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TRANSCRIPT:
https://lexfridman.com/jimmy-wales-transcript

EPISODE LINKS:
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Jimmy's Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Wales
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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
0:47 - Origin story of Wikipedia
6:51 - Design of Wikipedia
13:44 - Number of articles on Wikipedia
19:55 - Wikipedia pages for living persons
40:48 - ChatGPT
54:19 - Wikipedia's political bias
1:00:23 - Conspiracy theories
1:13:28 - Facebook
1:21:46 - Twitter
1:42:22 - Building Wikipedia
1:56:55 - Wikipedia funding
2:08:15 - ChatGPT vs Wikipedia
2:12:56 - Larry Sanger
2:18:28 - Twitter files
2:21:20 - Government and censorship
2:35:44 - Adolf Hitler's Wikipedia page
2:47:26 - Future of Wikipedia
2:59:29 - Advice for young people
3:06:50 - Meaning of life

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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.

And if they threaten to block, well knock yourself out, you're gonna lose Wikipedia.

The following is a conversation with Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, 1 of, if not the most impactful websites ever, expanding the collective knowledge, intelligence, and wisdom of human civilization.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, dear friends, here's Jimmy Wales.

Well, so I was watching the growth of the free software movement, open-source software, and seeing programmers coming together to collaborate in new ways, sharing code, doing that under a free license, which is really interesting because it empowers an ability to work together that's really hard to do if the code is still proprietary because then if I chip in and help, we sort of have to figure out how I'm gonna be rewarded and what that is, but the idea that everyone can copy it and it just is part of the commons really empowered a huge wave of creative software production.

And I realized that that kind of collaboration could extend beyond just software to all kinds of cultural works.

And the first thing that I thought of was an encyclopedia.

I thought, oh, that seems obvious that an encyclopedia, you can collaborate on it.

1, we all pretty much know what an encyclopedia entry on, say, the Eiffel Tower should be like.

You know, you should see a picture, few pictures maybe, history, location, something about the architect, etc., etc.

So we have a shared understanding of what it is we're trying to do, and then we can collaborate, and different people can chip in, and find sources, and so on and so forth.

So set up first, Newpedia, which was about 2 years before Wikipedia.

And with Newpedia, we had this idea that in order to be respected, we had to be even more academic than a traditional encyclopedia.

Because a bunch of volunteers on the internet getting it out of the right encyclopedia, you know, you could be made fun of if it's just every random person.

So we had implemented this seven-stage review process to get anything published.

So 1 thing, 1 of the earliest entries that we published after this rigorous process, a few days later, we had to pull it because as soon as it hit the web and the broader community took a look at it, people noticed plagiarism and realized that It wasn't actually that good, even though it had been reviewed by academics and so on.

So it's like, oh, OK, well, so much for a seven-stage review process.

But also, I decided that I wanted to try.

I saw that Robert Merton had won a Nobel Prize in economics for his work on option pricing theory.

And when I was in academia, that's what I worked on, was option pricing theory, how to publish paper.

So I'd worked through all of his academic papers, and I knew his work quite well.

I thought, oh, I'll just, I'll write a short biography of Merton.

And when I started to do it, I'd been out of academia, hadn't been a grad student for a few years then.

I felt this huge intimidation because they were gonna take my draft and send it to the most prestigious finance professors that we could find to give me feedback for revisions.

And it felt like being back in grad school.

You know, it was like this really oppressive sort of like, you're gonna submit it for review and you're gonna get critiques.

A little bit of the bad part of grad school.

Yeah, yeah, the bad part of grad school, right?

And so it was like, oh, this isn't intellectually fun, this is like the bad part of grad school.

And so I was like, oh, this isn't intellectually fun, this is like the bad part of grad school.

It's intimidating and there's a lot of, you know, potential embarrassment if I screw something up and so forth.

And so that was when I realized, okay, look, this is never gonna work.

This is not something that people are really gonna wanna do.

So Jeremy Rosenfeld, 1 of my employees, had brought and showed me the wiki concept in December, and then Larry Sanger brought in the same, said, hey, what about this wiki idea?

And so in January, we decided to launch Wikipedia, but we weren't sure.

