Disruptors

Trust at Scale: Lessons from Wikipedia

SPEAKERS

Jimmy Wales, John Stackhouse

John Stackhouse 00:00:03

Hi, it’s John here. Today’s episode is about a single word, trust. And if you’re like me, you probably think trust is in decline pretty much everywhere. And every survey out there, every study would say trust is in secular decline.

And yet, if you took a bus this morning, you put your trust in a whole bunch of people. If you bought a sandwich at lunch, you put your trust in a whole bunch of strangers. For all of our concerns about trust, we have trust all around us and in many ways it’s also growing.

Our guest today is someone who has just written a book about the seven rules of trust, and he’s also built one of the world’s most famous enterprises, which is stitched together entirely by trust.

I’ll be joined in a moment by Jimmy Wales, Sir Jimmy when he’s in the UK, Jimbo when he’s at home in Alabama, and around the world, known as the co-founder of Wikipedia.

Whether your questions are about science, business, wars, movie stars, wherever the human imagination will take you, Wikipedia continues to grow as the world’s encyclopedia, not just because it’s full of facts, but because it’s stitched together by trust.

In his book, The Seven Rules of Trust, Jimmy Wales and his Canadian co-author, Dan Gardner, outlined not just the core principles of Wikipedia, but the broader principles of trust that can make society and communities stronger, even in this disruptive age of generative AI.

Jimmy, welcome to Disruptors.

Jimmy Wales 00:01:44

Thanks for having me on. It’s good to be here.

John Stackhouse 00:01:46

Let me start with the book and curious what inspired you to write it 25 years after launching Wikipedia.

Jimmy Wales 00:01:53

Yeah. Well, I’ve been watching the Edelman Trust Barometer Survey, and we’ve seen this really long-term slide in trust in society. So trust in politics, trust in institutions, to a lesser degree, trust in business, trust in each other.

And I realized that Wikipedia is built on a foundation of trust. So I thought, “Okay, well, look, Wikipedia’s gone from being kind of a joke to one of the few things people trust. What are some of the lessons I’ve learned and what do I have to say about that?”

John Stackhouse 00:02:25

And lots of lessons that we’ll get into, but maybe we can chat a bit about what is causing that decline. Society’s very different today than 25 years ago when you launched Wikipedia. What in your mind has really changed in our worlds?

Jimmy Wales 00:02:40

If you take a long view, then, yes, a lot is different from 25 years ago, but a lot is the same. Human beings are still the same. Our institutions are flawed, good and bad, and all of that.

What has changed, certainly the rise of social media and how people are living their lives in that sense, but also the rise in, I would say, hyperpartisanship in politics.

When we look at trust, say trust in politics, it’s very tempting for a lot of people to lay the blame at the foot of Donald Trump, for example, who’s clearly not always a trustworthy person. But the decline in trust is much older than that, and it’s a much more broad long-term trend.

And so, that’s not the only place to look. I mean, I would say in part, he’s a symptom of the decline of trust as much as a cause.

John Stackhouse 00:03:31

Many people would attribute that to the decline of institutionalism, whether it’s churches, communities, the fragmentation of society. Do you buy that general theory of society that we’ve become more atomized?

Jimmy Wales 00:03:44

To some extent, the way we live our lives in many ways is not that far different. We still have groups of friends and we still have various community things we do and so on and so forth.

 But I do think there’s a piece to that. Certainly, when we see relatively rapid changes in technology, the way we get information… I’ll just give one example.

In the last 25 years, we’ve seen a real acceleration in the decline in local journalism, local newspapers. And that makes people a little disconnected from civic participation. I wish I had a solution to the problem of local newspapers, but I don’t. But I think some of those kinds of things are a factor in all of this.

John Stackhouse 00:04:48

One of the aspects of your book that I found interesting was the notion of, I want to call it community spirit, maybe you call it civics, but doing things together. And this takes me back to the origins of Wikipedia because people may describe it as crowdsourcing, but it really is about community.

Take us back 25 years when you were building Wikipedia. What inspired you as the internet was taking off to do this crazy thing of getting humans to work together across geographies on something as age-old as editing and fact checking?

