#385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia
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The following is a conversation, Jimmy wales, co founder of wikipedia, one of, if not the most impact for websites ever expanding the collective knowledge, intelligence and wisdom of human civilization. And now a quick few second mention of his sponsor. Checking out in the description is the best way to support this broadcast.

We got hex clip for cocoa, asleep for naps, and how some academia's for deliciousness choose wise than my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team, were always hiring, good elects, treatment of consolation, hiring and our friends onto the full arteries. As always, no ads in the middle.

I try to make this interesting, but if you must keep them, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought you by hacks clad, the maker of well engineer, and pounded hybrid cook air I just cooked with one of their hands last night. He made a delicious stake.

Is there anything Better than the meditated process of making mistake? Late night, when you have need no day, you fasted for twenty two, twenty three hours. He taken the smell and the sizing sounds of deliciousness.

And I just think how grateful I am to have shelter, to have food, to have all this amazing things that I can use, that other brilliant people have created, is awesome. This human civilization we've built up well. We do a thing that we're good, bad, and we, with that thing, help other people inform this cohesive network of goodness.

The beautiful thing, really, anyway, the thing that you also kind of notice is that is really well engineered. The nonstick works beautifully. IT looks bad as the whole thing looks amazing.

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I've given IT to friends, and i've brought joy not only into my life, but into theirs. They got bars, they got nuts. They got chocolate covered nuts.

I mean, the sexual innuendo w that is laden in his very description of this particular snack makes me want to go to all kinds of directions here. But i'm not going to, because i'm a classic german. And this is not the kind of show we're running here.

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Let's start at the beginning. What is the origin story of vocational dia?

The origin story of a okie dia? Well, so I was watching the growth of the free software movement opens or software and seeing programmer coming together to collaborate in new ways. Uh sharing code, uh doing that under free license, uh, which is really interesting because IT empowers an ability to work together.

That's really hard to do if the code is still propriety because then if I chip in, in help, but we all have to figure out how gonna rewarded and in what that is. But the other that everyone can copy IT in, in a just as part of the commons, a really empowered, a huge wave of a creative software production. And I realized that that kind of collaboration could extend beyond just software to all kinds of cultural world.

In the first thing that I thought I was an encyclopedia, thought that seems obvious, that and a psychotic, you can collaborate on IT. There's a few reasons why I won. We all pretty much, you know what an a psychopath entry on, say, the iphone tower should be like, you know you should see a picture, few pictures, maybe history, location um something about the architect to central.

So we have a shared understanding. What are these we're trying to do? And then we can collaborate and different people can chip in and find sources and sonus. So set up first new media, which was about two years before.

And with new media we we had this idea that um in order to be respected, we had to be even more academic than a traditional psychometric because a bunch of volunteers on the internet getting into the right at in a psychopath a you know, 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, two things came at that.

So one thing, one of the earliest entries that we published after this rigorous process a few days later, we had to pull up because as soon as they hit the web in the broader community took a look at IT. Uh, people notice plagiarism m and realized that IT IT wasn't actually that good, even though I have been reviewed by academics and so on. So we had to pull IT also like okkak well, so much for seven stage view process.

But also, I decided that I wanted to try. I was frustrated. And why is this taking so long? Why is this so hard? So I thought, okay, I saw that uh, Robert merton had won uh, nobel prize in economics for his work on option pricing theory.

And when I was an academic, that's what I worked on was option pricing theory how to publish paper so I worked through all of his academic papers and I knew his work quite well. I thought i'll just a write a short biography of merton. And when I started to do, i've been out of academia, had been a great student for a few years. Then I felt this huge intimidation because they were gna take my draft and send IT to the most prestigious finance professors that we could find to give me feedback for revisions. And I felt like being back in grad school know like this really oppressive, sort of like you're going to submit IT for a review and you going .

to get critics a liberate the bad part of.

yeah yeah, the bad part of grad school, right? So this isn't intellectually fun. This is like the bad part of grad school.

It's intimidating. There's a lot of, you know, potential embarrassment if I screw something up. And so with and so that was when I realized, okay, look, this is never gonna work.

This is not something that people are really gonna want to do. So jermy rose phone, one of my employees, had brought and showed me the wicky concept in december. And Larry sanger brought in the same, said he would have this wiki idea.

And so in january, we decided to launch wikipedia, but we weren't sure so that the original project was called nupedia. And even though I wasn't successful, we did have quite a group of academics s and like, really serious people. And we were concerned that, oh, maybe these economics gna really hate this idea.

And we shouldn't just convert the project immediately. We should launch this as a side project. The idea, here's a week where we can start playing around. But actually we've got more work done in two weeks then we had in almost two years because people were able to just jump on and start doing stuff. And I was actually very exciting time.

You know, you could back then you could be the first person who typed africa is a continent and hit save, you know, which isn't much of an a cycle pedia try. But it's true and it's a start and it's kind of fun like, you know, you put your name down. Actually a funny story was, uh, several years later, I just happened to be online and I saw when name is a Robert won the noble prize on economics and we didn't have an entry uh on him at all which was surprising but he wasn't that surprising.

This was still early days no and so I got to be the first person to type robber human won noble prize economics and its safe which game wasn't a very good article. But then I came back two days later, and people had improved IT and so forth, so that the second half of the experience, where, with Robert merton, I never six city because I was just too intimidating, IT was like, 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 uh and so it's just a completely different model which worked much.

much Better. What is that that me that so accessible, so fun. So ah so natural to just add something.

I think it's you know especially in the early days and this bother way has gotten much harder because there are fewer topics that are just Green field you know available um but you know you could say, oh well you know I I know a little bit about this and I I can get IT started uh but then IT is fun to to come back then and see other people have added and improved and so is so forth and that idea of collaborating, you know where people can much like opens or software um you know you you put your code out and then people suggest revisions and I change IT and and a modified and IT grows beyond the original creator um is just a kind of a fun, wonderful, quite geeky hobby but um people enjoy how much .

debate was there over the interface, over the details of how to make that well seamless and friction yeah I mean.

not as much as they probably should have been in a way. During that two years of the failure of new media were very little work got done. What, 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 encyclical pedia, but also talking about more technical ideas, you know, things.

Back then, exam was kind of all the rage and thinking, I could we you know, shouldn't you have certain a data that might be in multiple articles that get updated? Tomato ally, so for example, you the population of new york city every ten years, there's a new official sense. Couldn't you just up at the update that bit of data in one place that would updated across all old? That is a reality today.

But back then I was wicked. Yeah wicky data you can you can link um you know from a wikipedian try you can link to that piece of data in wiki data I mean a pretty advanced thing, but there are advanced sers who are doing that. And then when when that is updated, IT updates and all the language is where you've done that.

I mean, that's really interesting. There is this chain of emails in the early days of discussing the details of what is. So there's the interface.

There's the yes, so the interface. So an example, there was some software called use mod wiki, which we started with, quite amusing actually, because in the main reason we launched with use mud wiki is that IT was a single per script. So IT was really easy for me to install IT on the server and just keep running ah but IT was um you know some guy's hobby project.

IT was cool, but IT was just a project. And uh all the data was stored uh in flat text files so there was no real database behind IT. So to search the site, you basically used grab, which is just like the basic unique utility, like look through all the files so that clearly was never going to scale.

But also in the early days, IT didn't have real loggins so you could set your user name but there were no passwords. So you know I might say bob Smith and there's someone else comes along says i'm bob Smith and they're both at that never really happened. We didn't have a problem with IT about IT was kind of obvious like you can't grow a big website where everybody can pretend to be everybody that's that's not going to be good for trust and reputation and so forth.

So quickly, I had to write a little you log in store people's passwords and things like that so you can have unique identities. And then another example of something, you know, quite, he would have never thought would have been a good idea. And IT turned out to not be a problem.

But to make a link in wikipedia in the early days are you would make a link to a page. You, that mayor, may not exist by just using camel case, meaning like upper case, lower case. And you smash the words together.

So maybe a new york city, he 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. And so I was like, okay, well, that's just not gonna look nice. Let's just use square brackets. Two square brackets makes a link and that may have been an option in the software that thought up square brackets. We just did that.

Um we worked really well that makes nice links and you know you can see and its red links or blue links depending on if the page exit or not. But the thing that I didn't occur me even 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 the lot of users cotton paste a square bracket.

When they can find one, they're just cut past one in. And yet, german, we could be been a massive success. So somehow that didn't slow people down.

How's that? That the german keyboards don't have a square break. How do do you programing? How do you. How do you live? Is life to its fullest with us?

Very good question. I'm not really sure. I mean, maybe IT doesn't have because of keyboard standards, you drifted out over time and becomes useful to have a different character in is same thing like there's not really A W character in italian um and IT wasn't on keyboards or I think IT is now but in in general w is not a letter in italian language but IT appears .

an enough international words that it's crept into italian and and all of these things are probably .

wikipedia .

articles in both the english idea and and the difference between those two might be very a very interesting. So wiki data, fascinating, but even the broader discussion of what is an encyclopedia, you go to that sort of a sopo question of what is what is what is an cyclical.

cyclical. So the way I would put IT is, uh, an encyclopedia. What our goal is, is as the sum of all human knowledge, but some meaning summary. So and this wasn't early debate. I mean, somebody started uploading, uh, the full text of hamlet t for example and we um wait hold on a second that's not in a psycho pedia article but why not um so hence was born with he source which is where you put original tax and things like that out of copyright tax ah because he said no an in psycho pedia article about ham that's a perfectly valid thing but the actual text of the play is not an in psychometric article so most of its fairly obvious but there are some interesting corks and and differences. So for example, as I understand that in french language in psychopathy is 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 metallic um and so um I actually don't know the current state, having thought about that many, many years now helps .

state of cake recipes in wikipedia. In english wikipedia.

I wouldn't say there's chocolate cake recipes. I mean you might find a sample recipes somewhere. I'm not saying there are no, but in general, no. Like we wouldn't have recipe.

I told myself not get our regions and but now i'm alright. I'm deeply upset.

It's actually very complicated. I I love to cook. You know I am actually quite a good cook. Um what's interesting is that it's very hard to having neutral recipe because the recipe for kind of difficult to come by because there are so many variants and it's all debatable and interesting for something like chocolate cake, you could probably say, and here's one of the earliest recipes or here's one of the most common recipes. But you for many, many things, the very are as interesting you know as you know somebody said to me recently, you know, ten spaniards to have pie recipes. So you know, these are all matters of open discussion.

Well, just to throw some numbers, as of may twenty seventh, twenty twenty three, there are six million, six point six six million articles in english compete a containing over four point to three billion words, including articles. The total number of pages is fifty eight million. Yes, disable your mind.

I mean, yes, he does. I mean, IT doesn't because I I know those numbers and see them from time to time. But in another science of the percent, yeah, I don't I mean, it's really a remarkable.

I remember when, uh, english, we kept a past one hundred thousand articles and when german, we kept a part. One thousand could happen to be germany with a bit of wikipedia that night. And you know then IT seemed quite big. I mean, we knew at that time that IT IT was nowhere near complete.

I remember at wikimania in harvard, uh, when we 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, uh, single volume, uh, encyclopedia of biography. So short biography is Normally a paragraph so about famous people in poland. And there were some twenty two thousand entries.

And he pointed out that even then, two thousand six will be the felt quite big. And he said, in english wikipedia, there's only a handful of these you know less than ten percent I think he said um and so then you realize yeah actually you know who was the mayor of warsaw w in eighteen seventy three? Don't know, probably not an english wikipedia, but IT probably might be today. But there is so much out there.

And of course, what we get into when we were talking about how many entries there are and how many, you know, how many could there be, is this very deep philosophical issue of notability, which is the question of, well, how do you how do you draw the limit? How do you draw? You know what? What is there? So sometimes people say there should be no limit, but I think that doesn't stand up too much crutty.

If you really, paul, and think about IT. So I see in your hand there you ve got a big pen, pretty standard, everybody seeing you know billions of those in life. Classic though it's a classic clear big pen.

So could we have an entry about that big pen? And I bet we do that type of big pen um because it's classic, everybody knows that and it's got a history and um actually something interesting about the big company. They make pens, they have to make kaa's and there's something else.

They're him. So are basically there sort of a definition by nonessentials company, anything that's long and plastic, that's what they makes. Wow, you want to find the comment the photonic .

former of big.

But could we have an article about that very big pen in your hand? So like three mans big pens of very specific instance. And the answer is no.

There is not much known about IT. I dare say, unless you know, it's very special to you, and your great grandmother gave IT to you something you probably know very little about. IT is a pen is to see in the office.

So that's just to show there there, there is a limit. Let me in. German wikipedia used to talk about the the rear, not of the wheel of early fooks bicycle, early fooks well known.

We he pean of the time to sort of illustration, you can have an arch about literally everything. So then that raises the question, what can you have an arch about? What can you? And that can vary depending on the subject matter.

Um one of the areas where we try to be a much more careful with be biography reason is a biography of a living person. If you get IT wrong, you can actually be quite hurtful, quite damaging. And so if someone is a private person um and somebody tries to create, we keep the interest, there's no way update there's not much not self.

For example, uh an pycroft dy article about my mother, my mother school teacher, later a pharmacist, wonderful woman, but never been in the news. I mean other than me talking about why there shouldn't a wikipedian try that probably made IT in somewhere standard example but um you know there's not enough known um and you could sort of imagine database of geneology having data, birth date of death, certain elements like that of private people. But you couldn't really bt ride biography.

And one of the areas this comes up quite often is what we call B L P one. We got lots of acronis, a bargrave y of a living person whose notable for only one event. There's a real sort of danger zone and 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, like really not much, is no, they weren't a public person. There are 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? And this is, you know, IT.

IT varies from from field, the fields of, 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. You know what? Papers theyve published things like that.

You may not know anything about their personal life but that's actually not cyclically relevant in the same way that IT is for member of a royal family where it's basic about the family. So we're fairly nuances about notability and he work comes in and i've always um thought that the the term nobility I think is a little problem of community. We struggle about how to talk about IT the problem and the ability is IT IT can feel insulting.

So no that you're not note worthy when my mother's know where this really important person in my life, right? So that's not right. But it's more like verifiability is there a way to get information that actually makes an cycle pedia entry IT?

So happens that there's a wikipedia page about me as i've learned recently. And uh, the first thought I had when I saw that was, uh, 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 is my favorite website on the internet.

The collection of articles that were kip dia created is just incredible. We'll talk about the various details of that. But the the love and care that goes into creating pages for individuals, for a big pen, for all this kind of stuff is is just really incredible. So I just felt the love that page um but I also felt this because I do this podcast and I just threw this podcast gun to know a few individuals are very controversial. I've got ten to be on the receiving end of something quite to me as a person who loves other human beings have gone to be at the receiving at of some kind of attacks through the wikipedia form. Like you said, when you look at living individuals IT can be quite hurtful the little details of information um and because i've become friends with our mosque, i've interviewed him but i've also interviewed people on the left, a far left people on the right, some people 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 debts and puts you write .

in boiling hot pot.

I guess it's it's hard and so I get to experience some of that. I think what you also realize is um there has to be for wikipedia kind of credible sources, verifiable sources and there's a dance there because some of the sources are uh pieces of journalism and of course journalist moob ate under its own complicated incentives such that people can write articles they are not factual or um are Cherry picking all the flaws they can have in a journalist card and those can be used as as a source. Is that they dance hand in hand.