So the original project was called Newpedia.

And even though it wasn't successful, we did have quite a group of academics and like really serious people.

And we were concerned that, oh, maybe these academics are going to really hate this idea, and we shouldn't just convert the project immediately.

We should launch this as a side project, the idea of, here's a wiki where we can start playing around.

But actually we got more work done in 2 weeks than we had in almost 2 years, because people were able to just jump on and start doing stuff.

And it was actually a very exciting time.

You know, you could, back then, you could be the first person who typed Africa is a continent and hit save, you know, which isn't much of an encyclopedia entry, But it's true, and it's a start, and it's kind of fun.

Actually, a funny story was several years later, I just happened to be online, and I saw when, I think his name is Robert Allman, won the Nobel Prize in Economics.

And we didn't have an entry on him at all, which was surprising, but it wasn't that surprising.

And so I got to be the first person to type, Robert Ullman won Nobel Prize in Economics and hit save, which again, wasn't a very good article.

But then I came back 2 days later and people had improved it and so forth.

So that second half of the experience where with Robert Merton, I never succeeded because it was just too intimidating.

It was like, oh no, I was able to chip in and help.

Everybody was interested in the topic because it's all in the news at the moment.

And so it's just a completely different model which worked much, much better.

Well, what is it that made that so accessible, so fun, so natural to just add something?

Well, I think it's, you know, especially in the early days, and this, by the way, has gotten much harder because there are fewer topics that are just green field, you know, available.

But, you know, you could say, oh, well, you know, I know a little bit about this and I can get it started.

But then it is fun to come back then and see other people have added and improved and so on and so forth.

And that idea of collaborating, where people can, much like open source software, you put your code out and then people suggest revisions and they change it and it modifies and it grows beyond the original creator.

It's just a kind of a fun, wonderful, quite geeky hobby, but people enjoy it.

How much debate was there over the interface, over the details of how to make that seamless and frictionless?

Yeah, I mean, not as much as there probably should have been in a way.

During that 2 years of the failure of Newpedia, 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, you know, things.

Back then, XML was kind of all the rage, and thinking about, ah, could we, you know, shouldn't you have certain data that might be in multiple articles that gets updated automatically?

So, for example, you know, 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 1 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?

So that is the reality today where it's, there's some universal variables.

Yeah, Wikidata, you can link, you know, from a Wikipedia entry, you can link to that piece of data in Wikidata.

I mean, it's a pretty advanced thing, but there are advanced users who are doing that.

And then when that gets updated, it updates in all the languages where you've done that.

There was this chain of emails in the early days of discussing the details of what is, so there's the interface, there's the-

Yeah, So the interface, so an example, there was some software called UseModWiki, which we started with.

It's quite amusing, actually, because the main reason we launched with UseModWiki is that it was a single Perl script.

So it was really easy for me to install it on the server and just get running.

But it was, you know, some guy's hobby project.

It was cool, but it was just a hobby project.

And all the data was stored in flat text files, so there was no real database behind it.

So to search the site, you basically used Grab, which is just like basic Unix utility to like look through all the files.

But also in the early days, it didn't have real logins.

So you could set your username, but there were no passwords.

So I might say Bob Smith, and then someone else comes along and says, I'm Bob Smith, and they're both at it.

We didn't have a problem with it, but it was kind of obvious.

You can't grow a big website where everybody can pretend to be everybody.

That's not going to be good for trust and reputation and so forth.

So quickly I had to write a little, you know, login, you know, store people's passwords and things like that so you could have unique identities.

And then another example of something, you know, quite you would have never thought would have been a good idea, and it turned out to not be a problem, but to make a link in Wikipedia, in the early days, you would make a link to a page that may or may not exist by just using camel case, meaning it's like uppercase, lowercase, and you smash the words together.

So maybe New York City, you might type N-E-W, no space, capital Y, York City.

That would make a link, but that was ugly.

So I was like, okay, well, that's just not going to look nice.

That may have been an option in the software.

I'm not sure I thought up square brackets, but anyway, we just did that, which worked really well.

It makes nice links and you can see in its red links or blue links depending on if the page exists or not.