Jimmy Wales 00:05:06

Yeah. I’m glad you didn’t fully go with crowdsourcing because that’s a term I don’t particularly care for. Crowdsourcing is, “Oh, I’ve got some work to do. I’m going to try and trick the general public into doing it.” And that’s not a very respectful description. It’s not a very accurate description of what people are like and what Wikipedia is like.

And that’s really about community building, about people getting together because they enjoy doing something together. They feel productive in some way with Wikipedia, in particular. And some of the inspiration for it.

So I had a friend who was a professor at Brown University, so elite Ivy League University, philosophy professor, and we met each other online. And we had an email dialogue for several years discussing ideas and philosophy, and I was learning a lot from him. And it was fantastic that somebody was willing to share that much time with me.

And that kind of spirit to say, actually, people enjoy intellectual stuff. They enjoy working together with other people. That was part of the inspiration is to say, “I think people would enjoy doing this.”

John Stackhouse 00:06:13

One of the things about your own background that people may not appreciate is that you were, I don’t know if this is fair, but a bit of a quant.

Jimmy Wales 00:06:19

Mm. Mm-hmm.

John Stackhouse 00:06:20

You did your PhD studies in finance, you worked as an options trader, you’re a numbers guy. How did that intersect with that intellectual curiosity that was also a foundation of Wikipedia?

Jimmy Wales 00:06:35

I’m a big fan of an essay by Friedrich Hayek. It was in the American Economic Review in 1945, and it’s titled, On the Use of Knowledge in Society. And it’s about how a price system functions to communicate information.

So, at that time, there was a raging debate going on between the idea of a centrally planned economy versus a price-based market economy. And what he identified that I think is universally understood now is that the price system plays a very important role in efficiently communicating information about demand and what people want.

And his point was, “A price system’s incredibly efficient. I don’t need to know why the shelves are emptying out of this product that I make. I just need to know, “Hey, I can make more. I can sell more. And then the price system is sending me the signal.”

So, Wikipedia is not a price system, it’s not a marketplace. But that idea of decentralizing decision making was something that really impacted my thinking, which is to say in a traditional encyclopedia, all the information has to be communicated up a hierarchy and to the editor-in-chief and as sort of a central group of people decide.

Whereas at Wikipedia, the main decision making goes on at the end points, at the level of the individual article where people are discussing and debating, bringing in new sources and so on and so forth. And so that kind of decentralized approach did have a big impact on my early thinking.

John Stackhouse 00:08:02

So, a big bet in trust, I would assume by you in your community. But you didn’t seem to invest a lot in selecting that community, almost self-selected. Is that a fair reflection from what I’ve read in your book?

Jimmy Wales 00:08:16

I mean, that’s an interesting question, actually. So before Wikipedia, I had a project called Newpedia, which was a very traditional top-down, we’re going to write an encyclopedia, let’s recruit the best academics. And a lot of those people made up the backbone of the early community.

And certainly throughout the history of Wikipedia, there’s always been this idea of, we need to find people who are kind and thoughtful, who respect the idea of neutrality, who respect the need for quality sourcing and all of that.

And so, although, yes, it’s very open and anybody is welcome to come and join, we’re still, we’re looking for a certain type of person.

John Stackhouse 00:08:54

And the community helped you select that?

Jimmy Wales 00:08;56

Oh, yeah, for sure. I mean, even today, it’s all part of what we do. I mean, we do things like editathons, sort of public outreach events to get people to come and join Wikipedia and so forth. We’re always looking for people who think it would be a cool hobby.

John Stackhouse 00:09:09

So, this takes me back to those early years. At the time I was in journalism, I was Editor of The Globe and Mail during some of those years, and we experimented with lots of things, but one of them was community comments.

And in the early days, holy cow, it was almost an, I don’t want to say an unmitigated disaster, but it was pretty loud, noisy, and at times irresponsible. And it was a window on the downside of community, especially un-moderated community.

How did your thinking evolve in those early years as social media was exploding, as we were getting into those early days of the internet as something that everyone could participate in?

