For Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, truth has always been a matter of trust | The Excerpt

On the Friday, November 28, 2025 episode of The Excerpt podcast: Wikipedia began as an idea for open knowledge. Despite challenges, its team of volunteers continues to work to build trust one article at a time. Its founder Jimmy Wales joins USA TODAY’s The Excerpt to share insights from his new book, “The Seven Rules of Trust.”

Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

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Dana Taylor:

Since its inception back in 2001, Wikipedia has become a trusted source for information. The online encyclopedia took hold despite initially being a punch line for late night talk show host like Stephen Colbert. But nearly 25 years on, its founder has gotten the last laugh all while teaching the world about trust.

Hello, and welcome to USA TODAY's the Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Friday, November 28th, 2025. The engine of the world's largest encyclopedia runs on the work of volunteers, and at its helm is Jimmy Wales, the Wikipedia founder who joins me now to share insights from his new book, The Seven Rules of Trust on bookshelves now. Jimmy, thank you so much for joining me.

Jimmy Wales:

Thanks for having me. It's good to be here.

Dana Taylor:

In your book you said that new technology demands new thinking even if it seems a little crazy at first. That was true for the internet and Wikipedia. It's also true for AI. Does Wikipedia have a happy or unhappy relationship with AI?

Jimmy Wales:

A little bit of both, but I would say mostly happy. Wikipedia is really part of the infrastructure of the world, so of course it's a huge part of the training data for AI. But also, this technology is deeply flawed. The ability to trust it is quite low because of the hallucination problem as the experts call it. It makes stuff up, and so there's that sort of mixed feelings about it. But of course, we're also exploring what are some ways that we might use AI to support our community and to sort of do some of the work that humans don't find as fun or give us suggestions and ideas. So a lot to explore.

Dana Taylor:

And what would a partnership based on trust look like here?

Jimmy Wales:

Trust is really fundamentally about you don't have to completely supervise someone or something. And so reliability is incredibly important, and at least currently, large language models aren't reliable. And in fact, some argue the very nature of the technology randomly selecting a plausible next word doesn't really lend itself very easily to being factual. It's actually pretty good at brainstorming and making silly jokes. But in terms of being factual, you don't randomly generate the next plausible word. You actually find out what's true.

Dana Taylor:

So what would growth, transparency, trust look like today at Wikipedia given the current penchant for AI slop and the proliferation of social media deep fakes?

Jimmy Wales:

Growth for us is not really our goal. Our goal is to write an encyclopedia, and of course, there's still a lot of growth to be had for our communities in the developing world. So the growth in some of the smaller language versions of Wikipedia is still really exciting and really great, but for us, it isn't really about growth. It's about the quality of the work and what we're doing. And so we do have concerns about the broader information ecosystem to the extent that AI slop is competing with serious journalism and publications that we would rely on. That's not helpful, but we'll see what happens.

Dana Taylor:

You've led one of the most influential volunteer communities in the world, Jimmy. How does that work? How do you build trust among people who've never met?

Jimmy Wales:

Well, one of the seven rules is to get trust, give trust, and so Wikipedia has always been very trusting. Anyone can come and edit and for a great many pages, I mean almost all of the pages really, you don't even have to log in to make your first edit and it goes live immediately. It just sounds crazy, but it's always sounded crazy and we've always done it that way. And it turns out most people live up to that. They feel a sense of civic responsibility and they behave themselves. But there's also, you have to deal with the troublemakers and you have to be thoughtful about how you strive to improve things, but it turns out most people are basically nice. So it's kind of been a wonderful journey.

Dana Taylor:

At the outset, you had to deal with people who saw Wikipedia as an attack on expertise. As you noted, there were those who wondered if we were really going to trust an encyclopedia written by random strangers. What do you think led people to do exactly that?