And so um for me, sadly, after there was a really kind of concerted attack to say that I was never at MIT, I never did anything in MIT. Just to clarify, I am a research scientist at T. I have been there since twenty fifteen.

And there today I met a prestigious amazing laboratory called lids. And I hope to be there for a long time and work on a robotics machine learning. There's a lot of incredible people there.

And by the way, M, I, T has been very kind to defend me. Unlike wikipedia says, IT is not an unpaid position. There was no controversy. IT was all very calm and happy and almost boring research that i've been doing there.

And the other thing, because I am half ukrainian, ha, russian, and I ve travel to ukraine, and I will travel to ukraine again, and I will travel to russia for some very difficult conversations. My heart been broken by this war. I have family in both places been a really difficult.

But the little battle about the biography there also starts becoming important for the first time for me. I also want to clarify that I personally use the opportunity of summer accuracies there. My father was not born.

Age calls russia. He was born in key of ukraine. I was born his cosy, which is a town not in russia. There is a town called that in russia, but is another town into jq stan, which is a former republic of soviet union.

IT is that town is not called B U S T O N boston, which is funny because we're now in Austin and I awesome in boston and seems like my whole life is surrounded by these kinds of towns. So I was born in to jikiza, and the rest of the biography is interesting. But my family is very evenly distributed between their origins and where they grow up between ukraine and russia, which is adds a whole beautiful complexity to this whole thing.

So I want to just correct that is like the fascinating about wikipedia is, in some sense, those little details of, but in another sense, what I felt when I saw a wikipedia page about me, or anybody I know, this beautiful kind of saving that this person existed, like A A community that notices you. I said, 好 嗯， like a, like a little you see like a like a butterfly the first and you, uh, it's not just saying you butterflies is that one? I like that one you see a puppy or something or, uh, or is this big pen this one?

I remember this one as the scratch, and you get noticed in that way that I know it's a beautiful thing in its I may maybe it's very silly of me, a naive, but I feel like wikipedia in terms of individuals as an opportunity to celebrate people, to celebrate ideas, sure. And not a battle ground of attacks, of the kinder stuff we might see on twitter, like the mockery region, this kind of stuff. sure. Of course, you don't want a Cherry pick. All of us have flaws and so on but IT just feels like to highlight the controversy sm sort when that doesn't at all represent the entirety the human most cases yeah is said yeah.

yeah, yeah so as a few things uh unpacked in all that um so first one, one of the things I find really always find very interesting is you know your status with M I T. Okay, that's that's upsetting and it's an argument and can be sorted out. But then what interesting is you 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. And I find that a lot.

When I talk to people ever, a biography in wikipedia is the often is annoyed by a tiny error that no one's gonna notice like this town into jq sta got a new name and so like nobody even knows what that means are whatever but can be super important um and so that's that's one of the reasons you know for by graphs we we say like human dignity really matters um and so you know some of the things have to do with and this is this is a common debate that goes on in wikipedia is what we call undo weight so I give i'll give an example. There was an article I stumble across many years ago, uh, about the mayor. I know he wasn't the mir.

He was a city council member. I think IT was pure illinois, but some small town in in the midwest and the entry, you know he's been on the city council for thirty years or whatever is pretty and Frankly pretty boring guy, and seems like a good local city politician. But in this very short, about three there, there was a whole paragraph, a long paragraph, about his son being arrested for dui.

And IT was clearly undo weight. It's like, what does 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 is, i'm gonna, do I? 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, and that's a sort of thing. Where are you know, we have to really think about in a biography and about controversies to say, is this a real controversies in general, like one of the things we we tend to say is like 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, ah, I want to work on this entry, see the seven sections so this was quite short. Can I add something, go out and finds some more controversy and that's nonsense, right? And in general, putting IT separate from everything else kind of makes IT seen worse and also doesn't put IT in the right context, whether if it's sort of a lifetime there is a contract potential controversy for anyone, uh, IT should just be most sort of worked into the overall article.

Extended IT doesn't become a temptation. You can contextualize appropriately and so forth so that you know that's you know part of the whole process. But I I think for me, one of the most important things is, is what I call community health.

So yeah, are we're going to get IT wrong sometimes? Yeah, of course we're humans and doing good quality. You know, sort of reference material is hard.

Real question is how how do people react you to a criticism or a complaint or a concern? And if the reaction is a defensiveness or combat of in this back, or if someone's really sort of in there being aggressive and in the wrong? No, no, no. Hold on. We've got to do this the right way.

You've got to say, OK, hold on, know how other good sources is this contextualized a property? Is that even important ough to mention what does that mean? You know? And and sometimes one of the the areas where I do think there is a very complicated law and and you've related to IT a little bit, but is like we know the media is deeply flawed.

We know that journalism, I can go wrong. And I would say particularly in the last whatever or fifteen years, we've seen a real designation of local media, local newspapers. We've seen a real rise and click back headlines and sort of eager focus on anything that might be controversial.

We ve always had that with this. Of course, there always been tb newspapers, but that makes IT a little bit more chAllenging to say. Okay, how do we how do we sort things out um when we have a pretty good sense that that not every source is valid.

So as an example, a few years ago, it's been quite a while now um we deprecated a the mail online as a source and the male online, you know the digital ARM of the daily mall. It's a tabloid. It's not completely you know 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.

And so by saying deprecated and I think some people say how you ban the dilma now we didn't ban IT as so as we just look, it's probably not a great source, right? You should probably look for Better source. So certainly, if the daily mile runs a headline saying a new cure for cancer, like, you know, probably there is more serious sources than a ability newspaper.

So in in an article about lung cancer, you probably would inside the daily may like that's kind of ridiculous, but also for celebrities and and so forth know what they do cover celebrity gossip a lot, but they also tend to have been datas. And so more than you really have to step back and go, is this really in psychology? Or is this just the day around?

And some of that requires a great community health.

IT requires massive unity held.

I even for me, for stuff I seen that of, actually, if about people I know, things I know about myself, I still feel. Like a love for knowledge eminence from the article, like and like I feel the community has. So I will take all slight inaccurate. I, I, I love IT because that means there's people, for the most part I feel of respect and love in the search for knowledge like sometimes because I also love stack overflows that could change for programming related things, and I can get a little cranky sometimes. The degree words like it's not as like you see, you can feel the dynamics of the health of the particular community here and sub communities too, like a particularly sea sharp or java, python or whatever, like there's little like communities that emerge. You can feel the levels of taxi because a little bit of strickland is good, but all too much is bad because of the defensiveness, because when somebody writes an answer and then somebody else kind of says will modify and to get defensive and there's this tension that's not conducive to like improving towards a more truthful depiction of like what on the top.

Yeah, a great example that I really loved a this morning then I saw someone left a note on my user talk page in english wikipedia saying that was quite a dramatically like thing, racist hook on front page. So we have on the front page of the city, we have a little second called, did you know it's just little tidbits? In fact, these 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 A U. S. Football player, black a. There was a quote from another famous sports person, a, comparing him to a lambquin clearly compliment ah 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 in element objects and given that kind of analogy, and I think is demeaning to compare a person to a car but they said, i'm not i'm not pulling, i'm not deleting and i'm not removing and I just want to raise the question.

And then there's a really interesting conversation that goes on where I think the general consensus was, you know what this isn't like like the alarming headline racist thing on the front page. We could be that sounds, holy moly, that sounds Better. But it's sort of like actually 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 not compare sports people to inanimate objects. I 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. And I just thought, you know nothing for me to way in on here. This is a good conversation like nobody saying, you know, people should be banned if if they refer to what was the named the fridge refrigerator parade, very famous compared to an inanimation object of a chicago bears many years ago. But they're just saying, hey, let's be careful about analogies that we just pick up from the media that's good .

on the sort of depreciation of new source is really interesting because I think what you're saying is ultimately, you want to make a article by article decision, kind of 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 mascara is kind of an objective sorrow. Exploration of a human being is fascinating. Watch because controversy and hit pieces just get more clicks. Oh, this is I I guess as a wikipedia contribute you start to deeply become aware of that and start to have a sense like a radar click pay versus truth like to to pick out the truth from the click baby type language oh yeah.

I mean, it's it's really important and we talk a lot about VISA words, you know and you know, actually, i'm sure we will end up talking about AI and tragedy. But just to quickly mention in this area, I think one of the potentially powerful tools, because IT is quite good at this, have played around with practice IT quite a lot.

But chat B T four is is really quite able to to take a passage and a point out potentially biased terms to rewrite IT to be more neutral. IT is a bit hanna dan and it's a bit you know, cliched. So sometimes IT just takes the spirit out of something that's actually not bad. It's just like know poetic language and you're like not okay that's not actually helping. But in many cases, I think that sort of thing is quenching. And i'm also interested in, you know can you imagine where you you feed in a wikipedian try and all the sources and you say, help me find anything in the article that is not accurate, 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. So if if IT scans an article and all the sources and you say, oh, IT came back with ten suggestions and seven of them were decent and three of them I just didn't understand right actually that's probably worth my time to do and IT can help us um you know really um more quickly good people to serve, review obscure entries uh and things like that.

So just as a small aside on that, and we will probably talk about language models a little bit or a lot more, but one of the articles are one of the hit piece is about me now the journalist, sexy, was very straight forward and honest about having used GPT to write part of the article and then finding the emitted air and apologize for the error the GPT four generated, which has this kind of interesting loop which the articles are used to write with a pedia pages GPT train a wikipedia and there there's like this interesting loop where the whistle words and the nuances can get lost or can uh propagate even though they are ground in reality. Somehow in the generation of the language model new truths can be created and kind of linger.

Yeah, there is a famous web comic titled cattle genesis, which is about how something on errors in wikipedia and there's no source for, but then a lazy journalists reads IT and writes the source. yeah. And then some helpful wikipedia spots that has the source, finds the source and has a to wikipedia.

And a lot of magic. This happened to me, wanted to, what IT nearly happened there was this. It's really before I went back and research. And like, this is really odd. So biography magazine, which is magazine published by the bigfoot v channel, had a proser profile of me.

And I said in his spare time, i'm not quoting exactly have been many years, but in his spare time, he enjoys playing chess with friends. I know that sounds great, like I would like to be that guy, but actually, I mean, I play chess with my kids sometimes, but no, it's not a hobby of mine. And I like where they get that and I can't.

The magazine that from this I was kip dia, i'd looked in the history there have been vandalism of wikipedia was, you know, not damaging, is just false. So any or all have been removed. But then I think how much? Well, I mention this to people because others SE.

It's somebody going to read that and there's going to add, the entry is gonna on life, and if its own. And then sometimes I wonder that has because I ve been I was invited a few years ago to do the ceremonial first move in the world chess champion on. Wonder if they think i'm a really big chest and using because they read this biography magazine articles. So uh but that that problem, uh, when we think about large language models and the the ability quickly generate very plain usable but not true content, I think is something that there's going to be a lot of shake out, a lot of implications of that.

What would be hilarious is because of the social pressure of kip dia in the moment of you would actually start playing a .

lot more chess, just not only .

the articles are written based on wikipedia, but your own life project your changes because they look a just make more convenient.

Yeah, aspire to, aspire to. Yes, aspiration.

What if if we just talk about that before we jum, uh, back to some other interesting topics and OK pedia the stocks about GPT foregone large language models, so they are in part train and wikipedia content. Yeah ah, what are the pros, cons of these language models? What thought?

So I mean, there's a lot of stuff going on how we sly the technologies move very quickly in the last six months and looks poised to do so for some time to come. Um so first things first, I mean part of our philosophers, the open licensing, the free licensing, the idea that you know this is what we're hear for, we we are volunteers community and we write this in cycle pedia.

We give IT to the world to do what you're like with you can modify a distributed, distributed, modified versions commercially, non commercially. This is this is the licensing. So in that sense, of course, is completely fine.

Now we do worry a bit about attribution um because IT is a creative commons attribution share like license. So attribution important not just because of our licensing model and things like that, but it's just proper attribution is just good intellectual practice. And so and that's a really hard, complicated question. Um you know if if I were to write something about my visit here, I might say in a blog post, you know I was in Austin, which is a city in texas. I'm gna put a source for Austin, the city in texas that's just general log. I learned IT somewhere I can't tell you where so you don't have to sight in reference every single thing but you know if I actually did research and I use something their heavily is just proper, morally proper to uh give your sources so we would like to see that and obviously um you know the collect grounding um so particularly people like google are really keen on figuring out grounding statical terms.

So around any any texas generated trying to ground did to the wikipedia quality source source I mean, the same kind of standard of what the source means that wikipedia ses the same .

kind of generated. And of course, one of the biggest flaws in chat p right now is that IT just literally will make things up just to be amused. I think it's programmed to be very hopeful, inhabited and think, really know or care .

about the truth. Bully into yeah can be well.

But like this morning, I was the story I was telling earlier about comparing a football player to a lamborne. And I is that really racial? I don't know.

I'm just i'm mulling and over and called a ChatGPT so I sent a ChatGPT four I said, uh, you know this this happened in wikipedia. Can you think of examples where a White athlete has been compared to, uh. A fast car in an animal object.

And IT comes back of a very plausible essay where IT tells you know why these analogies are common in for more. I, no, no. I really.

Could you give me some specific examples? So IT gives me three specific examples, very paul, correct names of athletes and contemporaries. And all of that could have true google every single while.

None of them existed. And i'm like, that's really not good. Like I I wanted to explore a thought process. I was and I thought, I thought first, I thought, how do I google? And kind of a hard thing that google is, unless somebody y's written about the specific topics you is large language model can process all this data, can probably piece that together from, but I just can't yet. So I think I hope that tag P T five, six, seven, three to five years, i'm hoping we'll see a much tired you know level of accuracy um where when you ask a question like that, I think instead of being quite so eager to please by giving you a applausive sounding answer.

if you say down up or maybe display the how much bullsh might be in this uh, generate attack like I am really would like to make you happy right now, but i'm really stretched with general.

It's one of the things I I said for a long time. So in one of the great things we do may not be great for our reputation, expect in a deep sense for the long term.

I think IT is but you know will be a notice that says the neutrality of this section has been disputed or the following section doesn't cn these sources um and I always joke you sometimes I wish in york times we're run A A banner saying the neutrality this has been disputed and give us we had a big fight in the newsroom as to whether to run this or not. But we thought it's important ough to bring you too but just be aware that not all the journalists are important but that's actually interesting and that's fine. I would trust them more for that level of transparency. So yeah similar chatbot should say, yeah eighty seven percent all shit.

Well, the neutrality one is really interesting because um that's basically a summary of the discussions that are going on underneath. They'll be amazing. If I like I, I should be honest.

I don't look at the talk page often. I don't IT would be nice somehow. There is kind of a summary in the in this banner way of like this, lots of wars have been fought on this year. Land for this here paragraph is really interesting.

Yeah, I hadn't thought of that because we one of things I do spend a lot of time thing about these days, and you know, people have found IT, we're moving slowly. But you know, we are moving thinking about, okay, these tools exist.

Are there ways that this stuff can be useful to our community? Because as part of IT is we we do approach things in a non commercial way in a really deep sense, is like it's it's been great that we can is become very popular. But really, we're just where a community whose hobby is writing in a psychopath a 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. And so how do we help the community use these tools? What are the ways that these tools can formulate?

