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, I mean, it's really interesting. And it feels, but it's hard to judge the sweep of history within your own lifetime. But it feels like it's gotten much worse that this idea of. Two parallel universes where people can agree on certain basic facts feels worse than it used to be. And I'm not sure if that's true or if it just feels that way, but I also am not sure what the causes are. I would lay a lot of the blame in recent years on social media algorithms which reward clickbait headlines, which reward tweets that go viral and they go viral because they're cute and clever. I mean, my most successful tweet ever by a fairly wide margin, some reporter tweeted at Elon Musk because he was complaining about Wikipedia or something. You should buy Wikipedia and I just wrote, not for sale.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I hope so. Yeah. And I think so in the main obviously, you can always find debate that went horribly wrong because there's humans involved.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Into all kinds of things about politics. You want to be really careful, really thoughtful about not getting caught up in the anger of our times and really Recognize. Yes, I always thought I remember being really kind of proud of the US at the time when it was McCain was running against Obama because I thought, oh, I've got plenty of disagreements with both of them. But they both seem like thoughtful and interesting people who I would have different disagreements with, but I always felt like, yeah, like that's good. Now we can have a debate. Now we can have an interesting debate. And it isn't just sort of people slamming each other personal attacks and so forth.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are raising questions about the efficacy of masks. Okay, that's actually a reasonable thing to have a discussion about, and hopefully we should treat that as a fair conversation to have and actually address which authorities have said what and so on and so forth. And then there are other cases where it's not meaningful opposition. You know, like you just wouldn't say, I mean, I doubt if the main article moon, It may mention cheese, probably not even because it's not credible and it's not even meant to be serious by anyone. Or the article on the earth certainly won't have a paragraph that says, well, most scientists think it's round, but certain people think flat. Like that's just a silly thing to put in that article. You would want to sort of address, you know, that's an interesting cultural phenomenon. You want to put it somewhere. So this goes.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, yeah, it's exactly right. And so, you know, I think I find on many, many cases, and of course, I, like anybody else, might quibble about this or that in any Wikipedia article. But in general, I think there is a pretty good sort of willingness and indeed eagerness to say, oh, let's fairly represent all of the meaningfully important sides. So there's still a lot to unpack in that, right? So meaningfully important. So, you know, people who”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dra And how can you fly from South Africa to Perth because on a flat earth view that's really too far for any plane to make it. What I want to know spread out”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very little controversy. We will have an entry about flat earth theory, flat earth people. My personal view is most of the people who claim to be flat earthers are just having a laugh trolling and more power to them have some fun, but let's not be ridiculous. Of course.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tell to children or whatever, you know, it's just a thing. Everybody's heard moons made of cheese. But nobody thinks, wow, like Wikipedia is so one-sided. It doesn't even acknowledge the cheese theory. I say the same thing about flat earth, you know, again. Exactly.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“French, do you think? Well, I mean, I think we have to try to do our best to recognize both, but also to appropriately contextualize. And so this can be quite hard, particularly when emotions are high. That's just a fact about human beings. I'll give a simpler example because there's not a lot of emotion around it. Our entry on the moon doesn't say some say the moon's made of rocks, some say cheese. You know, who knows? That kind of false neutrality is not what we want to get to. Like that doesn't make any sense. But that one's easy. Like we all understand. I think there is a Wikipedia entry called something like the Moon is made of cheese. Where it talks about this is a common sort of joke or thing that children say or that”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And that whole politicization of society is just so damaging. And I don't know in broader world, like how do we start to fix that? That's a really hard question.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of thing that there's a lot of reports of people actively angry because someone else is wearing a mask, that sort of thing in public. And so, because it became very politicized, then clearly if Wikipedia, if you go to Wikipedia and you research this topic, I think you'll find more or less what I've just said. Actually, after it's all to this point in history, it's mixed evidence. Math seemed to help, but maybe not as much as some of the authorities said. And here we are. And that's kind of an example where I think, okay, we've done a good job, but I suspect there are people on both sides of that very emotional debate who think this is ridiculous. Hopefully we've got quality sources. So then hopefully those people who read this can say, oh, actually, you know, it is complicated. If you can get to the point of saying, okay, I have my view by understand other views and I do think it's a complicated question. Great. Now we're a little bit more mature as a society.