EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,072 words- 0:00 – 0:47
Introduction
- JWJimmy Wales
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.
- LFLex Fridman
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. And now, dear friends, here's Jimmy Wales.
- 0:47 – 6:51
Origin story of Wikipedia
- LFLex Fridman
Let's start at the beginning. What is the origin story of Wikipedia?
- JWJimmy Wales
The origin story of Wikipedia. Well, so I was watching the growth of, uh, the free software movement, open source software, and seeing pro-programmers coming together to collaborate in new ways, uh, sharing code, uh, doing that under a free license, uh, 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, uh, we sort of have to figure out how I'm gonna be rewarded and, and what that is. But the idea that everyone can copy it and, and it just is part of the commons, uh, really empowered a huge wave of, uh, creative software production, and I realized that that kind of collaboration could extend beyond just software to all kinds of cultural works. Um, and the first thing that I thought of was an encyclopedia, uh, and thought, oh, that seems obvious that an encyclopedia, you can collaborate on it. There's a few reasons why. One, we all pretty much know what an encyclopedia entry on, say, the Eiffel Tower should be like. You know, you should see a picture, a few pictures maybe, history, location, um, something about the architect, et cetera, et cetera. 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 Nupedia, which was, um, about two years before Wikipedia. And with Nupedia, we, we had this idea that, um, in order to be respected, we had to be even more academic than a traditional encyclopedia, uh, because, uh, a bunch of volunteers on the internet getting it out of to write a- an 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. Um, and two, two things came of that. So one thing, one 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, uh, people noticed plagiarism and realized that it, it wasn't actually that good, even though it had been reviewed by academics and so on. So we had to pull it. So it's like, oh, okay, well, so much for a seven-stage review process. Uh, but also, I decided that I wanted to try... I was frustrated. Why is this taking so long? Why is it so hard? So I thought, oh, okay. I saw that, uh, 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. I had a published 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, uh, 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 th- that we could find to give me feedback, uh, for revisions, and it felt like being back in grad school. You know, it's like this really oppressive, sort of, like, you're gonna submit it for review and you're gonna get critiques.
- LFLex Fridman
A little bit the bad part of grad school.
- JWJimmy Wales
Yeah, yeah, (laughs) the bad part of grad school, right? And so I was like, oh, this isn't intellectually fun. This is like the bad part of grad school.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- JWJimmy Wales
Um, it's intimidating and, and there's a lot of, um, 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, one of my employees, had brought and showed me the wiki concept in December and then Larry Sanger brought in, uh, the same, said, "Hey, what about this wiki idea?" And so, uh, in January, we decided to launch Wikipedia, but we weren't sure. So the, the original project was called Nupedia 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 gonna 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 two weeks than we had in almost two 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 kinda fun. Like, I... You know, you put your name down. Actually, a funny story was, uh, several years later, I just happened to be online and I saw when, um, I think his name is Robert Altman won the Nobel Prize in Economics, and we didn't have an entry, uh, on him at all, which was surprising, but it wasn't that surprising. This was still early days, you know? Um, and so I got to be the first person to type Robert Altman won Nobel Prize in Economics and hit save, which again, wasn't a very (laughs) good article, but then I came back two days later and people had improved it and so forth. So that, 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. Other people jumped in. Everybody was interested in the topic 'cause it was all in the news at the moment.... uh, and so it's just a completely different model which worked much, much better.
- LFLex Fridman
Well, what is it that made that so accessible, so fun, so, uh, so natural to just add something?
- JWJimmy Wales
Well, I think it's... You know, e- 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. Um, but, you know, you, you could say, "Oh well, uh, you know, I know a little bit about this and I can, I can get it started." Uh, but then it is fun to, to come back then and see other people have added and improved and so on and so forth. And that idea of collaborating, you know, where people can, much like open source software, um, you know, you, you put your code out and then people suggest revisions and they change it and it, and it modifies and it grows beyond the original creator. Um, it's just a kind of a fun, wonderful, quite geeky hobby, but, um, people enjoy
- 6:51 – 13:44
Design of Wikipedia
- JWJimmy Wales
it.
- LFLex Fridman
How much debate was there over the interface, over the details of how to make that-
- JWJimmy Wales
Well-
- LFLex Fridman
... seamless and frictionless?
- JWJimmy Wales
Yeah, I mean, 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, you know, things. Back then XML was kind of all the rage.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- JWJimmy Wales
And thinking about, uh, could we... You know, shouldn't you have certain, uh, 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, 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?"
