Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. Jimmy Wales is founder
Speaker 1: of Wikipedia. He has a new book out, The Seven
Speaker 1: Rules of Trust, a blueprint for building things that last.
Speaker 1: That book out tomorrow and lucky for us, he joins
Speaker 1: us right here in studio. Welcome, Welcome, Nice to have
Speaker 1: you here with us.
Speaker 2: Yeah, thanks for having me. It's like a spaceship.
Speaker 1: Some call it the fishball. We call it home. This
Speaker 1: book about trust. When did you start writing it.
Speaker 2: It was a couple of years ago. I had had
Speaker 2: some ideas around this, and yeah, just just started. And
Speaker 2: it's obviously turned out to be quite timely as we
Speaker 2: have a lot of issues around trust in society, and
Speaker 2: you know, I want to encourage people to let's get
Speaker 2: back to society of trust.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: It's funny, Carolyn, I spent a lot of time talking
Speaker 3: about this ahead of the interview because Wikipedia sort of
Speaker 3: seems and look, it's had its challenges, question, it's had
Speaker 3: its controversies. But for things that are online, m it's
Speaker 3: kind of as weird utopia in.
Speaker 1: The sense that it's kind of remarkable.
Speaker 3: It's really remarkable. I mean, we know anonymous people online
Speaker 3: are oftentimes are full of vitriol and hate. We can
Speaker 3: see that even when people use their names on social
Speaker 3: media platforms. We lock our doors when we leave the house.
Speaker 3: Why does trust work on Wikipedia? But kind of seems
Speaker 3: like nowhere else right now?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I think for me, you know, one
Speaker 2: of the seven rules of trust that is most meaningful
Speaker 2: in that regard is purpose. Like Wikipedia has a very
Speaker 2: simple purpose, which is to build an encyclopedia, and we
Speaker 2: make all our decisions around that and the rules about
Speaker 2: participation and so forth. And that's very different from social media,
Speaker 2: where there isn't a clear purpose other than free speech
Speaker 2: and openness, and therefore that toxicity really creeps in quite
Speaker 2: a lot in social media. You know, people say outrageous
Speaker 2: things because they get real for it. They get more followers,
Speaker 2: they get more engagement, and they algorithms love that.
Speaker 1: You talk about clickbait all the time, clickbait.
Speaker 2: All the time, And you know, that's very different from
Speaker 2: the world of Wikipedia, where I mean, thank goodness, our
Speaker 2: headlines are so boring. There's no clickbait. You know. It's
Speaker 2: like the erical on Thomas Jefferson's called Thomas Jefferson, you know,
Speaker 2: but it does what it says on the ten. You know,
Speaker 2: that's a that's a very British expression, afraid, but but yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean I do think that that having a simple
Speaker 2: purpose is a part of what keeps us focused and
Speaker 2: keeps our community focused.
Speaker 1: How do you describe facts? How do you determine facts?
Speaker 1: And I am amazed in I mean, I've been doing
Speaker 1: this a few years and I felt like when I
Speaker 1: started it was very clear fact versus ficion in terms
Speaker 1: of reporting and doing stories, and I feel like there's
Speaker 1: a lot of gray area and I just feel like
Speaker 1: a fact is a fact. So how you guys determine
Speaker 1: what's a fact in an entry?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I mean we're really old fashioned, like what we
Speaker 2: look for our reliable sources. So we want you know,
Speaker 2: sort of academic research or quality newspapers, quality magazines, quality books.
Speaker 2: Really old fashioned and you know, uh, the the idea
Speaker 2: that we should treat you know, the New England Journal
Speaker 2: of Medicine as the same as social media influence our
Speaker 2: line is obviously just wrong. Like you, you really want facts,
Speaker 2: and that's what people want from Wikipedia.
Speaker 1: They don't want sources matter.
Speaker 2: Sources really matter, Like having a good quality source is
Speaker 2: what it's all about.
Speaker 1: But why don't sources matter to everybody, and other people
Speaker 1: will say, Okay, I believe this source is reliable, so like,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean, Like we're living in like
Speaker 1: different worlds.
Speaker 2: I think, I think, and I think that's a huge problem.
Speaker 2: I mean, I do think, you know, it's really important.