Jimmy Wales 00:09:54

I’m old. I’m old enough that I remember Usenet, which was before the Worldwide Web even. It was a giant un-moderated and in many ways un-moderatable because it was a very distributed design. It was full of flamers, full of spam, full of very angry people.

And so, sometimes people have this kind of rosy view,  Oh, it must have been really easy back then because everybody was sweet and nice and everybody was happy about the internet.” And I’m like, “Well, no, not really.”

Because the thing about humans is we can be mean to each other even without an algorithm. And so, the way I think about this and the way I talk about this is like, what do you need to do to foster, facilitate a good community, a quality discussion?

And so, clearly, as many, many newspapers experienced back in the early days, just opening up and let anybody comment on anything, it’s going to be dominated by the angriest people, by the trolls and by… It’s sort of a bit of a fiasco. So then you have to start thinking about, “Okay, but how do we manage this? How do we get better at this?”

At Wikipedia, what’s interesting is we don’t use algorithms, we don’t use scoring mechanisms. It’s an accountability model, not a gatekeeping model. So everything you edit, everybody can see what you’ve done. And so they can see your history.

And so, you will have a good reputation or a not a good reputation and people would be aware of that. You don’t get a reward from being from low quality behavior. As you do, by the way, in almost all social media, because the reward is you act like a jerk and you get engagement.

Wikipedia, it’s just like your comment gets erased and that’s that. One of the earliest rules of Wikipedia was no personal attacks. You and I, maybe we’re editing something together and we’ve got a real disagreement. Well, the minute one of us steps across the line and starts attacking the other person, that’s not helpful.

That doesn’t mean everybody’s perfect in Wikipedia. Obviously, people get mad and they attack each other and so on. But there’s a culture that says, “You know what? If you’ve been a jerk to someone, you should probably apologize.”

Maybe you should back away from that subject area if you’re too emotional to be able to calmly interact with people, maybe too much trying to win a battle rather than help make the project better.

And so, it’s not magic and it’s not automatic. It really does require ongoing discussion, dialogue, coaching, people to say like, “Hold on a minute, here’s what we’re trying to do.”

And one of the seven rules of trust that I think is really important is have a good purpose. And with Wikipedia, we all know what we’re here to do.

We have a goal. The goal is a high quality, neutral encyclopedia that cites quality sources and so forth, and that puts a framework around everything that we do. And so we have a way of deciding. It’s like, “Oh, is this debate constructive or is this just people sniping at each other?”

John Stackhouse 00:12:47

Let’s fast-forward into this new age of AI. Probably like a lot of people, I’ve been wondering, how does Wikipedia survive in an age of generative AI? Most models, LLMs, draw on Wikipedia, it seems a lot.

Jimmy Wales 00:13:02

Yeah, they do.

John Stackhouse 00:13:03

But, over time, does that relationship continue where Wikipedia feeds the LLMs? Or do the LLMs figure it out and start to bypass you and those moderators who are essential to all that you’ve built?

Jimmy Wales 00:13;17

Yeah, I don’t see any movement in that direction. I mean, clearly, Wikipedia is a key part of the training data and that human curation of knowledge is very, very important. I mean, I always joke you wouldn’t want to use an LLM that was trained only on Twitter. It would be very angry and stupid.

And obviously, Wikipedia is different from a lot of publishers who are quite disturbed about all this and the training that’s going on on their content. But Wikipedia is open source, freely licensed. And so, on that level, it’s fine. That’s what it’s here for is the world is better off if LLMs have read Wikipedia.

But in terms of competing with us, at least for now, and we’ll see how this goes, the hallucination problem is still severe for large language models. I mean, they literally just make stuff up. And dangerously, they make stuff up that sounds plausible, that’s the way the technology works.

And that problem is much greater the more obscure the topic that you get to. So, at least for now, large language models aren’t a direct substitute in any way for Wikipedia. They’re clearly inferior.

What they are better at, and this is having some impact on us, is that quick answer to a question, particularly if it’s of low risk, low danger. So, if you ask Google today, “How old is Tom Cruise?” We do see a decline in traffic for that type of query.