One example I never thought about, i'm gna start playing with IT, is, you know, feed in the article and feed in the talk page and say, can you suggest some warnings in the article based on the conversation in the talk page? I think IT might might be good at that. I might get IT wrong sometimes. But again, if it's reasonably successful at doing that, and you can say of actually, yeah, IT does suggest you the new true, this has been disputed on a section that has a seven page discussion in the back that might be useful.

Don't know yeah with I mean some more color to the not neutrality but also the amount of emotion leading in the exploration of this particular for the topic IT, might I might actually help you look at more controversial pages like, you know a page on the one ukraine or a page on israeli. There could be parts that everyone agrees on and there's parts that are just like tough, tough, the hard part. And art IT would be nice when looking at those beautiful long articles to know like, let me just taking some stuff for everybody agrees on.

I 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 the discussion was that they are building something in israel, and for their own political reasons, one side calls IT a wall hearkened back to berlin, wall apart time, that causes of a security fence.

So we can understand quite quickly if we give you a moment thought, like, okay, I understand why people would have this grappling over the language. Like, okay, you want to highlight negative aspects of this, and you want to highlight the positive aspects, so you're going to try to 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, as well as called this by palestinians. And that how you explain that to people could be quite charge, right? You can easily explain that there's this difference.

And it's because this sides good and this sides bad, and that's why there's a difference. Or you could say, actually, let's just let's try and really stays neutral. We can and try explain the reasons of you may come away from IT with with a concept. okay. I understand what this debate is about now.

and just the term israel palin conflict is still the title of a page I will compete up but the word conflict is something that is a charged word course because .

from .

the postini an idea from, uh, certain size, the word conflict doesn't accurate describe the situation because if you see IT as a genocide, one way genocide is not a conflict because to to to people that uh discuss um that chAllenge the word conflict, they see you conflict is when this too equally powerful .

size right yeah yeah no it's hard in a number of cases. So this is is actually speaks to a slightly broader phone enon, which is there are number cases where there is no one word that can get in senses 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 White side wants to use a certain learn but there are some aspects like the page have a title um so you know there's that same thing with um certain things like photos. You know it's like, well, there's different photos, which one's best? Lot of different views on that, but you the day you need the lead photo because there's one spot for a lead photo categories, ies is another one.

Um so at one point, I have no idea if it's in there today, but I don't think so. Um I was listed in you know american american american atheists and I said, like I that doesn't feel right to me like just personally, it's true. I mean, I wouldn't wouldn't disagree with the objective of of IT.

But when you click the category and you see sort of a lot of people who are, you might say, american atheist activist because that's their big issue. So melanoma, al air, various famous people who Richard dockers who make IT a big part of their public argument and persona. But that's not truth me.

It's just like my private person believe if IT doesn't really it's not something a campaign about so I felt weird to put me the category but what what category would you put you know and and do you need that in this case? I was, I argued, doesn't need that. I like that's not I don't speak about a public icy except incidentally, from time to time I don't campaign about IT.

So it's weird to put me with this group of people and that argument cared that I hope not just because IT was me, but but category can be like that where you know you're either in the category, you're your not and sometimes it's a lot more complicated than that. And and is IT again we go back to, is that undo weight uh you know if someone who is now prominent in public life and generally consider to be a good person um was convicted of something, let's say D I when they were Young we Normally and Normal sort of discourse. We don't think uh this persue should be in the category of american criminals because you think criminal, technically speaking, is against the law to drive under the influence of alcohol anywhere arrested and you spend a months and prisoner whatever.

But it's odd to say that's a criminal. So just says, unlike example in this series, mark wilber, marky mark is what I always think of the masks 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, uh, T 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 that's actually an important part of his life story. You know that he had a very rough use and he could, you know god, not a really dark path and he turned his life around. That's actually interesting. So categories are tRicky.

especially with people. Because we like to sign labels to people into ideas. Somehow I was little, but stick, yeah in a certain words, that have a lot of power, like criminal, like political left, right, center, anarchist. Objectively, what other philosophy s are their Marks's, communist, social democratic moca tic socialist, socialists? And like, if you add that as a category also you're that guy now yeah and I don't know if .

you want to be some definitely some really charge ones are all right. I think this is quite, quite complicated and tough. I mean, it's not a 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 them were quite you wouldn't want to be grouped with. So it's yeah let's go into .

some you mentioned the hot water of the pool. They were bold tipping a toy uh, do you think wikipedia has a left leaning political bias, which is something that is sometimes accused of?

Yeah I so I don't think so, not broadly. And you know I think you can always point to specific entries and talk about specific biases, but that that's part of the process of wikipedia. Anyone can comment, chAllenge and to go about that. But you know I I see fairey often on twitter, you know some um you know quite extreme accusations of bias and I think you know actually I just I don't see that I don't buy that and if you ask people for an example, they Normally struggle um and depending on who they are and what it's about um so it's certainly true that some people who have quite french viewpoints um and who knows the full rush of history in five hundred years they might be considered be path breaking geniuses but at the moment quite french views and they're just unhappy that we keep the a doesn't report on the french views as being mainstream and that by the way, goes across all kinds of fields.

I mean I of us once accosted on the street um outside the ted conference in vancouver by a guy who is a homeowner who was very upset that wiki entry on home apathy basically says it's to do science and he felt that was biased if I can help you because you know what sites we cite, good quality sources to talk about the scientific status and it's not very good. So you know IT depends and um you know I think it's something that we should always be vigilant about um but it's um you know in general, I think we're pretty good. And I think any time you go to any serious uh, political controversy, we should have a pretty baLance perspective on who saying what, what the views are and so forth.

I would actually argue that the the the areas where we are more likely to have bias that persist for a long created time are actually fairly up sure things, or maybe fairly non political things. I give this kind of a humorous example, but it's it's meaningful. Uh, if you read our entries about, uh, japanese enemy, uh, they tend to be very, very positive and very favorable because almost no one knows about japanese enemies that for fans.

And so the people who come and spend their days is writing japanese anemone ticks. They love IT. They kind of have an inherent love for the the whole area, of course, being human beings have their internal debates and disputes about what's Better or not, you know.

But in general, there are quite positive because nobody actually cares on anything that people are quite passionate. And hopefully you know there's like quite a lot of interesting of soup. I'll give an example, a contemporary example, where I think we've done good job as of my most recent sort of look at IT um and that is the the question about the efficacy of masks during the covered pandemic.

And that's an area where I would say the public authorities really kind of jerk us all around a bit. Now in the very first day I said whatever you do, don't rush on to buy masks um and their concern was uh shortages in hospital OK firing off later like everybody he's got aware of masks everywhere. It's IT really works really well and it's you know then now I think it's the evidence is mixed, right? Massing to help, in my personal view, massing to help, there are no huge burden.

You know you might as well where a mask in in the environment where you're with a giant crowd of people and so forth. Um but it's very politicized that one is very politicized where uh certainly in the U. S.

You know much more. I I am I live in in the U. K. I live in that I never seen kind of on the streets sort of the kind of 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.

And so because he became very politicized, then clearly, if if wikipedia, so if you go to wikipedia and you research this topic, I think you'll find more or less what i've just like actually efforts all you know, to this point in history, it's max evidence like mass seem to help, but maybe not as much as some of the authorities said. And here we are. 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 a very emotional debate who think this is ridiculous.

Hopefully we've got quality sources. So then hopefully those people who read this can say how actually, you know, IT is complicated. So you know, if you can get to the point of saying, okay, this is I have my view.

I understand other views, and I do think it's a complicated question. great. Now a little bit more mature as a society.

but that one is an interest one, because I feel like, I hope that that article also contains the meda conversation about the politicization of that topic. Yes, to me, almost more interesting than whether masks work or not, at least at this point, is like why I became masks, became a symbol of the oppression of a centralized government. If you wear them, you're a sheep that follows the mass control, the master stereo of an author arian regime. And if you don't wear a mask, then you are a science nier anti vaca a um outright, probably an arc. So .

exactly. And that whole politicization of society is just so damaging um and I don't I don't know in broader in the broader world like how do we start to fix that? That's a really hard question .

at at every moment because he mentioned mainstream and fringe. There seems to be attention here and I wonder what your philosophy is on IT because there's make some ideas and this fringe ideas are you look at lab league theory, uh, for the virus, that could be other things we can discuss where there's a mainstream narrative. Well, if you just look at the percent of the population or the population with platforms, what they say and then ah what is a small percentage in opposition to that and what is wikipedia responsibility to accurate represent both the mainstream?

Do you think what I mean? I I think we we have to try to do our best to recognize both, but also appropriately contextualize. And so this can be quite hard to sing 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 moons made of rocks, some say cheese, you know, who know is that kind of force neutrality? This is not what we want to get to like that doesn't make any sense, but that was easy. Like we all understand. I think there is that we could be the entry called something like the moon is made of cheese but IT talks about this is a common sort of joke or or thing that children say or that people tell to children or whatever you know it's just the thing everybody y's heard moons made of cheese um but nobody thinks well well like wikipedia so one sided IT doesn't even acknowledge the cheese theory um I say the same thing about flat earth you know again.

what i'm looking up .

enough very little controversy uh we will have an entry about flat earth. The theorizing flat people, my personal view is most of people who claim to be flat earths, or just having a laugh, trolling and more power to them, have some fun. But let's not be in a ridiculous.

Of course, for most human history, people believe that there is flat. So the article i'm looking is actually kind of forest in the history. Flatter is an ark, concentric disproven conception of there is shape as a plane or disk.

Many ancient cultures subscribed to a flatters Cosmography with pretty ool pictures of what a flatters would look like with drag. Is that dragon no Angels on on the edge? There's a lot of controversy about that. What is in the edge is that the wall .

is in angle is a dome and how can you fly from uh, with south africa to perth? Because on a flat earth view, that's really too far for any plan to make IT.

I want to know spread out what I want to know, what's on the other side, Jimmy? What's other side? That's what all of us want to know. yeah. So there is some, I presume, is probably a small section about the conspiracy theory of flat earth, because I think there's a sizable person of the population who at least will say they believe in a flat earth. Yeah, I think IT is A A movement that just says that the man stream narrative to have distrust and sceptics about the instream narrative, which, to a very small degrees, probably a very productive thing to do, or the scientific process. But you can get a little silly.

ridiculous with IT. Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's exactly right. And so, you know, I think I find on on many, many cases, and of course I like anybody else might quibble about this to that any week be the article.

But in general, I think there is a pretty good um sort of willingness and indeed illness to say, oh, let's let's fairly represent all of the meaningly important size. So there's still a lot to hand packing that right so meaningful ly important. So you know um people who are are 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 as a fair conversation to have and actually address which authorities have said what and so on and so forth. Um and then you know there are other cases where it's not meaningful opposition. You know like you just wouldn't say if I I mean I I doubt if the main article moon IT may mention these but probably not even because it's not credible and is 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 is round, but certain people think flat like that's just a silly thing to put in that article.

You would want to sort of address, you know that's an interesting cultural of phenomenon on you want to put IT somewhere um so know this goes into a all kinds of things about politics um you want to be really careful, really thoughtful about, uh not getting caught up in the anger of our times um and really recognize yes, I I always thought I remember being really kind of proud of the U. S. At the time when I was uh, mccain was running against obama because I thought 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, like, that's good. Now we can have a debate. Now we can have an interesting debate. And IT isn't just sort of people slammed each other, personal attacks and so forth.

And you're saying wikipedia has also represented that.

I hope so. Yeah and I I think so in in the main obviously you can always find uh, debate and went horribly wrong because there's humans involved.

But speaking of those humans. I would venture to guess I don't know the data. Maybe you can um let me know but the personal political leaning of the a group of people who at work k pedia probably leans left I would guess so to meet the questioner is I mean the same super socom value the task for socon valley to create platforms that are not politically biased even though there is a bias for the engineers who created.

And I think I believe it's possible to do that you know this kind of conspiracy there is IT somehow is impossible. And there's this whole conspiracy where the left is controlling on. I think, I think engineers, for the most part, went to create platforms that are open and on bias, that are that create all kinds of perspective, because that's super exciting to have all kinds of perspective battle IT out.

But yeah, still is there is there a degree to which the personal political Price of the editors might see pin in silly ways, in a big way? Silly ways could be, I think, who am correctly saying this, but the right will call is the democrats party, and the left will call the democratic party. Yeah, like, subtle IT always hits my ear. weird. Like, are we children here were like, we're literally taking words and like, just jabin at each other like, and I like capitalize thing in a certain way or I can like just just take a word to miss le them that's a small way of how you these words but you can also you know have A A bigger way about uh about beliefs about various perspective and political events and uh honor bids laptop on how big of a story that is not how big sensorily with that stories is or not that kind of and then there's these camps to take very strong points. And the construct big narves around that in the emits very sizable percent of the population believes the two narratives .

that compete with each other. Yeah I mean it's it's really interesting um and IT feels but it's hard to judge you know the the sweep of history within your own lifetime yeah but he feels like it's gotten much worse that this idea of two universes um where people can agree on certain basic facts feels worse than they used to be and i'm not sure if that's true or IT just feels that way but also i'm not sure what the causes are.

I think I would lay a lot of the blame um in in recent years on social media algorithms um which reward click made headlines, which reward tweet that go viral and they go viral because they're cute and clever. I mean my most successful tweet ever by fairly wide margin um some reporter tweet at elon mosque a because he was complaining about wikipedia or something. Uh you should buy wikipedia and I just wrote not for sale and you ninety million retweets and people like that and IT was all very good um but i'm like, you know what it's cute line, right and it's a good like my drop in all that and I I was pleased with myself.

It's not really discourse, right? It's not really sort of the what I like to do, but it's what social media really rewards which is kind of lets you and him have a fight, right? And that's more state. I mean, it's funny because at the time I was, I was text with elan who very pleasant to me.

He might have been a little bit shy, the reporter might have been a little bit city, but you fed into the city with knocker funny or response not for sale, like where do you like what? So that's a funny little exchange and you could probably, after that, laugh at off. And well, like that kind of mechanism that rewards the snake, yeah can go into viciousness.

Yeah yeah. We certainly see IT online. You know, I like A A A series of tweet, you know, sort of A A tweet threat of fifteen tweet that assesses the quality of evidence for masks, prosing cons and and sort of where this that's not going to a go viral, you know um but you know a smack down for a famous politician who was famously in favor of mask also went to a dinner, didn't wear a mask that's going to go viral and you know that that's partly human nature um you know people love to call our apology racy and all that.

But it's partly what these systems elevate auto I talk about this with respect to facebook, for example. So I think facebook has done a pretty good job, although it's taken longer than its should in some cases. But you know if you have A A very large following and you're really spouting hatred or or misinformation, disinformation, they've kicked people off.

They've done you know some reasonable things there but actually the deeper issue is um of this this um the anger we're talking about of the the contentiousness of everything I make of a family example um with two great stereotypes so one the the crack part races uncle and one the sweet grammar and I always want to point out my all of my uncles and my family were wonderful people so I didn't have a track pot right everybody knows the steroid well so grandma SHE just posts like sweet comments on the kids pictures and congratulates people on their wedding in a version and crack about uncles posting his nonsense and Normally sort of at Christmas dinner nobody rolls her eyes or angle Frank series about going to say some racist commented. We need to tell him to shut up you know maybe let's not inviting in this year the Normal human drama. He's got three mates down at the pub who listened to him and and all of that.

