I'm Alison Beard.
And I'm Adi Ignatius, and this is the HBR IdeaCast.
So Adi, picture a moment when a new source of information comes online, turns into a go-to for people everywhere, sometimes to the chagrin of professors and bosses, but becomes a household name and really changes the internet.
So we're doing AI again.
Actually, I am talking about Wikipedia, the online crowdsourced encyclopedia, which for a long time generated a lot of skepticism, but today is actually seen as a pretty trusted source of information.
It's an example of an organization that actually created something positive on the internet.
And my guest today is the co-founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales.
Interesting.
So I interviewed Jimmy Wales years ago, when I was at Time Magazine and Wikipedia was just getting established.
And I actually tried to challenge him.
There was a Wikipedia entry about my father who had been the Secretary of the Navy in the U.S.
And there were a number of iterations.
Some of them had facts that were completely wrong.
And I challenged him on it.
And Will said, yeah, OK.
But in the end, the final iteration was correct.
And he mentioned that he had been interviewed by Time magazine and Time had gotten a bunch of stuff wrong and that lived forever in print.
So at that point, I realized, all right, Wikipedia is the future.
Yeah, and I think the point of Wikipedia is that you could have gone in there yourself and corrected the entry about your dad and listed proper citations to prove that your facts were true.
And I think Wales makes that point.
You know he created an organization with a defined purpose where everyone who works on it has clear rules of engagement.
And as a result, it creates a good product.
And he has a new book.
It's called The Seven Rules of Trust, a blueprint for building things that last.
And he has lots of advice for leaders in other organizations about how to foster a trusting culture inside as well as externally with users or customers.
So here's my conversation with Jimmy Wales.
Jimmy, thanks so much for being on the show.
It's good to be here.
Thanks for having me.
Do you see business leaders struggling to build trust nowadays, either internally with their own teams or externally with customers, or both?
Is it a problem that you're seeing?
It's really, really important.
So to what extent it's a problem is going to vary depending on that specific business and that specific circumstance.
But what I believe is that, Unless you can build a real foundation of trust with your staff first of all, your customers, your partners, whoever they might be it makes everything else a lot harder, a lot more expensive and generally not very successful.
So you think it's something that any entrepreneur needs to think about from the very start and then any leader of an existing organization needs to consider really carefully right now.
Yeah, it's super important.
I mean, if you look at the Edelman Trust Barometer Survey, in the last 20 years we've seen this real decline in trust across society.
And that includes trust in business, trust in journalism, trust in politicians, and so on.
And to some degree, trust in each other, which is particularly unfortunate.
Yet we know I mean we all know quite intuitively and sort of from childhood, how important it is to be around people who are trustworthy and to be trusted ourselves.
And so the whole point of my book is about thinking about, okay, how do we build trust?
What are the things that we need to be doing to create a culture of trust?
We talk in the book about the story of Airbnb, who had at one point a real crisis of trust, a real issue where you know someone who had rented out her home to some guests who then trashed the place.
And Airbnb initially didn't respond very well.
It was all new to them.
You know, they hadn't really made the right plans.
And they recognized very early on that they wouldn't have a business if they didn't really fix the problem of trust.
Like, who's going to let people come and stay in your home?
Like, that's a bit of a bold thing to do already.
And if you think, well, gee, if the people come and trash my house...
Is Airbnb even going to do anything about it?
And, you know, like, who are these people and so on?
So they did a huge exercise to figure out what are all the things we need to change about the business to build trust.
And obviously, they've gone on to be this enormous success story.
And I think that's true in a lot of cases.
So not only is it possible to build trust and then lose trust, you can recover it if you're trying to do the right thing and thinking carefully about it.
When you were starting Wikipedia, this was well before Airbnb, well before eBay, well before Uber.
So there were a lot of people that thought how could this ever be a trusted source of information when you're collecting information information from people who aren't experts?
So why did you think that a crowdsourced platform like Wikipedia could become such a trusted source?
I'm not sure I did know, but I hypothesized, you know.
But I also understood that we were going to have a lot of work to do to figure out what are the processes procedures, what are the rules that will give rise to better quality.
You know, we always had a goal of being the Britannica or better quality is what we always said.
And so what does that mean?
It means paying attention to sources, paying attention to neutrality, all of these kinds of things.
And those have been really the bedrock principles of Wikipedia from the very beginning.
But then the other piece of it really is how trusting Wikipedia is.
And you know the idea that it's actually something I wrote on my own personal user page in Wikipedia many, many years ago to say you can edit this page.
