it was McCain was running against Obama because I thought, “Oh, I’ve got plenty of disagreements with both of them, but they both seem like thoughtful and interesting people who I would have different disagreements with.” But I always felt like, yeah, that that’s good, now we can have a debate. Now we can have an interesting debate. And it isn’t just people slamming each other, personal attacks and so forth.
Jimmy Wales (01:06:00): It isn’t just people slamming each other with personal attacks and so forth.
Lex Fridman (01:06:05): You’re saying Wikipedia has also represented that?
Jimmy Wales (01:06:09): I hope so. Yeah, and I think so in the main. Obviously, you can always find debate that went horribly wrong because there’s humans involved.
Lex Fridman (01:06:18): But speaking of those humans, I would venture to guess, I don’t know the data, maybe you can let me know, but the personal political leaning of the group of people who had a Wikipedia probably leans left, I would guess. To me, the question there is, I mean the same is true for Silicon Valley, the task for Silicon Valley is to create platforms that are not politically biased even though there is a bias for the engineers who create it. I believe it’s possible to do that. There’s conspiracy theories that it somehow is impossible, and there’s this whole conspiracy where the left is controlling it, and so on. I think engineers, for the most part, want to create platforms that are open and unbiased that create all kinds of perspective because that’s super exciting to have all kinds of perspectives battle it out, but still is there a degree to which the personal political bias of the editors might seep in in silly ways and in big ways?
Lex Fridman (01:07:22): Silly ways could be, I think, hopefully I’m correct in saying this, but the right will call it the Democrat Party and the left will call it the Democratic Party, right? It always hits my ear weird. Are we children here? We’re literally taking words and just jabbing at each other. Yeah, I could capitalize a thing in a certain way, or I can just take a word and mess with them. That’s a small way of how you use words, but you can also have a bigger way about beliefs, about various perspectives on political events, on Hunter Biden’s laptop, on how big of a story that is or not, how big the censorship of that story is or not, and then there’s these camps to take very strong points and they construct big narratives around that. It’s a very sizable percent of the population believes the two narratives that compete with each other.
Jimmy Wales (01:08:21): Yeah. It’s really interesting and it’s hard to judge the sweep of history within your own lifetime, but it feels like it’s gotten much worse, that this idea of two parallel universes where people can agree on certain basic facts feels worse than it used to be. I’m not sure if that’s true or if it just feels that way, but I’m not sure what the causes are. I think I would lay a lot of the blame in recent years on social media algorithms, which reward clickbait headlines, which reward tweets that go viral, and they go viral because they’re cute and clever.
Jimmy Wales (01:09:13): My most successful tweet ever by a fairly wide margin, some reporter tweeted at Elon Musk because he was complaining about Wikipedia or something, “You should buy Wikipedia,” and I just wrote, “Bot for sale,” and 90 zillion retweets, and people liked it, and it was all very good, but I’m like, “You know what? It’s cute line and it’s a good mic drop,” and all that, and I was pleased with myself. I’m like, “It’s not really a discourse.” It’s not really what I like to do, but it’s what social media really rewards, which is kind of a let’s you and him have a fight, and that’s more interesting. It’s funny because at the time, I was texting with Elon who’s very pleasant to me, and all of that.
Lex Fridman (01:10:01): He might have been a little bit shitty, the reporter might have been a little bit shitty, but you fed into the shitty with a snarky funny of response, “Not for sale,” and where do you… That’s a funny little exchange, and you can probably after that laugh it off and it’s fun, but that kind of mechanism that rewards the snark can go into viciousness.
Jimmy Wales (01:10:22): Yeah. Well, and we certainly see it online. A series of tweets, sort of a tweet thread of 15 tweets that assesses the quality of the evidence for masks, pros and cons, and sort of wear this, that’s not going to go viral, but a SmackDown for a famous politician who was famously in favor of mask, who also went to a dinner and didn’t wear a mask, that’s going to go viral, and that’s partly human nature. People love to call out hypocrisy and all of that, but it’s partly what these systems elevate automatically. I talk about this with respect to Facebook, for example. I think Facebook has done a pretty good job, although it’s taken longer than it should in some cases, but if you have a very large following and you’re really spouting hatred or misinformation, disinformation, they’ve kicked people off.
Jimmy Wales (01:11:24): They’ve done some reasonable things there, but actually, the deeper issue of the anger we’re talking about, of the contentiousness of everything, I make of a family example with two great stereotypes. One, the crackpot racist uncle, and one, the sweet grandma. I always want to point out all of my uncles in my family were wonderful people, so I didn’t have a crackpot racist, but everybody knows the stereotype. Well, so grandma, she just posts sweet comments on the kids’ pictures and congratulates people on their wedding anniversary, and crackpot uncle’s posting his nonsense. Normally, it’s at Christmas dinner, everybody rolls their eyes, “Oh, yeah, Uncle Frank’s here, and he is probably going to say some racist comment and we’re going to tell him to shut up, or maybe let’s not invite him this year.” Normal human drama. He’s got his three mates down at the pub who listen to him and all of that, but now grandma’s got 54 followers on Facebook, which is the intimate family, and racist uncle has 714, so he’s not a massive influence or whatever, but how did that happen?
Jimmy Wales (01:12:36): It’s because the algorithm notices when she posts, nothing happens. He posts and then everybody jumps in to go, “God, shut up, Uncle Frank. That’s outrageous,” and there’s engagement, there’s page views, there’s ads. Those algorithms, I think they’re working to improve that, but it’s really hard for them. It’s hard to improve that if that actually is working. If the people who are saying things that get engagement, if it’s not too awful, but it’s just, maybe it’s not a racist uncle, but maybe it’s an uncle who posts a lot about what an idiot Biden is, which isn’t necessarily an offensive or blockable or bannable thing, and it shouldn’t be, but if that’s the discourse that gets elevated because it gets a rise out of people, then suddenly in a society, it’s like, “Oh, we get more of what we reward,” so I think that’s a piece of what’s gone on.
Lex Fridman (01:13:28): Well, if we could just take that tangent. I’m having a conversation with Mark Zuckerberg second time. Is there something you can comment on how to decrease toxicity on that particular platform, Facebook? You also have worked on creating a social network that is less toxic yourself, so can we just talk about the different ideas that these already big social network can do and what you have been trying to do?
Jimmy Wales (01:13:55): A piece of it is it’s hard. The problem with making a recommendation to Facebook is that I actually believe their business model makes it really hard for them, and I’m not anti-capitalism, I’m not, “Great. Somebody’s got business, they’re making money,” that’s not where I come from, but certain business models mean you are going to prioritize things that maybe aren’t longterm healthful, and so that’s a big piece of it. Certainly, for Facebook, you could say with vast resources, start to prioritize content that’s higher quality, that’s healing, that’s kind. Try not to prioritize content that seems to be just getting a rise out of people. Now, those are vague human descriptions, but I do believe good machine running algorithms, you can optimize in slightly different ways, but to do that, you may have to say, “Actually, we’re not necessarily going to increase page views to the maximum extent right now.”
Jimmy Wales (01:14:59): I’ve said this to people at Facebook. It’s like if your actions are convincing people that you’re breaking Western civilization, that’s a really bad for business in the long run. Certainly, these days, I’ll say, Twitter is the thing that’s on people’s minds as being more upsetting at the moment, but I think it’s true. One of the things that’s really interesting about Facebook compared to a lot of companies is that Mark has a pretty unprecedented amount of power. His ability to name members of the board, his control of the company is pretty hard to break even if financial results aren’t as good as they could be because he’s taken a step back from the perfect optimization to say, “Actually, for the longterm health in the next 50 years of this organization, we need to reign in some of the things that are working for us in making money because they’re actually giving us a bad reputation.” One of the recommendations I would say is, and this is not to do with the algorithms and all that, but how about just a moratorium on all political advertising?
Jimmy Wales (01:16:11): I don’t think it’s their most profitable segment, but it’s given rise to a lot of deep, hard questions about dark money, about ads that are run by questionable people that push false narratives, or the classic kind of thing is you run… I saw a study about Brexit in the UK where people were talking about there were ads run to animal rights activists saying, “Finally, when we’re out from under Europe, the UK can pass proper animal rights legislation. We’re not constrained by the European process.” Similarly, for people who are advocates of fox hunting to say, “Finally, when we’re out of Europe, we can re-implement…” You’re telling people what they want to hear, and in some cases, it’s really hard for journalists to see that, so it used to be that for political advertising, you really needed to find some kind of mainstream narrative, and this is still true to an extent, mainstream narrative that 60% of people can say, “Oh, I can buy into that,” which meant it pushed you to the center.
Jimmy Wales (01:17:20): It pushed you to try and find some nuance balance, but if your main method of recruiting people is a tiny little one-on-one conversation with them, because you’re able to target using targeted advertising, suddenly you don’t need consistent. You just need a really good targeting operation, really good Cambridge analytic style machine learning algorithm data to convince people. That just feels really problematic, so until they can think about how to solve that problem, I would just say, “You know what? It’s going to cost us X amount,” but it’s going to be worth it to kind of say, “You know what? We actually think our political advertising policy hasn’t really helped contribute to discourse and dialogue in finding reasoned middle ground and compromise solutions, so let’s just not do that for a while until we figure that out,” so that’s maybe a piece of advice.
Lex Fridman (01:18:15): Coupled with, as you were saying, recommender systems for the newsfeed and other contexts that don’t always optimize engagement, but optimize the long term mental wellbeing and balance and growth of a human being, but it’s a very difficult problem.
Jimmy Wales (01:18:33): It’s a difficult problem. Yeah. With WT Social, WikiTribune Social, we’re launching in a few months time a completely new system, new domain, and new lots of things, but the idea is to say let’s focus on trust. People can rate each other as trustworthy, rate content as trustworthy. You have to start from somewhere so it’ll start with a core base of our tiny community who, I think, are sensible, thoughtful people, want to recruit more, but to say, “You know what? Actually, let’s have that as a pretty strong element,” to say let’s not optimize based on what gets the most paid views in this session, let’s optimize on what the feedback from people is, this is meaningfully enhancing my life. Part of that is, and it’s probably not a good business model, but part of that is say, “Okay, we’re not going to pursue an advertising business model, but a membership model where you don’t have to be a member, but you can pay to be a member.”
Jimmy Wales (01:19:36): You maybe get some benefit from that, but in general, to say, actually the problem with… Actually, the division I would say is, and the analogy I would give is broadcast television funded by advertising gives you a different result than paying for HBO, paying for Netflix, paying for whatever. The reason is, if you think about it, what is your incentive as a TV producer? You’re going to make a comedy for ABC Network in the US, you basically say, “I want something that almost everybody will like and listen to,” so it tends to be a little blander, family-friendly, whatever. Whereas if you say, “Oh, actually,” I’m not going to use the HBO example, and an old example, you say, “You know what? Sopranos isn’t for everybody, Sex and the City isn’t for everybody, but between the two shows, we’ve got something for everybody that they’re willing to pay for,” so you can get edgier, higher quality in my own view content rather than saying it’s got to not offend anybody in the world. It’s got to be for everybody, which is really hard.
Jimmy Wales (01:20:47): Same thing here in a social network. If your business model is advertising, it’s going to drive you in one direction. If your business model is membership, I think it drives you in a different direction. Actually, and I’ve said this to Elon about Twitter Blue, which I think wasn’t rolled out well and so forth, but the piece of that that I like is to say, look, actually, if there’s a model where your revenue is coming from people who are willing to pay for the service, even if it’s only part of your revenue, if it’s a substantial part, that does change your broader incentives to say, actually, are people going to be willing to pay for something that’s actually just toxicity in their lives? Now, I’m not sure it’s been rolled out well, I’m not sure how it’s going, and maybe I’m wrong about that as a plausible business model, but I do think it’s interesting to think about, just in broad terms, business model drives outcomes in sometimes surprising ways unless you really pause to think about it.
Lex Fridman (01:21:46): If we can just link on Twitter and Elon before… I would love to talk to you about the underlying business model, Wikipedia, which is this brilliant, bold move at the very beginning, but since you mentioned Twitter, what do you think works? What do you think is broken about Twitter?
Jimmy Wales (01:22:03): It’s a long conversation, but to start with, one of the things that I always say is it’s a really hard problem, so I concede that right up front. I said this about the old ownership of Twitter and the new ownership of Twitter because unlike Wikipedia, and this is true actually for all social media, there’s a box, and the box basically says, “What do you think? What’s on your mind?” You can write whatever the hell you want, right? This is true, by the way, even for YouTube. I mean the box is to upload a video, but again, it’s just an open-ended invitation to express yourself.
Jimmy Wales (01:22:38): What makes that hard is some people have really toxic, really bad, some people are very aggressive, they’re actually stalking, they’re actually abusive, and suddenly, you deal with a lot of problems. Whereas at Wikipedia, there is no box that says, “What’s on your mind?” There’s a box that says, “This is an entry about the moon. Please be neutral. Please set your facts.” Then there’s a talk page which is not coming rant about Donald Trump. If you go on the talk page of the Donald Trump entry and you just start ranting about Donald Trump, people would say, “What are you doing? Stop doing that. We’re not here to discuss. There’s a whole world of the internet out there for you to go and rant about Donald Trump.”
