YouSaid · the spoken record

Jimmy Wales

lines on the record: 234
first: 2023-06-18
most recent: 2023-06-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“One of my unsuccessful arguments with the Chinese government is by blocking Wikipedia, right? You aren't just stopping people in China from reading Chinese Wikipedia and other language versions of Wikipedia. You're also preventing the Chinese people from telling their story. So is there a small festival in a small town in China like Buekor? I don't know. But by the way, the people who live in that village, that small town of 50,000, they can't put that in Wikipedia and get it translated into other places. They can't share their culture and their knowledge. And I think for China, this should be a somewhat influential argument because China does feel misunderstood in the world. And it's like, okay, well, there's one way. If you want to help people understand, put it in Wikipedia. That's what people go to when they want to understand.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And suddenly it's like, wow, like music, street music from wherever in the world can suddenly become accessible to us all in new ways. It's so cool.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're already seeing some really great pieces of this. So like Korean soap operas, really popular, not with me, but with people. And the ability to just, you know, imagine taking a very famous, very popular, very well-known Korean drama. And now, I mean, and I literally mean now, we're just about there technologically where we use a machine to redub it in English. in an automated way, including digitally editing the faces so it doesn't look dubbed. And so suddenly you say, oh, wow, like here's a piece of, you know, it's the Korean equivalent of maybe it's friends as a comedy or maybe it's succession just to be very contemporary. It's something that really impacted a lot of people and they really loved it and we have literally no idea what it's about.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“triggered me to say something really interesting which is when we talked earlier about translating and using machines to translate we mostly talked about small languages and translating into English but I always like to tell this story of something inconsequential really but there's I was in Norway, in Bergen, Norway where every year they've got this annual festival called Bu ⁇ ps which is young groups drumming and they have a drumming competition. It's the 17 sectors of the city and they've been doing it for a couple hundred years or whatever. They wrote about it in the three languages of Norway and then from there it was translated into English into German etc etc and so what I love about that story is what it reminds me is like this machine translation goes both ways and like when you talk about the richness and broadness of humankind”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Therefore, we should really think about sustainability. And I mean, One million year sustainability. And we don't have all the answers. We have nothing close to the answers. I'm actually excited about AI in this regard while also bracketing. Yeah, I understand there's also risks and people are terrified of AI. But I actually think it is quite interesting this moment in time that we may have in the next 50 years to really, really solve some really long-term human problems, for example, in health. the progress that's being made in cancer treatment because we are able to at scale model molecules and genetics and things like this. It gets huge. It's really exciting. If we can hang on for a little while and certain problems that seem completely intractable today like climate change may end up being actually not that hard.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everything he has to say because I think that's not a meaning that can motivate most people in their own lives. It's like, okay, great, you know, like the distances of space are absolutely enormous. So I don't know. Should we build generationships to start flying places? Well, I can't do that and I'm not even if I could, even if I'm Elon Musk and I could devote all my wealth to building, I'll be dead on the ship on the way. So is that really meaning? But I think it's really interesting to think about. And reading his little book is quite a short little book. Reading his book, it did make me think about, wow, like this is big. Like this is not what you think about in your day-to-day life. It's like, where is the human species going to be in 10 million years? And it does make you sort of turn back to Earth and say, gee, let's not destroy the planet. We're stuck here for at least a while.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I think there's no external answer to that. I think it's internal. I think we decide what meaning we will have in our lives and what we're going to do with ourselves. And so when I think, you know, if we're talking about thousand years, millions of years, Yuri Milner wrote a book. He's a big internet investor guy. He wrote a book advocating quite strongly for humans exploring the universe and getting off the planet. And he funds projects to using lasers to send little cameras and interesting stuff. And he talks a lot in the book about meaning. It's like his view is that the purpose of the human species is to broadly survive and get off the planet. Well, I don't agree with that.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“go and meet the Chinese propaganda minister. Oh, okay, that's super interesting. Like, yeah, Jimmy, you know, like, here's the situation. Like, you can go to this country and while you're there, the president has asked to see you. It's like, God, that's super interesting. Jimmy, you're going to this place and there's a local Wikipedian who said, do you want to stay with me and my family? And I'm like, yeah, like that's really cool. Like I would like to do that. That's really interesting. Don't do that all the time, but I've done it and it's great. So for me, that's arranging your life so that You have interesting experiences, it's just great.