But now grandma got you know fifty four followers on facebook, which is the intimate family and race. Suncor has seven hundred and fourteen. He's not a massive influence or whatever, but how did that happen is because the notices oh when when SHE post nothing happens, he posts everybody jumped in A O got shut up on a Frank you like that outrages.

And it's like there's engagement, there's page views, there's ads, right? And and 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 um if it's not too awful, but it's just you know like maybe it's not a racist cle, but maybe it's an uncle who post a lot about what an idiot den is right which isn't necessarily an offensive or blocker or abandon thing and IT shouldn't be but if that's the discourse that is elevated because IT gets a rise out of people then suddenly in a society is like, oh, this is we get more of what we reward so I think that's a piece of what's gone on.

Well, if you just uh, take that tangent, i'm having a conversation with the Marks like a book. Uh, second time, is there something you can comment on how to decrease taxes 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?

So A A piece of IT is um it's hard. So I don't 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 you know great somebody y's got business and making money. That's that's not where I come from. But certain business models mean you are gone to prioritize things that maybe aren't that long term helpful. And so that's a big piece of IT.

So certainly for facebook, you could say, you know um with vast resources, start to prioritize content that's higher quality, that's healing, that's kind trying to propose content that seems to be just getting a rise out of people. Now those are vae human descriptions, right? 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 gonna increase space views to the maximum extent right now. Not said this to people at at facebook. It's like, you know IT, if if your actions are you know 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 has been more upsetting at the moment, but I think it's true. Um and so 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 is pretty hard to break even if financial results as good as they could be because he's taking a step back from the perfect optimization to say actually, for the long term health in the next fifty years of this organization, we need to rain in some of the things that are working for us and making money because they actually giving us a bad reputation. So one of the recommendations, I would say, is, and this is not to do with the algorithms all that but you know how about just a morritt um on all political advertising? I don't think it's their most profitable segment, but it's given us a lot of deep part questions about dark money, about you know a ads that are run by questionable people that push false natus or know the classic kind of thing is you run I saw I saw a study about bracket in in the U.

K. Where people talking about there were ads run to animal rights activists saying finally move out from under europe. The U.

K. Can pass proper animal rights legislation. We're not constrained by the european and process.

Similarly, for people who are advocates of fox hunting to say finally move out of europe, we can reimplement. So 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 there than this is still true to extend mainstream narrative that sixty percent of people can say how I can buy into that which meant IT pushed you to the center. IT pushed you sort, try and find some nuances baLance.

But if your main method of recruiting people is an a tiny little one on one conversation with them, because you're able to target using targeted advertising, suddenly you don't need a consist need a really good uh, targeting uh, Operation, really good cambridge analytics style machine learning algorithms ata to convince people. And that just feels really problematic. So I mean, until they can think about how to solve that problem, I just say, you know, it's going to cost the sex amount, but it's going to be worth IT to kind to say, you know what we actually think our political advertising policy hasn't really helped a contribute to dut discourse and dialogue and finding. Reasoned, you know middle ground and compromise solution. So let's just not do that for a while until we figure that out so that maybe .

A P and and coupled with that, you were saying a recommended system for the news feed and another contact that don't always optimize engagement but optimized the long term mental well being, a baLance and growth of a human being yeah that is a very difficult problem.

It's a difficult problem. Yeah and you know so in in with A W T social wiki, social we are launching in a few months time, uh, a completely new system, new domain, a new new, lots of things. But the ideas to say, let's let's focus on trust.

People can rate each other is trust where they rate continuous trust where they have to start from somewhere. So i'll start with A A core base of our tiny community who I think you're sensible, thoughtful people want to, to recruit more. But just saying, 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 page using this session. I optimize on what sort of the feedback from people is. This is meaningfully enhancing my life. And so part of that is and it's probably not a good business model, but part of that is so okay, we're not going to pursue an advertising business model, bt a you know membership model where you know you can you don't have to be a member, but you can pay to be a member, uh, maybe get some from that.

But in general, to say actually the problem with and actually the division I would say is and the analogy would give, is broadcast television funded by advertising gives you a different result, then paying for HBO, paying for netflix, paying for whatever. And the reason is, you know, if you think about IT, what what is your incentive as A T, V producer going to make a comedy for A B C net k in the us. You basically say, I want something that almost everybody will like and listen to.

So IT tends to be a little blender, no family friendly, whatever. Whether if you say, oh, actually i'm i'm going to use the H B. O example and an old example, you know what surprise isn't for everybody? Sex in the city isn't for everybody.

But between the two shows, we've got something for everybody that they're willing to pay so you can get edge your higher quality in my of you content rather saying it's gotten not offend anybody in the world. It's got to before everybody, which is really hard. So same thing you know here in a social network of your business models, advertising is going to drive you in one direction. If your business model is membership, I think that drives on a different direction. I actually and I said this to elan about twitter blue, which I think wasn't ruled out well and so forth.

But it's like the piece of that, that I like is decide, look, actually, if there is 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 your people gonna be willing to pay for something that's actually just toxicity in their lives. Now i'm not sure been ruled out. Well, i'm not sure how it's going and maybe i'm wrong about that as a applausive business model, uh, but I do think it's interesting to think about just in in, in broad terms, business model drives outcomes in sometimes surprising ways unless you really passed to think about IT.

So if we can ah just link on twitter in on before, I would love to talk about the underlying business model, kip dia, which is this brilliant, bold move at the very beginning but that since you much on twitter, what do you think works? What do you think is broken about twitter?

There is a long conversation. But to to start with, one of the things that I always say is it's a really hard problem.

So I can see that right up from, I said this about, you know, the old ownership of twitter and the new ownership of twitter, because unlike wikipedia, and this is true actually for for all social media, there is a box, and the box basically says, what do you think what's on your mom? You can write whatever the hell you want you, right? This is true, by the way, even for for youtube, I mean, the boxes to upload a video.

But again, it's just like an open ended invitation to express. And what makes that hard is some people ever really toxic, really bad. You know, some people are very aggressive.

They're actually stocking. They're actually get abusive. And suddenly you deal with a lot of problems.

Whereas wikipedia, there is no box says what's on your mind. There's a box that says, this is an entry about the moon. Please be neutral. Please sit 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 truck entry and you just start ranting about Donald trump, people would say, what are you doing? Like stop doing that. Like we're not here to discuss. Like there's a whole world of the internet out there for you to go in rent about .

Donald job is just not fun to do on wikipedia somehow is fun on twitter well.

also i'm looking at pedia people are going to say stop yeah and actually, are you here to tell us like how can we improve the article or you just hear a rent about trump because that's not actually interesting. So because the the goal is different. So that's just admitting saying up front, this is a hard problem certainly.

Um i'm i'm writing a book on trust so the ideas um you know in the last twenty years we've lost trust you know uh in all kinds of institutions in politics. You know that the adult trust at our survey has been done for long time and you know trust in politicians, trust in journalism. It's it's come declines substantially and I think he dica es deservedly so. How do we restore trust? And how do we think about that?

But does that also include trust in the idea .

of truth? Trust in the idea of truth? They are even the concept of facts.

And truth is really, really important in the the idea of uncomfortable, true, this this is really important now so when we when we look at um twitter, right and we say we can see OK, this is really hard. So here here's my my story about twitter. It's two part story and it's all free.

Elon mask ownership. So many years back, somebody um accused me of horrible crimes on on twitter. And I you know like anybody would I you know i'm in the public.

People say bad things. I don't really, you know, I brush IT off whatever I like. This is actually really bad. Like accusing me of pedophilia like this is not okay. So i'm going to report this.

So I click report and the report, the tweet, there's five others in a and go through the process and then I get in the email that says, you know whatever, couple hours later saying thank you for your report. We're looking into this OK good then several hours further, I get the email back saying, sorry, we don't see anything here to violate our terms of views. I am like kay so I emails jack and I say, jack, come on like this is ridiculous and he emailed back roughly saying, yeah, sorry to me.

Don't worry, what will sort this out and I just thought to myself, you know what? That's not the point, right? I'm to me, wales.

I know jack orca. I can email jack orca. Listen to me because he's got email from me and sort set up for me.

What about the teenager who's being bullied uh, and is getting abuse right and getting accusations aren't true. Are they getting the same kind of like really poor result in that case? So festival a few years, same thing happens.

The exact quote that is, please help me i'm only ten years old Jimmy whales rate me last week. I come out fucked off like that's ridiculous so I report, i'm like this time i'm reporting, but i'm thinking, but will see what happens. This one get even worse because then I get the same result, email back again, sorry, we don't see me promise.

I so I raise IT with other members of the board who I know. And jack, like this is really ridiculous. Like this is outrageous. And some of the board member, friends of mine, sympathetic and so good for them, but actually got an email back then from the general council head of trust and safety, saying actually there's nothing in this tweet that violates our terms of service.

We don't regard and and gave reference to the me too movement if we didn't allow accusations, the me too movement is an important thing and I was like, you know what, actually, if someone says i'm ten years old and someone write me last week, I think the advice should be, here's the phone number of the police, like you need to get the police involve twitter, not the place for that accusation. So even back then, by the way, they did delete those streets. But I mean, the rational that gave us a spi behavior so completely separate from abusing me, IT was just like, oh, they were retweet too often, okay, whatever.

So like that's just broken. Like that's a system that is not working for people in the public guy. I'm sure it's not working for private people who get abuse.

Really horrible abuse can happen. So how is that today? Well, IT hasn't happened to me since elon took over, but I don't see why I couldn't. And I suspect ough, I send the 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.

Just context. Moderation at huge scale.

at huge scale is really something and I don't know the full answer to this. I mean uh a piece of IT could be um you know to say actually making specific allegations of crimes. This isn't the place to do that.

You know we've got a huge database if you've got an accusation of crime, here is huge a 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 and all of that. But it's again, it's like probably you should talk to a journalist, right? Probably there are Better avenues than just tweet um from an account that was created ten days ago, obviously set up to abuse someone. So I think they could do a lot Better um but I also admit it's a hard problem.

And there's also a way doing directly or more humorously or more marketing way to make the same kinds of accusations. In fact, the accusation is you mentioned if I were to guess, don't go that vireos because they're not funny enough or cutting enough but if you make a wedding and cutting in and limit somehow yeah sometimes actually indirectly to make an accusation is directly make an accusation can go viral and they can destroy reputations. And ah and get to watch yourself uh just all kids in natives takes take hold .

yeah no I mean, I remember another uh, because they didn't bother because I wasn't of that nature but somebody was saying, you know i'm sure you you're making millions off of wikipedia. 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 nine ninety form, which is the U. S. Form for tax reporting for charities yeah not. Here's the link. Go go read IT and you'll see he listed as a board member and my salary is listed zero. So um you know so you know things like that is like, okay, that when that feels like you're wrong but I can take that and I can we can have that debate quite quickly. And again, I didn't go virtual because he was kind of silly and if anything would have gone borrel IT was me responding.

But that's one where it's like actually unhappy to respond because a lot of people don't know that I don't work there and that I don't don't make millions and i'm not a billion while they 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 barby strides in effect. You know, it's like sometimes calling attention to someone is abusing you who basically has no followers. And so what is just a waste?

And everything you describe in knowledge, just something that all of us have to kind of learn because everybody in the public, I I think when you have just two followers and you get bully by one of the followers is hard just as much as when you have a large number. So it's not years uh, I think is echoed in the situations of millions of other, especially teenagers and kids and so on.

Yeah I mean, it's actually. An an example. Uh, so we don't generally use my picture in 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 you know one guy, 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 so sudden here is with long hair and tattoo s and there's there's his sort of say, here's what your money goes for. Here's my my letter.

Ask your sporting. He got massive abuse from wikipedia, like calling him creepy and you like really massive. And this was being shown to eighty million people a day.

His picture, not the abuse where the abuse was elsewhere on the internet. And he he was bothered by IT. And 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 and make public speeches.

Ran of thing I think of, I can, right, publish in the new york times. And you know have this interesting life. He's not a public figure. And so actually he wasn't mad at us.

He was A D he was just like he actually suddenly being thrust in the public guy and you get suddenly lots of abuse which Normally think, you know, if you're a teenager in somebody in your classes abusing you, it's not gonna go viral. So you're only going it's going to be hurtful because it's local and it's your classmates or whatever. But when when sort of ordinary people go viral in some abusive way, it's really, really quite tragic. I don't know.

I even at a small scale, IT feels viral when five five people in your school and there's a rumor and there's a feeling like you're surrounded and nobody in the feeling of loneliness, I think, which you're speaking in to when you don't have a plat, when you at least feel like you don't have a platform to defend yourself yeah and then this powerlessness that I think a lot of teenagers definitely feel and a lot of people.

I think you .

and that I think even when just like two people make up stuff about you or lie about you, or say, mean things about your bully, you that can feel like a crowd, yes.

that's A.

I mean, whatever that is in our genetics and our biology in the way our brain works, that this can be a terrifying experience. And somehow to correct that, I mean, I think because everybody feels the pain of that, everybody sues the pain of that, I think will be forced to fix that. A society to figure out a on that.

I think it's really hard to fix because I don't think that problem isn't necessarily new. Um you know someone in high school who writes crafted that says backy as a slight and spreads a rumor about what that he did last weekend. It's always been damaging, is always been hurt. And that's those .

kinds of attacks as all the time itself, they proceed the internet. Now what do you think about the technology that feels wikipedia like, which is community notes on twitter? You like IT with present cards. Do you think it's already 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 it's the use, as i've seen of IT, I I found quite good and in some cases, changed my mind. You know, it's like I see something. And of course, you know that the sort of human tendency is to read, tweet something that you hope is true, or that you are afraid is true.

But, you know, it's like that kind of quick mental action. And then, you know, 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 nuances tissue so I like that. Um I think that's really important.

Now how is this specifically implemented? Is is scalable 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 it's um you know when you're when you're only mechanisms on twitter um and you're a big twitter user, you know we know the platform and you got plenty followers and all of that.

The only mechanism is are retweet, replying, blocking. It's a pretty limited scope. And it's kind of good if there's a way to elevate a specific thoughtful response and IT kind of goes to again, like does the algorithm just pick they retreat or the I mean retreating, not even the algorithm that makes IT viral like you know if pale quello very famous author, I think it's got like I don't know.

I look lately, he used to eight million twitter followers. I think I looked in teo. Well, if he retreats, something is going to get seen a lot on mosque's.

Something is going to have seen a lot. That's not the alga. That's just the way the platform works. So IT is kind of nice if you have something else and how that something else is designed. That's obviously completed question.

Well, there's this interesting thing that I think what are doing, but I know facebook is doing for sure, which is really interesting. So you have what are the signals that a human can provide a scale like an twitter retweet in facebook, I think you can share.

I forget what this basic interactions you can have comment and on yeah but there's also in facebook and youtube passes too is um would you like to see more of this or would you like to see less of this? They posted sometimes end the thing that the 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. Did you see too much of this content already? Uh, you like IT, but you don't want to see so much of IT.

