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

“Yeah, this is exactly what I think this is where the Wikipedia neutral point of view is and should be an ideal and obviously every article and everything you know me now and you know how I am about these things. But ideally it's to say look we're happy to show you all the perspectives. This is Planned Parenthood's view and this is Catholic Church view and we're going to explain that and we're going to try to be thoughtful and put in the best arguments from all sides because I trust you. Like you read that and you're going to be more educated and you're going to begin to make a decision. I mean, I can just talk in the UK. Government, da da da. When we found out in the UK that very high-level government officials were not following the rules they had put on everyone else.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fine, but they were also statements of masks, they're not effective and they won't help you. And then the complete about face to you're ridiculous if you're not wearing them. You know, it's just like, no, like that about face just lost people from day one”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's interesting because, as I say, I live in the UK and I think all these things are a little less politicised there. And I haven't played close enough attention to Fauci to have a really strong view. I'm sure I would disagree with some things. I definitely, you know, I remember hearing at the beginning of the pandemic as I'm unwrapping my Amazon package with the masks I bought because I heard there's a pandemic and I just was like, I want some in 95 mask, please. And they were saying, don't buy masks. And the motivation was because they didn't want there to be shortages in hospitals.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And to go, oh, right, these are scientists we should actually take seriously and listen to, and they're not politicized. And it's like, okay, and if you put out statements, I don't know if the CDC did, but health organization, whoever, that are provably false and also provably, you kind of knew they were false, but you did it to scare people because you wanted them to do the right thing. It's like, no, you know what? That's not going to work in the long run. Like you're going to lose people. And now you've got a bigger problem, which is a lack of trust in science, a lack of trust in authorities who are, you know, by and large, they're like quite boring government bureaucrat scientists who just are trying to help the world.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The response to the pandemic? Well, I think in many cases, and this goes back to my topic of trust. So there were definitely cases of public officials, public organizations where I felt like they lost the trust of the public because they didn't trust the public. And so the idea is we really need people to take this seriously and take actions. Therefore, we're going to put out some overblown claims because it's going to scare people into behaving correctly. You know what? That might work for a little while, but it doesn't work in the long run because suddenly people go from a default stance of the Center for Disease Control very well respected scientific organization sort of, I don't know, they've got fault in Atlanta with the last vial of smallpox or whatever it is that people think about them.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's actually important to say, like, whatever the Wikimedia Foundation thinks. Has no impact on what's in Wikipedia. So it's more about saying to them, right, we understand you're the World Health Organization or you're whoever. And part of your job is to sort of public health is about communications. You want to understand the world. So it's more about oh, well, let's explain how Wikipedia works.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A call from a government agency and say, yeah, why don't you just fuck off? You're the government. But it would also be irresponsible to go, oh dear, government agents are not happy. Let's fix Wikipedia so that. FBI loves this.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're going to have that conversation, right? We're happy to say here's, you know, if they say, how do you know that Wikipedia is not going to be pushing some crazy anti-vax narrative? First, I mean, I think it's somewhat inappropriate for a government to be asking pointed questions in a way that implies possible penalties. I'm not sure that ever happened because we would just go, I don't know, the Chinese blocked us and so it goes, right? We're not going to cave in to any kind of government pressure. But whatever the appropriateness of what they were doing, I think there is a role for government in just saying let's understand the information ecosystem. Let's think about the problem of misinformation, disinformation in society, particularly around election security, all these kinds of things. So, you know, I think it would be irresponsible of us to get”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You could be the government, could be the Pope. I don't care who they are. It's like, oh, okay, well, our responsibility as Wikipedia is to go, oh, hold on, let's check. Is that right or wrong? Is there something that we've got wrong in Wikipedia? Not because you're threatening to block us, but because we want Wikipedia to be correct. So we do have these dialogues with people. And, you know, a big part of what was going on with... You might call it pressure on social media companies or dialogue with depending on, as we talked earlier, grapple with the language, depending on what your view is. In our case, it was really just about, oh, okay, right, they want to have a dialogue about COVID information, misinformation. We're this enormous source of information which the world depends on.