I trust you.
I trust you'll do something good and make it better and don't do anything bad, please.
That'd be rude and annoying.
And by and large, that works.
And obviously, we can't be completely naive.
I think one of the things that people have come to understand about Wikipedia is it isn't a wild free-for-all where people can just come and willy-nilly write anything.
We have rules about sourcing.
You can get blocked if you misbehave.
And there's a lot of layers to it.
And why on earth did you think that people would be interested in devoting their time and energy and cooperating with total strangers for no pay?
This was in the early optimistic days of the World Wide Web, of course.
But you know, I knew from my own experiences that I had a personal interest in philosophy and I was studying, and I was studying finance professionally.
You know, I came to understand like if you wrote An email to even quite a prominent professor at a big university and you were thoughtful and you had an interesting question you were asking, they would answer.
They'll give a lot of time because people do like that.
You know, people do enjoy. interacting in a pleasant and intellectual way with other people.
I saw the amount of generosity that you can see.
You can still see this today.
I mean, obviously we lament quite a lot these days the toxicity of social media and there's a lot to be said about that.
But we can also find places online where people are incredibly generous with their time.
That's true on Reddit.
One of my favorite groups to look at at Reddit is there's a personal finance group.
Subreddit where you know a typical type of post there is.
I'm 18 years old and I just found out that my estranged alcoholic father took my Social Security number and applied for credit cards in my name.
Do I have to pay this?
What do I do?
And then people will go, right, well, here's what you do.
And I see from your post history, you're in California.
Here's the fraud office.
You've got a call.
Here's what, you know.
And I'm like wow, like these are just random people who are sitting around going.
Oh, I know how to help.
I can help you.
And they do.
And.
We see that spirit in Wikipedia all the time.
People come to Wikipedia.
They often have a particular interest.
So, you know, there are people who have a hobby interest in, I mean, really obscure things.
People who are into trains, for example, or whatever it might be.
Mm-hmm, partly because they just think, oh great well, now the world's slightly better.
But also they meet other people who are interested in the same subject and they're like, oh great yeah, this is something you know.
I didn't know there were that many people who were interested in locomotives from the 1930s.
But here we are, we found each other and it's great and let's make this really great.
Part of Wikipedia.
I'm a very optimistic person.
And that optimism has been borne out, that if you extend that hand of trust to people and say hey, come on, let's do something great together.
A lot of people are like yeah, I mean, that sounds a lot better than what I was going to do, which was yell at people on Twitter.
So they come and they're like, this is more fun.
So why did you choose to make it a nonprofit?
Was that a key to building trust, especially with users?
In the very early days of Wikipedia, it was open source.
But of course, like within the world of open source software, there are nonprofits, there are for profit companies, there's all kinds of business models that support open source.
And I didn't really have a strong view at that time, like what what would be the best model.
But It pretty quickly emerged like, OK, I don't want to have ads in Wikipedia.
And that raises all kinds of questions about your neutrality and objectivity.
I mean, you can imagine if you go to a page about a company and you see ads for that company there, or their competitors, you wonder like oh, is this sponsored content?
What is this?
But also, you know, I think of Wikipedia as like a temple for the mind.
It's just a place to go to read and reflect and to learn and to think.
It's not really about, you know, the rest of the world and all that commercial stuff, which I have nothing against really, but it's just not right for Wikipedia.
And then a lot of the volunteers wanted it to be in a nonprofit.
They thought that would be a better way.
And so it did definitely help to create a lot of loyalty.
And the way that we're organized is very, very community oriented.
Half of our board is elected by the community.
And there's a lot of details about that which are really important for making sure that the Wikimedia Foundation, which is the charity that I set up, that owns and operates Wikipedia, stays on track in terms of all of our traditional values about quality and community and so forth.
Let's talk about these seven principles that you think made Wikipedia work and that are necessary for other organizations to build trust.
First, make it personal.
What do you mean by that?
One of the things in a business context in particular is it's very easy to, particularly in sort of modern online business or anything that touches online, to think a huge amount about A-B testing and sort of tracking the statistics of numbers and chasing those numbers.
That is important and it's perfectly valid.
But if you lose sight in the process of that individual customer, that person and the problem they're facing, you may make some mistakes that undermine the long-term health of the business.
So just as a simple example, if we just think about, a lot of times in online journalism there's been a real struggle around the problem of clickbait headlines and sort of very viral kind of content.
So if you simply take a view of like we're just going to look at the broad numbers, what gets the most ads shown?
What gets us visible?