You already figured that out. Great, great. Or does this little namic you feel good? There's so many interpretations all like this. But if you get that kind of signal that actually can create a really powerful created a list of content that is fed to you every day, that doesn't doesn't create an echo chAmber or silo that actually just makes you feel good yeah in the in the good way, which is like a chAllenges you but IT doesn't exhaust you make you kind of this this is this weird animal i've been .

saying for a long time. If I went on facebook one morning and I said all 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 guests of quality like. Now that sounds interesting. Yeah, I want to see something where you like. H, I don't know. So Larry lesser is good for the mind, founder of creative commons, and he's moved on to doing stuff about corruption and politics and so and I don't always agree with Larry, but I always grapple with Larry because he's so interesting and he so far form that even when we don't degree, i'm like, actually I wanna hear him out, right? Because i'm onna learn from IT and that doesn't mean I always come around to agree room with him, but i'm going to understand a perspective that's really great feeling yeah there .

is a interesting thing on social media where people kind of accuse others of saying where you don't want to hear opinions that you disagree with their ideas you disagree with I think um this is something that stone at me all the time. The reality is there's literally almost nothing I enjoy more I think .

accuse of because you have quite a wide range of long conversations with a very diverse sponge people.

but that there is a very there is like A A very harsh drop off, because what I like is high quality disagreement that really me can think.

And at a certain point, there's a thresh hold is a kind of a great area when the quality the disagreement is just sounds like mocking you not really interested in A A deep understanding the topic or you your self don't seem to Carry deep understanding the topic like a there's something called uh intelligence square debates. But the main one is the british version with the british action on everything. Everything always sounds Better and the Price seems to argue more intensely like they are, uh, invigorated.

They are energized by the debate. Those people I often disagree with, basically everybody involved and is so fun. I learned something that's high quality. If you could do that, if there's some way for me to click button says, um filter out lower quality just today is sometimes show IT to me because I want to be able to but today i'm just not in the mood. Mercury, yeah, this high quality stuff even even flatter.

I want, I want to get high quality arguments for the flat IT would make me feel good because I i'll see all that's really interesting like I I never really thought in my mind to chAllenge the mainstream narrative of of general relativity, right? Of a perception of physics, maybe all of reality, maybe all all of space times in inclusion. That's really interesting.

I never really thought about. Let me consider that full. Okay, what's the evidence? How do you test that? What is the what the alternative? How would you be, uh, able to have such consistent perception of a physical reality if it's all of IT is an illusion.

All always seem to share the same kind of perception. Reality like like that's the kind of stuff I love, but not like the mockery of IT. You know that the cheap that IT seems that a social media can kind of inspire.

I I, I, I talk sometimes about how people assume that, like the big debate in wikipedia, the sort of arguments are between the party of the left and the party the right. You say, no, it's actually the party of the kind and thoughtful in the party of the jerks is really is really yet I mean left and right like yeah bring me somebody I disagree with politically as long as their thoughtful kind we're going to have a you know a real discussion.

I give an example of um our article on abortion. So, you know, if you can bring together a kind and thoughtful catholic priest and a kind and thoughtful plan paranal activist and they're onna work together on the oracle on abortion, uh, that can be a really great thing if they're both kind of thought like that's the important part. They're never gonna ree on the topic, but they will understand.

Okay, like wikipedia not gonna take aside, but wikipedia going to explain what the debate is about. We're going to try to characterize IT fairly and IT turns out like your kind and thought for people, even if they're quite ideological, like a catholic crisis generally going to be quite ideological on the subject of abortion. But they can grapple with ideas and they can discuss and they they may feel very proud of the interest in of the day.

Not because they suppress the other size views, but because they think the case has been stayed in very well that other people can come to understand IT. And if you're highly eeo logical, 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 so that's where you know that's what I think we need to encourage more of in society generally is is wrapped with ideas and a really um in .

a thoughtful way so is that possible if the majority of volkers editors of OK pedia really dislike Donald trump, are they still able to write an article that empathizes with the perspective of for time at least a very large percentage in the united days that were supporters and down 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 yeah I think so. Um and I think if you read the article is pretty good. Um and I think a piece of that is within our community um if people have the the self awareness to understand, I personally wouldn't go and edit the entry on Donald trump.

I get emotional about IT and like i'm not good at this and if I try to do IT I would fail I wouldn't be a good wikipedian was Better if I just stepped back and let people who are more this passionate on this topic edit whether there are other topics that are incredible emotional to some people where I can I can actually do quite well like i'm i'm gonna be OK maybe um we were discussing earlier the efficacy of masks. Oh, I think that's an interesting problem and I don't know the answer, but I can help kind of catalogue what's the best evidence is. So i'm not going to get upset.

I'm not going to get angry. I'm able to be a good wikipedian. So I think that's important. And I do think though in in a related framework that the composition of the community is really important, uh, not because wikipedia is or should be a battleground, but because blind spots like maybe I don't even realize what biased if i'm if i'm particularly of a certain point of you. I never thought much about IT.

So one of the things we we focus on a lot, the wikipedia volunteers are, but we don't know the exact number, but let's say eighty percent plus mail. And there are a certain demographic. They tend to be college educated, heavy your own techniques than not, you know, with sea, sea.

So there is a demographic to the community that's pretty much global. Me, somebody said to me once, why is the only White men who had IT wikipedia? And I said, we've ve obviously not meet japanese wikipedia community.

It's kind of a joke because the broader principle still stands. Who edits japanese wikipedia? A onto gigi.

Men, right? And women as well. So we do have women in the community that's very important. But we do think, okay, you know what that does lead to some problems that leads to some content issues simply because people write more about what they know and what they're interested in. There will tend to be dismissive of things as being uninterested if it's not something that they personally have.

An interesting um I I like the an example as a parent, I would say our entries on early childhood velocity ment probably earn as good as they should be because a lot of the wikipedia of volunteers aren't actually we're getting older the wikipedia so that the demographic has changed a bit. But you know if if you got a bunch of twenty five year old techy dudes who don't have kids, there is not going to be interested in early childhood velocity ment. And if they tried to write about IT, they probably wouldn't do a good job because they don't know about IT.

And somebody did a look at our entries on our novell's, who've won a major literary prize, and they looked at the male novellas. First is the female, and the male novellas had longer and higher quality entries. And why is that? Well it's not because because I know hundreds of wikipedia is not because these are bunch of biased, sexist men who are like books by women are not important.

It's like, no, actually there is a um agenda kind of breakdown of leadership. There are books like hard science fictions, a classic example, hard science fiction, mostly read by men, uh, other types of novels, more red by women. And if we don't have women in the community, then these award winning, clearly important novell ess may have less coverage.

And not because anybody consciously thinks, uh, we don't like what a book by my Angelo like, who cares SHE is poet like? That's not interesting. no.

But just because want people write what they know, they write what they're interest in IT. So we do think diversity, the community is really important. And that's one area where I do think it's really clear.

But I can also say, you know what actually that also applies in the political sphere. Like to say actually we do want kind and thoughtful, uh, catholic priest, kind and thoughtful conservatives, kind and thought for libertarians, kindly, thoughtful markus, you know, to come in. But the key is the kind and thoughtful peace. So when people sometimes come to wikipedia outraged by some, you know, dramatic things that happened on twitter, they come to a kip dia with a chip on the shoulder ready to do battle. And if this doesn't work out very well.

you know and there's tribes in general where I think there's a responsibility on the larger group to be even kind dn more welcoming to the smaller group yeah we .

think that's really important. And so you know often times people come in and know there's a lot 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 newcomer's to the community and so I can tell you what our ideals are, what our philosophy is um but do we live up to that?

So now the ideal is you come to wikipedia know we have a rules like one of our fundamental rules is ignore all rules which is partly written that way because IT pegs people's attention like how kind of rule is that, you know, but basically says, look, don't get nervous and depressed about a bunch of, you know, what's the formatting of your footnote, right? So you shouldn't come to wikipedia and link and then get boner yelled out because it's not the right format a instead, somebody should go, oh hey, thanks for perhaps ing but you know here's the link to how to format. You know if you want to keep going, you might want to earn how to form out footnote and 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.

Any know sometimes in in the community that can be quite hard. So people come in and theyve got a great big idea. They're na propose this through to be the community and they have no idea.

That's basically a perennial discussion we've had seven thousand times before. And so then ideally, you would set of the person, oh yeah, great. Thanks like a lot of people have. And here's where we got to and here's the nuance conversation we've had about that in the past that I think they'll find interesting.

And some of the people are like, I got another one, you know who's come in with this idea which doesn't work and they don't understand why I can lose patients but and that of human but I think I just does require really thinking you know ah you you know self aware manner of like, oh, I was wanted new bye. Actually we do have we have a great I just didn't interview with the uh uh Emily temple where to SHE was wikipedia year. He is like a great well known wikipedian.

And I attributor for my book, and he told me something I never knew, apparently that is not secret, like shouldn't reveal IT to me. But is that when he started a wikipedia SHE was a vandal SHE came in vandalised wikipedia and then basically what happened was he done some sort of, uh, vandal ized a couple of articles and then somebody popped up on her talk, patient, hey, like why are doing this? Like we're trying to make an cyclop ity here and this was very kind yeah and he felt so bad she's like, oh, right.

I didn't really think of IT that way. He just was coming in as he was like, thirteen years old come back you like having fun and drawing a bit and then she's like, I actually, oh, I see your point and became a great opinion so that the idea really is that you don't just go throw block fucked off here you go, hey, you know, like what my goes, you know, which is, I think the way we tend to treat things in real life. You know, if you've got somebody who's doing something on noxious in your friend group, you probably go, hey, like, really, I I, I don't know 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, h, you know what? I didn't. I thought that was OK, I didn't. And then they stop, or they keep IT up and then herb IT goes .

well yearly as well. Yeah I mean that just an example that give me faith in humanity that they were all capable and wanting to be kind to each other. And in general, this the fact there's a small group of lunchers they are able to contribute so much to the organization, the collection um the the discussion of all of human knowledge is so IT makes me so grateful to be part of this whole human project I that's one of the reasons that the love capet a gives me faith unity.

No I I I once was um at wiki menu or annual conference and people come from all around the world, really active volunteers. I was at the dinner, we were in egypt a week, many in alex entry at the sort of closing dinner, whatever. And a friend of man came out of the table, and she's sort of been in the movement more broadly, creative commerce, not really with opinion SHE come to conference because she's in to creative commerce and all that.

So we have dinner in IT. Just turned out I SAT down at the table with most of the members of the english language arbitraging tee, and there are a bunch of very sweet kiki wikipedian. And as we left the table, I said her, it's really like, I still find this kind of sense of amazing, like we just had dinner with some of the most powerful people in english language media because there the people who are like the final court of appeal in english, kip dia.

And thank goodness they are not media moguls, right? They're just a bunch of geeks who are just like. Well liked in the community because they're kind and they're thoughtful and they really, you know sort of think about things I was like that is great love bean.

It's it's to degree that geeks run the best aspect of human civil ation brings me joy in all aspects. And this is a programming like linux yeah like programmer in all, like people that kind of specializing a thing and they don't really get caught up in into the massive the Bakery of of a society. They just kind of do their thing and they valued the crazy of IT yeah the competence .

of if you've never heard of this or looked into you'll enjoy IT. I read something recently and I didn't even know about but like the the the fundamental like time zones and and they change from sometime you sometimes a country will pass daylight savings, remove IT by a week, whatever. There is a file uh that on all sort of unique space computers and basically all computers in up using this file. It's the official time on file.

But why is the official? It's just this one guy. It's like this guy and a group of community around him and basically something something weird happened and IT broke something because he was on vacation.

And i'm just like, isn't that wild right, that you would think? I mean, first of all, most will never even think about like how do computers know about time zones? Well, they know because they just use this fire which tells all the time zones and which dates they change in all of that. But this is just one guy and he doesn't get paid for IT. It's just he's like, you know, with all the billions of people on the planet, he sort of put his hand up and goes, i'll take care the .

times and there's a lot, a lot, a lot of programmer listening to this right now with ptsd about time zones. And then there um I mean, there's on top of this one guy, these other libraries to the different programing languages that help manage the times on for you. But still they just within those. There's it's it's amazing just the package is the libraries ha few people will out of their own love for building, for creating, for community and all that yeah it's I almost like don't want to interfere with the natural habitat of the geek like when you spot tom in a while you just want to be yeah .

well careful yeah thing I each measured matter guide many years ago um lovely really sweet guy he is running a boat on english wikipedia that I thought wow that's actually super clever and what have you done is his butt was like spell checking but rather than simple spell checking, what he had done is created database of words that are commonly mistaken for other words. They're spelled wrong. So I can even give an example.

And so the word is, people often spell IT wrong. But no spot tracker catches IT because IT is another word. And so what he did is he wrote a boat that looks for these words and then checks the sentence around IT for certain keywords. So in in some context, uh, matter, this isn't correct. But boy 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 and an article, he would look in the context and see, is this a nodal reference? And if IT was, he didn't order correctly, just would flag IT up to himself to go, oh, check this one out. And that's not a great example, but he had thousands of examples.

I was like, that's amazing. Like I won't never thought to do that and i'm glad that so that's also part of the openness of the system and also I think being a charity, being you know this idea of like actually this is a gift to the world, uh, that makes someone go, oh, oh, well, i'll put my hand up. Like, 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. Well, I gotta ask .

about this big, bold decision at the very beginning to not do advertisements on the website. And I just, in general, the philosophy of the business model. Competition went behind that. yeah.

So I think most people know this, but we're a charity. So in the U. S. Of, you know, rejected as a charity. And uh, we don't have any ads on the site. And the vast majority the money is from donations, but the vast majority from small donors of people giving twenty five box or whatever.

If you listening to this, go donate, donate. Now x have donate so many times and we .

have you know millions of donors every year. But it's like a small percentage people. I was said in the early days, a big part of IT was aesthetic almost as much as anything else I was like. I just think I don't really want ads in wikipedia like I just think that would be. There's a lot of reasons why I might not be good.

And even back then, um I didn't think as much as I have since about a business model contend to drive you in a certain place and really thinking that through in advance is really important because you might say yet, we're really, really keen on community control and neutrality. But if we had an advertising based business model, probably that would begin to a road even if I believe in a very strongly, organizations tend to follow the money in the D N. A. In the long run. And so things like it's easy to think about some of the immediate problem.

So like if you go uh to read about A I don't know um needs on car company and if you saw an add for the new knees on at the top of the page, you might be like, do they pay for this or that? Do the advertise have influence of the content? Kind of wonder about that for all kinds of media and that undermines trust, undermines trust, right? But also things like, you know we don't have click bait headlines in wikipedia.

I've never seen you know, wikipedia entries with all this kind of a list ticals. You know, sort of the ten ten funny st cat pictures number of of will make you cry. You know, none of that kind of stuff because there's no incentive, no reason to do that.

Also, you know there's no reason to have an algorithm to say, actually, we're onna use our algorithm to drive you to stay on the website longer. We're going to use the algorithm to drive you to you know, it's like you're reading about queen Victoria. There's nothing to sell you when you're reading about queen Victoria.

Let's move you onto lost vegas because actually they had around hotels and lawmakers is quite good. So we don't have that sort of there's no incentive for the organza to go. Oh, let's let's move people around to things that have Better ad revenue instead. It's just like, oh well, what's most interesting to the community just to make those link. So that um decision uh just seemed obvious to me. But as I say, IT was less of a business decision and more of an aesthetic was like, oh, that this is how I like wikipedia doesn't have ads, don't really want these early days like a lot of the s that that was well before the era of really quality at targeting and all that. So a lot of banners, banners punched the monkey ads and all that kind of nonsense.