Lex Fridman (01:23:17): It’s just not fun to do on Wikipedia as somehow as fun on Twitter.
Jimmy Wales (01:23:20): Well, also on Wikipedia, people are going to say, “Stop,” and, “Actually, are you here to tell us how can we improve the article or are you just here to rant about Trump? Because that’s not actually interesting.” Because the goal is different, so that’s just admitting and saying upfront, this is a hard problem. Certainly, I’m writing a book on trust. The idea is, in the last 20 years, we’ve lost trust in all kinds of institutions, in politics. The Edelman Trust Barometer Survey has been done for a long time, and trust in politicians, trust in journalism, it’s come declined substantially, and I think in many cases, deservedly, so how do we restore trust and how do we think about that?
Lex Fridman (01:24:07): Does that also include trust in the idea of truth?
Jimmy Wales (01:24:13): Trust in the idea of truth. Even the concept of facts and truth is really, really important, and the idea of uncomfortable truths is really important. When we look at Twitter and we can see, okay, this is really hard, so here’s my story about Twitter. It’s a two-part story, and it’s all pre Elon Musk ownership. Many years back, somebody accused me of horrible crimes on Twitter, and like anybody would, I was like… I’m in the public eye. People say bad things. I don’t really… I brush it off, whatever, but I’m like, “This is actually really bad.” Accusing me of pedophilia? That’s just not okay, so I thought, “I’m going to report this,” so I click report, and I report the tweet and there’s five others, and I report, and I go through the process, and then I get an email that says whatever, a couple of hours later saying, “Thank you for your report. We’re looking into this.” Great. Okay, good.
Jimmy Wales (01:25:16): Then several hours further, I get an email back saying, “Sorry, we don’t see anything here to violate our terms of use,” and I’m like, “Okay,” so I emailed Jack and I say, “Jack, come on. This is ridiculous,” and he emails back roughly saying, “Yeah, sorry, Jimmy. Don’t worry. We’ll sort this out.” I just thought to myself, “You know what? That’s not the point. I’m Jimmy Wales, I know Jack Dorsey. I can email Jack Dorsey. He’ll listen to me because he’s got an email from me and sorts it out for me.” What about the teenager who’s being bullied and is getting abuse and getting accusations that aren’t true? Are they getting the same kind of really poor result in that case? Fast-forward a few years, same thing happens. The exact quote, it goes, “Please help me. I’m only 10 years old, and Jimmy Wales raped me last week.” I was like, “Come on. Fuck off. That’s ridiculous,” so I report. I’m like, “This time I’m reporting,” but I’m thinking, “Well, we’ll see what happens.”
Jimmy Wales (01:26:15): This one gets even worse because then I get a same result email back saying, “Sorry, we don’t see any problems,” so I raised it with other members of the board who I know, and Jack, and like, “This is really ridiculous. This is outrageous,” and some of the board members, friends of mine, sympathetic, and so good for them, but I actually got an email back then from the general counsel head of trust and safety saying, “Actually, there’s nothing in this tweet that violates our terms of service. We don’t regard and gave reference to the Me Too Movement. If we didn’t allow accusations, the Me Too Movement, it’s an important thing,” and I was like, “You know what? Actually, if someone says, ‘I’m 10 years old and someone raped me last week,’ I think the advice should be, ‘Here’s the phone number of the police.’ You need to get the police involved. Twitter’s not the place for that accusation.”
Jimmy Wales (01:27:05): Even back then… By the way, they did delete those tweets, but the rationale they gave is spammy behavior, so completely separate from abusing me. It was just like, “Oh, well, they were retweeting too often.” Okay, whatever. That’s just broken. That’s a system that it’s not working for people in the public eye. I’m sure it’s not working for private people who get abuse. Really horrible abuse can happen. How is that today? Well, it hasn’t happened to me since Elon took over, but I don’t see why it couldn’t, and I suspect now if I send a report and email someone, there’s no one there to email me back because he’s gotten rid of a lot of the trust and safety staff, so I suspect that problem is still really hard.
Lex Fridman (01:27:46): Just content moderation at huge scales.
Jimmy Wales (01:27:49): At huge scales is really something. I don’t know the full answer to this. A piece of it could be to say, “Actually, making specific allegations of crimes, this isn’t the place to do that. We’ve got a huge database. If you’ve got an accusation of crime, here’s who should call, the police, the FBI, whatever it is. It’s not to be done in public,” and then you do face really complicated questions about Me Too Movement and people coming forward in public and all of that, but again, it’s like probably you should talk to a journalist. Probably there are better avenues than just tweeting from an account that was created 10 days ago, obviously set up to abuse someone. I think they could do a lot better, but I also admit it’s a hard problem.
Lex Fridman (01:28:38): There’s also ways to indirectly or more humorously or a more mocking way to make the same kinds of accusations. In fact, the accusations you mentioned, if I were to guess, don’t go that viral because they’re not funny enough or cutting enough, but if you make it witty and cutting and meme it somehow, sometimes actually indirectly making an accusation versus directly making an accusation, that can go viral and that can destroy reputations, and you get to watch yourself. Just all kinds of narratives take hold.
Jimmy Wales (01:29:09): Yeah, no, I remember another case that didn’t bother me because it wasn’t of that nature, but somebody was saying, “I’m sure you’re making millions off of Wikipedia,” and I’m like, “No, actually, I don’t even work there. I have no salary,” and they’re like, “You’re lying. I’m going to check your 990 form,” which is the US form for tax reporting for charities, and I was like, “Yeah, here’s the link. Go read it and you’ll see I’m listed as a board member, and my salary is listed as zero.” Things like that, it’s like, “Okay.” That one, that feels like you’re wrong, but I can take that and we can have that debate quite quickly.
Jimmy Wales (01:29:52): Again, it didn’t go viral because it was kind of silly, and if anything would’ve gone viral, it was me responding, but that’s one where it’s like, actually, I’m happy to respond because a lot of people don’t know that I don’t work there and that I don’t make millions, and I’m not a billionaire. Well, they must know that because it’s in most news media about me, but the other one, I didn’t respond to publicly because it’s like Barbara Streisand effect. It’s like sometimes calling attention to someone who’s abusing you who basically has no followers and so on is just a waste.
Lex Fridman (01:30:24): And everything you’re describing now is just something that all of us have to learn because everybody’s in the public eye. I think when you have just two followers and you get bullied by one of the followers, it hurts just as much as when you have a large number, so it’s not… Your situation, I think it’s echoed in the situations of millions of other, especially teenagers and kids and so on.
Jimmy Wales (01:30:43): Yeah, no, it’s actually an example. We don’t generally use my picture and the banners anymore on Wikipedia, but we did, and then we did an experiment one year where we tried other people’s pictures, so one of our developers, and one lovely, very sweet guy, and he doesn’t look like your immediate thought of a nerdy Silicon Valley developer. He looks like a heavy metal dude because he’s cool. Suddenly, here he is with long hair and tattoos, and there’s his sort of say, “Here’s what your money goes for. Here’s my letter asking for support,” and he got massive abuse from Wikipedia, like calling him creepy, and really massive. This was being shown to 80 million people a day, his picture, not the abuse. The abuse was elsewhere on the internet. He was bothered by it.
Jimmy Wales (01:31:39): I thought, “You know what? There is a difference.” I actually am in the public eye. I get huge benefits from being in the public eye. I go around and make public speeches. Any random thing I think of, I can write and get it published in the New York Times, and I have this interesting life. He’s not a public figure, and so actually he wasn’t mad at us. It was just like, actually, suddenly being thrust in the public eye and you get suddenly lots of abuse, which normally, I think if you’re a teenager and somebody in your class is abusing you, it’s not going to go viral. It’s going to be hurtful because it’s local and it’s your classmates or whatever, but when ordinary people go viral in some abusive way, it’s really, really quite tragic.
Lex Fridman (01:32:24): I don’t know. Even at a small scale, it feels viral. When five people at your school, and there’s a rumor, and there’s this feeling like you’re surrounded, and the feeling of loneliness, I think, which you’re speaking to when you at least feel like you don’t have a platform to defend yourself, and then this powerlessness, that I think a lot of teenagers definitely feel, and a lot of people-
Jimmy Wales (01:32:49): I think you’re right.
Lex Fridman (01:32:51): I think even when just two people make up stuff about you or lie about you or say mean things about you or bully you, that can feel like a crowd.
Jimmy Wales (01:33:01): Yeah. No, that’s true.
Lex Fridman (01:33:03): Whatever that is in our genetics and our biology and the way our brain works, that just can be a terrifying experience. Somehow, to correct that, I think because everybody feels the pain of that, everybody suffers the pain of that, I think we’ll be forced to fix that as a society, to figure out a way around that.
Jimmy Wales (01:33:22): I think it’s really hard to fix because I don’t think that problem isn’t necessarily new. Someone in high school who writes graffiti that says, “Becky is a slut,” and spreads a rumor about what Becky did last weekend, that’s always been damaging, it’s always been hurtful, and that’s really hard.
Lex Fridman (01:33:45): Those kinds of attacks, there is oldest time itself, they proceed the internet. Now, what do you think about this technology that feels Wikipedia like, which is community notes on Twitter? Do you like it? Pros and cons? Do you think it’s scalable?
Jimmy Wales (01:34:00): I do like it. I don’t know enough about specifically how it’s implemented to really have a very deep view, but I do think it’s quite… The uses I’ve seen of it, I’ve found quite good, and in some cases, changed my mind. It’s like I see something, and of course, the human tendency is to retweet something that you hope is true or that you are afraid is true, or it’s that kind of quick mental action. Then I saw something that I liked and agreed with, and then a community note under it that made me think, “Oh, actually, this is a more nuanced issue,” so I like that. I think that’s really important. Now, how is it specifically implemented? Is it scalable or that? I don’t really know how they’ve done it, so I can’t really comment on that, but in general, I do think when your only mechanisms on Twitter, and you’re a big Twitter user, we know the platform and you’ve got plenty of followers and all of that, the only mechanisms are retweeting, replying, blocking.
Jimmy Wales (01:35:13): It’s a pretty limited scope, and it’s kind of good if there’s a way to elevate a specific thoughtful response. It kind of goes to, again, does the algorithm just pick the retweet or the… I mean retweeting, it’s not even the algorithm that makes it viral. If Paulo Coelho, very famous author, I think he’s got… I don’t know. I haven’t looked lately. He used to have eight million Twitter followers. I think I looked, he’s got 16 million now or whatever. Well, if he retweets something, it’s going to get seen a lot. Elon Musk, if he retweets something, it’s going to get seen a lot. That’s not an algorithm. That’s just the way the platform works. So, it is kind of nice if you have something else, and how that’s something else is designed, that’s obviously complicated question.
Lex Fridman (01:35:58): Well, there’s this interesting thing that I think Twitter is doing, but I know Facebook is doing for sure, which is really interesting. What are the signals that a human can provide at scale? In Twitter, it’s retweet. In Facebook, I think you can share. I think, yeah, but there’s basic interactions, you can have comment and so on, but there’s also, in Facebook, and YouTube has this too is, “Would you like to see more of this or would you like to see less of this?” They post that sometimes. The thing that the neural net that’s learning from that has to figure out is the intent behind you saying, “I want to see less of this.”
Lex Fridman (01:36:39): Did you see too much of this content already? You like it, but you don’t want to see so much of it. You already figured it out, great. Or does this content not make you feel good? There’s so many interpretations that I would like to see less of this, but if you get that kind of signal, this actually can create a really powerfully curated list of content that is fed to you every day that doesn’t create an echo chamber or a silo, that actually just makes you feel good in the good way, which it challenges you, but it doesn’t exhaust you and make you this weird animal.
Jimmy Wales (01:37:20): I’ve been saying for a long time, if I went on Facebook one morning and they said, Ooh, we’re testing a new option. Rather than showing you things we think you’re going to like, we want to show you some things that we think you will disagree with, but which we have some signals that suggest it’s of quality,” I’m like, “Now, that sounds interesting.”
Lex Fridman (01:37:40): Yeah, that sounds really interesting.
Jimmy Wales (01:37:41): I want to see something where… Oh, I don’t agree with… Larry Lessig is a good friend of mine, founder of Creative Commons, and he’s moved on to doing stuff about corruption and politics and so on. I don’t always agree with Larry, but I always grapple with Larry because he’s so interesting and he’s so thoughtful, that even when we don’t agree, I’m like, “Actually, I want to hear him out because I’m going to learn from it,” and that doesn’t mean I always come around to agree with him, but I’m going to understand a perspective, and that’s really great feeling.
Lex Fridman (01:38:12): Yeah, there’s this interesting thing on social media where people accuse others of saying, “Well, you don’t want to hear opinions that you disagree with or ideas you disagree with.” I think this is something that’s thrown at me all the time. The reality is there’s literally almost nothing I enjoy more.
Jimmy Wales (01:38:29): It seems an odd thing to accuse you of because you have quite a wide range of long conversations with a very diverse bunch of people.
