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