Origin story of Wikipedia

We've never bowed down to government pressure anywhere in the world, and we never will. We understand that we're hardcore, and actually, there is a bit of nuance about how different companies respond to this, but our response has always been just to say no. If they threaten to block, well, knock yourself out. You're going to lose Wikipedia. The following is a conversation with Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, one of, if not the most impactful websites ever, expanding the collective knowledge, intelligence, and wisdom of human civilization. This is Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. Now, dear friends, here's Jimmy Wales.

How much debate was there over the interface, over the details of how to make that, seamless and frictionless? Yeah, not as much as there probably should have been, in a way. During that two years of the failure of Nupedia where very little work got done, 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 encyclopedia, but also talking about more technical ideas. Back then, XML was all the rage and thinking about shouldn't you have certain data that might be in multiple articles that gets updated automatically? So for example, the population of New York City, every 10 years there's a new official census, couldn't you just update that bit of data in one place and it would update across all languages? That is a reality today. But back then it was just like, "Hmm, how do we do that? How do we think about that?"

Well, just to throw some numbers, as of May 27, 2023, there are 6.6 million articles in the English Wikipedia containing over 4.3 billion words. Including articles, the total number of pages is 58 million. Yeah.

It so happens that there's a Wikipedia page about me as I've learned recently, and the first thought I had when I saw that was, "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. It's my favorite website on the internet. The collection of articles that Wikipedia has created is just incredible. We'll talk about the various details of that. But the love and care that goes into creating pages for individuals, for a BIC pen, for all this kind of stuff is just really incredible. So I just felt the love when I saw that page. But I also felt just because I do this podcast and I just through this podcast, gotten to know a few individuals that are quite controversial, I've gotten to be on the receiving end of something quite ... to me as a person who loves other human beings, I've gotten to be at the receiving end of some attacks through Wikipedia. Like you said, when you look at living individuals, it can be quite hurtful, the little details of information. Because I've become friends with Elon Musk and I've interviewed him, but I've also interviewed people on the left, far left, people on the right, some would 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 depths and pulls you right in.

If we could just talk about that before we jump back to some other interesting topics in Wikipedia. Let's talk about GPT-4 and large language models. So they are in part trained on Wikipedia content. What are the pros and cons of these language models? What are your thoughts? Yeah, so I mean, there's a lot of stuff going on. Obviously the technology has moved very quickly in the last six months and looks poised to do so for some time to come. So first things first, part of our philosophy is the open licensing, the free licensing, the idea that this is what we're here for. We are a volunteer community and we write this encyclopedia. We give it to the world to do what you like with, you can modify it, redistribute it, redistribute modified versions, commercially, non-commercially. This is the licensing. So in that sense, of course it's completely fine. Now, we do worry a bit about attribution because it is a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License. So attribution is important, not just because of our licensing model and things like that, but it's just proper attribution is just good intellectual practice.

Let's go into some, you mentioned the hot water of the pool that we're both tipping a toe in. Do you think Wikipedia has a left leaning political bias, which is something it is sometimes accused of? Yeah, so I don't think so, not broadly. And I think you can always point to specific entries and talk about specific biases, but that's part of the process of Wikipedia. Anyone can come and challenge and to go on about that. But I see fairly often on Twitter, some quite extreme accusations of bias. And I think actually I don't see it. I don't buy that. And if you ask people for an example, they normally struggle and depending on who they are and what it's about. So it's certainly true that some people who have quite fringe viewpoints and who knows the full rush of history in 500 years, they might be considered to be pathbreaking geniuses. But at the moment, quite fringe views. And they're just unhappy that Wikipedia doesn't report on their fringe views as being mainstream. And that, by the way, goes across all kinds of fields.

Well, at every moment, because you mentioned mainstream and fringe, there seems to be a tension here, and I wonder what your philosophy is on it because there's mainstream ideas and there's fringe ideas. You look at lab leak theory for this virus. That could be other things we can discuss where there's a mainstream narrative where if you just look at the percent of the population or the population with platforms, what they say, and then what is a small percentage in opposition to that, and what is Wikipedia's responsibility to accurately represent both the mainstream and the fringe, do you think? Well, I think we have to try to do our best to recognize both, but also to appropriately contextualize. And so this can be quite hard, particularly 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 moon's made of rocks, some say cheese, who knows? That kind of false neutrality is not what we want to get to. That doesn't make any sense, but that one's easy. We all understand. I think there is a Wikipedia entry called something like the moon is made of cheese, where it talks about this is a common sort of joke or thing that children say or that people tell to children or whatever. It's just a thing. Everyone's heard moon's made of cheese, but nobody thinks, wow, Wikipedia is so one-sided it doesn't even acknowledge the cheese theory. I say the same thing about flat Earth, again, very-

Well, if we could just take that tangent. I'm having a conversation with Mark Zuckerberg second time. Is there something you can comment on how to decrease toxicity 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? A piece of it is it's hard. 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, "Great. Somebody's got business, they're making money," that's not where I come from, but certain business models mean you are going to prioritize things that maybe aren't longterm healthful, and so that's a big piece of it. Certainly, for Facebook, you could say with vast resources, start to prioritize content that's higher quality, that's healing, that's kind. Try not to prioritize content that seems to be just getting a rise out of people. Now, those are vague human descriptions, 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 going to increase page views to the maximum extent right now."