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What we did do, and this is what I've done, I've been to China and met with the Minister of Propaganda. We've had discussions with governments all around the world, not because we want to do their bidding, but because we don't want to do their bidding, but we also don't want to be blocked. And we think actually having these conversations are really important. Now, there's no threat of being blocked in the US. Like that's just never going to happen. There is the First Amendment. But in other countries around the world, it's like, okay. What are you upset about? Let's have the conversation. Like, let's understand and let's have a dialogue about it so that you can understand where we come from and what we're doing and why. And then, you know, sometimes it's like, gee, like if somebody complains that something's bad in Wikipedia, whoever they are, don't care who they are. Could be...”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Received zero requests of any kind from the FBI or any of the other government agencies for any changes to content in Wikipedia. And had we received those requests at the level of the Wikimedia Foundation, we would have said, it's not our, like we can't do anything because Wikipedia is written by the community. And so the Wikimedia Foundation can't change the content of Wikipedia without causing, I mean, God, that would be a massive controversy. You can't even imagine.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If Elon said, actually, I've got 100 staff members on the ground in such and such a country. And if we don't comply, somebody's going to get arrested and it could be quite serious. Okay, that's a tough one, right? That's actually really hard. But yeah, no, and then the FBI one, no, no, like the criticism I saw, I kind of prepared for this because I saw people responding to your request for questions and I was like, Somebody's like, oh, well, don't you think it was really bad that you? And I actually reached out to Stefan. Can you just make sure I've got my facts right? And the answer is we...”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we're super hardcore on this. We've never bowed down to government pressure anywhere in the world, and we never will. And 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 going to lose Wikipedia. And that's been very successful for us as a strategy because governments know they can't just casually threaten to block Wikipedia or block us for two days and we're going to cave in immediately to get back into the market. And that's what a lot of companies have done. And I don't think that's good. We can go one level deeper and say, I'm actually quite sympathetic. Like if you have staff members in a certain country and they are at physical risk, you've got to put that into your equation. So I understand that. Like if”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“YouTube video, yeah, yeah, yeah. It sounds really. Enticing and intriguing and surprising to most people because they're like, I'm reading Wikipedia. It doesn't seem like a crackpot leftist website. It seems pretty kind of dull, really, in its own geeky way. So that makes a good story. Oh, am I being misled because there's a shadowy cabal of Jimmy”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And close the debate, and that was it. That was the whole thing that happened. And so nobody proposed suppressing the information. Nobody supposed it wasn't important. It was just like editorially boring internal questions. So sometimes people read stuff like that and they're like, oh, you see, look at these leftists, they're trying to suppress the truth again. It's like, well, slow down a second and come and look. Literally, it's not what happened.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there was an article called The Twitter Files, which is about these files that were released once Elon took control of Twitter and he released internal documents. And what happened was somebody nominated it for deletion, but even the nomination said, this is mainly about the Hunter Biden laptop controversy. Shouldn't this information be there instead? So anyone can like it takes exactly one human being anywhere on the planet to propose something for deletion. And that triggers a process where people discuss it, which within a few hours, it was what we call snowball closed, i.e. this doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of passing. So an admin goes, yeah, wrong.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so the article has always had the definition of two quarters. And the only thing that really changed was moving that from the lead from the top paragraph to further down. And then news stories appeared saying, Wikipedia has changed the definition of recession. And then we got a huge rush of trolls coming in. So the article was temporarily protected. I think only semi-protected. And people were told, go to the talk page to discuss. So it was a dust up that was, you know, when you look at it as a Wikipedia and you're like, oh, like this is a really routine kind of editorial debate. Another example, which unfortunately our friend Elon fell for, I would say, is the Twitter files.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Happened was one editor thought the article needed restructuring. So the article always said, so the traditional kind of loose definition of recession is two quarters of negative growth. But there's always been within economics, within important agencies in different countries around the world, a lot of nuance around that. And there's other factors that go into it and so forth. And it's just a interesting, complicated topic.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can give a really good example, which is there was this sort of dust up about the definition of recession in Wikipedia. So the accusation was, and accusation was often quite ridiculous and extreme, which is under pressure from the Biden administration, Wikipedia changed the definition of recession to make Biden look good. Or we did it not under pressure, but because we're a bunch of lunatic leftists and so on. And then, you know, when I see something like that in the press, I'm like, oh dear, like what's happened here? How do we do that? Because I always just accept things for five seconds first. And then I go and I look and I'm like, you know what? That's literally completely not what happened”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think they would say, I don't even understand why you would say that. We have to sort of grapple with minority viewpoints in science and politics and so on. But this is one of the reasons why there is no magic simple answer to all these things. It's really... Contextual. It's case by case. It's like, you know, you've got to really say, okay, what is the context here? How do you do it? And you've always got to be open to correction and to change. Of challenge and always be sort of serious about that.