But the thing that didn't occur to me even to think about is that, for example, on the German language standard keyboard, there is no square bracket.

So for German Wikipedia to succeed, people had to learn to do some alt codes to get the square bracket, or A lot of users cut and paste a square bracket when they could find 1, they would just cut and paste 1 in.

And yet, German Wikipedia has been a massive success.

How is it that the German keyboards don't have a square bracket?

How do you live life to its fullest without screwing over

I mean, maybe it does now because keyboard standards have drifted over time and becomes useful to have a certain character.

There's not really a W character in Italian.

And it wasn't on keyboards, or I think it is now, but in general, W is not a letter in Italian language, but it appears in enough international words that it's crept into Italian.

And all of these things are probably Wikipedia articles in themselves.

On both the English and the German Wikipedia.

And the difference between those 2 might be very interesting.

So Wikidata is fascinating, but even the broader discussion of what is an encyclopedia?

Can you go to that sort of philosophical question of what is an encyclopedia?

So the way I would put it is an encyclopedia, what our goal is, is the sum of all human knowledge, but sum meaning summary.

I mean, somebody started uploading the full text of Hamlet, for example, and we said, wait, hold on a second.

That's not an encyclopedia article, but why not?

So, hence was born Wikisource, which is where you put original text and things like that out of copyright text.

Because they said, no, an encyclopedia article about Hamlet, that's a perfectly valid thing, but the actual text of the play is not an encyclopedia article.

But there are some interesting quirks and differences.

So for example, as I understand it, in French-language encyclopedias, traditionally, it would be quite common to have recipes, which in English language, that would be unusual.

You wouldn't find a recipe for chocolate cake in Britannica.

And so I actually don't know the current state, haven't even thought about that in many, many years now.

State of cake recipes in Wikipedia, in English Wikipedia?

I wouldn't say there's chocolate cake recipes.

I mean, you might find a sample recipe somewhere.

I'm not saying there are none, but in general, no.

I told myself I would not get outraged in this conversation, but now I'm outraged.

And what's interesting is it's very hard to have a neutral recipe because-

A canonical recipe is kind of difficult to come by, because there's so many variants and it's all debatable and interesting.

For something like chocolate cake, you could probably say, you know, here's 1 of the earliest recipes, or here's 1 of the most common recipes.

But, you know, for many, many things, the variants are as interesting, you know, as somebody said to me recently, 10 Spaniards, 12 paella recipes.

So these are all matters of open discussion.

Well, Just to throw some numbers, as of May 27th, 2023, there are

million articles in the English Wikipedia containing over 4.3 billion words, including articles.

it doesn't because I know those numbers and see them from time to time, but in another sense, a deeper sense, Yeah, it does.

I remember when English Wikipedia passed 100, 000 articles and when German Wikipedia passed 100, 000, because I happened to be in Germany with a bunch of Wikipedians that night.

I mean, we knew at that time that it was nowhere near complete.

I remember at Wikimania in Harvard, when we did our annual conference there in Boston, someone who had come to the conference from Poland had brought along with him a small encyclopedia, a single volume encyclopedia of biographies.

So short biographies, normally a paragraph or so about famous people in Poland.

And he pointed out that even then, 2006, Wikipedia felt quite big.

And he said, in English Wikipedia, there's only a handful of these, you know, less than 10%, I think he said.

And so then you realize, yeah, actually, who was the mayor of Warsaw in 1873?

Probably not in English Wikipedia, but it probably might be today.

And of course, what we get into when we're talking about how many entries there are, and how many could there be, is this very deep philosophical issue of notability, which is the question of, well, how do you draw the limit?

So sometimes people say, oh, there should be no limit, but I think that doesn't stand up to much scrutiny if you really pause and think about it.

So I see in your hand there, you've got a BIC pen, pretty standard.

Everybody's seen, you know, billions of those in life.

So could we have an entry about that BIC pen?

That type of BIC pen, because it's classic, everybody knows it, and it's got a history.

And actually, there's something interesting about the Bic company.

They make pens, they also make kayaks, and there's something else they're famous for.

Basically, they're sort of a definition by non-essentials company.

Anything that's long and plastic, that's what they make.

So if you want to find the common ground.

