How Wikipedia Can Survive the Age of AI with Jimmy Wales

Jimmy Wales (0:00)

So, I think that Wikipedia is not going away. Generative AI, large language models, what we want to do is preserve what's human about Wikipedia. We want to preserve the trust. We want to preserve that everything you see, it isn't all correct, right? Of course, we all know Wikipedia's got errors, and Wikipedia can be biased and all that, but people have tried.

And you want to have that sense, right? And not like, oh, well, this is just another commodity LLM, just like anything else. So I just think we want to be innovative, but thoughtful.

Guy Kawasaki (0:34)

Jimmy Wales, Jimmy Wales, man, one of my heroes. Welcome to the Remarkable People podcast. You started one of the most amazing organizations in the world, Wikipedia, and I served on the Board of Trustees with you. And let's just say those are very interesting times.

Jimmy Wales (0:57)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Guy Kawasaki (1:00)

So now you've written this book called The Seven Rules of Trust. And Jimmy, I'm not jerking your chain. I'm not bullshitting you. I had no idea you're such a good writer.

It's like succinct, it's clear, it's well-organized, your stories are great. And believe me, Jimmy, I have to read about 100 books a year. And man, some of them is just pulling teeth.

Jimmy Wales (1:27)

Well, I have to give a lot of credit to Dan Gardner, who helped me with the book. The writing process, you know, I write a lot and I think I'm a clear writer and all of that. And I have a lot of stories and I give a lot of talks to people. And I know the kinds of stories that helps things click in their mind and so forth. So I started writing and I wrote down all my great stories. And then I realized I actually have no idea how to turn this into a coherent book.

And so raise the white flag of my publisher said, yeah, I actually I think I do need some help here. And interviewed a few different people to help me and Dan Gardner was fantastic. He's written a few other great books. And we worked intimately together, loads and loads of phone calls and back and forth and so forth. I actually learned a lot about writing just working with him. So I'm gonna give him most of the credit for the beautiful writing, but I'll take a little bit of credit. I can tell a good story anyway, so yeah.

Guy Kawasaki (2:20)

You certainly can. So are you telling me, one writer to another, you started with the stories and then you figured out what they meant, or you started with, this is the seven principles I want to talk about, and I'll find stories that illustrate the principles. Which direction did you go?

Jimmy Wales (2:38)

I would say it was a kind of a blend of both. Started with the concept of trust, and I knew that was really key. At first, I looked at the five pillars of Wikipedia, which then didn't map exactly into what I wanted to say about trust. Then at one point, we had eight rules. At one point, we had 11, and then we're saying, well, let's rearrange it. The truth is, in the book, there's the triangle diagram which comes from academic research into trust, and we use Francis Fry's exact nomenclature, but a lot of writings on trust have the same kind of thing. That's a theoretical construct that's actually in the literature.

My seven rules, there wasn't like seven perfect, you know, this is the seven and I'm going to start from there and then I'm going to write the book around it. It was like, yeah, let's talk about what are the things that I've learned along the way, what are the things that I feel like are important, and that I have something useful to say about. And yeah, and in fact, there's sort of a hidden eighth rule in the last chapter, which is basically, you actually have to do all the things, right? Oh, what a concept. Yeah.

Guy Kawasaki (3:41)

Alrighty. Just bring us all up to speed. It's a whole different world of information and disinformation.

How does Wikipedia work these days? It's still human authors and their writing subjects that they know about, and they have to cite sources that are respected and legitimate.

Jimmy Wales (4:00)

Yeah, yeah.

Guy Kawasaki (4:00)

Have we changed a lot?

Jimmy Wales (4:02)

No, it's all very quite classic, and indeed part of the story of Wikipedia is, we started with basically no rules, but with the vision of an encyclopedia. And most of the rules of Wikipedia about sourcing and things like that are actually just writing down best practice. Like they were always implicitly rules, we just didn't write them down. Like we understood if you're going to write a good quality encyclopedia, you can't just randomly prattle on about whatever you want. You need to actually have evidence and so on and so forth and be clear.