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, I mean, for sure. To take this area of discussion seriously is to say, yeah, you know what? Actually, that is a big part of what Wikipedians spend their time grappling with, is to say, you know, how do we figure out whether a less popular view is pseudoscience? Is it just a less popular view that's gaining acceptance in the mainstream? Is it fringe versus crackpot, et cetera, et cetera? And that debate is what you've got to do. There's no choice about having that debate, of grappling with something. And I think we do. And I think that's really important. And I think if anybody said to the Wikipedia community, gee, you should stop sort of covering minority viewpoints on this issue.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me just straight up disagree, like go and read any Wikipedia entry on a controversial topic. And what you'll see is a really diligent effort to explain all the relevant sides. So yeah, just disagree.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I would say unimportant, not that interesting. I mean, one of the things that people are sometimes surprised to hear me say is I actually think Larry Sanger doesn't get enough credit for his early work in Wikipedia, even though I think co-founder is not the right title for that. So, you know, like he had a lot of impact and a lot of great work. And I disagree about a lot of things since and all that, and that's fine. So, yeah, no, to me, that's like, It's one of these things that the media love a falling out story. So they want to make a big deal out of it. And I'm just like, Yeah, no”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Filtered through that and sort of tried to knock off the rough edges. Yeah. No, it's very, I think that's exactly right. And I think, you know, I think that kind of grounding is, I think they're working really hard on it. I think that's really important. And that actually, so if you ask me to step back and be like very business-like about our business model and where's it going to go for us, and are we going to lose half our donations because everybody's just going to stop coming to Wikipedia and go to chat GPT, I think grounding will help a lot because frankly, most questions people have, if they provide proper links, we're going to be at the top of that just like we are in Google. So we're still going to get tons of recognition and tons of traffic just from even if it's just the moral properness of saying, here's my source. So I think we're going to be all right in that.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Including links to the articles you might want to read next. And that's just a step forward. Like that's just using a new type of technology to make the extraction of information from this body of text into my brain faster and easier. So I think that's kind of cool.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The kind of thing you think, oh, I might just Google for that, I might start looking in Wikipedia. I don't know. And so what he did is he asked ChatGPT, what are some Wikipedia entries that might answer this? Then he grabbed those Wikipedia entries, said here's some Wikipedia entries, answer this question based only on the information in this. And he had pretty good results. And it kind of prevented the making stuff up. It's just he hacked together a weekend, but what it made me think about was, OK, so now we've got this huge body of knowledge that in many cases you're like, oh, I'm really, I want to know about Queen Victoria. I'm just going to go read the Wikipedia entry and it's going to take me through her life and so forth. But other times you've got a specific question and maybe we could have a better search experience where you can come to Wikipedia, ask your specific question, get your specific answer that's from Wikipedia.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we're also at a great demo, literally just hacked together over a weekend by our head of machine learning. He did this little thing to say you could ask any question. And he was just knocking it together. So he used the OpenAI's API just to make a demo, ask a question, why do ducks fly south for winter”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, no, that's completely fine. I mean, part of it is our ethos has always been here's our gift of the world make something. So if the knowledge is more accessible to people, even if they're not coming through us, that's fine. Now, obviously, we do have certain business model concerns, right? Like, and we've talked where we've had more conversation about this. This whole GPT thing is new, things like if you ask Alexa, you know, what is the Eiffel Tower? And she reads you the first two sentences from Wikipedia and doesn't say it's from Wikipedia. And they've recently started citing Wikipedia, then we worry like, oh, if people don't know they're getting the knowledge from us, are they going to donate money? Or they just think, oh, what's Wikipedia for? I can just ask Alexa. It's like, well, Alexa only knows anything because she read Wikipedia. So we do think about that, but it doesn't bother me in the sense of like, oh, I want people to always come to Wikipedia first.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That out. And so we are similar in that regard. Like, obviously, all the things we've talked about, like ChatGPT makes stuff up and it makes up references. So our community has already put into place some policies about it. But roughly speaking, there's always more nuance. But roughly speaking, it's sort of like you, the human, are responsible for what you put into Wikipedia. So if you use ChatGPT, you better check it. Because there's a lot of great use cases of, you know, like, oh, well, I'm not a native speaker. of German by Kynem and pretty good. I'm not talking about myself a hypothetical me that's pretty good. And I kind of just want to run my edit through ChatGPT in German to go make sure my grammar's okay. That's actually cool.