The Seven Rules of Trust: Why It Is Today’s Most Essential Superpower Jimmy Wales Bloomsbury (2025)
Jimmy Wales, an Internet entrepreneur from Huntsville, Alabama, now based in London, is best known for creating Wikipedia, which launched in January 2001. The online encyclopedia now holds more than seven million articles and has become a standard guide for anyone seeking information.
The Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization in San Francisco, California, runs the project with about 700 employees, but Wikipedia still relies entirely on unpaid volunteers to write and edit its articles: hundreds of thousands of people contribute to the site each month, under a set of community-developed rules to deal with disagreements, cut down self-promotion and generate consensus.
Wales’ book, The Seven Rules of Trust, released in October, tells the tale of Wikipedia’s origins and how the project highlights lessons in earning and maintaining trust. Wales spoke to Nature about the importance of scientific transparency and the rise of artificial intelligence.
Anyone can contribute to Wikipedia. Does the site lack respect for expertise?
Everything about Wikipedia is a worship of expertise. We have rules about citing quality sources: newspapers, magazines, academic journals, peer-reviewed literature and books from reputable publishers. That’s very different from letting anyone offer a random opinion.
It is true that you don’t have to be an expert to write a Wikipedia article. But, for lots of topics, having amateur passion is a great way to get started. It’s like journalism: journalists have to write about topics that they aren’t experts in, but hopefully they consult and quote the experts. Then, the journalist can make sense of it.
Your seven rules of trust are: be personal; collaborate; have a mission; give trust to get trust; stay civil; don’t take sides; and be transparent. Which one is most relevant to scientists?
‘Be transparent’ is very important. That’s not an admonishment that science needs to become more transparent — it’s an observation that science is very transparent. There are obviously areas in which this could be improved, but I think that the statement is generally true.
There was a study of the ‘retraction penalty’, which found that running a correction for a scientific article is better for an author’s citation counts than is trying to bluff their way through it (S. F. Lu et al. Sci. Rep. 3, 3146; 2013). I thought that was super interesting research. The conclusion makes sense, but it’s nice to see science validate it.
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