- LFLex Fridman
So that is a reality today where it's-
- JWJimmy Wales
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
... there, there's some-
- JWJimmy Wales
Yeah, so Wikidata-
- LFLex Fridman
... universal variables. Wikidata.
- JWJimmy Wales
Yeah, Wikidata, um, you can, you can link, uh, 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, when that gets updated, it updates in all the languages where you've done that.
- LFLex Fridman
I mean, that's really interesting. There was this chain of emails in the early days of discussing-
- JWJimmy Wales
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
... the details of what is-
- JWJimmy Wales
Yeah, yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
So, th- there's the interface, there's the-
- JWJimmy Wales
Yeah, so the interface. So an example, there was some software called UseModWiki which we started with. Quite amusing actually, because the main reason we launched with UseModWiki is that it was a single Pearl script. So it was really easy for me to install it on the server and just get running. Uh, but it was, um, you know, some guy's hobby project. It was cool, but it was just a hobby project and, uh, all the data was stored, uh, in flat text files. So there was no real database behind it. So the... To search the site, you basically used GRAP, which is just like basic Unix utility to, like, look through all the files. Uh, so that clearly was never gonna scale, but also in the early days it didn't have real logins. So you could set your username, but there were no passwords. So, you know, I might say Bob Smith and then someone else comes along and says, "No, I'm Bob Smith," and they both had it. Now, that never really happened. We didn't have a problem with it, but it was kind of obvious, like you can't grow a big website where everybody can pretend to be everybody. That's, that's not gonna 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, uh, 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, uh, New York City, you might type N-E-W, no space, capital Y, York City, and that would make a link, but that was ugly. That was clearly not right. And so I was like, okay, well that, that's just not gonna look nice. Let's just use square brackets. Two square brackets makes a link and that may have been an option in the software. I'm not sure I thought of square brackets. But anyway, we just did that, um, which worked really well. It makes nice links and, you know, you can see and it's 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 they... A lot of users cut and paste a square bracket. When they could find one, they would just cut and paste one in. And yet German Wikipedia has been a massive success, so somehow that didn't slow people down, um...
- LFLex Fridman
How is that, that the German keyboards don't have a square bracket? How do you do programming? How do you, how do you live-
- JWJimmy Wales
It- (laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
... life to its fullest without square bracket?
- JWJimmy Wales
It's a very good question. I'm not really sure. I mean, maybe it does now because, uh, keyboard standards have, you know, drifted o- over time and becomes useful to have a certain character. I mean, it's same thing like there's not really a W character in Italian.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- JWJimmy Wales
Um, and it wasn't on keyboards or I think it is now, but in, in general W is not a letter in Italian language, but it appears in enough international words that it's crept into Italian soon.
- LFLex Fridman
And all of these things are probably Wikipedia articles in-
- JWJimmy Wales
Oh, yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
... in themselves.
- JWJimmy Wales
Oh, yeah. (laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
The discussion of square brackets in German.
- 13:44 – 19:55
Number of articles on Wikipedia
- JWJimmy Wales
- LFLex Fridman
Well, just to throw some numbers, as of May 27th, 2023, there are six million, 6.66 million articles in the English Wikipedia containing over 4.3 billion words, including, uh, articles. The total number of pages is 58 million.
- JWJimmy Wales
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
Uh, does that blow your mind?
- JWJimmy Wales
I mean, yes, it does. I mean, it doesn't because I, I know those numbers and see them from time to time, but in another sense, a deeper sense, yeah, it does. I mean, it's really, uh, remarkable. I remember when, uh, English Wikipedia passed 100,000 articles and when German Wikipedia passed 100,000 'cause I happened to be in Germany with a bunch of Wikipedians that night, and, um, you know, then it seemed quite big. I mean, we knew at that time that it, it was nowhere near complete. I remember at Wikimania in Harvard, uh, when we, when we did our annual conference there in Boston, um, someone who had come to the conference from Poland had brought along with him a small encyclopedia, a single volume, uh, encyclopedia of biographies, so short biographies, normally a paragraph or so, about famous people in Poland, and there were some 22,000 entries, 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, um, and so then you realize, yeah, actually, you know, who was the mayor of Warsaw in 1873? Don't know. Probably not in English Wikipedia, but it probably might be today. But there's so much out there, and of course, what we get into when we're talking about how many entries there are and how many, you know, how many could there be is this very deep philosophical issue of notability, um, which is the question of, well, h- how do you, how do you draw the limit? How do you draw, you know, what, what is there? 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.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- JWJimmy Wales
Pretty standard. Everybody's seen, you know, billions of those in life.