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it just works better than sifting through threads. And I kind of feel bad about that because I do love Stack Overflow and their community. I mean, I'm assuming I haven't read anything in the news about it. I'm assuming they are keenly aware of this and they're thinking about how can we sort of use this chunk of knowledge that we've got here and provide a new type of interface where you can query it with a question and actually get an answer that's based on the answers that we've had. I don't know.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, that's right. And I also like Stack Overall. Although I wonder what you think of this, so I only program for fun as a hobby and I don't have enough time to do it, but I do. And I'm not very good at it. So therefore, I end up on Stack Overflow quite a lot trying to figure out what's gone wrong. And I have really transitioned to using ChatGPT. Much more for that because I can often find the answer clearly explained.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wikipedia, there's no Wikipedia page that, yeah, I gave her a media contributor of the year award this year because she's so great. Depth of Wikipedia is so fun.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But also, I wonder for some people if they just don't feel like guilty and then think, well, I shouldn't bother them so much. I don't know. It's a good question. I don't know the answer.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Giving a lot here. Well, you know The Guardian newspaper has a similar model which is they have ads but they also there's no paywall but they just encourage people to donate and they do that like I've sometimes seen a banner saying this is your 134th article you've read this year would you like to donate? And I think that's I think it's effective. I mean they're testing”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Influence starts to creep in Like the best funding for Wikipedia is the small donors. We also have major donors, right? We have high net worth people who donate, but we always are very careful about that sort of thing to say, wow, that's really great and really important. But we can't let that become influence because that would just be really quite, quite, yeah, not good for Wikipedia.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know what my life would suck without Wikipedia. I use it constantly and whatever I should chip in. Like it just seems like the right thing to do. And that, and there's many variants on that, obviously. And that's really, it works. And like people are like, oh yeah, like Wikipedia, I love Wikipedia. And I shouldn't. And so sometimes people say. Why are you always begging for money on the website? And it's not that often, it's not that much, but it does happen. They're like, why don't you just get Google and Facebook and Microsoft? Why don't they pay for it? And I'm like, I don't think that's really the right answer.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fundraising campaigns, and we've tested a lot of different messaging and so forth. What we used to think, you know, I remember one year we really went heavy with. We have a great ambitions to, you know, the idea of Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia for every single person on the planet. So what about the languages of sub-Saharan Africa? So I thought, okay, we're trying to raise money. We need to talk about that because it's really important and near and dear to my heart. Instinctively knowing nothing about charity fundraising, you see it all around. It's like, oh, charities always mention the poor people they're helping. So let's talk about that. Didn't really work as well. The pitch that this is very vague and very sort of broad, but the pitch that works better than any other in general is a fairness pitch of like you use it all the time. You should probably chip in. And most people are like, yeah.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had three servers database servers and two front end servers, and they were all the same size or whatever. And two of them crashed. They broke. Like, I don't even know, remember now, like the hard drive. It's Christmas Day. So I scrambled on Christmas Day to sort of go onto the database server, which fortunately survived, and have it become a front-end server as well. And the site was really slow, and it wasn't working very well. And I was like, okay, it's time. We need to do a fundraiser. And so I was hoping to raise $20,000 in a month's time, but we raised nearly $30,000 within two, three weeks' time. So that was the first proof point of like, oh, like we put a banner up and people will donate. Like we just explained we need the money and people are like already, we were very small back then. And people were like, oh, yeah, like I love this. I want to contribute. Then over the years, we've become more sophisticated.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Targeting and all that. So you got a lot of. Banners punch the monkey ads and all that kind of nonsense. And so, you know, but there was no guarantee. There was no, it was not really clear how could we fund this, you know, like it was pretty cheap. It still is quite cheap compared to most, you know, we don't have 100,000 employees and all of that. But would we be able to raise money through donations? And so I remember the first time that we did really did a donation campaign was on a Christmas day in 2003, I think it was, there was”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To say, actually, we're going to use our algorithm to drive you to stay on the website longer. We're going to use the algorithm to drive you to, you know, it's like, you're reading about Queen Victoria. There's nothing to sell you when you're reading about Queen Victoria. Let's move you on to Las Vegas because actually the ad revenue around hotels in Las Vegas is quite good. So we don't have that sort of, there's no incentive for the organization to go, oh, let's move people around to things that have better ad revenue. Instead, it's just like, oh, well, what's most interesting to the community just to make those links. So that decision just seemed obvious to me. But as I say, it was less of a business decision and more of an aesthetic. It's like, oh, this is how I like Wikipedia. It doesn't have ads. Don't really want these early days, a lot of the ads, that was well before the era of really quality ads.