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rich as Elon Musk. And so that, you know, like realistically, you can set a standard of success, even in a really narrow sense, which I don't recommend, of thinking about your financial success. It's like if you measure your financial success by thinking about billionaires, that's heavy. Like that's probably not good. I don't recommend it. Whereas I personally, you know, like for me, when people, when journalists say, oh, how does it feel to not be a billionaire? I usually say, I don't know, how does it feel to you? Because they're not. But also, I'm like, I live in London. The number of bankers that no one's ever heard of who live in London who make far more money than I ever will is quite a large number. And I wouldn't trade my life for theirs at all, right? Because mine is so interesting. Like, oh, right. Jimmy, we need you.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It does, and that is also advice to young people. One of the things I would say, like when we have our mental models of success as an entrepreneur, for example, and your examples in your mind are Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, so people who at a very young age had one really great idea that just went straight to the moon and became one of the richest people in the world. That is really unusual, like really, really rare. And for most entrepreneurs, that is not the life path you're going to take. You're going to fail. You're going to reboot. You're going to learn from what you failed at. You're going to try something different. And that is really important because if your standard of success is, well, I feel sad because I'm not as rich as Elon Musk. It's like, well, so should almost everyone, possibly everyone except Elon Musk is not as...”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Remember the numbers. He bought it for 800 million, and it was very profitable through its decline. And he actually made his money back and more. So it wasn't like from a financial point of view, it was a bad investment in the sense of you could have been Facebook, but on sort of more mundane metrics, it's like, actually, it worked out okay for you all.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Well Yeah, I mean, I always like to give an example of my space because I just think it's an amusing story. So MySpace was poised, I would say, to be Facebook, right? It was huge. It was viral. It was lots of things kind of foreshadowed a bit of maybe even TikTok because it was like a lot of entertainment content casual. And then Rupert Murdoch bought it and it collapsed within a few years. And part of that, I think, was because they were really, really heavy on ads and less heavy on the customer experience. So I remember to accept a friend request was like three clicks where you saw three ads. And on Facebook, you accept a friend request, you didn't even leave the page. It just like that just accepted. But what is interesting, so I used to give this example of like, yeah, well, Rupert Murdoch really screwed that one up and in a sense, maybe he did. But somebody said, you know what? Actually, he bought it for, and I don't.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But also, I think for me, that always gives me a framework of like, okay, let's, okay, here's a problem. Do we need to change direction or do we need to kind of power through it? And just knowing those are the choices, and not always the only choices, but those are choices. I think can be helpful to say, okay, am I... Am I checking it out? Like, because I'm having a little bump and I'm feeling emotional, and I'm just going to give up too soon. Okay. Ask yourself that question. And also it's like, am I being pig-headed and trying to do something that actually doesn't make sense? Okay, ask yourself that question too. Even though they're contradictory questions, sometimes it'll be one, sometimes it'll be the other. And you got to really think it through.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be persistent, right? There'll be moments when it's not working out and you can't just give up too easily. You've got to persist through some hard times, maybe two servers crash on a Sunday and you've got to sort of scramble to figure it out, but persist through that. And then also be prepared to pivot. That's a newer word, new for me. But when I pivoted from Newpedia to Wikipedia, it's like, this isn't working. I've got to completely change. So be willing to completely change direction when something's not working. Now, the problem with these two wonderful pieces of advice is which situation am I in today? Right. Is this a moment when I need to just power through and persist because I'm going to find a way to make this work? Or is this a moment where I need to go, actually, this is totally not working and I need to change direction?”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, great. If you want to be successful, do something you're really passionate about rather than some kind of cold calculation of what can make you the most money. Because if you go and try to do something and you're like, I'm not that interested, but I'm going to make a lot of money doing it. You're probably not going to be that good at it. And so that is a big piece of it. I also like, you know, so for startups, I give this advice. And this is a career startup. Any kind of like young person just starting out is like.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And people aren't going to go, yeah, how do we know that could be a deep fake? Like you could have faked that because people are like, well. No, like you're a well known podcaster and you do interview interesting people. And yeah, you wouldn't think that. So your brand becomes really important. Whereas if suddenly, and I've seen this already, I've seen sort of video with subtitles in English. And apparently the Ukrainian was the same. And Zelensky saying something really outrageous. And I'm like, yeah, I don't believe that. Like, I don't think he said that in a meeting with, you know, whatever. I think that's Russian propaganda or probably just trolls. Yeah.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think people, you know, like if you come and you say, right, here's my tape, you wouldn't hand out a tape, like I just gestured to you as if I'm handing you a cassette tape. But if you put it into your podcast, here's my interview with Zelensky.