- LFLex Fridman
Classic, though.
- JWJimmy Wales
It's a classic clear Bic pen. So could we have an entry about that Bic pen? Well, I bet we do, that type of Bic pen, um, because it's classic, everybody knows it, and it's got a history, and, um, 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, uh, they're, they're sort of a, a definition by non-essentials company. Anything that's long and plastic, that's what they make. (laughs) So...
- LFLex Fridman
Wow. That's-
- JWJimmy Wales
So (laughs) if you wanna find a common ground...
- LFLex Fridman
...that's very platonic form, the platonic form of a Bic.
- JWJimmy Wales
But could we have an article about that very Bic pen in your hand?
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- JWJimmy Wales
So Lex Fridman's Bic pen as of this week.
- LFLex Fridman
Oh, the very, this instance.
- JWJimmy Wales
The very specific instance. And the answer is no. There's not much known about it. I daresay unless, you know, 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 and, um, so that, that's just to show there's a, there's, there is a limit. I mean, in German Wikipedia they used to talk about the, the rear nut of the wheel of Uli Fuchs' bicycle. Uli Fuchs, a 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. Um, one of the areas where we try to be, uh, 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, um, and somebody tries to create a Wikipedia entry, th- there's no way to update it. There's not much in there. So for example, uh, 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, but, um, you know, there's not enough known, um, and you could sort of imagine a, a database of-... genealogy, having date of birth, date of death, and you know, cer- certain elements like that of, of private people. But you couldn't really bi- write a biography. And one of the areas this comes up quite often is, uh, what we call BLP1E. We've got lots of acronyms. Biography of a living person who's notable for only one event-
- LFLex Fridman
Hmm.
- JWJimmy Wales
... is a real sort of danger zone.
- LFLex Fridman
Oh.
- JWJimmy Wales
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. But for that person, no, not really. Um, that's not really something that makes any sense because how can you h- write a biography about someone you don't know much about? And this is, you know, it, it varies from, 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, you know, what papers they've published, things like that.
- LFLex Fridman
Okay.
- JWJimmy Wales
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, we, we're fairly nuanced about notability and, and where it comes in. And I've always, um, thought that the, the term "notability" I think is a little problematic. I mean, it's, we, we, we struggle about how to talk about it. The problem with notability is it's, it can feel insulting. So, "Oh no, th- you're not noteworthy." Well, my mother's noteworthy. She's a really important person in my life, right? So that's not right. But it's more like verifiability. Is there a way to, to get information that actually makes an encyclopedia
- 19:55 – 40:48
Wikipedia pages for living persons
- JWJimmy Wales
entry?
- LFLex Fridman
It so happens that there's a Wikipedia page about me, as I've learned recently.
- JWJimmy Wales
Mm.
- LFLex Fridman
And, uh, the first thought I had when I saw that was, uh, "Surely I am not notable enough." So I was (laughs) 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-
- JWJimmy Wales
Hm.
- LFLex Fridman
... is just incredible. Uh-
- JWJimmy Wales
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
... uh, we'll talk about the various details of that. But the, the love and care that goes into creating pages for individuals, for a big pen, for all this kind of stuff is just, is just really incredible. So I just felt the love when I, when I saw that page. Um, but I also felt, just 'cause I do this podcast and I just through this podcast gotten to know a few individuals that are quite controversial.
- JWJimmy Wales
Mm.
- LFLex Fridman
Um, 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, uh, at the receiving end of some kind of attacks through the Wikipedia form.
- JWJimmy Wales
Mm.
- LFLex Fridman
Like you said, when you look at living individuals, it can be quite hurtful.
- JWJimmy Wales
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
The little details of information.
- JWJimmy Wales
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
Um, and because I've become friends with Elon Musk-
- JWJimmy Wales
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
... and I've interviewed him, but I've also interviewed people on the left, uh, 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-
- JWJimmy Wales
(laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
... and the shark emerges from the depths and pulls you right in.
- JWJimmy Wales
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
I, I, I, uh-
- JWJimmy Wales
A boiling hot pool of politics. (laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs) Yeah. I guess it's, it's hot. And so I got to experience some of that. Um, I think what you also realize is, um, there has to be for Wikipedia kind of credible sources, verifiable sources.