Lex Fridman (01:38:35): But there is a very, very harsh drop off because what I like is high quality disagreement. That really makes me think. At a certain point, there’s a threshold, it’s a kind of a gray area when the quality of the disagreement, it just sounds like mocking, and you’re not really interested in a deep understanding of the topic, or you yourself don’t seem to carry deep understanding of the topic. There’s something called intelligence square debates that may-
Lex Fridman (01:39:00): There’s something called Intelligence Squared debates. The main one is the British version. With the British accent, everything always sounds better. And the Brits seem to argue more intensely, like they’re invigorated, they’re energized by the debate. Those people I often disagree with, basically everybody involved, and it’s so fun. I learned something. That’s high quality. If we could do that, if there’s some way for me to click a button that says, “Filter out lower quality just today,” just sometimes show it to me because I want to be able to, but today I’m just not in the mood for the mockery.
Lex Fridman (01:39:38): Just high quality stuff, because even flat Earth, I want to get high quality arguments for the flat Earth. It would make me feel good because I would see, “Oh, that’s really interesting. I never really thought in my mind to challenge the mainstream narrative of general relativity, of a perception of physics. Maybe all of reality, maybe all of space is an illusion. That’s really interesting. I never really thought about, let me consider that fully. Okay, what’s the evidence? How would you test that? What are the alternatives? How would you be able to have such consistent perception of a physical reality, if it’s all of it is an illusion? All of us seem to share the same kind of perception of reality,” that’s the kind of stuff I love, but not the mockery of it that cheap, that it seems that social media can inspire.
Jimmy Wales (01:40:34): Yeah. I talk sometimes about how people assume that the big debates in Wikipedia or the arguments are between the party of the left and the party of the right. And I would say no, it’s actually the party of the kind and thoughtful and the party of the jerks, is really it. Left and yeah, yeah, bring me somebody I disagree with politically. As long as they’re thoughtful, kind, we’re going to have a real discussion. I give an example of our article on abortion: so, if you can bring together a kind and thoughtful Catholic priest and a kind and thoughtful Planned Parenthood activist and they’re going to work together on the article on abortion, that can be a really great thing, if they’re both kind and thoughtful. That’s the important part. They’re never going to agree on the topic, but they will understand, okay, Wikipedia is not going to take a side, but Wikipedia is going to explain what the debate is about, and we’re going to try to characterize it fairly.
Jimmy Wales (01:41:36): And it turns out your kind and thoughtful people, even if they’re quite ideological, like a Catholic priest is generally going to be quite ideological on the subject of abortion, but they can grapple with ideas and they can discuss, and they may feel very proud of the entry at the end of the day, not because they suppress the other side’s views, but because they think the case has been stated very well that other people can come to understand it. And if you’re highly ideological, you assume, I think naturally, “If people understood as much about this as I do, they’ll probably agree with me.” You may be wrong about that, but that’s often the case. So, that’s what I think we need to encourage more of in society generally, is grappling with ideas in a really thoughtful way.
Lex Fridman (01:42:21): So is it possible if the majority of volunteers, editors of Wikipedia really disliked Donald Trump, are they still able to write an article that empathizes with the perspective of, for time at least, a very large percentage of the United States that were supported of Donald Trump, and to have a full broad representation of him as a human being, him as a political leader, him as a set of policies promised and implemented, all that kind of stuff?
Jimmy Wales (01:42:55): Yeah, I think so. And I think if you read the article, it’s pretty good. And I think a piece of that is within our community, if people have the self-awareness to understand. So, I personally wouldn’t go and edit the entry on Donald Trump. I get emotional about it and I’m like, “I’m not good at this,” and if I tried to do it, I would fail. I wouldn’t be a good Wikipedian, so it’s better if I just step back and let people who are more dispassionate on this topic edit it. Whereas there are other topics that are incredibly emotional to some people where I can actually do quite well. I’m going to be okay. Maybe we were discussing earlier the efficacy of masks. I’m like, “Oh, I think that’s an interesting problem. And I don’t know the answer, but I can help catalog what’s the best evidence and so on.”
Jimmy Wales (01:43:48): I’m not going to get upset. I’m not going to get angry, able to be a good Wikipedian, so I think that’s important. And I do think though in a related framework that the composition of the community is really important. Not because Wikipedia is or should be a battleground, but because blind spots, like maybe I don’t even realize what’s biased if I’m particularly of a certain point of view, and I’ve never thought much about it. So one of the things we focus on a lot, the Wikipedia volunteers are, we don’t know the exact number, but let’s say 80% plus male, and they’re a certain demographic: they tend to be college educated, heavier on tech geeks than not, et cetera. So, there is a demographic to the community, and that’s pretty much global. Somebody said to me once, “Why is it only white men who edit Wikipedia?”, and I said, “You’ve obviously not met the Japanese Wikipedia community.”
Jimmy Wales (01:44:51): It’s a joke because the broader principle still stands, who edits Japanese Wikipedia? A bunch of geeky men, and women as well. So, we do have women in the community, and that’s very important. But we do think, “Okay, you know what, that does lead to some problems,” it leads to some content issues simply because people write more about what they know and what they’re interested in. They’ll tend to be dismissive of things as being unimportant if it’s not something that they personally have an interest in. I like the example, as a parent I would say our entries on early childhood development probably aren’t as good as they should be because a lot of the Wikipedia volunteers… Actually we’re getting older, the Wikipedians, so that demographic has changed a bit. But if you’ve got a bunch of 25 year old tech geek dudes who don’t have kids, they’re just not going to be interested in early childhood development. And if they tried to write about it, they probably wouldn’t do a good job, ’cause they don’t know anything about it.
Jimmy Wales (01:45:53): And somebody did a look at our entries on novelists who’ve won a major literary prize, and they looked at the male novelist versus the female, and the male novelists had longer and higher quality entries. And why is that? Well, it’s not because, ’cause I know hundreds of Wikipedian, it’s not because these are a bunch of biased, sexist men who like, “Books by women are not important.” No. Actually, there is a gender breakdown of readership. There are books, like hard science fiction’s a classic example, hard science fiction: mostly read by men. Other types of novels, more read by women. And if we don’t have women in the community, then these award-winning clearly important novelists may have less coverage. And not because anybody consciously thinks, “We don’t like a book by Maya Angelou. Who cares? She’s a poet. That’s not interesting.”
Jimmy Wales (01:46:55): No, but just because, well, people write what they know, they write what they’re interested in it. So, we do think diversity in the community is really important. And that’s one area where I do think it’s really clear. But I can also say, actually that also applies in the political sphere, to say, actually, we do want kind and thoughtful Catholic priests, kind and thoughtful conservatives, kind and thoughtful libertarians, kind and thoughtful Marxists to come in. But the key is the kind and thoughtful piece, so when people sometimes come to Wikipedia outraged by some dramatic thing that’s happened on Twitter, they come to Wikipedia with a chip on their shoulder ready to do battle, and it just doesn’t work out very well.
Lex Fridman (01:47:38): And there’s tribes in general where I think there’s a responsibility on the larger group to be even kinder and more welcoming to the smaller group.
Jimmy Wales (01:47:48): Yeah, we think that’s really important. And so oftentimes, people come in and there’s a lot… When I talk about community health, one of the aspects of that that we do think about a lot, that I think about a lot is not about politics. It’s just like, how are we treating newcomers to the community? And so, I can tell you what our ideals are, what our philosophy is, but do we live up to that? So the ideal is you come to Wikipedia, we have rules. One of our fundamental rules is ignore all rules, which is partly written that way because it piques people’s attention, like, “Oh, what the hell kind of rule is that?” But basically says, “Look, don’t get nervous and depressed about a bunch of what’s the formatting of your footnote?”, so you shouldn’t come to Wikipedia, add a link, and then get banned or yelled at because it’s not the right format.
Jimmy Wales (01:48:46): Instead, somebody should go, “Oh, hey. Yeah, thanks for helping, but here’s the link to how to format. If you want to keep going, you might want to learn how to format a footnote,” and to be friendly and to be open and to say, “Oh, right, oh, you’re new and you clearly don’t know everything about Wikipedia,” and sometimes in any community, that can be quite hard. So, people come in and they’ve got a great big idea, and they’re going to propose this to the Wikipedia community, and they have no idea. That’s basically a perennial discussion we’ve had 7,000 times before. And so then ideally, you would say to the person, “Oh yeah, great, thanks.” A lot of people have, and here’s where we got to and here’s the nuanced conversation we’ve had about that in the past that I think you’ll find interesting, and sometimes people are just like, “Oh God, another one, who’s come in with this idea which doesn’t work, and they don’t understand why.”
Lex Fridman (01:49:39): You can lose patience, but you shouldn’t.
Jimmy Wales (01:49:40): And that’s human, but I think it just does require really thinking in a self-aware manner of, “Oh, I was once a newbie.” Actually, I just did an interview with Emily Temple Woods, she was Wikipedian of the year, she’s just like a great, well-known Wikipedian. And I interviewed her for my book and she told me something I never knew, apparently it’s not secret, she didn’t reveal it to me, but it’s that when she started Wikipedia, she was a vandal. She came in and vandalized Wikipedia. And then basically what happened was she’d vandalized a couple of articles, and then somebody popped up on her talk page and said, “Hey, why are you doing this? We’re trying to make an encyclopedia here, and and this wasn’t very kind.”
Jimmy Wales (01:50:29): And she felt so bad. She’s like, “Oh, right. I didn’t really think of it that way.” She just was coming in, and she was 13 years old, combative and having fun, and trolling a bit. And then she’s like, “Oh, actually, I see your point,” and became a great Wikipedian. So that’s the ideal really, is that you don’t just go throw a block, “Fuck off.” You go, “Hey, what gives?”, which is I think the way we tend to treat things in real life, if you’ve got somebody who’s doing something obnoxious in your friend group, you probably go, “Hey, really, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I think this person is actually quite hurt that you keep making that joke about them.” And then they usually go, “Oh, I thought that was okay,” and then they stop, or they keep it up and then everybody goes, “Well, you’re the asshole.”
Lex Fridman (01:51:21): Well, yeah, that’s just an example that gives me faith in humanity that we’re all capable and wanting to be kind to each other. And in general, the fact that there’s a small group of volunteers, they’re able to contribute so much to the organization, the collection, the discussion of all of human knowledge is so it makes me so grateful to be part of this whole human project. That’s one of the reasons I love Wikipedia is gives me faith in humanity.
Jimmy Wales (01:51:53): Yeah, no, I once was at Wikimania is our annual conference and people come from all around the world, really active volunteers. I was at the dinner, we were in Egypt at Wikimania and Alexandria at the closing dinner or whatever, and a friend of mine came and sat at the table, and she’s been in the movement more broadly, creative commons, she’s not really a Wikipedian, she’d come to the conference because she’s into creative commons and all that. So we have dinner, and it just turned out I sat down at the table with most of the members of the English language arbitration committee, and they’re a bunch of very sweet, geeky Wikipedians.
Jimmy Wales (01:52:31): And as we left the table, I said to her, “I still find this sense of amazement, we just had dinner with some of the most powerful people in English language media,” because they’re the people who are the final court of appeal in English Wikipedia. And thank goodness they’re not media moguls. They’re just a bunch of geeks who are just well-liked in the community because they’re kind and they’re thoughtful and they really think about things. I was like, “This is great. Love Wikipedia.”
Lex Fridman (01:53:01): To the degree that geeks run the best aspect of human civilization brings me joy in all aspects. And this is true programming, like Linux programmers, people that kind of specialize in a thing, and they don’t really get caught up into the mess of the bickering of society. They just do their thing, and they value the craftsmanship of it, the competence of it.
Jimmy Wales (01:53:29): Yeah. If you’ve never heard of this or looked into it, you’ll enjoy it, I read something recently that I didn’t even know about, but the fundamental time zones, and they change from time to time. Sometimes, a country will pass daylight savings or move it by a week, whatever. There’s a file that’s on all Unix based computers, and basically all computers end up using this file, it’s the official time zone file. But why is it official? It’s just this one guy. It’s like this guy and a group of community around him.
Jimmy Wales (01:54:04): And basically, something weird happened and it broke something because he was on vacation. And I’m just like, isn’t that wild that you would think… First of all, most people never even think about how do computers know about time zones? Well, they know because they just use this file which tells all the time zones and which dates they change and all of that. But there’s this one guy, and he doesn’t get paid for it. With all the billions of people on the planet, he put his hand up and goes, “Yo, I’ll take care of the time zones.”
Lex Fridman (01:54:36): And there’s a lot of programmers listening to this right now with PTSD about time zones. On top of this one guy, there’s other libraries, the different programming languages that help manage the time zones for you. But still, within those, it’s amazing just the packages, the libraries, how few people build them out of their own love for building, for creating, for community and all of that. I almost like don’t want to interfere with the natural habitat of the geek. When you spot him in the wild, you just want to be like, “Well, careful, that thing needs to be treasured.”