But if you have that question and that’s literally all you wanted, okay, fine, you’re done. You don’t come to Wikipedia, that’s okay. We’re not ad driven, so our revenue isn’t based on how many clicks we get.

But if you’re like, “Oh, wow, he’s younger than I thought. I thought he must have been 80 by now and he isn’t. What was he in? I thought he was in a movie. What was that?”

And then you go, you dig in, then you’re back to Wikipedia. And so that’s great.

John Stackhouse 00:15:08

Does it change the business model for you?

Jimmy Wales 00:15:11

No, no. Our business model, so to speak, we’re a charity and we’ve had very, very good donations. I mean, our donors are very loyal. And then there was sort of the amusing theme because Elon Musk has been on a campaign against us and he once tweeted, “Defund Wikipedia.” We brought in a few million that day, so bring it on, Elon.

But no, it hasn’t impacted us. And we’re very lucky. I mean, actually one of the things that I do think is quite important, and this was a decision that we made consciously. We aren’t funded by governments and we aren’t funded by a handful of billionaires, and that’s a really good thing.

Imagine if 10 years ago Elon had said, “Oh, Jimmy, stop with the banners and asking people for money. I’ll just fund it. I’ll just write a check every year for the costs.”

Well, then we’d be absolutely vulnerable to whatever whims he might have. And we’re much better off having the intellectual independence of being funded by the general public and we answer to the general public, and that’s really, really important.

John Stackhouse 00:16:15

All of this in a way speaks to neutrality. Elon has labeled you Wokepedia and says, “You’re not neutral. You’re biased.” And there’s some debate as to what neutrality means in this day and age. In some ways, none of us are neutral.

How’s your own thinking about neutrality evolving in this arguably more contentious age?

Jimmy Wales 00:16:36

I’m still very, very keen. So, certainly, the way I approach these questions is, if you say we’ve become Wokepedia, I’m like, “Well, that’s just not true. I know the Wikipedians. I know Wikipedia. It’s not true.”

If you say, “Yeah, but this particular area, you’ve got a bias.” My answer to that is always, “Okay, let’s see what we can do about that. Tell me what you think is wrong and how do we fix it?”

And there are areas where I don’t think we’ve got it right right now. I think we’ll get there, but that’s just part of the discourse.

For me, that is the heart of what Wikipedia should be about is having that thoughtful dialogue. How do we get to a place where everybody can point to it with pride and say, “Yeah, that is a good presentation of the issue.”

And so, for me, neutrality in these divisive times is the same as it ever was. It’s not that hard. It’s sometimes hard to calm people down enough to get there and things like that, of course.

But when people say,  Oh, but how can you be neutral anyway?” I’m like, “Well, okay, here’s one technique. One of the most important techniques that we have is step back from the issue and don’t take a side in the debate, just describe the debate and describe it in a way that’s fair to all the sides.”

And the reason that I prefer that is because I believe that is what an encyclopedia should give you. You shouldn’t go to an encyclopedia and get a one-sided presentation of something. You should get an understanding of what the debate is about.

When we think about the question of trust, I think people will continue to trust us and increase their trust in us as long as we’re willing to grapple with it. We’re willing to say, “Okay, hold on. You’re saying we’re super biased. Let’s go through this.”

What I find when I look into this is, that what Wikipedia tends to do is knock off some of the rough edges in the media. When the media is being biased, we kind of tone it down and stay at more neutrally.

John Stackhouse 00:18:29

One of the important aspects, even essential aspects of neutrality is skepticism, including self-skepticism. That takes me to your Seven Rules of Trust, and we don’t have time to go through each of them, but I want to talk about the social context of these pillars of trust.

I was fascinated in the book with your reflections on Quakerism. The belief in community, Quakers work and worship in circles and meet in circles.

It had me wonder about how our circles have been broken and whether we can rebuild them online or if we are becoming too self-centered, losing the circle and having things revolve around us rather than us being part of a broader group that revolves around something bigger.

Jimmy Wales 00:19:13

So, a lot of our sense that society’s breaking down in some horrific way does come from a very politicized political class and from highly toxic social media, not from our day-to-day life. It’s easy to fall into a little bit of despair if we think about broad, huge, big picture trends, because what can anybody do about that? I’m just one person.