- JWJimmy Wales
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
And there's a dance there because some of the sources are, uh, pieces of journalism. And of course, journalism operates under its own complicated incentives.
- JWJimmy Wales
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
Such that people can write articles that are not factual or, um, are cherry picking, all the flaws that you can have in a journalistic article.
- JWJimmy Wales
For sure.
- LFLex Fridman
And those can be used as-
- 40:48 – 54:19
ChatGPT
- LFLex Fridman
what... If- if we could just talk about that before we jump, um, back to some other interesting topics on Wikipedia. Let's talk about GPT-4 and, uh, large language models. Uh, so they are, in part, trained on Wikipedia content.
- JWJimmy Wales
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
Uh, what are the pros and cons of- of these language models? What are your thoughts?
- JWJimmy Wales
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. Um, so first things first, I mean, part of our philosophy is the open licensing, the free licensing, the idea that, you know, this is what we're here for. We- we are a volunteer community, and we write this, um, 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- this is the licensing. So in that sense, of course, it's completely fine. Now, we do worry a bit about attribution, um, because it is a creative commons attribution share-alike license.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- JWJimmy Wales
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. And so... And that's a really hard, complicated question. Um, you know, if, um... If I were to write something about my visit here, I might say in a blog post, you know, "I was in, uh... Austin, which is a city in Texas." I'm not gonna put a source for Austin is a city in Texas. That's just general knowledge. I learned it somewhere. I can't tell you where. So you don't have to cite and reference every single thing. But, you know, if I actually did research and I used something very heavily, it's just proper...... morally proper to, uh, give your sources. So (inhales deeply) we would like to see that and obviously, um, you know, they call it grounding. Uh, so particularly people at Google are really keen on figuring out grounding. Uh-
- LFLex Fridman
It's such a cool term. So ground- any, any text that's generated, trying to ground it to the Wikipedia quality-
- JWJimmy Wales
Or to a source.
- LFLex Fridman
... source.
- JWJimmy Wales
Yeah, yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
I mean, like, the same kinda standard of what a source means that Wikipedia uses?
- JWJimmy Wales
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
The same kind of source-
- JWJimmy Wales
The same kind of-
- LFLex Fridman
... will be generated.
- JWJimmy Wales
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
W- will ground.
- JWJimmy Wales
The same kind of thing. And of course, one of the biggest flaws in ChatGPT right now, um, is that it just literally will make things up just to be a-amiable, I think. (laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- JWJimmy Wales
It's programmed to be very helpful and amiable and it doesn't-
- LFLex Fridman
It kind of-
- JWJimmy Wales
... really know or care about the truth. So-
- LFLex Fridman
Can get bullied into a- (laughs)
- JWJimmy Wales
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
It can kinda be convinced into ... (laughs)
- JWJimmy Wales
At least, uh, well, but like this morning I, I was, I, the story I was telling earlier about, uh, comparing a football player to a Lamborghini and I thought, "Well, is that really racial? I don't know, but I'm just, I'm mulling it over." And I thought, "Oh, I'm gonna go to ChatGPT."
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- JWJimmy Wales
So I sent to ChatGPT-4, I said, uh, "You know, this, this happened in Wikipedia. Can you think of examples where a white athlete has been compared to a, a fast car, inanimate object?" And it comes back with a very plausible essay where it tells, you know, why these analogies are common in sport and blah, blah, blah. I said, "No, no, I really, uh, could you give me some specific examples?"
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- JWJimmy Wales
So it gives me three specific examples, very plausible, correct names of athletes and contemporaries and all of that, could have been true. Googled every single quote and none of them existed.
- 54:19 – 1:00:23
Wikipedia's political bias
- JWJimmy Wales
... Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
Let's go into some, uh ... You mentioned the hot water of the pool that we're both tipping our, our toe in.
- JWJimmy Wales
(laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
Uh, do you think Wikipedia has a left-leaning political bias, which is something it is sometimes accused of?