Lex Fridman (01:55:16): No, I met a guy many years ago, lovely, really sweet guy, and he was running a bot on English Wikipedia that I thought, “Wow, that’s actually super clever.” And what he had done is his bot was like spell checking, but rather than simple spell checking, what he had done is create a database of words that are commonly mistaken for other words. They’re spelled wrong, so I can’t even give an example. And so, the word is people often spell it wrong, but no spell checker catches it because it is another word. And so, what he did is he wrote a bot that looks for these words and then checks the sentence around it for certain keywords. So in some context, this isn’t correct, but buoy and boy: people sometimes type B-O-Y when they mean B-O-U-Y, so if he sees the word boy, B-O-Y in an article, he would look in the context and see, is this a nautical reference? And if it was, he didn’t autocorrect, he just would flag it up to himself to go, “Oh, check this one out.”
Lex Fridman (01:56:23): And that’s not a great example, but he had thousands of examples, and I was like, “That’s amazing. I would’ve never thought to do that.” And I’m glad that somebody did. And that’s also part of the openness of the system, and also I think being a charity, being this idea of actually, this is a gift to the world that makes someone go, “Oh, well, I’ll put my hand up. I see a little piece of things I can make better because I’m a good programmer and I can write this script to do this thing, and I’ll find it fun,” amazing.
Lex Fridman (01:56:55): Well, I got to ask about this big, bold decision at the very beginning to not do advertisements on the website. And just in general, the philosophy of the business model of Wikipedia, what went behind that?
Jimmy Wales (01:57:06): Yeah, so I think most people know this, but we’re a charity, so in the US, registered as a charity. And we don’t have any ads on the site. And the vast majority of the money is from donations, but the vast majority from small donors. So, people giving $25 or whatever.
Lex Fridman (01:57:29): If you’re listening to this, go donate.
Jimmy Wales (01:57:31): Go donate.
Lex Fridman (01:57:31): Donate now.
Jimmy Wales (01:57:33): $25.
Lex Fridman (01:57:33): I’ve donated so many times
Jimmy Wales (01:57:34): And we have millions of donors every year, but it’s a small percentage of people. I would say in the early days, a big part of it was aesthetic, almost as much as anything else. It was just like, “I don’t really want ads in Wikipedia. There’s a lot of reasons why it might not be good.” And even back then, I didn’t think as much as I have since about a business model can tend to drive you in a certain place, and really thinking that through in advance is really important because you might say, “Yeah, we’re really, really keen on community control and neutrality,” but if we had an advertising based business model, probably that would begin to erode. Even if I believe in it very strongly, organizations tend to follow the money in the DNA in the long run.
Jimmy Wales (01:58:25): And so things like, it’s easy to think about some of the immediate problems. So if you go to read about, I don’t know, Nissan car company, and if you saw an ad for the new Nissan at the top of the page, you might be like, “Did they pay for this?”, or, “Do the advertisers have influence over the content?”, because of wonder about that for all kinds of media.
Lex Fridman (01:58:53): And that undermines trust.
Jimmy Wales (01:58:55): Undermines trust, right. But also, things like we don’t have clickbait headlines in Wikipedia. You’ve never seen Wikipedia entries with all these kind of listicles, “The 10 funniest cat pictures, number seven will make you cry,” none of that kind of stuff, because there’s no incentive, no reason to do that. Also, there’s no reason to have an algorithm to say, “Actually, we’re going to use our algorithm to drive you to stay on the website longer. We’re going to use the algorithm to drive you to…”, It’s like, “Oh, you’re reading about Queen Victoria. There’s nothing to sell you when you’re reading about Queen Victoria. Let’s move you on to Las Vegas because actually, the ad revenue around hotels in Las Vegas is quite good,” so there’s no incentive for the organization to go, “Oh, let’s move people around to things that have better ad revenue.”
Jimmy Wales (01:59:48): Instead, it’s just like, “Oh, well, what’s most interesting to the community?,” just to make those links. So, that decision just seemed obvious to me, but as I say, it was less of a business decision and more of an aesthetic. It’s like, “I like Wikipedia that doesn’t have ads.” In these early days, a lot of the ads, that was well before the era of really quality ad targeting and all that, so you got a lot of-
Lex Fridman (02:00:18): Banners.
Jimmy Wales (02:00:18): Banners, punch the monkey ads and all that kind of nonsense. But there was no guarantee. It was not really clear, how could we fund this? It was pretty cheap. It still is quite cheap compared to most. We don’t have 100,000 employees and all of that, but would we be able to raise money through donations? And so, I remember the first time that we really did a donation campaign was on a Christmas Day in 2003, I think it was. We had three servers, database servers, and two front end servers, and they were all the same size or whatever, and two of them crashed. They broke, I don’t even know, remember now, the hard drive. It was Christmas Day, so I scrambled on Christmas Day to go onto the database server, which fortunately survived, and have it become a front end server as well. And then, the site was really slow and it wasn’t working very well.
Jimmy Wales (02:01:28): And I was like, “Okay, it’s time. We need to do a fundraiser,” and so I was hoping to raise $20,000 in a month’s time, but we raised nearly $30,000 within two, three weeks time. So that was the first proof point of, “Oh, we put a batter up and people will donate,” we just explained we need the money. And we were very small back then, and people were like, “Oh yeah, I love this. I want to contribute.” Then over the years, we’ve become more sophisticated about the fundraising campaigns, and we’ve tested a lot of different messaging and so forth. What we used to think, I remember one year we really went heavy with, “The idea of Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia for every single person on the planet. So what about the languages of Sub-Saharan Africa?”
Jimmy Wales (02:02:20): So I thought, “Okay, we’re trying to raise money. We need to talk about that because it’s really important and near and dear to my heart,” and just instinctively knowing nothing about charity fundraising, you see it all around, it’s like, oh, charity’s always mentioned the poor people they’re helping, so let’s talk about. Didn’t really work as well. This is very vague and very broad, but the pitch that works better than any other in general is a fairness pitch of, “You use it all the time, you should probably chip in.” And most people are like, “Yeah, you know what? My life would suck without Wikipedia. I use it constantly and whatever. I should chip in, it just seems like the right thing to do.”
Jimmy Wales (02:03:02): And there’s many variants on that, obviously. And it works. And people are like, “Oh yeah, Wikipedia, I love Wikipedia, and I shouldn’t.” So sometimes people say, “Why are you always begging for money on the website?”, and it’s not that often, it’s not that much, but it does happen. They’re like, “Why don’t you just get Google and Facebook and Microsoft, why don’t they pay for it?”, and I’m like, “I don’t think that’s really the right answer.”
Lex Fridman (02:03:34): Influence starts to creep in.
Jimmy Wales (02:03:35): Influence starts to creep in, and questions start to creep in. The best funding for Wikipedia is the small donors. We also have major donors. We have high net worth people who donate, but we always are very careful about that sort of thing to say, “Wow, that’s really great and really important, but we can’t let that become influence because that would just be really quite not good for Wikipedia.”
Lex Fridman (02:04:01): I would love to know how many times I’ve visited Wikipedia, how much time I’ve spent on it, because I have a general sense that it’s the most useful site I’ve ever used, competing maybe with Google search, which ultimately lands on Wikipedia.
Jimmy Wales (02:04:01): Yeah, right.
Lex Fridman (02:04:20): But if I would just be reminded of like, “Hey, remember all those times your life was make better because of the site?”, I think I would be much more like, “Yeah, why did I waste money on site X, Y, Z when I should be giving a lot of it here?”
Jimmy Wales (02:04:33): Well, the Guardian newspaper has a similar model, which is they have ads. There’s no paywall, but they just encourage people to donate, and they do that. I’ve sometimes seen a banner saying, “Oh, this is your 134th article you’ve read this year, would you like to donate?” And I think it’s effective-
Lex Fridman (02:04:55): [inaudible 02:04:55].
Jimmy Wales (02:04:54): … they’re testing. But also, I wonder just for some people, if they just don’t feel like guilty and then think, “Oh, I shouldn’t bother them so much.” I don’t know. It’s a good question. I don’t know the answer.
Lex Fridman (02:05:06): I guess that’s the thing I could also turn on, ’cause that would make me… I feel like legitimately, there’s some sites, this speaks to our social media discussion: Wikipedia unquestionably makes me feel better about myself if I spend time on it. There’s some websites where I’m like, if I spend time on Twitter, sometimes I’m like, I regret. I think Elon talks about this, minimize the number of regretted minutes. My number of regretted minutes on Wikipedia is zero. I don’t remember a time… I’ve just discovered this. I started following on Instagram, a page, depthsofwikipedia.
Jimmy Wales (02:05:46): Oh, yeah.
Lex Fridman (02:05:47): There’s crazy Wikipedia pages. There’s no Wikipedia page that [inaudible 02:05:51]-
Jimmy Wales (02:05:51): Yeah, I gave her a media contributor of the year award this year because she’s so great.
Lex Fridman (02:05:55): Yeah, she’s amazing.
Jimmy Wales (02:05:57): Depthsofwikipedia is so fun.
Lex Fridman (02:05:59): Yeah, that’s the interesting point that I don’t even know if there’s a competitor. There may be the programming, Stack Overflow type of websites, but everything else, there’s always a trade-off. It’s probably because of the ad driven model because there’s an incentive to pull you into clickbait, and Wikipedia has no clickbait. It’s all about the quality of the knowledge and the wisdom.
Jimmy Wales (02:06:22): Yeah. No, that’s right. And I also Stack Overflow. Although I wonder what you think of this, so I only program for fun as a hobby, and I don’t have enough time to do it, but I do, and I’m not very good at it. So therefore, I end up on Stack Overflow quite a lot trying to figure out what’s gone wrong. And I have really transitioned to using ChatGPT much more for that because I can often find the answer clearly explained, and it works better than sifting through threads, and I feel bad about that because I do love Stack Overflow and their community. I’m assuming, I haven’t read anything about in the news about it, but I’m assuming they are keenly aware of this, and they’re thinking about, “How can we use this chunk of knowledge that we’ve got here and provide a new type of interface where you can query it with a question and actually get an answer that’s based on the answers that we’ve had?” I don’t know.
Lex Fridman (02:07:19): Mm-hmm. And I think Stack Overflow currently has policies against using GPT. There’s a contentious kind of tension.
Jimmy Wales (02:07:28): Of course, yeah.
Lex Fridman (02:07:29): But they’re trying to figure that out.
Jimmy Wales (02:07:30): Well, and so we are similar in that regard. Obviously, all the things we’ve talked about like ChatGPT makes stuff up and it makes up references, so our community has already put into place some policies about it. But roughly speaking, there’s always more nuance. But roughly speaking, it’s, you the human are responsible for what you put into Wikipedia. So, if you use ChatGPT, you better check it, ’cause there’s a lot of great use cases of like, “Oh, well, I’m not a native speaker of German, but I am pretty good,” I’m not talking about myself, a hypothetical me that’s pretty good, and I just want to run my edit through ChatGPT in German to go make sure my grammar’s okay. That’s actually cool.
Lex Fridman (02:08:15): Does it make you sad that people might use, increasingly use ChatGPT for something where they would previously use Wikipedia? So basically, use it to answer basic questions about the Eiffel Tower?
Jimmy Wales (02:08:32): Yeah. No-
Lex Fridman (02:08:32): And where the answer really comes at the source of it from Wikipedia, but they’re using this as an interface.
Jimmy Wales (02:08:38): Yeah. No, that’s completely fine. Part of it is our ethos has always been, “Here’s our gift of the world. Make something,” so if the knowledge is more accessible to people, even if they’re not coming through us, that’s fine. Now, obviously we do have certain business model concerns, and where we’ve had more conversation about this, this whole GPT thing is new, things like if you ask Alexa, “What is the Eiffel Tower?”, and she reads you the first two sentences from Wikipedia and doesn’t say it’s from Wikipedia, and they’ve recently started citing Wikipedia, then we worry, “Oh, if people don’t know they’re getting the knowledge from us, are they going to donate money? Or are they just going to think, oh, what’s Wikipedia for? I can just ask Alexa.” It’s like, well, Alexa only knows anything because she read Wikipedia. So we do think about that, but it doesn’t bother me in the sense of like, oh, I want people to always come to Wikipedia first.
Jimmy Wales (02:09:33): But we had a great demo, literally just hacked together over a weekend by our head of machine learning where he did this little thing to say, you could ask any question, and he was just knocking it together, so he used OpenAI’s API just to make a demo, asked a question, “Why do ducks fly south for winter?”, which is the kind of thing you think, “Oh, I might just Google for that, or I might start looking in Wikipedia. I don’t know.” And so what he did, he asked ChatGPT, “What are some Wikipedia entries that might answer this?” Then, he grabbed those Wikipedia entries, said, “Here’s some Wikipedia entries. Answer this question based only on the information in this,” and he had pretty good results, and it prevented the making stuff up. Now, it’s just he hacked it together on a weekend, but what it made me think about was, “Oh, okay, so now we’ve got this huge body of knowledge that in many cases you’re like, oh I really I want to know about Queen Victoria. I’m just going to go read the Wikipedia entry and it’s going to take me through her life and so forth.”
Jimmy Wales (02:10:44): But other times, you’ve got a specific question, and maybe we could have a better search experience where you can come to Wikipedia, ask your specific question, get your specific answer that’s from Wikipedia, including links to the articles you might want to read next. And that’s just a step forward. That’s just using new type of technology to make the extraction of information from this body of text into my brain faster and easier. So, I think that’s cool.