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's an area where I would say the public authorities really kind of jerked us all around a bit. And the very first days they said, whatever you do, don't rush on and buy masks. And their concern was shortages in hospitals. Okay, fair enough. Later, it's like, no, everybody's got to wear a mask everywhere. It really works really well and it's, you know. Then now I think it's the evidence is mixed, right? Masks seem to help in my personal view. Masks seem to help. They're no huge burden. You might as well wear a mask in any environment where you're with a giant crowd of people and so forth. But it's very politicized that one. It's very politicized where certainly in the US, much more so. I mean, I live in the UK, I live in London. I've never seen kind of on the streets sort of.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so the people who come and spend their days writing Japanese anime articles love it. They kind of have an inherent love for the whole area. Now, they'll, of course, being human beings, they'll have their internal debates and disputes about what's better or not, you know. But in general, they're quite positive because nobody actually cares. On anything that people are quite passionate about, then hopefully, you know, there's like quite a lot of interesting stuff. So I'll give an example, a contemporary example where I think we've done a good job as of my most recent sort of look at it. And that is the question about the efficacy of masks during the COVID pandemic.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But in general, I think we're pretty good. And I think any time you go to any serious political controversy, we should have a pretty balanced perspective on who's saying what, what the views are and so forth. I would actually argue that the areas where we are more likely to have bias that persists for a long period of time are actually fairly obscure things or maybe fairly non-political things. It's kind of a humorous example, but it's meaningful. If you read our entries about Japanese anime, They tend to be very, very positive and very favorable because almost no one knows about Japanese anime except for fans.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rush of history in 500 years they might be considered to be path-breaking geniuses, but at the moment quite fringe views, and they're just unhappy that Wikipedia doesn't report on their fringe views as being mainstream. And that, by the way, goes across all kinds of fields. I mean, I was once accosted on the street. Outside the TED conference in Vancouver by a guy who is a homeopath who was very upset that Wikipedia's entry on homeopathy basically says it's pseudoscience. And he felt that was biased. And I said, well, I can't really help you because it cites, we cite good quality sources to talk about the scientific status and it's not very good. So, you know, it depends. And, you know, I think it's something that we should”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I don't think so, not broadly. And I think you can always point to specific entries and talk about specific biases, but that's part of the process of Wikipedia. Anyone can come and challenge and to go on about that. But I see fairly often on Twitter some quite extreme accusations of bias. And I think, you know, actually I just don't see it. I don't buy that. And if you ask people for an example, they normally struggle. And depending on who they are and what it's about. So it's certainly true that some people who have quite fringe viewpoints and who knows, Nafool.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there's definitely some really charged ones, like alt-right, I think is quite a complicated and tough. I mean, it's not a completely meaningless label, but boy, I think you really have to pause before you actually put that label on someone, partly because now you're putting them in a group of people, some of whom are quite, you wouldn't want to be grouped with. So it's, yeah.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mark Wohlberg, Marky Mark is what I always think of a mask because that was his first sort of famous name who I wouldn't think should be listed as in the category American criminal, even though he was convicted of quite a bad crime when he was a young person, but we don't think of him as a criminal. Should the entry talk about that? Yeah, it's actually, that's actually an important part of his life story, you know, that he had a very rough youth and he could have gone down a really dark path and he turned his life around. That's actually interesting. Categories are tricky.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Someone who is now prominent in public life and generally considered to be a good person. Was convicted of something, let's say, DUI when they were young. Normally in normal sort of discourse, we don't think, oh, this person should be in the category of American criminals because you think, oh, criminal, technically speaking, it's against the law to drive under the influence of alcohol and you were arrested and you spent a month in prison or whatever. But it's odd to say that's a criminal. So just says an example in this area is...”