But I think we can start where we are. And I think that’s part of the concept of the Seven Rules of Trust is to say, “In my personal life or in my family, in my company, in my organization, can I put trust at the center of what we’re thinking about?”

So if you’re a small business, you really should be thinking a lot about trust. What is the trust that your customers have in you? How do you build that trust? How do you extend that?

Because it’s very profitable to be trusted. It makes doing business of all kinds much easier and cheaper. And part of the story of the Quakers in the book is the Quakers, as a part of their ideology, they would be honest about their negotiating position to a fault.

And because of that, people were like, “Oh, well, you can do business with the Quakers. They’re not going to cheat you and great. Fantastic.” So they became very successful in business, and that’s really an amazing thing.

And I think that’s the kinds of things that we can put on the agenda in lots of places. And I think we should see more of that. As consumers, we should say, “Actually, I’m going to go with the product where I feel like the company has a reputation of standing behind it.”

John Stackhouse 00:20;45

And that’s the good side of the sharing economy that consumers, users get to share information. It’s not just about sharing a product. Uber’s a good example of this.

Great leap of faith. I’m getting into a stranger’s car, but I also trust the community that if others rate that driver 4. 9, odds are pretty good because I’m part of that community.

Jimmy Wales 00:21:07

Yeah. With Uber, the thing I find sort of amusing is, I remember there was a big kind of moral panic and scare, when? 30 years ago, I don’t remember exactly, about carjackings.

And at that time, if you pulled up at the curb somewhere and somebody opened the rear door of your car, you would be absolutely terrified that you were getting carjacked. Now, you wouldn’t do that because you would go, look, “Hey, I’m not an Uber.”

It’s sort of more trusting the idea, oh yeah, a random person tries to get in my car. I’m going to laugh about it because they’re probably not trying to kill me. They think I’m an Uber.

John Stackhouse 00:21:41

But one of the tensions, and this is perhaps a forever tension in online society and online economies is the need for regulation of having a central force that governs what we do. So when there is bad behavior, even if it’s abnormal, that it is both corrected and there’s a signal to the market, to the community of users that bad behavior is caught and addressed.

What should we learn from the Wikipedia model in terms of governance? Because there isn’t that centralizing force that you mentioned earlier in the conversation.

Is that just the special sauce of Wikipedia or can that be translated to other, especially more commercial markets?

Jimmy Wales 00:22:23

I think it can. I mean, we’ve talked about businesses that could do a better job of thinking about trust and building trust. Top down, centralized, opaque moderation mechanisms are not working very well. And so my view is, start to explore ways you can devolve a lot of that into the community.

I’ll give one example that I do think is a bright spot. I sort of knock on Twitter quite a lot, X. I can never change what it’s called in my mind, but their community knows feature I think is broadly a good thing.

It empowers people to say, “Hold on, that’s wrong. That’s misinformation.” And I think that kind of stuff is very useful because it’s not top down, it’s not from the company. It empowers the community to have a say over something.

But that idea of let’s find ways to devolve decision making to the end points, that’s probably a very helpful thing to do.

John Stackhouse 00:23:17

Jimmy, as we move towards close, one of the things I’m taking from this conversation is actually your optimism about humanity. Of course, your Seven Rules of Trust are positive. Things like make it personal. We can all do something. We don’t need to leave this up to an algorithm.

But I love the point, I think it’s rule number two, about being positive about people. Give us a sense of what gives you positivity when you wake up in 2026 about people.

Jimmy Wales 00:23:45

If you step away from the online world and spend time with families, spend time with friends, people are delightful. And in the research for the book, I found a lot of really bright spots.

Things like Braver Angels is a group that they get together people across the aisle, political spectrum to sort of have discussions and debates. But what they show is actually people have more in common than they have in difference, even if they’re very different politically. So there’s a lot to be happy about.

And even I’m going to say a lot of people are very dismissive and have a lot of concern about young people being addicted to their phones and addicted to TikTok and, “Oh, kids these days and their short form video.”