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So if something happens and eyewitness it and I write about it, people are going to go, well, Jimmy Wells said it, that's just like if a New York Times reporter said it, I'm going to tend to think he didn't just make it up. Truth is, nothing interesting ever happens around me. I don't go to war zones. I don't go to big press conferences. I don't interview Putin and Zelensky, right? So to an extent, yes. Whereas I do think for other people, those traditional models of credibility are really, really important. And then there is this sort of citizen journalism. I don't know if you think of what you do as journalism. I kind of think it is, but you do interviews. You do long-form interviews.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I agree, but the one thing I've said in the past, and this depends on who that person is and what they're doing, but it's like, I think my credibility, my general credibility in the world should be the equal of a New York Times reporter.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But now we can have much more specifically constructed, plausible looking photos that if I just see them circulating on Twitter, I'm going to go, just don't know, not sure. Like, I can make that in five minutes.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, brilliant. So I think people will care about the provenance of a photo. And if you show me a photo and you say, yeah, this photo is from Fox News, even though I don't necessarily think that's the highest, but I'm like, wow, it's news organization and they're going to have journalism and they're going to make sure the photo is what it purports to be. That's very different from a photo randomly circulating on Twitter. Whereas I would say 15 years ago, a photo randomly circulating on Twitter in most cases, the worst you could do, and this did happen, Battlefield, so like, oh, here's a bunch of injured children. Look what Israel's done, but actually it wasn't Israel. It was another case 10 years ago. That has happened. That has always been around.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“However, if I see a photo of the recent was the Pope wearing an expensive puffer jacket, I'm going to go, yeah, that's amazing that a fake like that could be generated, but my immediate thought is not, oh, so the Pope's dipping into the money, eh? Partly because this particular pope doesn't seem like he'd be the type.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, one of my predictions, and we'll see, you know, ask me again in five years how this panned out is that A way this will strengthen the value and importance of some traditional brands. So, if I see a news story and it's from the Wall Street Journal from The New York Times, from Fox News, I know what I'm getting and I trust it to whatever extent I might have trust or distrust on any of those. And if I see a brand new website that looks plausible, but I've never heard of it and it could be machine-generated content that may be full of errors, I think I'll be more cautious. I think I'm more interested. And we can also talk about this around photographic evidence. So obviously there will be scandals where major media organizations get fooled by fake photo.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so large language model, it feels like that to me. Like, oh, wow, this is something new and really pretty remarkable. And it's going to have some downsides. Like, you know, the negative use case. People in the area who are experts, they're giving a lot of warnings. I don't know enough to, I'm not that worried, but I'm a pathological optimist. But I do see some really low-hanging fruit bad things that can happen. So my example is How about some highly customized spam where the email that you receive isn't just like misspelled words and like trying to get through filters, but actually is a targeted email to you that knows something about you by reading your LinkedIn profile and writes a plausible email that will get through the filters. And it's like suddenly, oh, that's a new problem that's going to be interesting.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because I remember Altavista was kind of cool for a while, and then it just got more and more useless because the algorithm wasn't good. And it's like, oh, Google search. Now the internet works again.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do. I do. I mean, I think right now this sort of enormous step forward we've seen and has become public in the last year of the large language models really is something else. It's really interesting. And you and I have both talked today about the flaws and the limitations, but still it's, as someone who's been around technology for a long time, it's sort of that feeling of the first time I saw a web browser, the first time I saw the iPhone, like the first time the internet was really usable on a phone and it's like, wow, that's a step change difference. There's a few other, you know, maybe.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that hopefully we're not taking the kind of risks. And by the way, we're not taking too few risks either. That's always hard. I think the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikipedia will exist in 100 years if anybody exists in 100 years. We'll be there.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the only thing I say about 100 years is we've built the Wikimedia Foundation and we run it in a quite cautious and financially conservative and careful way. So every year we build our reserves. Every year we put aside a little bit more money. We also have the endowment fund, which we just passed $100 million. That's a completely separate fund with a separate board so that it's not just like a big fat bank account for some future profligate CEO to blow through. The foundation will have to get the approval of a second order board to be able to access that money. And that board can make other grants through the community and things like that. So the point of all that is I hope and believe that we're building in a financially stable way that we can weather various storms along the way.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Huge economically important languages, Zulu, not so much. So for those smaller languages, it was just still terrible. My understanding is it's improved dramatically and also because the new methods of training don't necessarily involve identical corpuses to try to match things up, but rather reading and understanding with tokens and large language models and then reading and understanding and then you get a much richer Anyway, apparently it's quite improved, so I think that now it is quite possible that these smaller language communities are going to say, oh, well, finally, I can put something in English and I can get out Zulu that I can, that I feel comfortable sharing with my community because it's actually good enough, or I can edit it a bit here and there. So I think that's huge. So I do think that's going to happen a lot. And that's going to accelerate, again, what will remain to most people in an invisible trend, but that's the growth in all these other.