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was listed in American entrepreneurs, fine, American atheists. And I said, hmm, that doesn't feel right to me. Just personally, it's true. I mean, I wouldn't disagree with the objective fact of it. But when you click the category and you see sort of a lot of people who are, you might say, American atheist activist, because that's their big issue. So Madeleine Murray O'Hare or various famous people who Richard Dawkins, who make it a big part of their public argument and persona, but that's not true of me. It's just like my private personal belief. It doesn't really, it's not something I campaign about. So it felt weird to put me in the category, but what category would you put? And do you need that category? In this case, I argued it doesn't need that category. Like, that's not, I don't speak about it publicly except incidentally from time to time. I don't campaign about it. So it's weird to put me with this group of people. And that argument carried the day, I hope not just because it was me, but categories can be like that, where you're either in the category or you're not. And sometimes it's a lot more complicated than that. And is it, again, we go back to is it undue weight?”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. No, it's hard. And a number of cases, so this actually speaks to a slightly broader phenomenon, which is there are a number of cases where there is no one word that can get consensus. And in the body of an article, that's usually okay because we can explain the whole thing. You can come away with an understanding of why each side wants to use a certain word. But there are some aspects, like the pay tests have a title. So, you know, there's that. Same thing with certain things like photos. It's like, well, there's different photos, which one's best, a lot of different views on that. But at the end of the day, you need the lead photo because there's one slot for a lead photo. Categories is another one. At one point, I have no idea if it's in there today, but I don't think so.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This grappling over the language, like, okay, you want to highlight the negative aspects of this and you want to highlight the positive aspects. So you're going to try and choose a different name. And so there was this really fantastic Wikipedia discussion on the talk page. How do we word that paragraph to talk about the different naming? It's called this by Israelis. It's called this by Palestinians. how you explain that to people could be quite charged, right? You could easily Explain there's this difference, and it's because this side's good and this side's bad, and that's why there's a difference. Or you could say, actually, let's just try and really stay as neutral as we can and try to explain the reason. So you may come away from it with a concept. Okay, I understand what this debate is about now.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Degrees on. I give an example that I haven't looked at in a long time, but I was really pleased with what I saw at the time. So the discussion was that they're building something in Israel. And for their own political reasons, one side calls it a wall, hearkening back to Berlin Wall, apartheid. The other calls it a security fence. So we can understand quite quickly, if we give it a moment's thought, like, okay, I understand.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Based on the conversations in the talk page, I think it might Might be good at that. It might get it wrong sometimes, but again, if it's reasonably successful at doing that and you can say, oh, actually, yeah, it does suggest the neutrality of this has been disputed on a section that has a seven-page discussion in the back, that might be useful. Don't know worth playing with.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For this here paragraph. That's really interesting. Yeah, I hadn't thought of that because one of the things I do spend a lot of time thinking about these days, and people have found it, we're moving slowly, but we are moving, thinking about, okay, these tools exist. Are there ways that this stuff can be useful to our community? Because a part of it is we do approach things in a non-commercial way in a really deep sense. It's like it's been great that Wikipedia has become very popular, but really we're just, we're a community whose hobby is writing an encyclopedia that's first. And if it's popular, great. If it's not, okay, we might have trouble paying for more servers, but it'll be fine. And so how do we help the community use these tools? What are the ways that these tools can support people? And one example I never thought about, I'm going to start playing with it, is feed in the article and feed in the talk page and say, can you suggest some warnings in the article?”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stretched thin with his generosity. Well, it's one of the things I've said for a long time. So in Wikipedia, one of the great things we do may not be great for our reputation except in a deeper sense for the long term I think it is. But there'll be a notice that says the neutrality of this section has been disputed or the following section doesn't cite in these sources. And I always joke, you know, sometimes I wish the New York Times would run a banner saying the neutrality of this has been disputed. They could give us we had a big fight in the newsroom as to whether to run this or not, but we thought it's important enough to bring it to, but just be aware that not all the journalists are on board with it. Ah, that's actually interesting, and that's fine. I would trust them more for that level of transparency. So yeah, similarly, ChatGPT should say, yeah, 87% bullshit.