Lex Fridman (02:11:10): I would love to see a ChatGPT grounding into websites like Wikipedia. And the other comparable website to me will be like Wolfram Alpha for more mathematical knowledge, that kind of stuff. So, taking you to a page that is really crafted as opposed to the moment you start actually taking you to journalist websites like news websites, it starts getting a little iffy, because you’re now in a land that has a wrong incentive.
Jimmy Wales (02:11:44): Right, yeah.
Lex Fridman (02:11:45): You’re pulled in.
Jimmy Wales (02:11:45): Yeah, and you need somebody to have filtered through that and tried to knock off the rough edges. Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. And I think that kind of grounding, I think they’re working really hard on it. I think that’s really important-
Jimmy Wales (02:12:00): … is, I think they’re working really hard on it. I think that’s really important. And that actually… So if you ask me to step back and be like very business-like about our business model and where’s it going to go for us, and are we going to lose half our donations because everybody’s just going to stop coming to Wikipedia and go to ChatGPT? Well, grounding will help a lot because frankly, most questions people have, if they provide proper links, we’re going to be at the top of that, just like we are in Google. So we’re still going to get tons of recognition and tons of traffic just from… Even if it’s just the moral properness of saying, “Here’s my source.” So I think we’re going to be all right in that.
Lex Fridman (02:12:39): Yeah, in the close partnership if the model is fine-tuned, is constantly retrained that Wikipedia is one of the primary places where if you want to change what the model knows, one of the things you should do is contribute to Wikipedia or clarify Wikipedia.
Jimmy Wales (02:12:53): Yeah, yeah. No, that’s [inaudible 02:12:55].
Lex Fridman (02:12:54): Or elaborate, expand, all that kind of stuff.
Jimmy Wales (02:12:56): Yeah.
Lex Fridman (02:12:57): You mentioned all of us have controversies. I have to ask, do you find the controversy of whether you are the sole founder or the co-founder of Wikipedia ironic, absurd, interesting, important? What are your comments?
Jimmy Wales (02:13:13): I would say unimportant. Not that interesting. I mean, one of the things that people are sometimes surprised to hear me say is I actually think Larry Sanger doesn’t get enough credit for his early work in Wikipedia, even though I think co-founder’s not the right title for that. So he had a lot of impact and a lot of great work, and I disagree about a lot of things since and all that, and that’s fine. So yeah. No, to me that’s like, it’s one of these things that the media love a falling out story, so they want to make a big deal out of it, and I’m just like, yeah, no.
Lex Fridman (02:13:51): So there’s a lot of interesting engineering contributions in the early days, like you were saying, there’s debates about how to structure it, what the heck is this thing that we’re doing? And there’s important people that contributed to that.
Jimmy Wales (02:14:02): Yeah, definitely.
Lex Fridman (02:14:03): So he also, you said you’ve had some disagreements. Larry Sanger said that nobody should trust Wikipedia, and that Wikipedia seems to assume that there’s only one legitimate, defensible version of the truth on any controversial question. That’s not how Wikipedia used to be. I presume you disagree with that analysis.
Jimmy Wales (02:14:21): Yeah. I mean, just straight up, I disagree. Go and read any Wikipedia entry on a controversial topic, and what you’ll see is a really diligent effort to explain all the relevant sides. So yeah, just disagree.
Lex Fridman (02:14:32): So on controversial questions, you think perspectives are generally represented?
Jimmy Wales (02:14:36): Yeah.
Lex Fridman (02:14:37): Because it has to do with the tension between the mainstream and the non-mainstream that we were talking about.
Jimmy Wales (02:14:43): Yeah. No, I mean for sure. To take this area of discussion seriously is to say, yeah, you know what? Actually that is a big part of what Wikipedia and spend their time grappling with is to say, how do we figure out whether a less popular view is pseudoscience? Is it just a less popular view that’s gaining acceptance in the mainstream? Is it fringe versus crackpot, et cetera, et cetera? And that debate is what you’ve got to do. There’s no choice about having that debate of grappling with something. And I think we do. And I think that’s really important. And I think if anybody said to the Wikipedia community, “Gee, you should stop covering minority viewpoints on this issue,”
Jimmy Wales (02:15:39): I think they would say, “I don’t even understand why you would say that. We have to grapple with minority viewpoints in science and politics and so on.” And this is one of the reasons why there is no magic simple answer to all these things. It’s really contextual. It’s case by case. It’s like you’ve got to really say, okay, what is the context here? How do you do it? And you’ve always got to be open to correction and to change and to challenge and always be sort of serious about that.
Lex Fridman (02:16:13): I think what happens, again, with social media is when there is that grappling process in Wikipedia and a decision is made to remove a paragraph or to remove a thing or to say a thing, you’re going to notice the one direction of the oscillation of the grappling and not the correction. And you’re going to highlight that and say, how come this person… I don’t know, maybe legitimacy of elections that’s the thing that comes up. Donald Trump maybe previously-
Jimmy Wales (02:16:42): Yeah, I can give a really good example, which is, there was this sort of dust up about the definition of recession in Wikipedia. The accusation was often quite ridiculous and extreme, which is, under pressure from the Biden administration Wikipedia changed the definition of recession to make Biden look good, or we did it not under pressure, but because we’re a bunch of lunatic leftists and so on. And then when I see something like that in the press, I’m like, “Oh dear, what’s happened here? How do we do that?” Because I always just accept things for five seconds first, and then I go and I look and I’m like, “You know what? That’s literally completely not what happened.” What happened was, one editor thought the article needed restructuring. So the article is always said, so the traditional kind of loose definition of recession is two quarters of negative growth, but there’s always been within economics, within important agencies and different countries around the world, a lot of nuance around that.
Jimmy Wales (02:17:43): And there’s other factors that go into it and so forth. And then it’s just an interesting complicated topic. And so the article has always had the definition of two quarters. And the only thing that really changed was moving that from the lead, from the top paragraph to further down. And then news stories appeared saying, “Wikipedia has changed the definition of recession.” And then we got a huge rush of trolls coming in. So the article was temporarily protected, I think, only semi protected, and people were told, “Go to the talk page to discuss.” So anyway, it was a dust up that was… When you look at it as a Wikipedian, you’re like, “Oh, this is a really routine kind of editorial debate.” Another example, which unfortunately our friend Elon fell for, I would say, is the Twitter files. So there was an article called the Twitter files, which is about these files that were released once Elon took control of Twitter, and he released internal documents.
Jimmy Wales (02:18:36): And what happened was somebody nominated it for deletion, but even the nomination said, “This is mainly about the Hunter Biden laptop controversy, shouldn’t this information be there instead?” So anyone can… It takes exactly one human being anywhere on the planet to propose something for deletion, and that triggers a process where people discuss it, which within a few hours, it was what we call snowball closed i.e, this doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of passing. So an admin goes, “Yeah, wrong,” and closed the debate, and that was it. That was the whole thing that happened. And so nobody proposed suppressing the information. Nobody proposed it wasn’t important, it was just editorially boring internal questions. So sometimes people read stuff like that and they’re like, “Oh, you see, look at these leftists. They’re trying to suppress the truth again.” It’s like, well slow down a second and come and look, literally, it’s not what happened.
Lex Fridman (02:19:36): So I think the right is more sensitive to censorship, and so they will more likely highlight there’s more virality to highlighting something that looks like censorship in any walks of life. And this moving a paragraph from one place to another, or removing it and so on, as part of the regular grappling of Wikipedia can make a hell of a good article or YouTube video.
Jimmy Wales (02:20:01): Oh, yeah. Yeah. No, it sounds really in enticing and intriguing and surprising to most people because they’re like, “Oh, no, I’m reading Wikipedia. It doesn’t seem like a crackpot leftist website. It seems pretty kind of dull, really in its own geeky way.” And so that makes a good story. It’s like, oh, am I being misled? Because there’s a shadowy cabal of Jimmy Wales.
Lex Fridman (02:20:25): I generally, I read political stuff. I mentioned to you that I’m traveling to have some very difficult conversation with high profile figures both in the war in Ukraine and in Israel and Palestine. And I read the Wikipedia articles around that, and I also read books on the conflict and the history of the different regions. And I find the Wikipedia articles to be very balanced, and there’s many perspectives being represented. But then I ask myself, “Well, am I one of them leftist crackpots?” They can’t see the truth. I mean, it’s something I ask myself all the time, forget the leftist, just crackpot in general. Am I just being a sheep and accepting it? And I think that’s an important question to always ask, but not too much.
Jimmy Wales (02:21:12): Yeah. No, I agree.
Lex Fridman (02:21:12): A little bit, but not too much.
Jimmy Wales (02:21:15): Yeah. No, I think we always have to challenge ourselves of what do I potentially have wrong?
Lex Fridman (02:21:20): Well, you mentioned pressure from government. You’ve criticized Twitter for giving in to Turkey’s government censorship. There’s also conspiracy theories or accusations of Wikipedia being open to pressure from government to government organizations, FBI and all this kind of stuff. What is the philosophy about pressure from government and censorship?
Jimmy Wales (02:21:50): So we’re super hardcore on this. We’ve never bowed down to government pressure anywhere in the world, and we never will. And we understand that we’re hardcore. And actually there is a bit of nuance about how different companies respond to this, but our response has always been just to say no. And if they threaten to block, well, knock yourself out, you’re going to lose Wikipedia. And that’s been very successful for us as a strategy because governments know they can’t just casually threaten to block Wikipedia or block us for two days, and we’re going to cave in immediately to get back into the market. And that’s what a lot of companies have done. And I don’t think that’s good that we can go one level deeper and say, I’m actually quite sympathetic. If you have staff members in a certain country and they are at physical risk, you’ve got to put that into your equation.
Jimmy Wales (02:22:43): So I understand that. If Elon said, “Actually, I’ve got a hundred staff members on the ground in such and such a country, and if we don’t comply, somebody’s going to get arrested. And it could be quite serious.” Okay, that’s a tough one. That’s actually really hard. But yeah, no. And then the FBI one, no, the criticism I saw. I kind of prepared for this because I saw people responding to your request for questions, and I was like, somebody’s like, “Oh, well, don’t you think it was really bad that you da da da, da?” I actually reached out to [inaudible 02:23:18] and said, “Can you just make sure I’ve got my facts right?” And the answer is, we received zero requests of any kind from the FBI or any of the other government agencies for any changes to content in Wikipedia. And had we received those requests at the level of the Wikipedia Foundation, we would’ve said, “We can’t do anything because Wikipedia is written by the community.”
Jimmy Wales (02:23:40): And so the Wikimedia Foundation can’t change the content of Wikipedia without causing… I mean, God, that would be a massive controversy, you can’t even imagine. What we did do, and this is what I’ve done, I’ve been to China and met with the Minister of Propaganda. We’ve had discussions with governments all around the world, not because we want to do their bidding, but because we don’t want to do their bidding, but we also don’t want to be blocked. And we think actually having these conversations are really important. There’s no threat of being blocked in the US. That’s just never going to happen. There is the First Amendment. But in other countries around the world, it’s like, “Okay, what are you upset about? Let’s have the conversation. Let’s understand, and let’s have a dialogue about it so that you can understand where we come from and what we’re doing and why.”
Jimmy Wales (02:24:26): And then sometimes it’s like, gee, if somebody complains that something’s bad in Wikipedia, whoever they are, don’t care who they are. It could be you, it could be the government, it could be the Pope. I don’t care who they are. It’s like, oh, okay. Well, our responsibility as Wikipedia is to go, “Oh, hold on, let’s check is that right or wrong? Is there something that we’ve got wrong in Wikipedia? Not because you’re threatening to block us, but because we want Wikipedia to be correct.” So we do have these dialogues with people. And a big part of what was going on with, you might call it pressure on social media companies or dialogue with, as we talked earlier, grapple with the language depending on what your view is. In our case, it was really just about, oh, okay, they want to have a dialogue about COVID information, misinformation.
Jimmy Wales (02:25:22): We are this enormous source of information which the world depends on. We’re going to have that conversation. We’re happy to say, here’s… If they say, how do you know that Wikipedia is not going to be pushing some crazy anti-vax narrative first? I mean, I think it’s somewhat inappropriate for a government to be asking pointed questions in a way that implies possible penalties. I’m not sure that ever happened because we would just go, I don’t know, the Chinese blocked us. So it goes, right? We’re not going to cave into any kind of government pressure, but whatever the appropriateness of what they were doing, I think there is a rule for government in just saying, let’s understand the information ecosystem. Let’s think about the problem of misinformation, disinformation in society, particularly around election security, all these kinds of things. So I think it would be irresponsible of us to get a call from a government agency and say, “Yeah, why don’t you just fuck off? You’re the government.” But it would also be irresponsible to go, “Oh, dear, government agent’s not happy. Let’s fix Wikipedia so the FBI loves us.”
Lex Fridman (02:26:35): And when you say you want to have discussions with the Chinese government or with organizations like CDC and WHO, it’s to thoroughly understand what the mainstream narrative is so that it can be properly represented, but not drive what the articles are?