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well done. So what I used to say is like machine translation for many years wasn't much use to the community because it just wasn't good enough. As it's gotten better, it's tended to be a lot better in what we might call economically important languages. That's because the corpus that they train on and all of that. So to translate from English to Spanish, if you've tried Google Translate recently, Spanish to English is what I would do. It's pretty good. It's actually not bad. It used to be half a joke. And then for a while it was kind of like, well, you can get the gist of something. And now it's like, actually, it's pretty good. However, we've got a huge Spanish community who write in native Spanish. So they're able to use it and they find it useful, but they're writing. But if you tried to do English to Zulu where there's not that much investment, like there's loads of reasons to invest in English to Spanish because they're both...”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To face some of the things that people most people won't notice, because already they don't notice it, is the growth of Wikipedia in the languages of the developing world So, you probably don't speak Swahili, so you're probably not checking out that Swahili Wikipedia is doing very well. And it is doing very well. And I think that kind of.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. So 10 years, I would say pretty much the same. Like we're not going to have, we're not going to become TikTok, you know, with entertainment scroll-by video humor and blah, blah, blah. An encyclopedia. I think in 10 years we probably will have a lot more AI supporting tools like I've talked about and probably your search experience would be you can ask a question and get the answer rather than from our body of work.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And, you know, at fandom, my for-profit wiki company, where it's like all these communities about pop culture mainly, sort of entertainment gaming and so on, there's a lot of small communities. And so I went last year to our community connect conference and just met some of these people and like, you know, here's one of the leaders of the Star Wars wiki, which is called Wikipedia, which I think is great. And, you know, he's telling me about his community and all that. And I'm like, oh, right. I love this. So it's not the same purpose as Wikipedia of a neutral, high quality encyclopedia, but a lot of the same values are there of like, oh, people should be nice to each other. It's like when people get upset, it's like, just remember, we're working on a Star Wars wiki together. Like, there's no reason to get too outraged and just kind people.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stories to tell, but I would say growing the organization was harder than growing the community and growing the website, which is interesting.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I would say some of the hard things. I mean, there were hard moments like when two out of three servers crashed on Christmas Day, and then we needed to do a fundraiser and no idea what was going to happen. I would say as well, in that early period of time, the growth of the website and the traffic to the website was phenomenal and great. The growth of the community, and in fact, the healthy growth of the community was fine. And then the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit I set up to own and operate Wikipedia as a small organization, it had a lot of growing pains. And, you know, that was, it was like, that was the piece that's just like many companies or mini organizations that are in a fast growth. It's like, you've hired the wrong people or there's this conflict that's arisen and nobody's got experience to do this and all that. So no specific.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's hard to say. I mean. So, part of what I always say about myself is that I'm a pathological optimist. So I always think everything is fine. And so things that other people might find a struggle, I'm just like, oh, well, this is the thing we're doing today. So that's kind of about me. And it's actually aware of this about myself. So I do like to have a few pessimistic people around me to keep me a bit on balance.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Isn't that the kind of thing that makes you want to? Like it sounds implausible at first because shouldn't everybody have on average about the same number of friends as all their friends? So you really want to dig into the math of that and really think, oh, why would that be true?”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very sad about that, but I've always liked that, and I actually, the reason depths of Wikipedia amuses me so greatly is because it does highlight really interesting obscure stuff. And you're like, wow, I can't believe somebody wrote about that in Wikipedia. It's quite amusing. And sometimes there's a bit of wry humor in Wikipedia. There's always a struggle. You're not trying to be funny. But occasionally a little inside humor can be quite healthy.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's, you know, it's actually a legitimate topic. So then they went through and they meticulously referenced every word that was in there and threw out a bunch that weren't. And so it becomes this really interesting. Now, my biggest disappointment, and it's the right decision to make because there was no source, but it was a picture of a cow. There was a rope around its head. Tying on some horns onto the cow So it was kind of a funny looking picture. It looked like a bull with horns, but it's just like a normal milk cow. And below it, the caption said, according to some, cow is an inherently funny word, which is just hilarious to me, partly because, according to some, sounds a lot like Wikipedia. But there was no source, so it went away and I...”