ALISON BEARD: I’m Alison Beard.
ADI IGNATIUS: And I’m Adi Ignatius. And this is the HBR IdeaCast.
ALISON BEARD: 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.
ADI IGNATIUS: So we’re doing AI again.
ALISON BEARD: 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.
ADI IGNATIUS: 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 US, and there were a number of iterations, some of them had facts that were completely wrong. And I challenged him on it and Wales said, “Yeah, okay, 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.
ALISON BEARD: 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. 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.
JIMMY WALES: It’s good to be here. Thanks for having me.
ALISON BEARD: So 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?
JIMMY WALES: It’s really, really important. So to what extent it’s a problem, it’s 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.
ALISON BEARD: 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?
JIMMY WALES: 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 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 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. 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. Who’s going to let people come and stay in your home? That’s a whole 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 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.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. 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 from people who aren’t experts? So why did you think that a crowdsourced platform like Wikipedia could become such a trusted source?
JIMMY WALES: I’m not sure I did know, but I hypothesized. 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? 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 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, 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.
ALISON BEARD: 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?
JIMMY WALES: This was in the early optimistic days of the worldwide web, of course, but I knew from my own experiences that I had a personal interest in philosophy, and I was studying finance professionally. I came to understand, 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. And they’ll give a lot of time because people do like that. People do enjoy interacting in a pleasant and intellectual way with other people.
I saw the amount of generosity that you can see, and you can still see this today. 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 Reddit is there’s a personal finance subreddit where 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 to call.” And I’m like, wow, 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 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. And they enjoy contributing a bit of fairly obscure history to Wikipedia, 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. I didn’t know there were that many people who are interested in locomotives from the 1930s, but here we are, we found each other and it’s great, and let’s make this really a great part of Wikipedia.”
I’m a very optimistic person. And that optimism has been born 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.”
ALISON BEARD: So why did you choose to make it a non-profit? Was that a key to building trust, especially with users?
JIMMY WALES: In the very early days of Wikipedia, it was open source. But of course within the world of open source software, there are non-profits, 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, what would be the best model. But it pretty quickly emerged like, okay, 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 I think of Wikipedia as 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 the rest of the world and all that commercial stuff, which I’ve 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.
ALISON BEARD: So 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?
JIMMY WALES: One of the things in a business context in particular is it’s very easy to, particularly in modern online business or anything that touches online, to think a huge amount about A/B testing and 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 very viral kind of content. 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 clickbait 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 realized 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.”
Instead, if you say, “Okay, 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, 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 experienced and how she shared that online was devastating to the reputation of Airbnb. And to sort of say actually the numbers don’t matter, even one is terrible. And we have to really think about that.
ALISON BEARD: So for a business that might be creating goods or delivering services, it’s really just about that focus on the end customer. Are we providing value? Are we serving them in the best way possible?
JIMMY WALES: 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 could we do better,” and really listen.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. And you also talk about purpose. Lots of companies have elaborate purpose statements. Yours is pretty simple, Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia. So why did you keep it so short and sweet?
JIMMY WALES: 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, “I mean interesting, but actually no, because what does that have to do with making an encyclopedia?” It’s not directly useful. It’ll distract us. Our tech team. 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 for for-profit companies, it can sometimes be a little more complex 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. 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 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.
ALISON BEARD: So even as Wikipedia got extremely successful, you were never tempted to evolve the business or the organization in a different way?
JIMMY WALES: 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 served us really well. So yeah, we’ve never really had any real interest in deviating from that.
ALISON BEARD: So a few of the other principles seem linked, and you’ve alluded to them, thinking positively about other people, being trusting and behaving with respect and civility. How does simple rules like that keep millions and millions of volunteers and people who are using the website cooperating and in line?
JIMMY WALES: 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, 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’ve 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, actually it’s fine, we can have a disagreement and be civil to each other.
ALISON BEARD: The sixth of the seventh 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?
JIMMY WALES: 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. I don’t care. 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 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.
Nobody should care about my personal opinions on Obamacare. 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.
ALISON BEARD: 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, 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?
JIMMY WALES: For me, I say sell the T-shirts, but don’t mind selling some religious T-shirts as well. You have to think about 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 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, it’s worth it. In other cases you might say, “Actually, this content’s 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 probably shouldn’t do that.” So basically I think the argument is not a decision about what makes the largest number of people trust us, it’s way too simplistic, but it’s about how being transparent and being reliable and doing what’s expected helps to build trust.
ALISON BEARD: 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 what they’re expected to do?
JIMMY WALES: 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 if you just issue a statement saying, “Oh, yeah, we screwed up, we got it wrong,” and then 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 Frei, who’s an academic at Harvard. And 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. Instead, you have to say, “Oh, hold on. There are things we need to do to repair trust. 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.
ALISON BEARD: 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?
JIMMY WALES: 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. There was a study that was done by Pew that showed that something like 3% of traditional search results linked to Wikipedia, but 6% of AI summaries linked to Wikipedia. But people click through a lot less. So they see us twice as often, but they don’t click through because 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 … It’s actually good if you’re trying to … 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. You’ve told me what your children, you should go and do this.” And it’s like, “Yeah, that doesn’t exist, why did you say it?” “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 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.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. And so Wikipedia is this shining example of positive crowdsourcing, but crowdsourced 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?
JIMMY WALES: 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 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’ve got a box that basically says, “What’s on your mind?” And sometimes people have really horrible things on their mind.
So it’s a challenge 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 want to criticize politicians. That’s part of what social media is about. You want to say, “I disagree. Or 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.
ALISON BEARD: Are you still optimistic about the future of the internet?
JIMMY WALES: Oh yeah, definitely. I mean, I think there’s all kinds of things that are amazing. And even I still would say when you look at, for example, Facebook, right? Facebook has a lot of problems for sure. But you know what? I keep up with people I knew when I was a teenager. I have a conversation with a guy I went to high school with. And we had completely lost touch and we got back in touch I would guess in the early 2000s when Facebook starting to get big. And great, that’s wonderful. 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.
ALISON BEARD: Great. Well, Jimmy, thank you so much. I’ve really enjoyed our conversation.
JIMMY WALES: Thank you.
ALISON BEARD: That’s Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia cofounder and author of The Seven Rules of Trust, a Blueprint for Building Things That Last.
Next Week, Adi talks to author Brené Brown about the state of leadership today. If you found this episode helpful, please share it with a colleague. And be sure to subscribe and rate IdeaCast in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. If you want to help leaders move the world forward, consider subscribing to Harvard Business Review. You’ll get access to the HBR mobile app, the weekly exclusive insider newsletter, and unlimited access to HBR online. Just head to hbr.org/subscribe.
Thanks to our team, senior producer Mary Dooe, audio product manager Ian Fox, and senior production specialist Rob Eckhardt. And thanks to you for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. We’ll be back with a new episode on Tuesday. I’m Alison Beard.