Jimmy Wales:

A part of it is once they came to realize we weren't here to attack expertise, Wikipedia has really strict rules about reliable sources, and we always prefer... For example, we prefer the New England Journal of a Medicine to a tabloid newspaper or a random blog by an anti-vax person, things like that. And so people came to understand, no, we're not anti-experts. We're actually quite passionate about getting it right and so on and so forth. It just turns out you don't have to be an expert on the history of the Civil War to write a decent article about a certain battle in the Civil War. Lots of people are really interested and can do that kind of thing, and they do.

Dana Taylor:

Some truths are uncomfortable. There may be times when facts aren't what we personally want them to be. What's your North Star for building or rebuilding trust in a deeply polarized society?

Jimmy Wales:

For us, the biggest thing is neutrality. We have to really double down in this environment on trying to be as neutral as possible, which means in most cases, the simple way to understand that is Wikipedia shouldn't take a side on a controversial issue. It should describe all the reasonable sides fairly and say, this is the debate. This is what's going on. These are the ground facts that everyone agrees on. Here's the disputed bits, and so on and so forth.

If we don't do that, then obviously people would be right to say, oh, I think I'm only hearing half the story. I didn't see any of the criticisms that I've read elsewhere or the praise that I've read elsewhere. So that's obviously hard to do it well. It requires a lot of discourse, dialogue, a lot of people chewing on things, people working in good faith to try to get it right.

Dana Taylor:

And can you give me an example of a particularly contentious issue?

Jimmy Wales:

Well, I mean, they're all around us, I would say. But when we think historically, it's actually sort of funny. The biggest issues that have been difficult within the Wikipedia world aren't the big ones you might think they're having to do with really obscure. Editorial matters. The names of rivers in Poland created a huge fight many years ago. But by and large, because our community does accept the concept of neutrality, it isn't that hard on a controversial issue to just say, okay, well, here's what a kind and thoughtful Catholic priest might say on abortion. And the kind and thoughtful Planned Parenthood activist might say, and the Catholic Church said this, and the Pope said that, and critics responded thus. And you can describe an issue in a way that people on both sides can say, yeah, that's fair. That's a fair description of the issue. And by coming here, I learned more about the different sides of what's going on.

But it does take people of goodwill. It takes a lot of thoughtfulness and good faith, and if people come to Wikipedia thinking it's a place to come and have culture wars, I think you're going to find it very uncomfortable. We're just not that interested in culture wars. We're just interested in trying to document things.

Dana Taylor:

Texas Senator Ted Cruz has accused Wikipedia of ideological bias. He directly goes after which media sources are deemed reliable on the platform. I want you to tell me about the criticism of Wikipedia article. What you learned from it, what the senator might learn from it and whether you believe it's enough to address questions about bias.

Jimmy Wales:

With all due respect, I think the senator is just mistaken about how Wikipedia works and how the sources are chosen and what are the standards that we use. They're not ideologically based at all. Sometimes people say, well, Wikipedia won't accept any conservative sources. And I'm like, well, if you think the Wall Street Journal is a left-wing rag, then maybe I don't know how to explain this to you.

But in general, I think what we have to do when we get that kind of criticism is not just ignore it or laugh it off or pretend there's no problem. But rather to just dig in and go, okay, let's really look at this. Which source did you mean and why do you think we should use it, and how do we think about that? And we should have a big discussion in the community. And that's the way we approach things. It's always about intellectually being responsible and thoughtful, and you don't sort of ban a news source because you don't like it. That's a completely ridiculous thing to do. Instead, you say it's really old-fashioned. Are the headlines inflammatory? Is the content fair? Do they issue corrections if they get something wrong? All those kinds of classic, old school journalistic traditions actually really do matter.

Dana Taylor:

In the intro of your book, you mention one of the lowest points in the rise of Wikipedia, and it's a story tied to USA TODAY. What happened there and how did it shape your decision-making while growing Wikipedia?

Jimmy Wales:

Yeah. So we had an unfortunate error in Wikipedia in which we said that John Seigenthaler Jr. had been briefly suspected of having something to do with the Kennedy assassinations, which was completely false, and he was a friend of the Kennedy family. He got in touch and we took it down within 10 minutes, and it turned out not many people had seen it. I mean, I checked the logs myself. This is the olden days.