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My favorite oracle. Well, I've got an amusing answer. Which is possibly also true. There's an article in Wikipedia called Inherently Funny Words. And one of the reasons I love it is When it was created early in the history of Wikipedia, it kind of became like a dumping ground. People would just come by and write in any word that they thought sounded funny. And then it was nominated for deletion because somebody's like, this is just a dumping around. People are putting all kinds of nonsense in. And in that deletion debate, somebody came forward and said, essentially, wait a second, hold on. This is actually a legitimate concept in the theory of humor and comedy. And a lot of famous comedians and humorists have written about it.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I mean, you can imagine. That because you're looking for an article to be on the front page of Wikipedia, you want to have a bit of diversity in it. You want it to be not always something that's really popular that week. So like, I don't know, the last couple of weeks, maybe succession, the big finale of succession might lead you to think, oh, let's put succession on the front page. That's going to be popular. In other cases, you kind of want pick something super obscure and quirky because people also find that interesting and fun. So yeah, don't know, but you don't want it to be video games most of the time. That sounds quite bad.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How many of those featured articles have been video games? And if it's disproportionate, I think we should, the community should go, actually, what's gone, like, that doesn't seem quite right.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, as if it's completely. But I'm trusting. So I think that's probably his right. They probably did have the list up. No, I think that piece, the piece about”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be me, it's the foundation. I'm not that much on the front lines So, I would say that to put Hitler on the front page of Wikipedia, it is a special topic, and you would want to say, yeah, let's be really careful that it's really, really good before we do that. Because if we put it on the front page and it's got enough, that could be a problem. There's no inherent reason. Clearly, World War II. Is a very popular topic in Wikipedia. It's like turn on the history channel. It's a fascinating period of history that people are very interested in. And then on the other piece, like anarchism and Karl Marx Yeah. I mean, that's interesting. I'm surprised to hear that not more political books or topics have made it to the front page.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so here's a funny story. I woke up one morning to a bunch of journalists in Germany trying to get in touch with me because German language Wikipedia chose to have as the featured article of the day swastika. And people were going crazy about it. And some people were saying it's illegal. Has German Wikipedia been taken over by Nazi sympathizers and so on? And it turned out it's not illegal. discussing the scholastic, using the swastika as a political campaign and using in certain ways is illegal in Germany in a way that it wouldn't be in the US because of First Amendment. But in this case, it was like actually part of the point is the swastika symbol is from other cultures as well. And they just thought it was interesting. And I did joke to the community. I'm like, please don't put the swastiki on the front page without warning me because I'm going to get a lot of now would.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love that. No, I love the comparison to how many video games. And that definitely speaks to my earlier as like. You've got a lot of young geeky men who really like video games. That doesn't necessarily get you the right place in every respect. Certainly.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's also a whole range of discourse around if this were a disease that were primarily, that was primarily killing babies. I think people's emotions about it would have been very different, right or wrong, than the fact that when you really looked at the sort of death rate of getting COVID, wow, it's really dramatically different if you're late in life This was really dangerous. And if you're 23 years old, yeah, well, it's not great and long COVID's a thing and all of that. And I think some of the public communications, again, were failing to properly Contextualize it, not all of it. It's a complicated matter, but yeah”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. And I think you see some of the ramifications of this. There's always been pretty anti-science, anti-vax people. That's always been a thing, but I feel like it's bigger now simply because of that lowering of trust. So a lot of people, yeah, maybe it's like you say, a lot of people are like, yeah, I got vaccinated, but I really don't want to talk about this because it's so toxic. And that's unfortunate because I think people should say what an amazing thing. And, you know.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that generally is going to mean following the rules, but it's basically at certain moments in time, like you're not allowed to be in an outside space unless you're exercising. I'm like, I think I can sit in a park and read a book. It's going to be fine. That's your rational rule, which I would have been following just personally of like, I'm just going to do the right thing. Yeah”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I moved from, I had just become a UK citizen just a little while before the pandemic. And, you know, it's kind of emotional. You get a passport in a new country and you feel quite good. And I did my oath to the queen and they dragged the poor old lady out to tell us all to be good. And I was like, we're British and we're going to do the right things. And it's going to be tough, but we're going to, you know, so you have that kind of Dunkirk spirit moment. And you're like following the rules to a T, and then suddenly it's like, well, they're not following the rules. And so suddenly I shifted personally from I'm going to follow the rules, even if I don't completely agree with them, but I'll still follow because I think we've got all chimneys.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source