And so, you know, but there was no guarantee, was no, I was not really clear how could we fun this? You know, like IT was pretty cheap, is IT still is quite cheap compared to, you know, most know we don't have one hundred thousand employees and all of that, but would we be able to raise money through donations? And so I remember the the first time that we did, and they really did A A donation campaign, was on a Christmas day in two thousand.

three. I think he was there 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 like, I don't know, remember now, like hard drive that was like Christmas day. So I scrambled on Christmas day to sort of go on to the database server, which fortunately survived, and have IT become a front in server as well. And then the site was really slow, and he doesn't working very well.

And he was like, okay, it's time we need to do a fun raiser. And so I was hoping to raise twenty thousand dollars in a months time, but we raised nearly thirty thousand within two, three weeks time. So that was the first proof point of like, uh, like we put a banner up and people will donate.

Like we just explain you need the money and people are like, already we were very small back then and people like, oh yeah, like i'd love this, I want to contribute. Then over the years, we've we come more sophisticated about the fundraising campaigns, and we've tested a lot of different messaging and so forth. What we used to think, you know, I remember one year we really went heavy with, we have great ambitions to, you know, the the idea of a is a free and cycle media for every single personal on the planet.

So what about the languages of sub saharan africa? So I thought, okay, we're trying to raise money. We need to talk about that because it's really important near dear to my heart and just instinctively knowing nothing about charity fun raising see at all around is like, oh, charity always mentioned like the poor people they're helping so let's talk about that didn't really work as well.

The the pitch that like this is very vague and very sort of bob at the pitch that works Better than any other in general is a fairness pitch of like you use IT all the time, we should probably chip in I must feel like, yeah you know what my life would suck without wikipedia use IT constantly and whatever I should chip in like IT just seems like the right thing to do and that and there's many variations on that obviously um that's really IT works and like people are like, oh yeah like wikipedia, I love wikipedia. You know I shouldn't so sometimes people say, you know, why are you always begging for money on the website and you know I it's not that often it's not that much, but that does happen. Uh, they're like one of you just get google and uh facebook and microsoft, one of they pay for IT.

And like I don't think that's really the right answer. Infant starts to creep in influence, starts to keep ban and questions started keeping. Like the best funding for wikipedia is the small donors.

We also have major donors. We have high networking k people who don't hate, but we always are very careful about that sort of thing to say. Well, that's really great and really important. But we can't let that become influence ah because that would just be really right quite yeah. Not good for kip dia.

I would love to know how many times I visited kip dia, how much time I spent on IT, because I have a general sense that is the most useful sight of every use competing may build google search, yeah. Which ultimately went.

yeah, yeah.

yeah. If I was just reminded of a, remember, all those times your life will make Better because I think I would be much more like, yeah, why did I waste money on site? X, Y, Z, when I could be like, I should be giving .

a lot of here well, you know, the guardian newspaper has a similar model, which is they have ads, but they also, there is no pay war, but they just encourage people to donate and they do that. Like i've sometimes seen a Better saying, this is your hundred and thirty fourth article you've read this year. Would you like to donate? And I think that I think it's effective. I think they're testing. But also, I wonder IT, just for some people, if they just don't feel like guilty and then think, well, I shouldn't bother them so much, but it's a good question.

I don't know the answer. I guess it's the thing I could also turn on because i'll make me I feel like literally there are some sites and speaks of our social media discussion.

Wikipedia unquestionably makes me feel Better about myself if I spend time on IT like there are some websites where I am like if I spend time twitter, sometimes i'm like i've regret there's I think elon talks about the minimized a number of regreted minutes yeah my number of regreted minutes on wikipedia is like a zero okay? I don't remember a time um i've just discovered this um a start following an instagram a page depth of wikipedia oh yeah there's like crazy wikia. There's no wikipedia ge .

that yeah I gave her a media contribute of the year award. This year is so great that is so fun.

So yes, so that that's the kind of interesting point that I uh, I don't even know if there's a competitor. There may be the sort of programing stack over the type of websites, but everything else, there's always a trade off. There's a because it's probably because the add driver model because there's an incentive to pull you on the click. Yeah and wikipedia has no click. It's all about the quality of the knowledge in the wisdom.

Yes, no, that's right. And I I also like sc overall, although I wonder I wonder what you think of this. I so I only programmed 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, and the stuck over flow quite a lot, trying to figure out what's gone wrong. And I have really transition to using a ChatGPT much more for that, because I can often find the answer clearly explained and IT just IT works Better than shifting through threats. And I can feel bad about that because I do love stuck overflow in their community. I mean, I am assuming I haven't read anything about in the news about i'm assuming they are keenly aware of this and they're thinking about how can we sort of 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.

And I think a stack or flow currently uh has policies against using GPT, like there's a contentious intention, but they're trying to figure that out.

And so we we are similar in that regard like obviously, all the things we have talked about like ChatGPT makes stuff 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, its sort of like you, the human, are responsible for what you put into a kip dia.

So if you use ChatGPT, you you Better check IT. There's a lot of great use cases of, you know like, oh, i'm i'm not a native speaker of german. My kind of pretty good.

I'm not going about myself hypotheticals pretty good. And I kind of just want to run my add IT through ChatGPT in german to go make sure my grandma's okay. That's actually cool.

This make you sad that people might use, increasingly use tragic ity for something where they would previously use the competition. So basically use IT to answer basic questions about the I tower yeah and where .

the answer .

really comes at the source of IT from okie dia. But they're using this is an interface yeah no.

no. That's completely fine. I mean, part of IT is our ethos has always been here's our gift to the world makes 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, right? Like if and we've talked where we've had more conversation about this, this old GPT thing is new things like if you ask a lesa, um you know what is the iphone tower and SHE reads you the first two sentences from wiki. A doesn't IT from wikipedia and they recently started citing wikipedia.

Then we worry like, oh, if people don't know they're getting the knowledge from us, are they gonna donate money or they just think of what's wikipedia? I can just ask alex a, well, lex only knows anything because he read wikipedia. So we do think about that. But IT doesn't bother me in the sense of, like, I want people always come to wikipedia first.

But we are also had a great demo like literally just hacked together over the weekend by I head a machine learning where he did little thing to say, you could ask any question and he was just knocking IT together to use a the open A A P I just make a demo, ask your question um why do ducks fly south for winter? Just the kinds thing you think oh, I I I might just google for that I might start looking in wikipedia, I don't know and so what he is, just what are some computer entries that might answer to this then he grabs those wikipedia, tries said, here's some wikipedia tries answered this question based only on the information in this need. A pretty good results.

And IT kind of prevented the making stuff up night is just a he had to together the weekend. But what IT made me think about was, okay. So now we've got this huge body of knowledge that in many cases you're like, oh, I am really I wanted know about queen Victoria.

I'm just going to go read the wikipedian tree and it's going to take me through her life and and so forth. 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 step ford like that's just using a 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 kind of cool.

I I would love to see a tragedy ity grounding into website like ork, pedia. And the other comparable website, to me, be like, well, from alpha for more mathematical knowledge. That so grounding, like taking you to a page that is really crafted, is supposed that the moment you started actually taking you to like journalist websites, like news websites, start getting no liffey ah get no little yeah yeah because they have you're now in a land that has a wrong incentive right .

yeah yes and you need somebody to have thought through that and sort of tried to knock off the refuge just yeah no IT is very um I think that's exactly right. And I think um you know I I think that kind of grounding is I think they're working really hard on that. I think that's really important.

And that actually when I so if you asked to step back and be like very business like about our business model and where is gonna go for us and how we're going to lose half er donations because everyone is just going to stop the community at going to tragedy. T I think the 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 gone to get tones of recognition and tons of of traffic just from even if it's just the moral um proper ess of saying here's my source um so I think I think we're going to be alright in that.

And then the close partnership of if that the models fine tune is constantly retrained, that will capet is one of the primary places were, if you want to change what the model knows, one of the things you should do is contribute to wikipedia clarifying cap yes.

that's .

elaborate x and that, uh, you mentioned all of of controversies. I have to ask, uh, do you find the controversy of whether you are the soul founder by the co founder of vocational dia? Ironic, absurd, interesting, important um what are your comments so .

I would say so important um not that interesting. I mean, one of the things that a people are sometimes surprised to hear me says I actually think Larry singer doesn't get enough credit for his early working wikipedia even though I think the founders is not the right title for that. So, you know, like he had a lot of impact and a lot of a great work and I disagreement, but a lot of things sense all that that's fine. So yeah no, to me that's like it's one of these things that the media love a falling out storing so they wanna make a big deal out of IT. And I just like, yeah no.

So there's a lot of interesting engineering contributions in the early days. Like you are saying, there's debates about how to structure IT is the thing that we're doing and there is important people .

that contributed to that.

Yeah yeah. So he also, he said you had some disagreements. Larry singer said that nobody should trust what kip dia and that what kip dia seems to assume that there is only one legitimate, defensible version of the truth and any controversial question. That's not how the kip dia used to be. I presume you disagree .

with that. S T up. I really like go and read any we can be the entry in a controversial topic.

And what you'll see is a really diligent effort to explain all the relevant sides. So yeah, just disagree. So .

uncontroversial questions you think perspectives are generally represented. I mean, good has to do with the kind of attention between the mainstream and not maintain that .

were talking about yeah no. I mean, for sure like to take this area of uh discussion seriously is to say, yeah you know what actually that is a big part of what wikipedia spend their time grappling with is to say, you know how do we figure out um whether A. Less popular view is super science.

Is IT just a less popular view that getting acceptance in the mainstream is IT french verses crack part at such a, such a? And that debate is what you've got to do. There is no choice about having that debate of crappy with something um and I think we do and I think that's really important.

And I think if anybody said uh to the P D community g you should stop you recovering minority viewpoints on this issue. I think they would say I even understand what why you would say that like we have to sort of grapple with minority view points in science and politics and so on. Um but it's and like this is one of the reasons why you know there is no magic simple answer all these things. It's really a contexture case by case. It's like, you know, you've got a really say, okay, what is the context here, how you do and and you've always going to be open to correction and to change and sort of chAllenge and always be out of serious about that.

And what happens again with social media is when there is that grappling process in kip dia, and a decision is me to remove a paragraph, or to remove a thing, or to say a thing, you're gona notice the one, one direction of the isolation of the grappling and not correction. And you're gna highlight and say how to how come this person yeah I don't know. I want maybe, uh, legitimacy of elections. That's something that comes up down. Trump may be I can .

give a really good example, which is there was this sort of dust up about the definition of recession in. So the accusation was, an accusation was often quite ridiculous. And exchange, which is under pressure from the by administration, we can be the change, the definition of recession, to make biden look good.

Or we did IT not under pressure, but because we, a bunch of balloon tic left us and so on. And then, you know, when I see something like that in the process, like, oh dear, like what's happened here, how do we do that? Because I always just accept things for five seconds first.

And then I go on to look at him, like, you know what? That's literally completely not what happened. What happened was one editor thought the article needed restructure.

So the article is always said so that 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 nuts around that. And there's other like factors that go into IT.

And so well, there is just an interesting complicated topic. And so the article has always had the definition of two quarters. The only thing that really changed was moving that from the lead from the top pargraph to further down.

And then new stories appeared, saying, wikipedia change the definition, recession. And then we got a huge rush of troll coming in. So the article was temporarily protected.

I think only thing I protected and people told, go to the talk pace to discuss the way that was the dust up that was no, when you look at that as a wikipedia, like like this is a really routine kind of editorial debate. Another example, which unfortunately our friend elan fell for, I would say, is the the twitter files. So there was an article called the twitter files, which is about these files that were released once in an to control a twitter.

And he released internal documents. And the, what happened was somebody nominated for delicious, but even the nomination said, this is actually, this is mainly about the hunter biden laptop controversy. Shouldn't this information be there instead? So anyone can, like IT takes exactly one human being anywhere on the planet to propose something for deletion.

And that trigger a process where people discuss IT, which, within a few hours, IT was what we call snowball closed. This doesn't have a snowballs chance in hell of passing. So an admin goes, yeah wrong and close the debate.

And that was that that was the whole thing that happened. And so nobody proposed suppressing the information. Nobody proposed IT wasn't important. IT was just like editorially boring internal question and so sometimes people with stuff like that and they like you see look at these leftist they're trying to suppress the truth again. It's like will slow down a second and come and look like literally .

it's not what happened yeah I think the right is more sensitive to censorship and so they will more likely highlight there's more reality to highlighting something that looks like censorship in any walks of life. And this moving a paragraph for one place turn another of removing in a soul a spot the regular grappling with a kip dia can make a help of a good article to video.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That sounds really a enticing and intrigue, surprising to most people because they are like, I know reading wikipedia doesn't seem like a crack pot left his website IT seem to pretty kind of dull regulating its on geeky way so that makes a good story that's oh am I being misled because there's a shadowy kab of to me .

whales you know I generally my very political stuff I I mentioned to you um traveling to a have some very difficile conversation. High profile figures, both in the war, ukraine and in israel, poland. And I read the wikipedia articles around that, and I also read books on the conflict in the history of the different regions.

And I find the worker articles to be very baLanced, and there's many perspectives being represented well. Then I asked myself, well, and I one of them left this crackpots, I can't see the truth. I mean, it's something I asked myself all the time. Forget the less is just crack about and and my am I just being a sheep in accepting? And I think that's an important question .

always ask but not you too much .

a bit but not no.

I think we always have to chAllenge ourselves of like what what do I potentially have wrong?

What you mentioned, the pressure from government. Um you've you've criticize twitter for the allowing giving in to turkey's government censorship. There's also conspiracy theories or accusations of wikipedia being um open to pressure from government to government organza of bi and all this kind of stuff. Uh is that what is the philosophy about pressure from government and sense?

So so where super heart core on this, we've never bowed ed down to government pressure anywhere in the world and we never will um and we understand that we are hard core. And actually there is a bit of nuance about how different companies respond to this, but our responses always been just to say no.

And if they threatened to block, not what you gonna lose wikipedia, and that's been very successful for us as a strategy um because governments know they can't just casually threaten to block wikipedia or block us for two days. And we're onna 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. We can go one level deeper and say, i'm actually quite synthetic, like if you have staff members in a certain country and they are at physical risk, you've gotta put that into your equation. So I understand that.

Like if if elan said actually i've got one hundred staff members on the ground in such as such a country, and if we don't comply, somebody who's going to get arrested and IT could be quite serious. Okay, that's a tough one, right? That's that's actually really hard um but yeah no and then the FBI one no, we like the criticism.

I thought I kind of prepare for this because I saw people responding to your request for questions and I was like someone who's like, I will do you think I was really bad that you I know I actually reached start to stuff. And can you just make sure i've got my facts right? And the answer is, we received zero request of any kind from the FBI or any other other government agencies for any changes to content in wikipedia.

And how do we receive those request at the level of the recommend dia foundation? We would have said it's not are like we can do anything because we can be is written by the community. And so the recommendation foundation can't change the content of kipt without causing I mean god would be a massive controversy you can imagine um what we did do and this is what i've done.

I 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 quite out. There's no thread of being blocked in the s like that, 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 like, 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. And then you sometimes just like g like if somebody complains that something's bad in wikipedia, whoever they are don't care who they are.

对比， you could be the government, could be the pope. I don't care who they are. So like, oh, okay, well, our responsibility, we pediments to go. Oh, hold on, let's check. right.

Is that right or wrong? Is there something that we've got wrong in wikipedia, not because you're threatened to block us, but because we want wikipedia to be correct? So we do have these dialogues with people.