Jimmy Wales (02:26:50): Well, it’s actually important to say whatever the Wikimedia Foundation thinks has no impact on what’s in Wikipedia. So it’s more about saying to them, “We understand you’re the World Health Organization, or you’re whoever, and part of your job is to… Public health is about communications. You want to understand the world.” So it’s more about, “Well, let’s explain how Wikipedia works.”
Lex Fridman (02:27:18): So it’s more about explaining how Wikipedia works and like, “Hey, it’s the volunteers”?
Jimmy Wales (02:27:22): Yeah, exactly.
Lex Fridman (02:27:23): It’s a battle of ideas, and here’s how the sources are used.
Jimmy Wales (02:27:29): Yeah, exactly.
Lex Fridman (02:27:30): What are the legitimate sources and what not a legitimate source is.
Jimmy Wales (02:27:32): Yeah, exactly.
Lex Fridman (02:27:33): I mean, I suppose there’s some battle about what is a legitimate source. There could be statements made that CDC… There’s government organizations in general have sold themselves to be the place where you go for expertise. And some of that has been to small degree, raised in question over the response to the pandemic.
Jimmy Wales (02:27:57): Well, I think in many cases, and this goes back to my topic of trust. So there were definitely cases of public officials, public organizations where I felt like they lost the trust of the public because they didn’t trust the public. And so the idea is, we really need people to take this seriously and take actions, therefore, we’re going to put out some overblown claims because it’s going to scare people into behaving correctly. You know what? That might work for a little while, but it doesn’t work in the long run because suddenly people go from a default stance of… Like the Center for Disease Control, very well respected scientific organization. I don’t know. They’ve got fault in Atlanta with the last file of smallpox or whatever it is that people think about them. And to go, “Oh, right, these are scientists we should actually take seriously and listen to, and they’re not politicized.”
Jimmy Wales (02:28:58): It’s like, okay. And if you put out statements, and I don’t know if the CDC did, but Who Health Organization, whoever, that are provably false and also provably, you kind of knew they were false, but you did it to scare people because you wanted them to do the right thing. It’s like, no, you know what? That’s not going to work in the long run. You’re going to lose people, and now you’ve got a bigger problem, which is a lack of trust in science, a lack of trust in authorities who are, by and large, they’re like quite boring government bureaucrat scientists who just are trying to help the world.
Lex Fridman (02:29:31): Well, I’ve been criticized, and I’ve been torn on this. I’ve been criticized for criticizing Anthony Fauci too hard. The degree to which I criticized him is because he’s a leader. And I’m just observing the effect in the loss of trust in the institutions like the NIH that where I personally know there’s a lot of incredible scientists doing incredible work, and I have to blame the leaders for the effects on the distrust and the scientific work that they’re doing because of what I perceive as basic human flaws of communication, of arrogance, of ego, of politics, all those kinds of things. Now, you could say, “You’re being too harsh,” possible, but I think that’s the whole point of free speech is you can criticize people who lead. Leaders, unfortunately or fortunately, are responsible for the effects on society.
Lex Fridman (02:30:28): To me, Anthony Fauci or whoever in the scientific position around the pandemic had an opportunity to have a FDR moment or to get everybody together, inspire about the power of science to rapidly develop a vaccine that saves us from this pandemic and future pandemic that can threaten the wellbeing of human civilization. This was epic and awesome and sexy. And to me, when I’m talking to people about science, it’s anything but sexy in terms of the virology and biology development because it’s been politicized. It’s icky, and people just don’t want to… “Don’t talk to me about the vaccine. I understand. I understand. I got vaccinated.” There’s just, “Let’s switch topics quick.”
Jimmy Wales (02:31:11): Yeah, yeah. Well, it’s interesting because as I say, I live in the UK and I think all these things are a little less politicized there. And I haven’t paid close enough attention to Fauci to have a really strong view. I’m sure I would disagree with some things. I remember hearing at the beginning of the pandemic as I’m unwrapping my Amazon package with these masks I bought because I heard there’s a pandemic. And I just was like, “I want some N95 mask, please.” And they were saying, “Don’t buy masks.” And the motivation was because they didn’t want there to be shortages in hospitals. Fine. But there were also statements of masks, they’re not effective and they won’t help you. And then the complete about phase two, you’re ridiculous if you’re not wearing a… It’s just like, no, that about face just lost people from day one.
Lex Fridman (02:32:06): The distrust in the intelligence of the public to deal with nuance, to deal with the uncertainty.
Jimmy Wales (02:32:11): Yeah. This is exactly what… I think this is where the Wikipedia neutral point of view is and should be in ideally. And obviously every article and everything we could… You know me now and you know how I am about these things, but ideally, it’s to say, look, we’re happy to show you all the perspectives. This is Planned Parenthood’s view, and this is Catholic Church view, and we’re going to explain that, and we’re going to try to be thoughtful and put in the best arguments from all sides, because I trust you. You read that and you’re going to be more educated and you’re going to begin to make a decision. I mean, I can just talk in the UK, the government, da, da, da. When we found out in the UK that very high level government officials were not following the rules they had put on everyone else. I had just become a UK citizen just a little while before the pandemic, and it’s kind of emotional. You get a passport in a new country and you feel quite good.
Jimmy Wales (02:33:09): I did my oath to the Queen, and then they dragged the poor old lady out to tell us all to be good. I was like, “We’re British and we’re going to do the right things, and it’s going to be tough, but going to…” So you have that kind of Dunkirk spirit moment, and you’re following the rules to a T, and then suddenly it’s like, well, they’re not following the rules. And so suddenly I shifted personally from, “I’m going to follow the rules, even if I don’t completely agree with them, but I’ll still follow because I think we’ve got to all chip in together,” to, “You know what? I’m going to make wise and thoughtful decisions for myself and my family.” And that generally is going to mean following the rules. But it’s basically when they’re at certain moments in time, you’re not allowed to be in an outside space unless you’re exercising. I’m like, I think I can sit in a park and read a book. It’s going to be fine. That’s irrational rule, which I would’ve been following just personally of like, I’m just going to do the right thing.
Lex Fridman (02:34:06): And the loss of trust, I think, at scale was probably harmful to science. And to me, the scientific method and the scientific community is one of the biggest hopes, at least to me, for the survival and the thriving of human civilization.
Jimmy Wales (02:34:22): Absolutely. And I think you see some of the ramifications of this. There’s always been pretty anti-science, anti-vax people. That’s always been a thing, but I feel like it’s bigger now simply because of that lowering of trust. So a lot of people, maybe it’s like you say, a lot of people are like, “Yeah, I got vaccinated, but I really don’t want to talk about this because it’s so toxic.” And that’s unfortunate because I think people should say, “What an amazing thing.” There’s also a whole range of discourse around if this were a disease that was primarily killing babies, I think people’s emotions about it would’ve been very different, right or wrong. Then the fact that when you really looked at the death rate of getting COVID, wow, it’s really dramatically different. If you’re late in life, this was really dangerous. And if you’re 23 years old, yeah, well, it’s not great. And long COVID is a thing and all of that. And I think some of the public communications, again, were failing to properly contextualize it. Not all of it. It’s a complicated matter, but yeah.
Lex Fridman (02:35:45): Let me read you a Reddit comment that received two likes.
Jimmy Wales (02:35:48): Oh, two whole people liked it.
Lex Fridman (02:35:52): Yeah, two people liked it. And I don’t know, maybe you can comment on whether there’s truth to it, but I just found it interesting because I’ve been doing a lot of research on World War II recently. So this is about Hitler.
Jimmy Wales (02:36:06): Oh, okay.
Lex Fridman (02:36:06): It’s a long statement. “I was there when a big push was made to fight bias at Wikipedia. Our target became getting the Hitler article to be Wiki’s featured article. The idea was that the voting body only wanted articles that were good PR and especially articles about socially liberal topics. So the Hitler article had to be two to three times better and more academically researched to beat the competition. This bias seems to hold today, for example, the current list of political featured articles at a glance seems to have only two books, one on anarchism and one on Karl Marx. Surely we’re not going to say there have only ever been two articles about political non-biography books worth being featured, especially compared to 200 plus video games. And that’s the only topics with good books are socialism and anarchy.” Do you have any interesting comments on this kind of-
Jimmy Wales (02:36:06): Oh, yeah.
Lex Fridman (02:37:00): [inaudible 02:37:00] featured, how the featured is selected, maybe Hitler, because he is a special figure [inaudible 02:37:09] kind of stuff.
Jimmy Wales (02:37:09): I love that. No, I love the comparison to how many video games, and that definitely speaks to my earlier is like, if you’ve got a lot of young geeky men who really like video games, that doesn’t necessarily get you to the right place in every respect. Certainly. Yeah. So here’s a funny story. I woke up one morning to a bunch of journalists in Germany trying to get in touch with me because German language, Wikipedia chose to have as the featured article of the day, Swastika. And people were going crazy about it, and some people were saying, “It’s illegal. Has German Wikipedia been taken over by Nazi sympathizers,” and so on? And it turned out it’s not illegal, discussing the swastika. Using the swastika as a political campaign and using it in certain ways is illegal in Germany in a way that it wouldn’t be in the US because the First Amendment, but in this case, it was like actually part of the point is the swastika symbol is from other cultures as well.
Jimmy Wales (02:38:17): I just thought it was interesting. I did joke to the community, I’m like, “Please don’t put the swastika on the front page without warning me because I’m going to get [inaudible 02:38:25].” It wouldn’t be me, it’s the foundation. I’m not that much on the front lines. So I would say that to put Hitler on the front page of Wikipedia, it is a special topic. And you would want to say, “Yeah, let’s be really careful that it’s really, really good before we do that,” because if we put it on the front page and it’s not good enough, that could be a problem. There’s no inherent reason. Clearly, World War II is a very popular topic in Wikipedia. It’s like, turn on the history channel. People, it’s a fascinating period of history that people are very interested in. And then on the other piece, like anarchism and Karl Marx.
Lex Fridman (02:39:05): Karl Marx. Yeah.
Jimmy Wales (02:39:06): Oh, yeah. I mean, that’s interesting. I’m surprised to hear that not more political books or topics have made it to the front page.
Lex Fridman (02:39:15): Now we’re taking this Reddit a comment.
Jimmy Wales (02:39:16): I mean, as if-
Lex Fridman (02:39:17): That’s face value.
Jimmy Wales (02:39:18): … it’s completely… But I’m trusting. So I think that’s probably is right. They probably did have the list up. No, I think that piece… The piece about how many of those featured articles have been video games, and if it’s disproportionate, I think the community should go, “Actually, what’s gone? That doesn’t seem quite right.” I mean, you can imagine that because you’re looking for an article to be on the front page of Wikipedia, you want to have a bit of diversity in it. You want it to be not always something that’s really popular that week, so I don’t know, the last couple of weeks, maybe succession, the big finale of succession might lead you think, oh, let’s put succession on the front page, that’s going to be popular. In other cases, you kind of want to pick something super obscure and quirky because people also find that interesting and fun. Yeah, I don’t know. But you don’t want it to be video games most of the time. That sounds quite bad.
Lex Fridman (02:40:17): Well, let me ask you just as somebody who’s seen the whole thing, the development of the millions of articles. Big impossible question, what’s your favorite article?
Jimmy Wales (02:40:33): My favorite article? Well, I’ve got an amusing answer, which is possibly also true. There’s an article in Wikipedia called Inherently Funny Words, and one of the reasons I love it is when it was created early in the history of Wikipedia, it kind of became like a dumping ground. People would just come by and write in any word that they thought sounded funny. And then it was nominated for deletion because somebody’s like, “This is just a dumping ground. People are putting all kinds of nonsense in.” And in that deletion debate, somebody came forward and said essentially, “Wait a second, hold on. This is actually a legitimate concept in the theory of humor and comedy. And a lot of famous comedians and humorists have written about it.” And it’s actually a legitimate topic. So then they went through and they meticulously referenced every word that was in there and threw out a bunch that weren’t.
Jimmy Wales (02:41:29): And so it becomes this really interesting. And now my biggest disappointment, and it’s the right decision to make because there was no source, but it was a picture of a cow, but there was a rope around its head tying on some horns onto the cow. So it was kind of a funny looking picture. It looked like a bull with horns, but it’s just a normal milk cow. And below it, the caption said, “According to some, cow is an inherently funny word,” which is just hilarious to me, partly because the “According to some” sounds a lot like Wikipedia, but there was no source. So it went away, and I know I feel very sad about that, but I’ve always liked that. And actually the reason Depths of Wikipedia amuses me so greatly is because it does highlight really interesting obscure stuff, and you’re like, “Wow, I can’t believe somebody wrote about that in Wikipedia. It’s quite amusing.” And sometimes there’s a bit of rye humor in Wikipedia. There’s always a struggle. You’re not trying to be funny, but occasionally a little inside humor can be quite healthy.
Lex Fridman (02:42:40): Apparently words with the letter K are funny. There’s a lot of really well researched stuff on this page. It’s actually exciting. And I should mention for Depths of the Wikipedia, it’s run by Annie Rauwerda.
Jimmy Wales (02:42:56): That’s right, Annie.
