Life’s Work: An Interview with Jimmy Wales

In 2000 Wales left his job as the research director at a futures and options trading firm to focus on building an early internet business. What soon emerged was Wikipedia, an online, crowdsourced encyclopedia that he decided to run as a nonprofit and which quickly became one of the world’s most popular websites. Wales went on to found both the Wikimedia Foundation, which he still chairs, and several for-profit ventures. His recent book is The Seven Rules of Trust. HBR: Explain the trajectory from studying finance to launching a nonprofit, crowdsourced online encyclopedia. Wales: The thing about me is I get up every day and try to do the most interesting thing I can. I don’t really think that much about money. I’ve got nothing against making it, and I’ve done well with my for-profit companies. But if I see something really interesting to do, that’s much more important. Why did you believe Wikipedia could become a trusted source of information? I didn’t know, but I hypothesized. I understood that we were going to do a lot of work to figure out processes and procedures that would give rise to better quality. We always had a goal of being Britannica or better. What does that mean? It means paying attention to sources and neutrality, and those have been the bedrock principles from the beginning. The other piece was being trusting. I wrote on my own Wikipedia page years ago something like “You can edit this. I trust you’ll make it better and not do anything bad.” And by and large that works. Obviously, we can’t be completely naive. It isn’t a wild free-for-all where people can write anything willy-nilly. We have rules, and you can get blocked if you misbehave. There are layers to it. How did you get people to give time and energy to cooperate with strangers for no pay? This was in the early optimistic days of the World Wide Web, but I knew from my own experiences that people enjoy interacting in a pleasant and intellectual way. I had a personal interest in philosophy and was studying finance professionally, and I found that if I wrote an email to even a prominent professor at a big university and was thoughtful, they would answer. I saw that generosity, and you can still see it today. Obviously we lament the toxicity of social media, but we can also find places online where people are incredibly generous. One of my favorite groups on Reddit is a personal-finance subreddit where a typical post 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. What do I do?” And then people will go, “Here’s what you do, and I see you’re in California, so this is the fraud office you’ve got to call.” And I’m like, “Wow, these are just random people going, ‘I know how to help’” and they do. We see that spirit in Wikipedia all the time. People come with an interest—trains, for example—and they enjoy contributing, because they think, Now the world’s slightly better. They also meet other people who are into the [same] subject, and they’re like, “We found each other. Let’s make this page great.” If you extend that hand of trust and say, “Hey, come on, let’s do something great together,” a lot of people are like, “That sounds a lot better than what I was going to do, which was yell at people on Twitter.” Why did you choose to make Wikipedia a nonprofit? There are all kinds of business models that support open-source platforms, and I didn’t have a strong view about which would be best. But I didn’t want to have ads, because it raises questions about objectivity, and I always thought of Wikipedia as a temple for the mind rather than something commercial—a place to go to read, reflect, learn, and think. Also, a lot of the volunteers wanted it to be a nonprofit. What are some of the biggest hurdles that you faced trying to live into that altruistic vision? In the early days one of the biggest challenges was growth and figuring out how to get servers fast enough. We had one incident where two of our three servers died on the same day, and I had to scramble to get everything running on one, which was very, very slow. I was like, “We need to raise some money,” so we asked on the website, and people gave. But I always bristle a bit at the word “altruistic,” because I think almost everybody involved in Wikipedia doesn’t think, Oh, here’s my sad duty to the world. They think, This is great fun. This is my hobby. I get to meet interesting people and have great conversations. It’s wonderful. I enjoy it. That’s a delightfully self-interested motive. How do simple rules keep millions and millions of volunteers and website users in line? I don’t believe we’re trying to impose something on human nature. We’re recognizing that people are generally very nice. Sure, they can also be irritating sometimes. But we’re social animals, and we prefer environments that are collaborative, cooperative, supportive, reasonable. It’s entirely possible that we could debate quite fundamental things and still approach each other with kindness, civility, and thoughtfulness. And we see in lots of cases that people, through their work in Wikipedia, get a more well-rounded and softer view and begin to recognize the humanity of people they disagree with. How do you ensure that a debate between people who might not even agree on facts doesn’t devolve into dysfunction? One of the most important principles is our insistence on sources. Wikipedia isn’t the place for anyone to come and say, “Here’s what I think. Here’s my opinion.” If people do start doing that, we often will say to them, “Maybe you want to start a blog or go to social media, because you can say whatever you like there.” I love to give the hypothetical example of a kind and thoughtful Catholic priest and a kind and thoughtful Planned Parenthood activist. They’re never going to agree on the issue of abortion, but they can still work together on the Wikipedia entry about abortion. It isn’t going to say abortion is a sin, but it can say the Catholic Church position is such and such, and the Pope has said this, and critics have responded in this way. At the end of the day, those two people can point to the work that they’ve done together and say, “If you read this, you’ll understand the debate.” I find that people who are intellectual and [have] studied the issues are actually pretty good at this. But when you have people with strong opinions who haven’t thought them through, you might just lash out at those who disagree, because they might prove you wrong. It can feel quite threatening. Whereas if you are fully bought in, you probably believe, “Gee, if I explain this well enough, and I’m fair about the argument and the debate, I think most people will come to see my point.” How do you think AI search is changing the way people get information and perceive truth? Is it a threat to Wikipedia? I don’t think so. People don’t come to Wikipedia for a broad, breezy summary. They come for verified facts with sources and links that humans have really pored over. What I’m interested in is how large language models might help our community work. One example is that our “user talk” pages show how decisions were made in maybe 50 pages of discussion. Perhaps AI could give a summary, which could be more transparent. That’s just one idea. But I do think that it’s an amazing, albeit quite flawed, technology, and there should be ways that we can use it to improve the quality of information. Crowdsourced content is also the lifeblood of social media companies like Facebook, X, YouTube, and TikTok. Some is positive; some is decidedly not. What’s your take on the current toxicity in social media? Companies have created a box that basically says, “What’s on your mind?” and sometimes people have horrible things on their mind. We all feel it’s too toxic, with too many attacks on people. But at the same time, you want to be able to criticize politicians and celebrities. That’s part of what social media is about. So it’s a hard problem, but one they have to take seriously. Abdicating responsibility is a poor decision. Are you still optimistic about the future of the internet? Definitely. Just the fact that you’re able to learn anything you want to know and meet people from all around the world is as magical to me as it ever was. I mean, even Facebook—it has a lot of problems, for sure, but it also helps me keep up with people I knew in high school. That purpose of connecting people is still there.

Life’s Work: An Interview with Jimmy Wales

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