And you know a big part of that, what was going on with you might call IT pressure on social media companies or dialogue with, depending on we talked apple with the language, depending on what your view is, in our case, IT was really just about, okay, right? They want to have a dialogue about a covered information, misinformation. We are this enormous source of information, which the world depends on.

We're going to have that conversation, right? We're happy to say here's you know if they say, how do you know that wikipedia is not going to be pushing some crazy anti vx narrative first? I mean, I think it's somewhat inappropriate for the 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 know the chinese baccus. And so so IT goes right we're not gona cave into any kind of government pressure um whatever the appropriators of what they were doing. I think there is a role 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 um all these kinds of things. So you know, I think I would be irresponsible of us to get a call from a government agency and say, yeah, wanna just fuck off your the government. Uh, but IT would also be irresponsible to o, oh, the government ever is not happy. Let's fix the comp. F, B.

I love this. Know when you say you want to. Discussions with the chinese government or with organizations exceed C, W, H, S. To thorough understand what the mainstream narrative is so that IT can be properly represented, but not drive what the articles are.

Well, it's actually important, like whatever the wikimedia foundation thinks has no impact on what's in wikipedia. So it's more about saying to them, right, uh, we understand your the world health organization or your whoever and part of your job is to sort of public health is about communications you want to understand the world is more about, oh, well, let's explain how wikipedia works.

So is more bugs plaining how wikipedia ks, and like, hey, it's the volunteers yeah, yeah it's it's a battle of ideas and is how, yes, the sources are used yeah, what are legitimate .

sources and what not .

a legitimate sources? Yeah exactly. I mean, I I suppose there are some battle about what is a legia source. There could be a statement made, a cdc. I mean, like there's a government organizations in general have sold themselves to be the place where you go for expertise. And some of that has been, uh, a small degree raised in question over the response to dependent.

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 like we really need people to take this seriously and take actions.

Therefore, we're going to put out some overblown claims because it's onna scare people into behaving correctly. Know what? That might work for a little while, but IT doesn't work in the long, long because suddenly people go from a defauts stance of, like the center for disease control, very well respected science. Fc, sort of I don't know you've got, uh, fault in IT lina, with the last file of small boxes or whatever 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 um and there you know it's like, okay and if you put out statements not enough the city city but health organza whoever that are provably false and also provably you kind of knew they were false, but you did IT to scare people because you want to them to do the right thing like, no, you know what? That's not gonna in the long run like you're gonna lose people and now you've got a bigger problem, which is a lack of trust in science, a lack of trust in authorities um who are, you know, but large there, like quite boring government burek rats, scientists, you just trying to help the world.

While I have been criticized and i've been torn on this, i've been criticize for criticizing and then he thought you too hard. The degree to which I criticize him is because he's a leader and i'm just observers.

The effect in the loss of trust in the institutions like the nh, that where I personally know there's a lot of incredible scientists doing incredible work yeah and I have to blame the leaders for the effects on the distress, the scientific work that they are doing because um 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 these speeches. You can criticize the lead people who lead, uh, leaders, unfortunately, unfortunately, responsible for the effects on society.

To me, ethnic or whoever in the scientific position around the pandemic had an opportunity to have a, uh, F, D R 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 world being of human civilization. This was epic and awesome and sexy. And to me, when I talk to people about science is aiming but sexy in terms of the real gen biog development um because it's but politicized, it's equi yeah and people just don't want like don't talk to me about the vaccine I and I anisha and I got vaccinated .

switch topics yeah well IT SMS because as I I live in the U. K. And I think it's all these things are a little less politicize there.

And I I haven't played close enough attention to for you to have a really strong view. I'm sure I would disagree with some things. I definitely. I remember hearing at the beginning of the pandemic as i'm unwrapping my amazon package with the mass about lot because I heard there's a pandemic and I just was like, I want some in ninety five mass, please uh and they were saying, don't buy mask and the motivation was because they don't want there to be shortages in hospitals, fine, but they were also a statements of mass, want they are not effective and they want to help you. And then the complete about face to you're you're ridiculous if you're not wearing, you know it's just like no like that that about face just lost people from.

They want the distress and intelligence of the public to deal with nuance.

to deal with the yeah this is exactly what you know I think this is where the wikipedia and neutral point of view, uh, is and and should be an ideal. And obviously every article and everything we could you you know me now and you know how I am about these things, but like ideas to say, look, we're happy to show you all the perspectives. This is plan parent hood 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 like you read that and you're going na be more educated and you're going to begin to make IT. I mean, I can just talk IT. In the U.

K, the government thought when we found out in the U. K, that very high level government officials were not following the rules they put on everyone else. Yes, I moved from.

I had just become A U. K. Citizen, just a little wb before the pandemic. And you know, it's kind of emotionally like you get a passport in a new country and you feel quite good and did my oath to the queen and dragged the pooled lady out to tell us all to be good. And I was like, we're british, we're going to do the right things and you know it's going to be tough, but we're not. So you have that kind of dunk k spirit moment and you're like following the rules to a tea. And then suddenly it's like, well, they're not following the rules as a suddenly I shifted personally from i'm going to follow the rules even if I don't completely agree with them, but I still follow because I think we've got all been together to like you know, i'm going to make wise and thoughtful decisions for myself and my family and that journalist gonna an following the rules but it's basically you know when there you know at certain moment in time, like you're not allowed to be in an outside space unless you're exercising. I like I think I can sit the part and read a book yeah like it's gonna fine like that irrational rule, which I would have been following just personally if like i'm just going to do the right yeah.

In the loss of trust, that ticket scale was probably harmful to science. And to me, the scientific method and the scientific communities is a one of the biggest hopes, at least to me, for the survival of the thriving of human civilization.

absolutely. And I you know, I think you see some of the ramifications of this. There is always been like pretty anti science, anti vx people. Okay, that's always been a thing, but I feel like it's bigger now a simply because of that lowering of trust.

So a lot of people yeah maybe it's like you say, a lot of people are like I ve I really don't want to talk about this because it's so toxic no. And that's unfortunate because I think people should say what what an amazing thing. And you know there's also a whole range of discourse around if this were a disease that were primarily that was primarily killing babies, I think people's emotions about IT would have been very different right or wrong. Then the fact that when you really looked at the the sort of death rate of getting cold, well it's really dramatically different if if you're late in life um this was really dangerous and if you're twenty three years old, yeah well it's not great like a long covers the thing in all of that but and I think some of the public communications again were fAiling to properly contextualized not all of IT you know it's a complicated .

matter but you let me your real red comment that received two legs and two whole .

people liked IT yeah two .

people liked IT a and .

I don't know maybe .

you can come on whether there's truth to digest. Found an interesting because i've been doing a lot of research on water or two recently. So this is about hitler.

Here's it's a long it's a long statement. I was there when a big push was made to fight buyer at wikipedia. Our target became getting the hitler article to be wicky 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 research to beat the competition. This bias seems to hold today.

For example, the current list of political feature articles at a gLance seems to have only two books, one on anarchism and one on car Marks. Surely were not going to say there have only ever been two articles about political, not biography books, what being featured, especially compared to two hundred plus video games, that's the only topics with with good books, are socialism and anarchy. Would you have an interesting comments on this kind of so featured how the feature is selected? maybe? Hr, because he's a special ah he's a special figure.

You know I love I ve no, I love the comparison to how many video games and that definitely speaks to my earlier as like if you've got a lot of Young geeky men yeah who really like video games, that doesn't necessarily give you give you the right place in every respect. Um certainly yes. 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, swatis a and people are going crazy about IT. And some people were saying it's illegal, has german? We can be been taken over by nazi sympathisers and so on.

And IT turned out it's not illegal, like discussing the swoon, the swiss ka, as a political campaign, and using in certain ways, easy legal in germany in a way that I wouldn't be in the U. S. Because of first amendment. But in this case, IT was like, actually part of the point is the sweet C A symbol is from other cultures as well.

And they just thought I was, and I did joke to the game name, like, please don't put the swan school on the front page without warning me because i'm gna get a look now, wouldn't be me at the foundation how 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 is really, really good before we do that. Because if we put on the front page and it's got and it's not good enough, that could be a problem. There's no inherent reason like clearly, world war two is a very popular topic in wikipedia is like there are on the history channel like people is a fascinating period of history that people are very interested in and then on the other piece, like anarchism and carmax, yeah I mean, that's interesting. I'm surprised to hear that not more political books or topics have made .

IT to the front pay.

Now we're taking this read comment I but i'm trust thing so I think that's probably is right. They probably did have the list up. No, I think it's I think that piece the piece about how many of those featured articles have been video games and if it's disproportionate, yeah I think we should the community should go actually what's gone like that doesn't seem quite right.

Um you know I mean, you can imagine uh, that because you're looking for an article to be on the front page of wikipedia, you want to have a bit of diversity and IT. You want IT to be not always something that's really popular that week. So like I know, the last couple of weeks may be succession, the big finally of succession.

Might these your thing all this put succession on the front page? It's gonna popular. In other cases, you you kind of want take something super rub score and quirky because people also find that interesting in fun.

So yeah don't know. But you don't want you to be video games most of the time. That sounds quite bad.

Well, let me ask you just a for as somebody who seen the whole thing, the development of the millions of articles, big impossible question. What's your .

favorite article my favorite article well i've got a an amusing answer um which is possibly also true um there is uh an article in wikipedia called inherently funny words and one of the reasons I love IT is when I was created early in in the history of kip dia, IT kind of became like a dumping ground. People would just come by in right in any word that they felt sounded funny.

And then IT was nominated for deletion because someone is like, this is just a dumping around like people are putting all kinds of nonsense. And in that deletion debate, somebody came forward and said, essentially, way to second, hold on. This is actually a legitimate concept in the theory of humour and comedy.

And a lot of famous comedians and humours have written about IT. And it's, you know, it's actually legitimate topic. So then they went through and they meticulous referenced every word that was in there and throughout a bunch that weren't I think IT becomes this really interesting that my biggest disappointment and its the right decision to make um because there was no source but there was a picture of a cow.

But there was a rope around its head trying on some horns onto the cow so I was kind of a funny looking picture IT look like like a bull with horns but it's just like a Normal milk cow and but no at the caption said, according to sam, cow is an inherently funny word, which is just hilarious to me, partly because the, according to sam sounds not like wikipedia, but there was no source. So I went away and I I feel very sad about that, but I ve always liked that. And I actually the reason depth of wikipedia amuses me so greatly as because IT does like highlight really interesting of score stuff and you're like, well, I can believe somebody wrote about that in wikipedia is quite a music and sometimes there's a bit of ri humor and wikipedia, there's always a struggle. You're not trying to be funny, but occasionally a little inside humor can be quite healthy.

And apparently words with the letter k are funny. There's there's a lot of really well research stuff on this page. Yes yeah exciting. And I should mention for that the kip dia is run by any rewa that's right.

And um that is me just read out some of the pages uh a octopus and octopus was are two separate non human underwater settlements built by the gloomy octopus is in java bay, east australia. The first settlement named octopus by biologists was found in two thousand nine. The individual structures and octopus consists of borrow around a piece of human, uh, the treats believed to be scrap a medal and that goes on in this way cetery misspelling least concern species.

Humans were formally assessed as a species of least concern in in two thousand and eight. Um I think he try his guide to the galaxy a would slightly disagree. And last one, let me just say friendship paradox is the phenomena first observed by the social gist got filled in nineteen eighty one that an average and individuals friends have more friends than that. Oh, that's really that is .

a kind of thing that makes you want to like that sounds implausible at first because shouldn't everybody have, on average, about the same number of friends as all their friends? So you really wanted dig into the math of that and really think so.

Why would that be true? And it's one way to feel more lonely in a mathematically rigorous way. Somebody also on red IT asks, I would love to hear some war stories from behind the scenes. Is there is something that we haven't mentioned that was particularly difficult in this entire during iron .

with wikipedia? I mean, it's hard to say. I mean, so part of what I always say about myself is that i'm a pathological optimist.

So I think everything is fine and so things that other people might find a struggle. I'm just like, oh, this is the thing we're doing today. So that 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. Um yeah I mean, I was saying some of the some of the hard things. I mean, there were there were hard moments like when two out of three service crashed on Christmas day and then we needed to do a fundraiser and no idea what was gonna happen.

Um I would say as well the like in in that early period of time, the growth of the website and the traffic to the website was phenomenal, great. The growth of the community and in fact, the healthy growth the community was fine. And in the weaken media foundation, the non profit I set up to own an Operate wikipedia as a small organza IT had a lot of growing ins.

And you know, that was that was like that was the piece that just like mini companies or mini oranienburg are in a fast growth, it's like you've had the wrong people or there's this conflict that's horizon and nobodies got experiences to do this and all that. So no specific stories to tell. But you know, like I would say, growing the organization was harder than growing the community, growing the website, which is interesting.

Oh yes, it's kind of moralism inspiring that a community can emerge and be stable and that, yes, that has so much kind of productive positive output kind of makes you think, I think I don't, is one of those things. You don't want allies too much because, you know, you want to mess with the beautiful thing, but he gives me faith and communities. Yeah, yeah, they can spring up another domains as well.

Yeah, I think that's exactly right. You know, at fandom, my four profit with he company where you know, it's like all these communities about pop culture, mainly sort of entertainment, gaming and so on. There's a lot of small communities. And so I I went last year to our community connect conference and just met some of these people.

And like, you know, here's one of the leaders of the star wars wiki, which go wookiee a, which I think is great and you know, he's telling me about his community all that and i'm like, oh, right, yeah, I love this. Like, so it's not it's not the same purposes. Wikipedia of a neutral, high quality and scope dia.

But a lot of the same values are there of like oh, people should be nice to each other is like when people get upset. It's like just remember we're working on the star wars. We get together like there's no reason again, too outraged and just kind people, just think geeky people with a hobby uh.

where do you see what could be in ten years, one hundred years and .

one thousand, right? So ten years um I would say pretty much the same like we're not going to have when I gona become tiktok you know with entertainment do you drawl by video humor and BBA ba uh and in cycle pedia, I think in ten years, we probably will have um a lot more A I supporting tools like I have talked about.

And probably your search experience will be you can ask a question and get the answer rather than, you know from our body of work. So the searching discovery would be improved you to face, I always say one of the things that people most people won't notice um because already they don't notice IT is the growth of wikipedia in the languages of the developing world so you probably don't speaks for hei. So you're probably not checking out that the pity is doing very well um and IT is doing very well. And I think that kind of groth is actually super important, is super interesting. But most people won't .

notice that if we can just like on that yeah if you could. Do you think is so much incredible translation work is being done with with A I will english models. Do you think that can accelerate the, uh, kip dia? So you start with the basic draft of the translation of articles.

And then here, what I used to say is like machine translation for many years wasn't much used to the community because I 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 in all of that.

So to translate from english to spanish, if you tried google translate recently, spanish to english is what I would do. It's pretty good. It's actually not bad.

And used to be half a joke. And for a while I was kind of like, you can get the just of something. And now it's like, actually, it's pretty good. However, we ve got a huge spanish community who write in native spanish that they're able to use IT and they find IT useful, but they're are writing.

But if you try to do english to zoo um where there's not that much investment like there's loser reason to the english to spanish because of both huge economically important languages is zooly not so much. So for those smaller languages, IT was just still terrible. My understanding is its improved dramatically, and also because the new methods of training don't necessarily involve identical purposes to try to match things up, but rather reading and understanding with tokens and largest language models, and then reading and understanding, and then you get a much richer.