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I'm like, well, that's really not good. Like, I wanted to explore a thought process I was in. I thought, I thought, first I thought, how do I Google? And I was like, well, it's kind of a hard thing to Google because unless somebody's written about this specific topic, it's a large language model. It's processed all this data. It can probably piece that together for me, but it just can't yet. So I think I hope that ChatGPT 5, 6, 7, you know, three to five years. I'm hoping we'll see a much higher level of accuracy where when you ask a question like that, I think instead of being quite so eager to please by giving you a plausible sounding answer, it's just say, don't know.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It can kind of be convincing to. Well, but like this morning, the story I was telling earlier about comparing a football player to a Lamborghini. And I thought, is that really racial? I don't know. But I'm just, I'm mulling it over. And I thought, I'm going to go to ChatGPT. So I sent to ChatGPT4. I said, you know, this happened in Wikipedia. Can you think of examples where a white athlete has been compared to a fast car inanimate object and it comes back with a very plausible essay where it tells why these analogies are common in sport? I said, no, no, I really, could you give me some specific examples? So it gives me three specific examples, very plausible, correct names of athletes and contemporaries and all of that could have been true. Googled every single quote and none of them existed.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The same concept. The same kind of thing. And of course, one of the biggest flaws in ChatGPT right now is that it just literally will make things up just to be... Amiable, I think. It's programmed to be very helpful and amiable and doesn't really know or care about the truth.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Attribution is important not just because of our licensing model and things like that, but it's just proper attribution is just good intellectual practice. And so, and that's a really hard, complicated question. If I were to write something about my visit here, I might say in a blog post, you know, I was in. Austin, which is a city in Texas. I'm not going to put a source for Austin as a city in Texas. That's just general knowledge. I learned it somewhere. I can't tell you where. So you don't have to cite and reference every single thing. But if I actually did research and I used something very heavily, it's just proper morally proper to give your sources. So we would like to see that. And obviously they call it grounding. So particularly people at Google are really keen on figuring out grounding.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I mean, there's a lot of stuff going on. Obviously, the technologies move very quickly in the last six months and looks poised to do so for some time to come. So first things first, I mean, part of our philosophy is the open licensing, the free licensing, the idea that this is what we're here for. We are a volunteer community and we write this encyclopedia, we give it to the world to do what you like with. You can modify it, redistribute it, redistribute modified versions, commercially non-commercially. This is the licensing. So in that sense, of course, it's completely fine. Now, we do worry a bit about attribution because it is a Creative Commons attribution share alike license.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But that problem, when we think about large language models and the ability to quickly generate very plausible but not true content, I think is something that there's going to be a lot of shakeout, a lot of implications of that.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was like, where did they get that? And I contacted the magazine. I said, Where did that come from? They said, oh, it was in Wikipedia. And I'd looked in the history. There had been vandalism of Wikipedia, which was not damaging. Just false. And it had already been removed. But then I thought, oh gosh, well, I better mention this to people because otherwise it's somebody's going to read that and they're going to add it to the entry and it's going to take on a life of its own. And then sometimes I wonder if it has because I've been I was invited a few years ago to do the ceremonial first move in the World Chess Championship and I I wonder if they think I'm a really big chess enthusiast because they read this biography magazine article.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then some helpful Wikipedian spots that it has no source finds a source and adds it to Wikipedia. And voila, magic. This happened to me once. It nearly happened. There was this really brief. I went back and researched it. I'm like, this is really odd. So biography magazine, which is a magazine published by the biography TV channel, had a profile of me and it said In his spare time, I'm not quoting exactly. It's been many years, but in his spare time, he enjoys playing chess with friends. I thought, wow, that sounds great. Like, I would like to be that guy, but actually, I mean, I play chess with my kids sometimes, but no, it's not a hobby of mine.