Sure, yeah, do all the click-based stuff.
It seems to work pretty well.
But if you stop and you think, oh, but what is our long-term business?
Are we building a relationship with our readers?
Are people going to trust us in the future?
How do I feel myself if I've clicked on a clickbait headline and I realize actually the article doesn't live up to what the headline promised?
Or I spent 10 minutes reading the article and I think my life is no better than it was 10 minutes ago, except that I've lost 10 minutes.
I'll never get back, you know.
Instead, if you say OK look, maybe sometimes we aren't going to have the most clicks, but the clicks we do get, people are going to find what we wrote interesting valuable informative, new and they're going to remember us and they're going to say the next time they see us, come back.
So that's that personal thing.
Think about that end customer and what are they experiencing and why.
So in the Airbnb case, you know, we might imagine that they had looked at the numbers and said, oh well, only a tiny percentage of people are going to have a problem.
But the pain that this woman you know sort of experienced and how she shared that online, was devastating to the reputation of Airbnb.
And, you know, to sort of say, actually, the numbers don't matter.
Like it's even one is terrible.
And we have to really think about that.
So for a business that might be creating goods or delivering services, it's really just about that focus on the end customer.
You know, are we providing value?
Are we serving them in the best way possible?
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And I do think that the best way to get to that is keep it personal.
Go and talk to some customers and say tell me what sucked about your experience and how can we do better and really listen.
Yeah.
And you also talk about purpose.
Lots of companies, you know, have elaborate purpose statements.
Yours is pretty simple.
Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia.
So why did you keep it so short and sweet?
One of the great things about the purpose of Wikipedia free encyclopedia for everyone in their own language is that it's a real unifying, clarifying idea.
So when we are making decisions, we either meaning we at the Wikimedia Foundation or we in the community We can always reference that.
We know what we're here for.
We know what we're trying to do.
So as one example, somebody once said in the early days of Wikipedia, Gmail had just come out.
I think that was maybe 2004 when Gmail came out.
Somebody said, oh, maybe we should offer free webmail accounts.
And I thought you know I mean interesting, but actually no, because like, what does that have to do with making an encyclopedia?
You know, it's not directly useful.
It'll distract us, our tech team.
Like, what is the business model for doing that?
What will it mean if people are confusing a Wikipedia email address as if you're representing the organization, versus just use your own email address and you're a Wikipedia volunteer and so on?
And so we decided not to do it because it didn't really make sense for that core purpose.
And if we didn't have a purpose... that we understood, we could be all over the map.
And, you know, for for-profit companies, it can sometimes be a little more complex, right?
Because you might say well, actually we will do different things.
If there looks like a good business opportunity, that's a good fit.
But even in those contexts you do have to sort of go back to the founding principle like what is this organization about?
What is it we're trying to do?
So you think of really successful companies like Apple and there's a certain thing thematic unity.
Even though Apple does a lot of different kinds of things, that user experience of the product has always had this very clean experience.
And they've avoided going into business models that might undermine that.
So they don't really make much money from advertising, for example.
And therefore they're actually very, very good about user privacy because they realize we make money selling fantastic slightly overpriced and I say this as an Apple fan hardware.
We sell expensive hardware and it's great.
And people really do want security and privacy.
And it wouldn't make sense for us to add to that business something that's going to tempt us to sort of undermine that.
And so they haven't.
And I think that's really good.
So, even as Wikipedia got extremely successful, you were never tempted to evolve the business or the organization in a different way.
Not in any fundamental way.
Obviously, we've added some things.
We've got some affiliated projects like Wiktionary, which is a dictionary, and Wikibooks.
There are other things, but they're all within that framework of free knowledge for everyone in a nonprofit structure and so forth.
And it's served us really well.
So, yeah, we've never really had any real interest in deviating from that.
So a few of the other principles seem linked and you've alluded to them.
You know, thinking positively about other people, being trusting and behaving with respect and civility.
So how does simple rules like that keep millions and millions of volunteers and people who are using the website cooperating and in line?
I don't believe we're trying to impose something on human nature.
We're actually recognizing something about people, which is that people are generally very nice.
We're social animals.
We like other people.
We like to do things together.
And people also can be kind of irritating sometimes and so forth.
But we prefer environments that are collaborative, cooperative, supportive, thoughtful, reasonable.
All those good things are really important.
And in fact you know, I think that civility is a huge part of that.
It's entirely possible that we could disagree about even things that are quite fundamental and still approach each other with a bit of kindness civility, thoughtfulness.