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Undermines trust, right? But also things like We don't have clickbait headlines in Wikipedia. You've never seen Wikipedia entries with all this kind of listicles, you know, sort of the 10 funniest cat pictures number seven make you cry. None of that kind of stuff because there's no incentive, no reason to do that. Also, there's no reason to have an algorithm”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we're really, really keen on community control and neutrality. But if we had an advertising-based business model, probably that would begin to erode. Even if I believe in it very strongly, organizations tend to follow the money in the DNA in the long run. And so things like, I mean, it's easy to think about some of the immediate problems. So if you go to read about... I don't know Nissan car company. And if you saw an ad for the new Nissan at the top of the page, you might be like, did they pay for this? Or do the advertisers have influence over the content? Because you kind of wonder about that for all kinds of media.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we have millions of donors every year, but it's like a small percentage of people. I would say in the early days, a big part of it was aesthetic almost. Much as anything else, it was just like, I just think I don't really want ads on Wikipedia. Like, I just think it would be, there's a lot of reasons why it might not be good. And even back then, I didn't think as much as I have since about a business model can tend to drive you in a certain place. And really thinking that through in advance is really important because you might say.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One behind that, yeah, so I think most people know this, but we're a charity, so in the US, you know, registered as a charity. And we don't have any ads on the site. And the vast majority of the money is from donations, but the vast majority from small donors, so people giving 25 bucks or whatever.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if he sees the word boy BOY in an article, he would look in the context and see is this a nautical reference, and if it was, he didn't auto correct, he just would flag it up to himself to go, oh, check this one out. And that's not a great example, but he had thousands of examples. I was like, that's amazing. I would have never thought to do that. And I'm glad that somebody did it. And that's also part of the openness of the system and also, I think, being a charity, being this idea of actually this is a gift to the world that makes someone go, oh, oh, well, I'll put my hand up. I see a little piece of things that I can make better because I'm a good programmer and I can write this script to do this thing. And I'll find it fun. Amazing”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, he treasured. I met a guy many years ago. Lovely, really sweet guy. And he was running a bot on English Wikipedia that I thought, wow, that's actually super clever. And what he had done is his bot was like spell checking. But rather than simple spell checking, what he had done is create a database of words that are commonly mistaken for other words They're spelled wrong, so I can't even give an example. And so the word is people often spell it wrong, but no spell checker catches it because it is another word. And so what he did is he wrote a bot that looks for these words and then checks the sentence around it for certain keywords. So in some context, this isn't correct, but buoy and boy. People sometimes type BOI when they mean BOUY.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like this guy and a group, a community around him. And basically something weird happened and it broke something because he was on vacation. And I'm just like, isn't that wild, right? That you would think, I mean, first of all, most people never even think about like how do computers know about time zones. Well, they know because they just use this file, which tells all the time zones and which dates they change and all of that. But there's this one guy and he doesn't get paid for it. It's just he's like, you know, with all the billions of people on the planet, he sort of put his hand up and goes, yo, I'll take care of the time zones.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But if you've never heard of this or looked into it, you'll enjoy it. I read something recently that I didn't even know about. The fundamental time zones, and they change from time to time, sometimes a country will pass daylight savings or move it by a week. Whatever. There's a file that's on all sort of Unix-based computers and basically all computers end up using this file. It's the official time zone file, but why is it official? It's just this one guy.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there are a bunch of very sweet geeky Wikipedians, and as we left the table, I said to her, It's really like, I still find this kind of sense of amazement. Like we just had dinner with some of the most powerful people in English language media because they're the people who are like the final court of appeal in English Wikipedia. And thank goodness they're not media moguls, right? They're just a bunch of geeks who are just like Well liked in the community because they're kind and they're thoughtful and they really sort of think about things. I was like, this is great. Love Wikip”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I once was at Wikimania as our annual conference and people come from all around the world, like really active volunteers. I was at the dinner. We were in Egypt at Wikimania in Alexandria, at the sort of closing dinner or whatever. And a friend of mine came and sat at the table and she's sort of been in the movement more broadly Creative Commons. She's not really a Wikipedian. She'd come to the conference because she's into Creative Commons and all that. We have dinner, and it just turned out I sat down at the table with most of the members of the English language arbitration committee.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source