And I’m like, yeah, they do love a little short form video. That’s true. They like the YouTube shorts and they like the TikTok and all of that. But guess what? This is also the same generation, I’m talking about teenagers who will binge-watch eight straight hours of a really complicated and sophisticated TV show.

Another element that I’ve really been pleased to find out, I had no idea is like the listenership to podcasts skews heavily young. And you think, wow, podcasts, like podcasts are long form content.

This is the same generation we’re afraid all they’re doing is flicking posts on Instagram and yet they’re doing that, but you know what they’re also doing? They’re also listening to really long conversations and that’s kind of fantastic.

John Stackhouse 00:25:10

And are they going to Wikipedia?

Jimmy Wales 00:25:11

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Massive. Yeah. One of my favorite things to do, I love to go out and speak at schools. And I always think when I was 15, if they had said, “Yeah, okay everybody, we’re having an assembly and the Editor-in-Chief of Britannica is going to come and give a lecture today,” we would have been like, “Ugh, kill me now. Are you kidding me?”

And when I go to speak, the kids are out of their minds. They’re so excited. They love Wikipedia.

John Stackhouse 00:25:36

Why do you think kids today may be more interested in encyclopedia as the online version than your generation might have been in the physical world?

Jimmy Wales 00:25:43

Oh, I just think it’s so much a part of our lives, Wikipedia, compared to encyclopedias back then. Back then, encyclopedia was a very solemn set of books on the shelf and you would go to it from time to time.

Whereas now, imagine that you hear, as you might in the news these days, I saw that Iran fired a missile at Azerbaijan and you think, “Azerbaijan, I don’t really know about that.”

40 years ago, you might have thought, “Oh, I should go to the library and look that up.” Well, you thought that, but you never did it. You just wondered and that was the end of that. Whereas now you probably go, “Oh, hold on. Azerbaijan.” You Google it and then you’re like, “Oh, Iranian Azerbaijani relations. Okay, now I’m going to see, what are they mad about?”

And that’s the kind of casual learning that people really enjoy and I think is really powerful.

John Stackhouse 00:26:26

It comes back to maybe one of the unspoken rules of trust, which is be curious.

Jimmy Wales 00:26:35

Jimmy Wales: Yeah.

John Stackhouse 00:26:36

And humans are, we’re a curious species.

Jimmy Wales 00:26:38

They definitely are.

John Stackhouse 00:26:39

We want to learn, we want to explore. If I can ask one last question, Jimmy, this has been such a rich conversation. It’s about what some might call a trust dividend.

If we’re doing all these things, following the rules, creating more trust, and if there is a dividend from that, where would you invest it? Is it in schools like you’re doing? Is it in institutions? Is it in digital infrastructure and product design?

Jimmy Wales 00:27:04

I definitely think that investing in education is incredibly important, investing time with your children and their education, things like that. That is massively, massively important. And I think that’s something we all need to focus on.

John Stackhouse 00:27:19

Jimmy Wales, what a great conversation. Thank you. Thank you for creating Wikipedia.

Jimmy Wales 00:27:24

Very good.

John Stackhouse 00:27:24

John Stackhouse: I can’t think of a person who has not benefited from it and you can’t say many things about that in the world.

Jimmy Wales 00:27:30

Jimmy Wales: Very good.

John Stackhouse 00:27:30

Thank you for being on Disruptors.

Jimmy Wales 00:27:32

Thanks for having me.

John Stackhouse 00:27:34

There’s so much to take away from that conversation. But one of the points that stands out in my mind is how trust is not a moral decoration. Every business, every community, every circle of friends depends on trust, and that’s something we can all invest in every day.

Check out our show notes for a new briefing on trust at Internet Scale. And if you’re looking for more ideas and insights, visit rbc.com/ thoughtleadership. There, you’ll find critical insights to help us all make more informed decisions in a rapidly changing world.

You’ve been listening to Disruptors, an RBC podcast. If you like this episode, please rate, review, and follow us on Apple or Spotify. That will help others find conversations like the one you’ve heard today.

I’m John Stackhouse. Thanks for listening.