And we see this in lots and lots of cases, lots of examples where people come into Wikipedia and, through their work in Wikipedia, get a more well-rounded and softer view of people they would have disagreed with quite vehemently and probably still do disagree quite vehemently on certain things.
But you can begin to recognize the humanity of people that you disagree with and realize you know actually it's fine.
We can have a disagreement and be civil to each other.
The sixth of the seven principles is staying independent.
And does that mean that you don't think organizations or business leaders should take any public stands on political or social or economic issues?
I mean, I think they should be pretty careful about doing it.
In many, many cases, it's something that they should do only if it's directly relevant to the business.
I'm not that interested in such and such a fast food restaurant's view on whatever.
Like, I don't care.
It's...
It's probably more likely to annoy me even if I agree and so forth.
And so it just isn't necessary.
There are other cases where it is important.
So for example, in the Wikipedia world, we stay out of politics as much as possible as an organization.
But there are times when there's controversy. safety of our volunteers at stake, freedom of expression at stake.
We fought against censorship in many different countries around the world.
We're very proud of having won a case in the Supreme Court in Turkey to overturn a ban there.
And we didn't compromise.
We fought and we won, and that was great.
But that's because it directly impacts us.
Like, nobody should care about my personal opinions on, I don't know, Obamacare.
Like, what's that got to do with anything?
I'm not an expert on healthcare policy.
I do know a thing or two about internet policy, so I do feel empowered to say a few words there.
And I think a lot of businesses can run the risk of alienating for no good purpose businesses.
It sounds like you're saying that businesses need to evaluate most decisions through this lens of.
Will it erode trust or build trust?
But that does get really tricky because you know, for example, a retailer that has Pride Week t-shirts.
That's building trust with one set of customers but it might be eroding trust with another.
So how do you navigate those gray areas?
For me, I say sell the T-shirts, but don't mind selling some religious T-shirts as well.
You have to think about, you know, what are the boundaries?
What are the reasonable boundaries?
So you wouldn't say well, actually there is a tiny group of people who are Nazis, so we should have a few swastika T-shirts.
No, I don't think so.
Not really.
For a lot of those kinds of decisions.
I think it really has to do with Actually, with thinking about trust as an element of the overall decision-making process.
To say look, if we do this and it's something that's going to be irritating for some and not irritating to others how is that going to impact trust?
And sometimes you might say well look, we're going to lose the trust of some people because they're so ideological.
They just can't bear it if we have a gay character in our movie.
And that's too bad.
Like, it's worth it.
In other cases, you might say, actually...
This content is going to offend a huge number of people.
People are going to think we are supporting something that we don't and so on.
We we probably shouldn't do that.
So, you know, it's basically I think the argument is not a decision about what makes the largest number of people trust us is way too simplistic.
But it's about how being transparent and being reliable and sort of doing what's expected helps to build trust.
Well, that neatly gets us to the last principle transparency, which Wikipedia has, because you can go into the talk logs and see how decisions have been made.
How do you think that other types of businesses can be more transparent, going above and beyond sort of what they're expected to do?
Where this often comes out is in crisis comms, where something has gone wrong and you look at it from the top and you say yeah, you know what?
We screwed up.
We didn't anticipate this.
We had the wrong policy.
We had the right policy.
We didn't follow it.
And in many cases, to the maximum extent possible, you should just own up to it.
If you want to rebuild trust, you have to say, yeah, you know what?
We got this really wrong.
Then the final rule, which is not a rule, because we didn't want to have eight rules, but the meta rule is you actually have to do the things, you have to walk the walk.
So just if you just issue a statement saying, oh, yeah, we screwed up, we got it wrong.
And you go right back to doing what you did before.
That's not going to help trust.
One of my favorite interviews that we did was with Frances Fry, who's an academic at Harvard.
One of the things that she says is people will say sometimes, once you've lost trust, that's it, you're done.
She's like, that's not actually true.
That doesn't mean you should be cavalier about trust, but you can rebuild trust.
You just have to do the right thing.
So if you screwed up, you don't think, oh, well, nobody trusts us anyway.
We might as well just go crazy.
That doesn't work.
They can trust you even less.
You know, instead you have to say, oh, hold on.
There are things we need to do to repair trust.
You know, we did this wrong.
We can get back to people and they will.
They'll forgive you and they'll trust you again.
But you have to do the right things.
So how do you think AI search is changing the way people perceive information and truth and trust?
And is it a threat to Wikipedia?
I don't think it's a threat.
And, at least so far, what we've seen, the impact on our traffic, just to take the most basic measure.