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there's a famous web comic that's titled Cytogenesis, which is about how... Something, an error's in Wikipedia, and there's no source for it, but then a lazy journalist reads it and writes the source.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Poetic language, and you're like, well, okay, that's not actually helping. But in many cases, I think that sort of thing is quite interesting. And I'm also interested in, you know, can you imagine where you feed in a Wikipedia entry and all the sources and you say, help me find anything in the article that is not accurately reflecting what's in the sources. And that doesn't have to be perfect. It only has to be good enough to be useful. To community. So if it scans. An article and all the sources, and you say, Oh, it came back with 10 suggestions, and seven of them were decent, and three of them it just didn't understand. Actually, that's probably worth my time to do. And it can help us really more quickly get good people to sort of review obscure entries and things like that.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah. I mean, it's really important. And, you know, we talk a lot about weasel words. Actually, I'm sure we'll end up talking about. AI and ChatGPT, but just to quickly mention In this area, I think one of the potentially powerful tools, because it is quite good at this. I've played around with and practiced it quite a lot. But ChatGPT4 is really quite able to take a passage and point out potentially biased terms, to rewrite it to be more neutral. Now, it is a bit anodyne and it's a bit cliched. So sometimes it just takes the spirit out of something that's actually not bad. It's just like...”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, very famous comparison to an inanimate object of a Chicago bears player many years ago. But they're just saying, hey, let's be careful about analogies that we just pick up from the media. I said, yeah, you know, that's good.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The alarming headline, racist thing on the front page of Wikipedia, that sounds holy moly, that sounds bad. But it's sort of like, actually, yeah, this probably isn't the sort of analogy that we think is great. And so we should probably think about how to improve our language and not compare sports people to inanimate objects, and particularly be aware of certain racial sensitivities that there might be around that sort of thing if there is a disparity in the media of how people are called. And I just thought, you know what? Nothing for me to weigh in on here. This is a good conversation. Nobody's saying people should be banned if they refer to, what was his name, the fridge, refrigerator Perry.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Comparing him to a Lamborghini. Clearly, a compliment. And so somebody said actually, here's a study, here's some interesting information about how black sports people are far more often compared to inanimate objects and given that kind of analogy. And I think it's demeaning to compare a person to a car, et cetera, et cetera. But they said, I'm not deleting it. I'm not removing it. I just want to raise the question. And then there's this really interesting conversation that goes on where I think the general consensus was, you know what, this isn't like.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, a great example that I really loved this morning that I saw someone left a note on my user talk page, an English Wikipedia saying it was quite a dramatic headline racist hook on front page. So we have on the front page of Wikipedia, we have a little section called Did You Know. And it's just little tidbits and facts, just things people find interesting. And there's a whole process for how things get there. The one that somebody was raising a question about was it was comparing a very well-known US football player, Black. There was a quote from”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, you know, probably there's more serious sources than a tabloid newspaper. So, you know, in an article about lung cancer, you probably wouldn't cite the Daily Mail. That's kind of ridiculous. But also for celebrities and so forth to sort of know, oh, well, they do cover celebrity gossip a lot, but they also tend to have vendettas and so forth. And you really have to step back and go, hmm, is this really encyclopedic or is this just the daily mail going on a rant?”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sort things out when we have a pretty good sense that not every source is valid. So as an example, a few years ago, it's been quite a while now, we deprecated the mail online as a source. And the mail online, you know, the digital arm of the daily mail, it's a tabloid. completely you know it's not fake news but it does tend to run very hyped up stories they they really love to attack people and go on the attack for political reasons and so on and it just isn't great and so by saying deprecated and i think some people say oh you ban the daily mail no we didn't ban it as a source we just said look it's probably not a great source right you should probably look for a better source so certainly you know if the daily mail runs a headline saying new cure for cancer”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of in there being aggressive and in the wrong, no, no, no, hold on. We've got to do this the right way. You got to say, okay, hold on. Are there good sources? Is this