- JWJimmy Wales
Yeah. A- so I don't think so. Not broadly. Um, and, you know, I think you can always point to specific entries and talk about specific biases, but that, that's part of the process of Wikipedia. Anyone can come and challenge and, and to, to go on about that, but, you know, I, I see fairly often on Twitter, you know, some-... uh, you know, sort of quite extreme accusations of bias and I think, "You know, actually, I just, I don't see it. I don't buy that." And if you ask people for an example, they normally struggle. Um, and depending on who they are and, and what it's about. Um, so it's certainly true that some people who have quite fringe viewpoints, um, 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. I mean, I was once accosted on the street, um, outside the TED Conference in Vancouver by a guy who was a homeopath who was very upset that Wikipedia's entry on homeopathy basically says it's pseudoscience. Um, and he felt that was biased and I said, "Well, I can't really help you because, you know, it cites, we cite good quality sources to talk about the scientific status and it's not very good." So, you know, it depends. And, uh, you know, I think it's something that we should always be vigilant about. Um, but it's, uh, you know, in general, I think we're pretty good. And I think any time you go to any serious, uh, political controversy, we should have a pretty balanced perspective on who's saying what, what the views are, and so forth. I would actually argue that the, the, the areas where we are more likely to have bias that persists for a long period of time are actually fairly obscure things or maybe fairly non-political things. So I just give, it's kind of a humorous example, but it's, it's meaningful. Uh, if you read our entries about, uh, Japanese anime-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- JWJimmy Wales
... uh, they tend to be very, very positive and very favorable because almost no one knows about Japanese anime except for fans. And so the people who come and spend their days writing Japanese anime articles, they love it. They kind of have a- an inherent love for the, the whole area. Now they'll, of course, being human beings, they'll have their internal debates and disputes about what's better or not, you know. But in general, they're, they're quite positive because nobody actually cares. On anything that people are quite passionate about, then hopefully, you know, there's, like, quite a lot of interesting stuff. So I'll give an example, a contemporary example where I think we've done a good job as of my most recent, sort of, look at it. Um, and that is the, the question about the efficacy of masks during the COVID pandemic.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- JWJimmy Wales
And that's an area where I would say the public, um, authorities really kind of jerked us all around a bit, you know? In the very first days they said, "Whatever you do, don't rush out and buy masks." Um, and their concern was, uh, shortages in hospitals. Okay, fair enough. Later, it's like, now everybody's gotta wear a mask everywhere. It's- it really works really well and it's, you know... Then now, I think it's- the evidence is mixed, right? Masks seem to help. In my personal view, masks seem to help. They're no huge burden, you know. You might as well wear, wear a mask in any environment where you're with a giant crowd of people and so forth. Um, but it's very politicized, that one.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- JWJimmy Wales
It's very politicized where, uh, certainly in the US, you know, much more so I- I mean, I live in, in the UK. I live in London. I've never seen kind of on the streets sort of the kind of thing that I- there's a lot of reports of people actively angry because someone else is wearing a mask, um, that sort of thing, in public. Um, and so because it became very politicized, then clearly if, if Wikipedia... No. So anyway, if you go to Wikipedia and you research this topic, I think you'll find more or less what I've just said. Like, mm, actually, after it's all, you know, to this point in history, it's mixed evidence. Like masks seemed to help, but maybe not as much as some of the authorities said and, and here we are. And that's kind of a- an example where I think, okay, we've done a good job, but I suspect there are people on both sides of that very emotional debate who think this is ridiculous. Hopefully we've got quality sources so then hopefully those people who read this can say, "Oh, actually, you know, it is complicated." Uh, so you know (laughs) , if you can get to the point of saying, "Okay, this is- I have my view, but I understand other views and I do think it's a complicated question," great. Now we're a little bit more mature as a society.
- LFLex Fridman
Well, that one is an interesting one because I feel like, I hope that that article also contains the meta conversation about the politicization of that topic.
- JWJimmy Wales
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
To me it's almost more interesting than whether masks work or not, as- at least at this point.
- JWJimmy Wales
For sure.
- LFLex Fridman
It's like why it became, masks became a symbol of the oppression of a centralized government, if you wear them.
- JWJimmy Wales
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
You're a sheep that follows the mass control, the mass hysteria of, uh, an authoritarian regime. And if you don't wear a mask, then you are a science denier, anti-vaxxer, a, um, alt-right, probably a Nazi.
- JWJimmy Wales
(laughs) Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs) So...
- JWJimmy Wales
Exactly. And that, that whole politicization of society is, uh, is just so damaging. Um, and I don't, I don't know in broader, in the broader world, like how do we start to fix that? That's a really hard question.