Lex Fridman (02:42:57): And let me just read off some of the pages. Octopolis and Octlantis-
Jimmy Wales (02:43:05): Oh yeah, that was…
Lex Fridman (02:43:05): … are two separate non-human underwater settlements built by the gloomy octopuses in Jarvis Bay East Australia. The first settlement named Octopolis by a biologist was founded in 2009. The individual structures in Octopolis consists of borrows around a piece of human detritus believed to be scrap metal, and it goes on in this way.
Jimmy Wales (02:43:29): That’s great.
Lex Fridman (02:43:30): Satiric misspelling, least concerned species. Humans were formally assessed as a species of least concern in 2008. I think Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy would slightly disagree. And the last one, let me just say, friendship paradox is the phenomena first observed by the sociologist Scott Feld in 1991, that on average an individual’s friends have more friends than that individual.
Jimmy Wales (02:43:58): Oh, that’s really interesting.
Lex Fridman (02:43:58): That’s very lonely.
Jimmy Wales (02:44:00): That’s the kind of thing that makes you want to… It sounds implausible at first because shouldn’t everybody have on average, about the same number of friends as all their friends? So you really want to dig into the math of that and really think, oh, why would that be true?
Lex Fridman (02:44:13): And it’s one way to feel more lonely in a mathematically rigorous way. Somebody else on Reddit asks, “I would love to hear some war stories from behind the scenes.” Is there something that we haven’t mentioned that was particularly difficult in this entire journey you’re on with Wikipedia?
Jimmy Wales (02:44:32): I mean, yeah, it’s hard to say. So part of what I always say about myself is that I’m a pathological optimist, so I always think everything is fine. And so things that other people might find a struggle, I’m just like, “Oh, well, this is the thing we’re doing today.” So that’s kind of about me, and it’s actually… I’m aware of this about myself, so I do like to have a few pessimistic people around me to keep me a bit on balance. I mean, I would say some of the hard things, I mean, there were hard moments like when two…
Jimmy Wales (02:45:00): I would say some of the hard things. I mean, there were hard moments when two out of three servers crashed on Christmas Day and then we needed to do a fundraiser and no idea what was going to happen. I would say as well, in that early period of time, the growth of the website and the traffic to the website was phenomenal and great. The growth of the community and in fact the healthy growth of the community was fine.
Jimmy Wales (02:45:29): And then the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit I set up to own and operate Wikipedia as a small organization, it had a lot of growing pains. That was the piece that’s just many companies or many organizations that are in a fast growth. It’s like you’ve hired the wrong people, or there’s this conflict that’s arisen and nobody has got experience to do this and all that. So, no specific stories to tell, but I would say growing the organization was harder than growing the community and growing the website, which is interesting.
Lex Fridman (02:46:02): Well, yeah. It’s kind of miraculous and inspiring that a community can emerge and be stable, and that has so much kind of productive, positive output. Kind of makes you think. It’s one of those things you don’t want to analyze too much because you don’t want to mess with a beautiful thing, but it gives me faith in communities. I think that they can spring up in other domains as well.
Jimmy Wales (02:46:29): Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. At Fandom, my for-profit wiki company where it’s all these communities about pop culture mainly, sort of entertainment, gaming and so on, there’s a lot of small communities. So, I went last year to our Community Connect conference and just met some of these people, and here’s one of the leaders of the Star Wars wiki, which is called Wookieepedia, which I think is great. And he’s telling me about his community and all that. And I’m like, “Oh, right. Yeah, I love this.”
Jimmy Wales (02:47:03): So, it’s not the same purpose as Wikipedia of a neutral, high quality encyclopedia, but a lot of the same values are there of like, “Oh, people should be nice to each other.” It’s like when people get upset, just remember we’re working on Star Wars wiki together, there’s no reason to get too outraged. And just kind people just, just geeky people with a hobby.
Lex Fridman (02:47:27): Where do you see Wikipedia in 10 years, 100 years, and 1,000 years?
Jimmy Wales (02:47:35): Right. So, 10 years, I would say pretty much the same. We’re not going to become TikTok with entertainment deals, scroll by video humor, and blah-blah-blah, and encyclopedia. I think in 10 years, we probably will have a lot more AI supporting tools like I’ve talked about, and probably your search experience would be you can ask a question and get the answer rather than from our body of work.
Lex Fridman (02:48:09): So, search and discovery, a little bit improved, interface, some of that.
Jimmy Wales (02:48:12): Yeah, all that. I always say one of the things that most people won’t notice, because already they don’t notice it, is the growth of Wikipedia in the languages of the developing world. So, you probably don’t speak Swahili, so you’re probably not checking out that Swahili Wikipedia is doing very well, and it is doing very well. And I think that kind of growth is actually super important. It’s super interesting, but most people won’t notice that.
Lex Fridman (02:48:41): If we can just link on that if we could, do you think there’s so much incredible translation work is being done with AI, with language models? Do you think that can accelerate Wikipedia?
Jimmy Wales (02:48:55): Yeah, I do.
Lex Fridman (02:48:55): So, you start with the basic draft of the translation of articles and then build on top of that.
Jimmy Wales (02:49:00): What I used to say is machine translation for many years wasn’t much used to the community, because it just wasn’t good enough. As it’s gotten better, it’s tended to be a lot better in what we might call economically important languages, that’s because the corpus that they train on and all of that.
Jimmy Wales (02:49:20): So, to translate from English to Spanish, if you’ve tried Google Translate recently Spanish to English is what I would do, it’s pretty good. It’s actually not bad. It used to be half a joke and then for a while it was kind of like, “Well, you can get the gist of something.” And now, actually, it’s pretty good. However, we’ve got a huge Spanish community who write in native Spanish, so they’re able to use it and they find it useful, but they’re writing.
Jimmy Wales (02:49:44): But if you tried to do English to Zulu where there’s not that much investment, there’s loads of reasons to invest in English-Spanish, because they’re both huge, economically important languages. Zulu not so much. So, for those smaller languages, it was just still terrible. My understanding is it’s improved dramatically and also because the new methods of training don’t necessarily involve identical corpuses to try to match things up, but rather reading and understanding with tokens and large language models, and then reading and understanding, and then you get a much richer …
Jimmy Wales (02:50:22): Anyway, apparently it’s quite improved, so I think that now, it is quite possible that these smaller language communities are going to say, “Oh, well finally, I can put something in an English and I can get out Zulu that I feel comfortable sharing with my community because it’s actually good enough, or I can edit it a bit here and there.” So, I think that’s huge. So, I do think that’s going to happen a lot and that’s going to accelerate, again, what will remain to most people an invisible trend, but that’s the growth in all these other languages. So, then move on to 100 years.
Lex Fridman (02:50:52): I was starting to get scary.
Jimmy Wales (02:50:54): Well, the only thing I’d say about 100 years is we’ve built the Wikimedia Foundation, and we run it in a quite cautious, and financially conservative, and careful way. So, every year, we build our reserves. Every year, we put aside a little bit of more money. We also have the endowment fund, which we just passed 100 million, that’s a completely separate fund with a separate board. So, it’s not just a big fat bank account for some future profligate CEO to blow through. The foundation will have to get the approval of a second order board to be able to access that money, and that board can make other grants through the community and things like that.
Jimmy Wales (02:51:38): So, the point of all that is I hope and believe that we are building in a financially stable way that we can weather various storms along the way, so that hopefully we’re not taking the kind of risks. And by the way, we’re not taking too few risks either. That’s always hard. I think the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikipedia will exist in 100 years if anybody exists in 100 years, we’ll be there.
Lex Fridman (02:52:06): Do you think the internet just looks a predictably different, just the web?
Jimmy Wales (02:52:11): I do. I think right now, this sort of enormous step forward we’ve seen and has become public in the last year of the large language models really is something else. It’s really interesting. You and I have both talked today about the flaws and the limitations, but still it’s … As someone who’s been around technology for a long time, it’s sort of that feeling of the first time I saw a web browser, the first time I saw the iPhone, the first time the internet was really usable on a phone. And it’s like, “Wow, that’s a step change difference.” There’s a few other …
Lex Fridman (02:52:48): Maybe a Google Search.
Jimmy Wales (02:52:49): Google Search was actually one.
Lex Fridman (02:52:51): I remember the first Search.
Jimmy Wales (02:52:51): Because I remember Alta Vista was kind of cool for a while, then it just got more and more useless, because the algorithm wasn’t good. And it’s like, “Oh, Google Search, now I like the internet, it works again.” And so, large language model, it feels like that to me. Like, “Oh, wow, this is something new and really pretty remarkable.” And it’s going to have some downsides. The negative use case …
Jimmy Wales (02:53:14): People in the area who are experts, they’re giving a lot of warnings. I’m not that worried, but I’m a pathological optimist. But I do see some really low-hanging fruit bad things that can happen. My example is, how about some highly customized spam where the email that you receive isn’t just misspelled words and trying to get through filters, but actually as a targeted email to you that knows something about you by reading your LinkedIn profile and writes a plausible email that will get through the filters. And it’s like suddenly, “Oh, that’s a new problem. That’s going to be interesting.”
Lex Fridman (02:53:55): Just on the Wikipedia editing side, does it make the job of the volunteer of the editor more difficult in a world where larger and larger percentage of the internet is written by an LLM?
Jimmy Wales (02:54:08): One of my predictions, and we’ll see, ask me again in five years how this panned out, is that in a way, this will strengthen the value and importance of some traditional brands. So, if I see a news story and it’s from the Wall Street Journal, from the New York Times, from Fox News, I know what I’m getting and I trust it to whatever extent I might have, trust or distrust in any of those.
Jimmy Wales (02:54:43): And if I see a brand new website that looks plausible, but I’ve never heard of it, and it could be machine generated content that may be full of errors, I think I’ll be more cautious. I think I’m more interested. And we can also talk about this around photographic evidence. So, obviously, there will be scandals where major media organizations get fooled by a fake photo.
Jimmy Wales (02:55:04): However, if I see a photo of the recent ones, the Pope wearing an expensive puffer jacket, I’m going to go, “Yeah, that’s amazing that a fake like that could be generated.” But my immediate thought is not, “Oh, so the Pope is dipping into the money, eh? Partly because this particular Pope doesn’t seem like he’d be the type.”
Lex Fridman (02:55:25): My favorite is extensive pictures of Joe Biden and Donald Trump hanging out and having fun together.
Jimmy Wales (02:55:31): Yeah. Brilliant. So, I think people will care about the provenance of a photo. And if you show me a photo and you say, “Yeah, this photo is from Fox News,” even though I don’t necessarily think that’s the highest, but I’m like, “Wow, it’s a news organization and they’re going to have journalism, and they’re going to make sure the photo is what it purports to be.”
Jimmy Wales (02:55:55): That’s very different from a photo randomly circulating on Twitter. Whereas I would say, 15 years ago, a photo randomly circulating on Twitter, in most cases, the worst you could do, and this did happen, is misrepresent the battlefield. So, like, “Oh, here’s a bunch of injured children. Look what Israel has done.” But actually, it wasn’t Israel, it was another case 10 years ago. That has happened, that has always been around. But now, we can have much more specifically constructed, plausible looking photos that if I just see them circulating on Twitter, I’m going to go, “I just don’t know. Not sure. I can make that in five minutes.”
Lex Fridman (02:56:32): Well, I also hope that it’s kind of like what you’re writing about in your book that we could also have citizen journalists that have a stable, verifiable trust that builds up. So, it doesn’t have to be in New York Times with this organization that you could be in an organization of one as long as it’s stable and carries through time and it builds up or it goes up.
Jimmy Wales (02:56:52): No, I agree. But the one thing I’ve said in the past, and this depends on who that person is and what they’re doing, but it’s like I think my credibility, my general credibility in the world should be the equal of a New York Times reporter. So, if something happens, and I witness it, and I write about it, people are going to go, “Well, Jimmy Wales said it. That’s just like if a New York Times reporter said it. I’m going to tend to think he didn’t just make it up.”
Jimmy Wales (02:57:18): The truth is nothing interesting ever happens around me. I don’t go to war zones. I don’t go to big press conferences. I don’t interview Putin and Zelenskyy. To an extent, yes. Whereas I do think for other people, those traditional models of credibility are really, really important. And then there is this sort of citizen journalism. I don’t know if you think of what you do as journalism. I kind of think it is, but you do interviews, you do long form interviews.
Jimmy Wales (02:57:49): If you come and you say, “Here’s my tape,” but you wouldn’t hand out a tape. I just gesture to you as if I’m handing you a cassette tape. But if you put it into your podcast, ” Here’s my interview with Zelenskyy.” And people aren’t going to go, “Yeah, how do we know? That could be a deep fake. You could have faked that.” Because people are like, “Well, no, you’re a well known podcaster and you do interview interesting people. Yeah, you wouldn’t think that.” So, that your brand becomes really important.
Jimmy Wales (02:58:19): Whereas if suddenly, and I’ve seen this already, I’ve seen sort of video with subtitles in English, and apparently the Ukrainian was the same and it was Zelenskyy saying something really outrageous. And I’m like, “Yeah, I don’t believe that. I don’t think he said that in a meeting with whatever. I think that’s Russian propaganda or probably just trolls.”