Apparently it's quite improved. 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 zou that I can that I feel comfortable sharing with my community because it's actually good enough. Or I can add IT a bit here and there.

So I think that's huge. So I do think that's going happen a lot and that's going to accelerate again. What will remain to most people in an invisible trend, but that's the growth in in all these other languages. So then move on to one hundred .

years starting get scary.

Well, the only thing I say about one hundred years is like we've built the wikimedia foundation and we run IT in a quite cautious and financially conservative and careful way. Every year, we build our reserves. Every year, we put aside a little bit more money.

We also have the endowment fund, which we just passed one hundred million. That's a completely separate fund um with a separate board. So that is not just like a big fat back account for some future profit here to blow through that.

You know, the foundation will have to get the approval of a second order board to be able to access that money, and that work can make other grants through the community and things like that. 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 were not we're not taking the kind of risks. And by the way, we're not taking too few rst leader. That's I think will the community foundation and we can will exist in one hundred years. If anybody exist in one hundred years.

be there. You think the internet looks unpredictable ly different.

just the web. I do. I do. I mean, I think a right now this sort of enormous step forward we've seen this has become public in the last year of the large language models.

Um really is something else, right? It's really everything in you and I have both talked today about the flaws in the limitations, but still it's as if someone who's been around technology for a long time. It's sort of that feeling of the first I saw web browser, the first time I saw the iphone, like the first time the internet was like really usable on a phone. And it's like, wow, that's a step changed difference. There's a few other.

you know maybe a google search.

I search was very first because I member alto via was kind of cool for a while and I just got more, more useless because algorithms a good and it's like, oh, google search now I like the internet works again yeah um and so large language one IT feels like that to me like, oh oh this is this is something new and like really pretty remarkable. And it's going to have some downsides like, you know the negative use case.

I'm people in the area who are experts that they're giving a lot of warnings and I don't know enough to. I'm not that worried, but i'm a pathological optimist. But I I do see some like really low hang fruit bad things that can happen. So my example is how about some highly customized spam where the the email that received isn't just like misspelled words and like trying to get through filters but actually is a targeted email to you that knows something about you by reading your linked in trophy and write a plausible email that will get through filters and it's like suddenly, oh um that's that's a new problem that's going to be interesting .

um is there just on the wikipedia editing side, does IT make the job of the volunteer of the editor more difficult if in a world where larger and larger percents of the internet is written by an alm?

So one of my predictions, and will see asking in five years how this pound out. Is that in a way, this will strengthen the value and importance of some traditional brands. So if I see A A new 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.

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 maybe full of errors, I think i'll be more cautious. I think i'm more interest. And we can also talk about this around photographic evidence. So obviously, there will be scandal's where major new Ortiz's get fooled by fake photo. However, if I see a photo of the the reason was the the pope wearing an expensive puffer jacket, i'm gonna yeah that's amazing that a fake like that can be generated but my immediate thought is night ah so the pops dipping into the money A H part as this particular pope doesn't seem like he'd be the type.

Um my favorite is a extensive pictures of joba and dial trump hanging out and having .

fun together very so I think I think people will care about the prevalence of a photo and if if you show me a photo and you say, yeah this this photo is from a fox news, even though I don't necessarily think that's the highest, but i'm like it's the news organza and they are going to have journalists and they are going to make sure the photo is what is proportional to be.

That's very different from a put photo randomly circulating on twitter, whether i'd say fifteen years ago, a photo random circulating on twitter. In most cases the worst you could do and this did happen is misrepresent the battle fields. So like, here's a bunch of injured children looked at israel done.

But actually he wasn't israel. IT was another case ten years ago that has happened. That has always Better around, but now we can have much more specifically constructed applausive looking photos that if I just see them circling ly on twitter, i'm going to go just don't know, not sure, like I can make that in five minutes.

So but I also hope that is kind of like what you're writing, writing your book, that we could also have citizen journalists that have a stable, verifiable trust that builds up. Yes, he doesn't have to be your times for this organization, that you could be an organization of one as long as it's stable and cares through time and IT builds up.

No, no, I I agree. But the one thing i've said in the past, and this depends on who that person is in what they're doing. But like I think my credibility, my general credit in the world should be the equal of a new york times reporter.

yeah. So if something happens and I witnessed and I write about IT, people are going to go well to me. Well, said IT, that's just like A A new ork times reporter said IT.

Like i'm going to tend to think he didn't just make IT up. Truth is, nothing interesting ever happens around me. I don't go to war zones. I don't go to big press confidence.

I don't interview putin and sill's sky, right? So just to an extent, yes, whether I do think for other people, those those traditional models of credibility are really, really important. And then there is this sort of citizens journalist.

I I don't know if you think of what you do is journalism kind of thing that is. But yeah, you do interviews. You do long form interviews. And I think people you know like if you come and you say, right, here's my tape but you wouldn't hand on a table like I just gestured you as if from handing you a cassette pe, if you put IT into your podcast, here's my interview with silence sky and people are going to go, yeah, how do we know that could be a deep fake? Yeah like you could have fake that because people are like, well, no, like you're a well known pod caster and you do interview interesting people and yet, like, you wouldn't think that so that your brand becomes really important where as 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 of silence. I saying something really outrages and i'm like, yeah, don't believe that like I don't think he said that in a meeting with, you know, whatever I think that russian propaganda or probably just troll and .

then building platforms and mechanisms or how that trust can be verified. You know, if something appears in a wikipedia pages, that means something is something appears on, like, say, my twitter count. I mean something that me, I this particular human have signed dolf on IT.

Yeah and then and then the trust you have in this particular human transfers to the piece of content and then each hopefully there are millions of people with different metrics of trust you and then you could see that there's A D kind of bias in a set of conversations you're having. So maybe okay, I trust this person of this kind of bias. And I go to the southern son of the other, the kind of eyes that I can integrate them away. Just think he said with fox news .

and times like we've all got there like where they sit um yeah .

so you have built um I would say one of that the most impact for website in the history of human civilization. So let me ask for you to give advice, the Young people, how to have impact in this world. High school. As college students, we need to have a big positive impact on world.

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 like i'm not that interested but i'm going to make a lot of money doing IT. You probably not gonna that good at IT.

And so that that is a big piece of IT. Um I I also like you know so for startups, I I give this advice so yeah and this is a career starter. Many kind of like Young person just starting out is like you be persistent, right? They'll be moments when it's not working out and you can't just give up too easily.

You've got ta persist through some hard times, maybe two service crash on the sunday and you've got a sort of scrambled to figure out but persist through that um and then also um be prepared to pay IT as a newer word knew for me but when I pivoted from new media to wikipedia is like this isn't working. I've got to completely change. So be willing to completely change direction when something not working.

Now, the problem with these two wonderful pieces of advice is which situation of I am today, right? Is this a moment when I need to just power through and persist because i'm onna find a way to make this work? Is this a moment where I needed 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, let's okay, here's a problem.

Do we need to change direction or do we need to kind of power through IT? And just knowing like those of the choices, not always the only choices, but those choices, I think, can be helpful to say, OK, M I, M I, I am I chicken you out? Like, because i'm having a little bump and i'm feeling an emotional is going to give up too soon.

Okay, I ask yourself that question and also is like, am I being big headed and trying to do something that actually doesn't make sense? OK, ask yourself that question to even contradictory question. Um sometimes it'll be one, sometimes with the other. And you kind of really think .

through I think persisting with the business model behind wikipedia is a city inspiring story because we live in in a capital world. We live in a in a scary world, I think, for an internet business. And so yeah and so like to do things different different than a lot of websites of doing like what wikipedia lived through the successive explosion of many websites that are basically addressed.

Google is add raven, uh, facebook, twitter, all of these website, or add driven and and and like to see them succeed, become this like incredibly rich, powerful companies that if I could just have their money, you would think, as somebody running with a pedia, I could do so much positive stuff, right? And so to persist through that is A I think is for my perspective now monday or monday night quarterback whatever um is IT was the right decision. But boy is that a tough decision .

but seem easy at the time.

So and you just kind of stay with .

with IT is working.

So now when you chose persistent.

yeah well, yeah I mean, I I always like to give an example of my space cause I just think it's an amusing story. So my space was poised, I would say, to be facebook.

IT was a huge IT was viral IT was lots of things kind of four shadowed a bit of may be even tiktok because I was like a lot of entertainment content casual um and then ripper 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. I remember to accept different request was like three clicks. We saw three ads.

And on facebook, except the different request, you didn't even leave the page or just like that, just accepted. What is IT think? So I used to give this example of, like roper murdoch, really scary.

That one up, in a sense, maybe did. But somebody said, you know what? Actually, he bought IT for, I cannot remember the numbers. He ought IT for eight hundred million. And IT was very profitable through its decline. I actually made his money back and more so IT wasn't like from a financial point of view, IT was a bad investment in the sense of you could have been facebook, but on sort of more mundane matrix is like actually .

worked on OK for all matters.

I define success IT that is also advised to Young people one of the things I I would say like when we have our mental models of success as an entrepreneur, for example, and your examples in your mind are bill gates Marks are covering so people who at a very Young age um had one really great idea that just went straight to the moon, became one of the richest people in the world that is really unusual, like really, really rare.

And for most afternoons that is not the live path you're onna take, you're onna fail. You're going to reboot, you going to learn from what you failed that you're onna try something different and that is really important because if if you are standard of success is, well, I feel sad because i'm not as richest elon mask. It's like, well, so should.

Almost everyone, possibly everyone except the on musk is not as much as elon mosque. And so that you know like realistically, you can set a standard of success even even in our really nounce, which I don't recommend of thinking about your financial success, like if you measure your financial success by thinking about billionaires, like that's that's heavy, like that's probably not good. I don't recommend IT.

Um where as like I personally you know like for me when people when journalists say how does that feel do not be a billion there. I usually say, I don't know how does that feel to you there? Not um but also i'm i'm like I live in london.

The number of bankers that no one's ever heard of, who live in on, who make far more money than I ever will, is quite a large number. And I wouldn't trade my life for theirs at a wool. Yeah right because I mine is so interesting.

Like IT. Oh right. Um Jimmy, we need you to go and meet meet the chinese propaganda minister. O okay, that's super interesting. Like, yeah, Jimmy, you know like here's the situation like you can go to this country and and why you're there um the president has as to see you. It's like, got that 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 like that's really cool like, I would like to do that that's really interesting country that all the time but i've done IT and its great. So like for me that's like arranging your life so that you have interesting experiences is just great.

Well, this is more to the question of what he looks like in a thousand years. Everything is the meaning of this whole thing where we here and was the meeting of life yeah.

I don't think there is a external answer to that question.

And I should mention that there is a very good wikipedia page on the different physics in the meaning of life. H .

interesting. I have to read that and see what I think. And this gives a also really good reference .

to a lot of different philosophy about meaning twenty years, century philosophy general, uh from from need you to the existent alist all but some of the are all of them have an idea of meaning they really struggle the system rigorously and that's what page and obviously a shot out to the he is guide no .

that yeah yeah yeah no I I think there's no external answer that I think it's internal. I think we decide um what meaning we will have in our lives and what we're going to do with ourselves.

Um and so when I think you know if we're talking about thousand years um millions of years um a eura milner wrote a book he's a big internet investigate he wrote a book um advocating quite strongly um for humans expLoring the universe and getting off the planet and he funds projects to like sand, like using lasers to send little cameras and interesting stuff um and he talks a lot in the book about meaning is like his his you is that the purpose of the human species is to broadly survive and get off the planet 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. You like the this is a space are absolutely enormous.

So I don't know what should we build generation ships to start flying places? Well, that I can do that and i'm not even if I could, even if i'm elan, must devote all my wealth, i'll be dead on the ship on the way. So is that really meaning? But I think is really interesting to think about. And and reading his little book is quite a short little book. Reading his book that made me IT did make me think about, wow, this is big, like, this is not what you think about in your data day.

Life is like, where is the human species going to be in ten million years? And IT does make you sort of turned back to earth and say, j, let's not destroy the planet like we can be stuck here for at least a while uh and therefore we should really think about um sustainability um and I mean one million years sustainability and we don't have all the answer. We have nothing close to the answers.

I'm actually excited about oni in this regard. All also bracton's yeah understand ards also risk people terrified of A I but actually think this is quite interesting this moment in time that we may have in the next fifty years to really, really solve some really long term human problems. For example, in health, the progress is being made in cancer treatment because we are able to add scale, you know uh model molecules and and genetics and things like this. It's you just really exciting um you know so if um you know if we can hang on for a little while and you know certain problems that seem completely intractable today like climate change may end up being .

actually not that hard and we might just might be able to live a the full diversity human suffering for sure yeah and in so doing a help increase the chance that we can propagate the flame of human conscious ness out into towards the stars and I think another important one if we failed to do that for me is propagating, maintaining the uh the full diversity and rationality and complexity and expensive veness of human knowledge so we destroy ourselves. We would would would make me feel a little bit okay yeah.

you just if the now tricked me to say something really interesting, which is when we talk to earlier about translating and using machines to translate, we mostly talked about small languages and translating into english.

But I always like to tell the story of is something in consequence to really but there's I was in norway in burgin, norway, but every year that have got this annual festival called bua core, which is Young uh groups drawing and have a drawing competition, the seventeen sectors of the city and been doing in for a coupon of years or whatever. They wrote about IT in um the three languages of norway and then from there IT was translated into english to german seta. And so what I what I love about that story is what IT reminds me is like this machine translation goes both ways.

And like when you talk about the richness and broaden ness of human culture, we're already seeing some really great pieces of this. So like korean soap uppers, really popular, not with me, but with people, and the ability to you imagine taking a very famous of, very popular, very well known korean drama. And now, I mean, and I literally mean, now we're just about their technologically where we use a machine to reduce bit in english in an automatic way, including easily editing the faces.

So IT doesn't look dumped. And so suddenly you say, oh, well, like here's here's a piece of you know, it's it's the korean equivalent of maybe it's friends as a comment or maybe it's succession. Just to be very contemporary is something that really impacted a lot of people and they really loved IT, and we have literally no idea what it's about there. And suddenly it's like, wow, you know like music, uh, street music from wherever in the world and can suddenly become accessible to us all in new ways. It's so cool.

It's really exciting to get access to the the directions of culture in in china, in the many different subcultures of africa, south america.

One of my unsuccessful arguments with the chinese government is by blocking wikipedia, right? You aren't just stopping people in china from reading chinese wikipedia and other language versions. Wikipedia are also preventing the chinese people from telling their story.

So is there a small festival in a small town in china like GUI corp? I don't know, but by the way, the people who live in that village, that small town of fifty thousand, they can't put that in wikipedia and get IT translated into other places. They can share their culture and their knowledge. And I think for china, this should be a somewhat influential argument because china does feel misunderstood in the world. It's like, okay, but there's one way, if you want to help people understand what put in my kip dia, that's what people go to when they .

want to understand and give the amazing, incredible are people of .

china voice exactly jme.

I'd thank you so much. I'm such a huge fan of everything you've done. I think deep deely deeply grateful for pedia I love IT brings me joy.

I donate all the time. You should donate to a huge. To find a talk with you is amazing.

Thank you so much for that. Thanks for listening this conversation with jm wales to support the spokespeople. Check out our sponsors in the description.

And now let me leave you the words from the world historian Daniel boston. The greatest number of knowledge is not ignorance. IT is the illusion of knowledge. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.