- LFLex Fridman
Well, at- at every moment
- 1:00:23 – 1:13:28
Conspiracy theories
- LFLex Fridman
'cause 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. Uh, you look at lab leak theory, uh, for, for this virus. There could be, uh, 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...... uh, what is a small percentage-
- JWJimmy Wales
Hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
... uh, in opposition to that, and what is Wikipedia's responsibility to accurately represent both the mainstream and-
- JWJimmy Wales
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
... the fringe do you think?
- JWJimmy Wales
Well, I mean, I, I think we, we have to try to do our best to, 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. Um, I, 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 is made of rocks, some say cheese." You know, who knows? That kind of false neutrality is not what we wanna get to. Like, that doesn't make any sense. But that one's easy. Like, we all understand, um... I think there is a Wikipedia entry called something like, "The Moon is Made of Cheese."
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- JWJimmy Wales
Where it talks about, this is a common sort of joke or, or thing that children say or that people tell to children or whatever, you know. It's just a thing. It's- everybody has heard the moon is made of cheese. Um, but n- nobody thinks, "Wow, like, Wikipedia is so one-sided it doesn't even acknowledge the cheese theory." Um, I say the same thing about flat earth, you know? Again, it's very-
- LFLex Fridman
That's exactly what I'm looking up right now.
- JWJimmy Wales
... (laughs) Very little controversy. Uh, we will have an entry about flat earth theor- theorizing, flat earth people.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- JWJimmy Wales
Um, my personal view is, most of the people who claim to be flat earthers are just having a laugh, trolling. And more power to them, have some fun but, uh, let's not be, you know, ridiculous. But then-
- LFLex Fridman
Of course, for most of human history, people believe that the earth is flat so, uh, the article I'm looking at is actually kind of focusing on this history. Flat earth is an archaic and scientifically disproven conception of the earth's shape as a plane or disc. Many ancient cultures subscribe to a flat earth cosmography with pretty cool pictures of what a flat earth would look like, with dragon... is that a dragon? No, angels on the, on the edge. There's a lot of controversy about that, what is on the edge. Is it the wall? Is it angels?
- JWJimmy Wales
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
Is it dragons?
- JWJimmy Wales
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
Is there a dome?
- JWJimmy Wales
And how can you fly from, uh-
- LFLex Fridman
Wha-
- JWJimmy Wales
... South Africa to Perth? Because on a flat earth view, that's really too far for any plane to make it.
- LFLex Fridman
What I wanna know-
- JWJimmy Wales
(laughs) It's all spread out.
- LFLex Fridman
What I wanna know is what's on the other side, Jimmy?
- JWJimmy Wales
(laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
What's on the other side? That's what all of us want to know.
- JWJimmy Wales
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
Um, so there's some- I- I presume there's probably a small section about the conspiracy theory of, uh, flat earth 'cause I think there's a sizeable percent of the population who at least will say they believe in a flat earth.
- JWJimmy Wales
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
I, I think it is a, a movement, um, that just says that the mainstream narrative... To have distrust and skepticism about the mainstream narrative, which to a very small degree-
- JWJimmy Wales
Mm-hmm.
- 1:13:28 – 1:21:46
Facebook
- JWJimmy Wales
going on.
- LFLex Fridman
Well, if we could just, uh, take, uh, that tangent. Uh, I'm having a conversation with, uh, Mark Zuckerberg a 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.
- JWJimmy Wales
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
So can we just talk about the different ideas that these already big social networks can do and what you have been-
- JWJimmy Wales
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
... trying to do?