But what we realized then is like, oh, wow. We thought of ourselves before then as we're just this little internet project and we're trying to write an encyclopedia, but we realized actually people are reading this and it's actually getting very popular. So we instituted a policy for biographies that anything negative in a biography should have a source, a good quality source, or it should be removed first and then talked about.

Before that the practice was more like, oh, I don't see a source for this. And you go to the talk page and you discuss, oh, do we have a source for this? No, no, no. Take it out. It's a negative statement about a living person. That's not okay to have and negative, that's quite broad. It doesn't mean it's necessarily libel. It just means it's not a good thing. And so you need to be really careful.

And so we've always had this idea that for biographies in particular, we need to have a really strong respect for human dignity. You don't say bad things about a person unless you've got really good quality sources that have analyzed the issue. Because you can't avoid not ever saying anything negative about someone because lots of negative things have happened in the world, but you can be responsible about your sourcing.

Dana Taylor:

Of the seven rules of trust, I probably spent the most time thinking about how admitting mistakes builds trust. It resonated with me because not doing so wastes so much time. Do you have a favorite of the seven?

Jimmy Wales:

That's a big one. I think that and purpose, have a clear purpose. But on that admitting one, when we think about AI models, I use AI models all the time. I'm fascinated by the technology, and I'm a programmer, but not a very good one. And one of the biggest problems is ChatGPT, it gets something wrong and then I query it, and it very often won't acknowledge that it got something wrong. It sort of says, oh, you must be using a different version of the software. I'm like, I'm pretty sure I'm not.

So that kind of thing I do think you have to sort of really think about what do you expect from other people in your life? People make mistakes, of course. Do they apologize? Do they try and make it better? Those are all the things that we do interpersonally to build trust, and it's the things that we have to do in organizations, in journalism, in politics. Nobody's going to be permanently angry because you made a mistake. They will be permanently angry if you're hypocritical and you're not really owning up to things that could be better.

Dana Taylor:

When you look back on Wikipedia now, this book, what do you hope people will understand about trust?

Jimmy Wales:

One of the things that I think people should understand about trust is how much we need to value it. That when we live in a world where trust has declined substantially, it's leading to all kinds of really quite ugly side effects, ranging from the rise of authoritarian leaders who promise to fix things, and maybe they're not even being honest about what's broken or not. And when we have a rise in political violence because people feel like the other side is so horrible that you can't even talk to them, there's no room left for discussion. Wow, you end up in a really, really dark place and you have to say, okay, right. You and I, we disagree on some ideas. We disagree on some policies, but I trust that you are a decent human being and that maybe if we have a dialogue, we can either find a compromise or I can show you where you're mistaken or you can show me where I'm mistaken.

And that building of trust, there's a lot of evidence to say societies that can do that are more prosperous, they're more successful in lots of different ways, and we just don't want to slip into savagery and sort of violence.

Dana Taylor:

And finally, your book has now been printed and bound, but if you were to add an eighth rule of trust, what might it be?

Jimmy Wales:

Well, it was interesting. I'm not sure about it. There is a sort of a hidden eighth rule because we sort of have a last shepherd that says and you have to actually do all these things. They're not just rules to write down on a sheet of paper on the wall in your business. They're like things you actually have to do. And I do think that's quite important.

Yuval Harari gave us a blurb and he read the book and he loved it, but he said in his email to me, he said, "Jimmy, I think you need to add one more chapter about what do you do when you really can't trust someone? How do you deal with that? What are some of the steps you should take?" So I'm thinking about that. But yeah, that's an interesting one.

Dana Taylor:

That's the next book then. Jimmy Wales is the founder of Wikipedia. His new book, The Seven Rules of Trust is out now. Thank you so much for joining me on The Excerpt.

Jimmy Wales:

Thank you. This was fun.

Dana Taylor:

Thanks to our senior producer, Kaely Monahan for production assistance, our executive producer's Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to [email protected]. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. I'll be back Monday morning with another episode of USA TODAY's The Excerpt.