Lex Fridman (02:58:42): Yeah. And then building platforms and mechanisms of how that trust can be verified. If something appears on a Wikipedia page, that means something. If something appears on my Twitter account, that means something. That means I, this particular human, have signed off on it.
Jimmy Wales (02:58:58): Yeah, exactly.
Lex Fridman (02:58:58): And then the trust you have in this particular human transfers to the piece of content. Hopefully, there’s millions of people with different metrics of trust. And then you could see that there’s a certain kind of bias in the set of conversations you’re having. So, maybe okay, I trust this person, I have this kind of bias and I’ll go to this other person with this other kind of bias and I can integrate them in this kind of way. Just like you said with Fox News and whatever [inaudible 02:59:24].
Jimmy Wales (02:59:23): Yeah. Wall Street Journal, New York Times, they’ve all got where they sit. Yeah.
Lex Fridman (02:59:29): So, you have built, I would say, one of if not the most impactful website in the history of human civilization. So, let me ask for you to give advice to young people how to have impact in this world. High schoolers, college students wanting to have a big positive impact on the world.
Jimmy Wales (02:59:50): Yeah, great. If you want to be successful, do something you’re really passionate about rather than some kind of cold calculation of what can make you the most money. Because if you go and try to do something and you’re like, “I’m not that interested, but I’m going to make a lot of money doing it,” you’re probably not going to be that good at it. And so, that is a big piece of it.
Jimmy Wales (03:00:12): For startups, I give this advice. And this is a career startup, any kind of young person just starting out is be persistent. There will be moments when it’s not working out and you can’t just give up too easily. You’ve got to persist through some hard times. Maybe two servers crash on a Sunday, and you’ve got to scramble to figure it out, but persist through that, and then also be prepared to pivot. That’s a newer word, new for me. But when I pivoted from Nupedia to Wikipedia it’s like, “This isn’t working. I’ve got to completely change.” So, be willing to completely change direction when something is not working.
Jimmy Wales (03:00:54): Now, the problem with these two wonderful pieces of advice is, which situation am I in today? Is this a moment when I need to just power through and persist because I’m going to find a way to make this work? Or is this a moment where I need to go, “Actually, this is totally not working and I need to change direction?” But also, I think for me, that always gives me a framework of like, “Okay, here’s the problem. Do we need to change direction, or do we need to power through it?” And just knowing those are the choices. Not always the only choices, but those choices.
Jimmy Wales (03:01:27): I think it can be helpful to say, “Okay, am I chickening out because I’m having a little bump, and I’m feeling unemotional, and I’m just going to give up too soon?” Ask yourself that question. And also, it’s like, “Am I being pigheaded and trying to do something that actually doesn’t make sense?” Okay. Ask yourself that question too. Even though they’re contradictory questions, sometimes it will be one, sometimes it will be the other, and you got to really think it through.
Lex Fridman (03:01:53): I think persisting with the business model behind Wikipedia is such an inspiring story, because we live in a capitalist world. We live in a scary world, I think, for an internet business. And so, to do things differently than a lot of websites are doing, what Wikipedia has lived through this excessive explosion of many websites that are basically ad driven. Google is ad driven. Facebook, Twitter, all of these websites are ad driven. And to see them succeed, become these incredibly rich, powerful companies that if I could just have that money, you would think as somebody running Wikipedia, “I could do so much positive stuff.” And so, to persist through that is … I think from my perspective now, Monday night quarterback or whatever was the right decision, but boy is that a tough decision.
Jimmy Wales (03:02:56): It seemed easy at the time.
Lex Fridman (03:02:58): And then you just kind of stay with it. Stick with it.
Jimmy Wales (03:03:00): Yeah, just stay with it. It’s working.
Lex Fridman (03:03:01): So now, when you chose persistent.
Jimmy Wales (03:03:06): Yeah. I always like to give an example of MySpace, because I just think it’s an amusing story. MySpace was poised, I would say, to be Facebook. It was huge. It was viral, it was lots of things. Kind of foreshadowed a bit of maybe even TikTok because it was a lot of entertainment, content, casual. And then Rupert Murdoch bought it and it collapsed within a few years. And part of that I think was because they were really, really heavy on ads and less heavy on the customer experience.
Jimmy Wales (03:03:40): So, I remember, to accept a friend request was like three clicks where you saw three ads. And on Facebook, you accept the friend request, you didn’t even leave the page, like that’s just accepted. So, I used to give this example of like, “Yeah, well, Rupert Murdoch really screwed that one up.” And in a sense, maybe he did, but somebody said, “You know what, actually, he bought it for …” And I don’t remember the numbers he bought it for, 800 million, and it was very profitable through its decline. He actually made his money back and more. From a financial point of view, it was a bad investment in the sense of you could have been Facebook. But on more mundane metrics, it’s like, “Actually, it worked out for him.”
Lex Fridman (03:04:18): It all matters how you define success.
Jimmy Wales (03:04:20): It does. That is also advice to young people. One of the things I would say when we have our mental models of success as an entrepreneur, for example, and your examples in your mind are Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg. So, people who at a very young age had one really great idea that just went straight to the moon and it became one of the richest people in the world. That is really unusual, like really, really rare.
Jimmy Wales (03:04:52): And for most entrepreneurs, that is not a life path you’re going to take. You’re going to fail, you’re going to reboot, you’re going to learn from what you failed at. You’re going to try something different. And that is really important, because if your standard of success is, “Well, I feel sad because I’m not as rich as Elon Musk.” It’s like, “Well, so should almost everyone, possibly everyone except Elon Musk is not as rich as Elon Musk.”
Jimmy Wales (03:05:17): Realistically, you can set a standard of success. Even in a really narrow sense, which I don’t recommend of thinking about your financial success. It’s like if you measure your financial success by thinking about billionaires, that’s heavy. That’s probably not good. I don’t recommend it.
Jimmy Wales (03:05:40): Personally, for me, when journalists say, “Oh, how does it feel to not be a billionaire?” I usually say, “I don’t know how does it feel to you.” Because they’re not. But also, I live in London. The number of bankers that no one has ever heard of who live in London, who make far more money than I ever will is quite a large number, and I wouldn’t trade my life for theirs at all, because mine is so interesting.
Jimmy Wales (03:06:07): “Oh, right, Jimmy, we need you to go and meet the Chinese propaganda minister.” “Oh, okay. That’s super interesting.” Like, “Yeah, Jimmy, here’s the situation. You can go to this country. And why you’re there, the President has asked to see you.” It’s like, “God, that’s super interesting.” “Jimmy, you’re going to this place and there’s a local Wikipedia who said, ‘Do you want to stay with me and my family?'” And I’m like, “Yeah, that’s really cool. I would like to do that. That’s really interesting.” I don’t do that all the time, but I’ve done it and it’s great. So, for me, that’s arranging your life so that you have interesting experiences. It’s just great.
Lex Fridman (03:06:50): This is more to the question of what Wikipedia looks like in 1,000 years. What do you think is the meaning of this whole thing? Why are we here, human civilization? What’s the meaning of life?
Jimmy Wales (03:07:00): Yeah. I don’t think there is external answer to that question.
Lex Fridman (03:07:05): And I should mention that there’s a very good Wikipedia page on the different philosophies in the meaning of life.
Jimmy Wales (03:07:11): Oh, interesting. I have to read that and see what I think. Hopefully, it’s actually neutral and gives a wide range …
Lex Fridman (03:07:16): Oh, it’s a really good reference to a lot of different philosophies about meaning. The 20th century philosophy in general, from Nietzsche to the existentialist, to Simone de Beauvoir, all of them have an idea of meaning. They really struggle with it systematically, rigorously, and that’s what the page … And obviously, a shout-out to the Hitchhiker’s Guide and all that kind of stuff.
Jimmy Wales (03:07:37): Yeah. I think there’s no external answer to that. I think it’s internal. I think we decide what meaning we will have in our lives and what we’re going to do with ourselves. If we’re talking about 1,000 years, millions of years, Yuri Milner wrote a book. He’s a big internet investor guy. He wrote a book advocating quite strongly for humans exploring the universe, and getting off the planet. And he funds projects to using lasers to send little cameras, and interesting stuff. And he talks a lot in the book about meaning. His view is that the purpose of the human species is to broadly survive and get off the planet.
Jimmy Wales (03:08:31): Well, I don’t agree with everything he has to say, because I think that’s not a meaning that can motivate most people in their own lives. It’s like, “Okay, great.” The distances of space are absolutely enormous, so I don’t know. Shall we build generation ships to start flying places? I can’t do that. Even if I’m Elon Musk and I could devote all my wealth to build, I’ll be dead on the ship on the way. So, is that really a meaning?
Jimmy Wales (03:08:57): But I think it’s really interesting to think about. And reading his little book, it’s quite a short little book. Reading his book, it did make me think about, “Wow, this is big. This is not what you think about in your day-to-day life. Where is the human species going to be in 10 million years?” And it does make you sort of turn back to Earth and say, “Gee, let’s not destroy the planet. We’re stuck here for at least a while, and therefore we should really think about sustainability.” I mean, one million year sustainability.
Jimmy Wales (03:09:37): And we don’t have all the answers. We have nothing close to the answers. I’m actually excited about AI in this regard, while also bracketing, yeah, I understand there’s also risks and people are terrified of AI. But I actually think it is quite interesting this moment in time that we may have in the next 50 years to really, really solve some really long-term human problems, for example, in health. The progress that’s being made in cancer treatment, because we are able to at scale model molecules, and genetics, and things like this, it gets huge. It’s really exciting. So, if we can hang on for a little while, and certain problems that seem completely intractable today, like climate change may end up being actually not that hard.
Lex Fridman (03:10:30): And we just might be able to alleviate the full diversity of human suffering.
Jimmy Wales (03:10:35): For sure. Yeah.
Lex Fridman (03:10:37): In so doing, help increase the chance that we can propagate the flame of human consciousness out towards the stars. And I think another important one, if we fail to do that. For me, it’s propagating, maintaining the full diversity, and richness, and complexity, and expansiveness of human knowledge. So, if we destroy ourselves, it would make me feel a little bit okay if the human knowledge persists.
Jimmy Wales (03:11:09): It just triggered me to say something really interesting, which is when we talked earlier about translating and using machines to translate, we mostly talked about small languages and translating into English, but I always like to tell this story of something inconsequential, really.
Jimmy Wales (03:11:28): I was in Norway, in Bergen, Norway, where every year they’ve got this annual festival called [foreign language 03:11:33], which is young groups drumming, and they have a drumming competition. It’s the 17 sectors of the city, and they’ve been doing it for a couple hundred years or whatever. They wrote about it in the three languages of Norway. And then from there, it was translated into English, into German, et cetera, et cetera.
Jimmy Wales (03:11:53): And so, what I love about that story is what it reminds me is this machine translation goes both ways. And when you talk about the richness and broadness of human culture, we’re already seeing some really great pieces of this. So, like Korean soap operas, really popular, not with me, but with people.
Jimmy Wales (03:12:17): Imagine taking a very famous, very popular, very well known Korean drama. I literally mean now, we’re just about there technologically where we use a machine to redub it in English in an automated way, including digitally editing the faces so it doesn’t look dubbed. And so, suddenly you say, “Oh, wow, here’s a piece of …” It’s the Korean equivalent of maybe it’s Friends as a comedy, or maybe it’s Succession, just to be very contemporary. It’s something that really impacted a lot of people, and they really loved it, and we have literally no idea what it’s about. And suddenly, it’s like, “Wow.” Music, street music from wherever in the world can suddenly become accessible to us all in new ways. It’s so cool.
Lex Fridman (03:13:09): It’s really exciting to get access to the richness of culture in China, in the many different subcultures of Africa, South America.
Jimmy Wales (03:13:19): One of my unsuccessful arguments with the Chinese government is by blocking Wikipedia, you aren’t just stopping people in China from reading Chinese Wikipedia and other language versions of Wikipedia, you’re also preventing the Chinese people from telling their story. So, is there a small festival in a small town in China like [foreign language 03:13:41]? I don’t know. But by the way, the people who live in that village, that small town of 50,000, they can’t put that in Wikipedia and get it translated into other places. They can’t share their culture and their knowledge.
Jimmy Wales (03:13:54): And I think for China, this should be a somewhat influential argument, because China does feel misunderstood in the world. And it’s like, “Okay, well, there’s one way. If you want to help people understand, put it in Wikipedia. That’s what people go to when they want to understand.”
Lex Fridman (03:14:08): And give the amazing, incredible people of China a voice.
Jimmy Wales (03:14:13): Exactly.
Lex Fridman (03:14:14): Jimmy, I thank you so much. I’m such a huge fan of everything you’ve done.
Jimmy Wales (03:14:18): Oh, thank you. That’s really great.
Lex Fridman (03:14:18): I keep saying Wikipedia. I’m deeply, deeply, deeply, deeply grateful for Wikipedia. I love it. It brings me joy. I donate all the time. You should donate too. It’s a huge honor to finally talk with you, and this is just amazing. Thank you so much for today.
Jimmy Wales (03:14:31): Thanks for having me.
Lex Fridman (03:14:33): Thanks for listening to this conversation with Jimmy Wales. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from the world historian, Daniel Boorstin. The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.
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