Speaker 2: I mean one of the problems that we've seen is
Speaker 2: that a lot of the media, in response to the
Speaker 2: changing and very difficult financial model for journalism, they've chased
Speaker 2: after really partisan audiences and so you know, sometimes you
Speaker 2: read something and you're like, yeah, that was interesting, that
Speaker 2: was good, but I'm not sure I got both sides
Speaker 2: of the story there. I live in the UK and
Speaker 2: we have a just an example, two quality newspapers, the
Speaker 2: Guardian and the Telegraph, left leaning, right leaning. They're both
Speaker 2: great newspapers. But I often read one and I'm like, oh,
Speaker 2: but and then I go read the other and I'm like, yeah,
Speaker 2: you probably should have been somewhere in the middle both
Speaker 2: of you, and it would have been I think a
Speaker 2: better story had you said, well, you know, we got
Speaker 2: one side of the story, but we actually had to
Speaker 2: go out and find somebody to tell us a little
Speaker 2: bit about the other side, you know. You can't be
Speaker 2: too like the moon is made of rocks or is
Speaker 2: it cheese? Who knows. I don't mean that seriously hopefully geez,
Speaker 2: but you know, like seriously thinking about like who are
Speaker 2: we talking to and we are we getting to the
Speaker 2: bottom of this.
Speaker 3: With media, With trust in media here in the United
Speaker 3: States declining and having declined over the last few years,
Speaker 3: in your view, is there something that we can do
Speaker 3: better the media can do better that it can borrow
Speaker 3: from what has worked at Wikipedia, what has worked with
Speaker 3: the trust, the methods of trust that you've studied, that
Speaker 3: can make us build trust again with our audiences.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, well, the good news is that the
Speaker 2: financial press, like Bloomberg is still among the most trusted
Speaker 2: h And I think that's because by the mandate of
Speaker 2: what you're trying to do informing business people and investors,
Speaker 2: you kind of have to be like ruthlessly objective. You're
Speaker 2: not chasing after partisan audiences and things like that.
Speaker 1: But I do think that's up data.
Speaker 2: Big data. Data is important transparency, I think, you know, realistically,
Speaker 2: you know, one of the things that Wikipedia does that's
Speaker 2: kind of odd is we'll have a you know, at
Speaker 2: the top of a page the neutrality of this article
Speaker 2: has been disputed, and I we've all seen it. Yeah,
Speaker 2: we've all seen it. And I always say, you know,
Speaker 2: I kind of wish sometimes the New York Times would
Speaker 2: put a banner up just saying, you know, we had
Speaker 2: a big fight in the news room. We weren't quite sure,
Speaker 2: so like but yeah, yeah, but here's a little bit
Speaker 2: of their inside thinking, like we did want to report this,
Speaker 2: We're not sure we've got the full story yet, because
Speaker 2: that pretending to be perfection all the time. People see
Speaker 2: through that, and they know, of course, and I think
Speaker 2: they're willing to say, yeah, like, actually journalism is quite hard,
Speaker 2: you know, so a little more transparency is always good.
Speaker 1: Do you get pressure a lot from companies, politicians, individuals
Speaker 1: to like change an entry?
Speaker 2: No, not really. I mean people, you know, I meet
Speaker 2: a lot of people, and people often are like, well,
Speaker 2: you know my Wikipedia entry, what about this? What about that?
Speaker 2: I much like, yeah, send us an email, like you know,
Speaker 2: we'll have somebody look at that. That's all fine in general.
Speaker 3: Note and actually we're very but you really just say,
Speaker 3: just send them in an email and I'm not going
Speaker 3: to do anything about it.
Speaker 2: Kind of yeah, okay, But no. Sometimes people have a
Speaker 2: legitimate point. They're like, oh, well, you know I did
Speaker 2: this thing and it was in the press, and you know,
Speaker 2: it's like, okay, well maybe we just overlooked it, and
Speaker 2: that's that's great. But you know, at a deeper level,
Speaker 2: one of the things that's really important is, you know,
Speaker 2: we aren't funded by governments. We aren't funded by sort
Speaker 2: of the major donors. We're funded by people giving their
Speaker 2: twenty dollars and that makes a big difference for our
Speaker 2: intellectual independence. We're not worried like if we've got something
Speaker 2: negative about whatever, then we might lose our donation.
Speaker 3: How is how is the fundraising going? Because I feel
Speaker 3: like I've gotten a lot of messages from you throughout
Speaker 3: the years. Throughout the year, from Jimmy Wills on Wikipedia,
Speaker 3: We've all seen it.
Speaker 1: Is it going okay?
Speaker 3: Is funding going okay?
Speaker 2: It's okay. Yeah, we've we've been uh, you know, we're stable,
Speaker 2: We're very cautious with money, so we always try to
Speaker 2: build our reserves and so on. And then you know, recently,
Speaker 2: I don't know, Elon tweeted defund Wikipedia. I think we
Speaker 2: were about five million dollars that day. So you can
Speaker 2: text melon I know you guys have been in touch.
Speaker 2: You can text them and say tweet about us again.
Speaker 3: It's to the end of the year.
Speaker 1: Well you have some cos there raise money