If we can just link on Twitter and Elon before... I would love to talk to you about the underlying business model, Wikipedia, which is this brilliant, bold move at the very beginning, but since you mentioned Twitter, what do you think works? What do you think is broken about Twitter? It's a long conversation, but to start with, one of the things that I always say is it's a really hard problem, so I concede that right up front. I said this about the old ownership of Twitter and the new ownership of Twitter because unlike Wikipedia, and this is true actually for all social media, there's a box, and the box basically says, "What do you think? What's on your mind?" You can write whatever the hell you want, right? This is true, by the way, even for YouTube. I mean the box is to upload a video, but again, it's just an open-ended invitation to express yourself.

So is it possible if the majority of volunteers, editors of Wikipedia really disliked Donald Trump, are they still able to write an article that empathizes with the perspective of, for time at least, a very large percentage of the United States that were supported of Donald 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. And I think if you read the article, it's pretty good. And I think a piece of that is within our community, if people have the self-awareness to understand. So, I personally wouldn't go and edit the entry on Donald Trump. I get emotional about it and I'm like, "I'm not good at this," and if I tried to do it, I would fail. I wouldn't be a good Wikipedian, so it's better if I just step back and let people who are more dispassionate on this topic edit it. Whereas there are other topics that are incredibly emotional to some people where I can actually do quite well. I'm going to be okay. Maybe we were discussing earlier the efficacy of masks. I'm like, "Oh, I think that's an interesting problem. And I don't know the answer, but I can help catalog what's the best evidence and so on."

Well, I got to ask about this big, bold decision at the very beginning to not do advertisements on the website. And just in general, the philosophy of the business model of Wikipedia, what went behind that? Yeah, so I think most people know this, but we're a charity, so in the US, registered as a charity. And we don't have any ads on the site. And the vast majority of the money is from donations, but the vast majority from small donors. So, people giving $25 or whatever.

Does it make you sad that people might use, increasingly use ChatGPT for something where they would previously use Wikipedia? So basically, use it to answer basic questions about the Eiffel Tower? Yeah. No-

Yeah. You mentioned all of us have controversies. I have to ask, do you find the controversy of whether you are the sole founder or the co-founder of Wikipedia ironic, absurd, interesting, important? What are your comments?

And what happened was somebody nominated it for deletion, but even the nomination said, "This is mainly about the Hunter Biden laptop controversy, shouldn't this information be there instead?" So anyone can... It takes exactly one human being anywhere on the planet to propose something for deletion, and that triggers a process where people discuss it, which within a few hours, it was what we call snowball closed i.e, this doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of passing. So an admin goes, "Yeah, wrong," and closed the debate, and that was it. That was the whole thing that happened. And so nobody proposed suppressing the information. Nobody proposed it wasn't important, it was just editorially boring internal questions. So sometimes people read stuff like that and they're like, "Oh, you see, look at these leftists. They're trying to suppress the truth again." It's like, well slow down a second and come and look, literally, it's not what happened. So I think the right is more sensitive to censorship, and so they will more likely highlight there's more virality to highlighting something that looks like censorship in any walks of life. And this moving a paragraph from one place to another, or removing it and so on, as part of the regular grappling of Wikipedia can make a hell of a good article or YouTube video.

Well, you mentioned pressure from government. You've criticized Twitter for giving in to Turkey's government censorship. There's also conspiracy theories or accusations of Wikipedia being open to pressure from government to government organizations, FBI and all this kind of stuff. What is the philosophy about pressure from government and censorship? So we're super hardcore on this. We've never bowed down to government pressure anywhere in the world, and we never will. And we understand that we're hardcore. And actually there is a bit of nuance about how different companies respond to this, but our response has always been just to say no. And if they threaten to block, well, knock yourself out, you're going to lose Wikipedia. And that's been very successful for us as a strategy because governments know they can't just casually threaten to block Wikipedia or block us for two days, and we're going to 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 that we can go one level deeper and say, I'm actually quite sympathetic. If you have staff members in a certain country and they are at physical risk, you've got to put that into your equation.

Let me read you a Reddit comment that received two likes. Oh, two whole people liked it.

Where do you see Wikipedia in 10 years, 100 years, and 1,000 years? Right. So, 10 years, I would say pretty much the same. We're not going to become TikTok with entertainment deals, scroll by video humor, and blah-blah-blah, and encyclopedia. I think in 10 years, we probably will have a lot more AI supporting tools like I've talked about, and probably your search experience would be you can ask a question and get the answer rather than from our body of work.

So, you have built, I would say, one of if not the most impactful website in the history of human civilization. So, let me ask for you to give advice to young people how to have impact in this world. High schoolers, college students wanting to have a big positive impact on the world. Yeah, great. 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're like, "I'm not that interested, but I'm going to make a lot of money doing it," you're probably not going to be that good at it. And so, that is a big piece of it.

This is more to the question of what Wikipedia looks like in 1,000 years. What do you think is the meaning of this whole thing? Why are we here, human civilization? What's the meaning of life? Yeah. I don't think there is external answer to that question.