We haven't seen anything material.
You know there was a study that was done by Pew that showed that something like 3 of traditional search results linked to Wikipedia are But 6 of AI summaries link to Wikipedia.
But people click through a lot less.
So they see us twice as often, but they don't click through because, you know, maybe you just ask Google how old is Tom Cruise?
And they just told you and there's a link to Wikipedia.
But you found out what you need to know, so you don't need to click through.
But we appear a lot more often.
And so I think that at least for now, we're not sort of being undermined there.
I think more broadly, people do understand that, at least the current models and even the ChatGPT-5, for example.
They still hallucinate an enormous amount.
And people see that and they see oh like, it's actually good if you're trying to.
You know I use it a lot for making itineraries for family vacation.
It's pretty good at that, but I do check to make sure the things it tells me to go do actually exist, and things like that.
It could easily say oh yeah, you should do this.
Your children you've told me what your children like you should go and do this and it's like yeah, that doesn't exist.
Why did you say yeah, but your kids would enjoy it if it did exist.
Okay, It's that kind of thing you have to be super careful for.
And what people come to Wikipedia for is not that kind of broad, breezy, whatever.
They come for verified facts that humans have really poured over, that there are sources and links and so forth.
And I think that is really important.
And I'm actually really interested in what are some of the ways that large language models in particular might help our community.
How can we use it to help us with our work?
And so there's a lot of ideas that we're looking at.
So one example transparency in terms of you can always go to the user talk pages and see how decisions were made.
Sometimes we're so transparent that you can't see it all.
It's like oh, I can come to understand why this page says this, but I have to read like 50 pages of discussion.
Maybe AI could give a decent summary, if it can summarize and say well, here's the decision that was taken.
Here are some of the various points of view.
And if that summary is decent...
That could be useful.
That would help us to be more transparent.
And you could even see like oh, and these are the people who are arguing in favor of this side versus that side, and so forth.
That's just one idea.
But I do think that it's an amazing technology, albeit quite flawed.
And there should be ways that we can use it to improve the quality of information.
Yeah.
And so Wikipedia.
Is this shining example of positive crowdsourcing, you know?
But crowdsource content is also the lifeblood of social media companies like Facebook X YouTube, TikTok.
Lots of positive content on there.
Lots of not so positive content.
So do you worry that you sort of set this example that others followed, but then they didn't institute any of the rules and protections that you have?
I try to be generous in the sense that with Wikipedia, we have a purpose which is to build an encyclopedia.
And we've always said, I've always said, Wikipedia is not a wide open free speech forum.
And that's really important because, well, we're trying to write an encyclopedia.
So we're not the place to come and sort of have raging battles about this, that and the other.
Even on the talk pages, it's not there for a general debate of the issue.
It's there to discuss how to improve the article.
And for social media companies, they actually have a much harder problem.
And the harder problem is, you know, you've got a box that basically says what's on your mind.
And sometimes people have really horrible things on their mind.
And so it's a challenge right in that context, because we have a very strong rule no personal attacks.
Well, what would that mean in the context of social media?
I mean, yeah, we all feel it's way too toxic and there's too much attacking people.
But you know, sort of you want to criticize politicians.
That's part of what social media is about.
You want to say I disagree or I, you know, I think this celebrity was a horrible person in this context.
Nothing particularly wrong with that kind of opinion, but it makes a really hard problem for them.
And I do think that they have to take it really seriously.
And to the extent that they abdicate any responsibility, I think it's a poor decision for the long term health of the business.
Are you still optimistic about the future of the Internet?
Oh, yeah, definitely.
I mean, I think, you know, there's all kinds of things that are amazing.
And even you know, I still would say, when you look at, for example Facebook right, Facebook has a lot of problems, for sure.
But, you know, I keep up with people I knew when I was a teenager.
You know, I have a conversation with a guy I went to high school with.
We completely lost touch and we got back in touch, I would guess in the early 2000s, when Facebook started to get big.
And great, you know, that's wonderful.
Like that actually connecting people, that's still there.
It's still very healthy.
There's still a lot of great people on Twitter, for example.
And there's that positivity and just the fact that you're able to learn anything you want to know and meet people from all around the world.
That to me is still just as magical as it ever was.
Well, Jimmy, thank you so much.
I've really enjoyed our conversation.
Thank you.
That's Jimmy Wales Wikipedia.
Co-founder and author of The Seven Rules of Trust, a blueprint for building things that last.
Next week, Adi talks to author Brene Brown about the state of leadership today.
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I'm Alison Beard.