contextualized appropriately? Is it even important enough to mention? What does it mean? And sometimes one of the areas where I do think there is a very complicated flaw, and you've alluded to it a little bit, but it's like We know the media is deeply flawed. We know that journalism can go wrong. And I would say particularly in the last whatever 15 years, we've seen a real decimation of local media, local newspapers. We've seen a real rise in clickbait headlines and sort of eager focus on anything that might be controversial. We've always had that with us, of course. There's always been tabloid newspapers. But that makes it a little bit more challenging to say, okay, how do we”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Putting it separate from everything else kind of makes it seem worse and also doesn't put it in the right context. Whereas if it's sort of a live flow, and there is a controversy, there's always potential controversy for anyone, it should just be sort of worked into the overall article because it doesn't become a temptation. You can contextualize appropriately and so forth. So that's, you know, that's part of the whole process. But I think for me, one of the most important things is what I call community health. So, yeah, are we going to get it wrong sometimes? Yeah, of course. We're humans and doing good quality, you know, sort of reference material is hard. The real question is, how do people react to a criticism or a complaint or a concern? And if the reaction is defensiveness or combativeness back, or if someone's really...”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, what has this guy to do with this guy if it even deserves a mention? It wasn't even clear had he done anything hypocritical, had he done himself anything wrong. Even was his son. His son got a DUI. That's never great, but it happens to people and it doesn't seem like a massive scandal for your dad. So of course, I just took that out immediately. This is a long, long time ago. And that's the sort of thing where, you know, we have to really think about in a biography and about controversies to say, is this a real controversy? So in general, like one of the things we tend to say is any section, so if there's a biography and there's a section called controversies, that's actually poor practice because it just invites people to say, oh, I want to work on this entry. It's either seven sections. Oh, this one's quite short. Can I add something? Go out and find some more controversy. That's nonsense, right? And in general.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so that's one of the reasons for biographies we say, human dignity really matters. And so, you know, some of the things have to do with, and this is a common debate that goes on in Wikipedia, is what we call undue weight. So I'll give an example. There was an article I stumbled across many years ago about the mayor. Or no, he wasn't a mayor. He was a city council member of, I think he was Peora, Illinois, but some small town in the Midwest. And the entry, you know, he's been on the city council for 30 years or whatever. He's pretty, I mean, frankly, pretty boring guy and seems like a good local city politician. But in this very short biography, there was a whole paragraph, a long paragraph about his son being arrested for DUI. And it was clearly undue weight.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's a few things to unpack and all that. So first, one of the things I find really always find very interesting is your status with MIT. Okay, Setting, and it's an argument and can But then what's interesting is you gave as much time to that, which is actually important and relevant to your career and so on, to also where your father was born, which most people would hardly notice, but is really meaningful to you. And I find that a lot when I talk to people who have a biography in Wikipedia is they're often as annoyed by a tiny error that no one's going to notice. this town in Tajikistan has got a new name and so on like nobody even knows what that means or whatever but it can be super important”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We struggled about how to talk about it. The problem with notability is it can feel insulting, say, oh no, you're not noteworthy. My mother's noteworthy. She's a really important person in my life, right? So that's not right. But it's more like verifiability. Is there a way to get information that actually makes an encyclopedia entry?”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We really shouldn't have an article about that person. They'll be mentioned, of course, and maybe the specific crime might have an article. But for that person, no, not really. That's not really something that makes any sense because how can you write a biography about someone you don't know much about? And this is, you know, it varies from field to field. So for example, for many academics, we will have an entry that we might not have in a different context because for an academic It's important to have sort of their career, you know, what papers they've published, things like that. You may not know anything about their personal life, but that's actually not encyclopedically relevant in the same way that it is for a member of a royal family where it's basically all about the family. So, you know, we're fairly nuanced about notability and where it comes in. And I've always thought that the term notability, I think, is a little problematic. I mean, it's...”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source