But could we have an article about that very Bic pen in your hand?

So Lex Friedman's Bic pen as of this week.

And the answer is no, there's not much known about it, I dare say, unless it's very special to you and your great-grandmother gave it to you or something, you probably know very little about it.

It's a pen, it's just here in the office.

In German Wikipedia, they used to talk about the rear nut of the wheel of Uli Fuchs' bicycle, Uli Fuchs, the well-known Wikipedian of the time, to sort of illustrate, like, you can't have an article about literally everything.

And so then it raises the question, what can you have an article about, what can't you?

And that can vary depending on the subject matter.

1 of the areas where we try to be much more careful would be biographies.

The reason is, a biography of a living person, if you get it wrong, it can actually be quite hurtful, quite damaging.

And so if someone is a private person and somebody tries to create a Wikipedia entry, there's no way to update it.

So for example, an encyclopedia article about my mother.

My mother, school teacher, later a pharmacist, wonderful woman, but never been in the news.

I mean, other than me talking about why there shouldn't be a Wikipedia entry that's probably made it in somewhere, standard example.

And you could sort of imagine a database of genealogy, having date of birth, date of death, and certain elements like that of private people, but you couldn't really write a biography.

And 1 of the areas this comes up quite often is what we call BLP1A, we've got lots of acronyms, biography of a living person who's notable for only 1 event, is a real sort of danger zone.

And the type of example would be a victim of a crime.

So someone who's a victim of a famous serial killer, but about whom, like really not much is known.

They weren't a public person, they're just a victim of a crime.

We really shouldn't have an article about that person.

They'll be mentioned, of course, and maybe the specific crime might have an article.

That's not really something that makes any sense, because how can you write a biography about someone you don't know much about?

And this is, you know, it varies from field to field.

So, for example, for many academics, we will have an entry that we might not have in a different context, because for an academic, it's important to have sort of their career, what papers they've published, things like that.

You may not know anything about their personal life, but that's actually not encyclopedically relevant in the same way that it is for a member of a royal family, where it's basically all about the family.

So, you know, we're fairly nuanced about notability and where it comes in.

And I've always thought that the term notability, I think is a little problematic.

I mean, we struggled about how to talk about it.

The problem with notability is it can feel insulting to say, oh no, you're not noteworthy.

She's a really important person in my life, right?

Is there a way to get information that actually makes an encyclopedia entry?

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.

We'll talk about the various details of that, but the love and care that goes into creating pages for individuals, for a big 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 gone to be at the receiving end of some kind of attacks through the Wikipedia form.

Like you said, when you look at living individuals, it can be quite hurtful.

And 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 people 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.

I think what you also realize is there has to be for Wikipedia kind of credible sources, verifiable sources, and there's a dance there because some of the sources are pieces of journalism, and of course, journalism operates under its own complicated incentives such that people can write articles that are not factual or are cherry picking, all the flaws that you can have in a journalist's article.

And so for me, sadly enough, there was a really kind of concerted attack to say that I was never at MIT, I never did anything at MIT.

Just to clarify, I am a research scientist at MIT.

I'm at a prestigious, amazing laboratory called LIDS, and I hope to be there for a long time.

I work on AI, robotics, machine learning.

There's a lot of incredible people there, and by the way, MIT has been very kind to defend me.

Unlike Wikipedia says, it is not an unpaid position.

It was all very calm and happy and almost boring research that I've been doing there.

And the other thing, because I am half Ukrainian, half Russian, and I've traveled to Ukraine, and I will travel to Ukraine again, and I will travel to Russia for some very difficult conversations.

But the little battle about the biography there also starts becoming important for the first time for me.

I also wanna clarify sort of personally, I use this opportunity of some inaccuracies there.

My father was not Born in Chkalovsk, Russia.

I was born in Chkalovsk, which is a town not in Russia.

There is a town called that in Russia, but there's another town in Tajikistan, which is a former republic of the Soviet Union.

It is that town is now called B-U-S-T-O-N, Buston, which is funny, because we're now in Austin, and I also am in Boston.

It seems like my whole life is surrounded by these kinds of towns.

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Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia | Lex Fridman Podcast #385