Wikipedia will be 25 years old in January. During that time, the encyclopedia has gone from a punchline about the unreliability of online information to the factual foundation of the web. The project’s status as a trusted source of facts has made it a target of authoritarian governments and powerful individuals, who are attempting to undermine the site and threaten the volunteer editors who maintain it. (For more on this conflict and how Wikipedia is responding, you can read my feature from September.)
Now Wikipedia’s cofounder Jimmy Wales has written a new book, The Seven Rules of Trust: A Blueprint for Building Things That Last. In it, Wales describes a global decline in people’s trust in government, media, and each other, instead looking to Wikipedia and other organizations for lessons about how trust can be maintained or recovered. Trust, he writes, is at its core an interpersonal assessment of someone’s reliability and is best thought of in personal terms, even at the scale of organizations. Transparency, reciprocity — you have to give trust to get trust — and a common purpose are other ingredients that he attributes to Wikipedia’s success.
We spoke over video call about his book, how Wikipedia handles contentious topics, and the threats facing the project and other fact-based institutions.
Photo by Hayley Benoit / The Verge
The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
The Verge: You wrote a book about trust, and a global crisis in trust. Can you tell me what that crisis is and how we got there?
Jimmy Wales: If you look at the Edelman Trust Barometer survey, which has been going since 2000, you’ve seen this steady erosion of trust in journalism and media and business and to some degree in each other. I think it gives rise in a business context to a lot of increased cost and complexity, and politically, I think it’s tied up with the rise of populism. So I think it’s important that we focus on this issue and think about, What’s gone wrong? How do we get back to a culture of trust?
What do you think has gone wrong?
I think there’s a number of things that have gone wrong. The trend actually goes back to before the Edelman data. Some of the things I would point to are the decline of the business model for local journalism. To the extent that the business model for journalism has been very difficult, full stop, you see the rise of low-quality outlets, clickbait headlines, all of that. But also that local piece means people aren’t necessarily getting information that they can verify with their own eyes, and I think that tends to undermine trust. In more recent times, obviously the toxicity of social media hasn’t been helpful.
Why has Wikipedia so far bucked that trend and continued to be fairly widely trusted?
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