- JWJimmy Wales
So a, a piece of it is, um, it's hard. So I don't... The, the problem with making a recommendation to Facebook is that I actually believe their business model makes it really hard for them. Uh, and I'm not anti-capitalism. I'm not, you know, great, somebody's got business. They're making money. That's not, that's not where I come from. But certain business models mean you are gonna prioritize things that maybe aren't that long-term healthful. And so that's a big piece of it. So certainly for Facebook you could say, you know, uh, with vast resources, start to prioritize content that's higher quality, that's healing, that's kind. Uh, try not to prioritize content that seems to be just getting a rise out of people. Now, those are vague human descriptions, right? But I do believe good machine learning algorithms, you can optimize in slightly different ways. But to do that you may have to say, "Actually, we're not necessarily gonna increase page views to the maximum extent right now." And I've said this to people at, at Facebook. It's like, you know, i- if, if your actions are, you know, convincing people that you're breaking Western civilization, that's really bad for business in the long run.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- JWJimmy Wales
Um, certainly these days I would say Twitter is the thing that's on people's minds as being more upsetting at the moment. But I think it's true. Um, and so one of the things that's really interesting about Facebook compared to a lot of companies is that Mark has a pretty unprecedented amount of power. His ability to name members of the board, uh, his control of the company is, is pretty hard to break even if financial results aren't as good as they could be, because he's taken a step back from the perfect optimization to say, "Actually, for the long-term health in the next 50 years of this organization, we need to reign in some of the things that are working for us and making money because they're actually giving us a bad reputation." So one of the recommendations I would say is, and this is not to do with the algorithms and all that, but, you know, how about just a m- moratorium on all political advertising? I don't think it's their most profitable segment, but it's given rise to a lot of deep, hard questions about dark money, about, um, you know, uh, ads that are run by questionable people that push false narratives or, you know, the classic kind of thing is you run, uh... I saw, I saw a study about Brexit-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- JWJimmy Wales
... in, in the UK where people were talking about there were ads run, um, to, uh, animal rights activists saying, "Finally when we're out from under Europe, the UK can pass proper animal rights legislation. We're not constrained by the European process." Similarly, for people who are advocates of fox hunting to say, "Finally, when we're out of Europe, we can, we can re-implement." So you're telling people what they wanna hear and i- in some cases, it's really hard for journalists to see that. So it used to be that, for political advertising, you really needed to find some kind of mainstream narrative. And this is still true to an extent, mainstream narrative that 60% of people can say, "Oh, I can buy into that." Which meant it pushed you to the center, it pushed you to sort of try and find some nuanced balance. But if your main method of recruiting people is an, a tiny little one-on-one conversation with them because you're able to target using targeted advertising, suddenly you don't need, uh, consistent... You just need a really good, uh, targeting, uh, operation, really good Cambridge Analytical style machine learning algorithm data to convince people. And that just feels really problematic. So I mean, until they can think about how to solve that problem, I would just say, "You know what? It's gonna cost us X amount, but it's gonna be worth it to kind of say, 'You know what? We actually think our political advertising policy hasn't really helped, uh, contribute to d- discourse and dialogue and finding reasoned, you know, middle ground and compromised solutions.' So let's just not do that for a while until we figure that out." So that's maybe a piece of advice I'd-
- LFLex Fridman
And, and coupled with, as you were saying, recommender systems for the newsfeed and, and other contexts that don't always optimize engagement but optimize the long-term mental wellbeing and balance and growth of a human being.
- JWJimmy Wales
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
It's a very difficult problem.
- JWJimmy Wales
(laughs) It's, it's a difficult problem. Yeah. And, you know, so in, in, with, uh, WT Social, Wiki, Twitter and social, we are launching in a few months time a completely new system, new domain name, new, new lots of things. But the idea is to say let's, let's focus on trust. People can rate each other as trustworthy, rate content as trustworthy. You have to start from somewhere. So we'll start with a, a core base of our tiny community who I think are sensible, thoughtful people, wanna recruit more. But to say, "You know what? Actually, let's have that as a pretty strong element to say let's not optimize based on what gets the most page views in this session. Let's optimize on what-"... sort of the feedback from people is, "This is meaningfully enhancing my life."
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- JWJimmy Wales
And so part of that is, and it's probably not a good business model, but part of that is, say, okay, we're not gonna pursue an advertising business model, but... A, you know, membership model where, you know, you can... You don't have to be a member, but you can pay to be a member. Uh, you maybe get some benefit from that. But in general, to say, actually the problem with e- and I- and actually the, the division I would say is, and, and the analogy I would give is... Broadcast television funded by advertising gives you a different result than paying for HBO, paying for Netflix, paying for whatever. And the reason is, you know, if you think about it, if- what, what is your incentive as a, a TV producer? You're gonna make a comedy for ABC Network in the US. You basically say, "I want something that almost everybody will like and listen to." So it tends to be a little blander, you know, family-friendly, whatever. Whereas if you say, "Oh, actually," um, I'm gonna use the HBO example, an- an old example. You say, "You know what? Sopranos isn't for everybody."
Episode duration: 3:15:06
Install uListen for AI-powered chat & search across the full episode — Get Full Transcript
Transcript of episode diJp4zoQPqo
Get more out of YouTube videos.
High quality summaries for YouTube videos. Accurate transcripts to search & find moments. Powered by ChatGPT & Claude AI.
Add to Chrome