Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales on rebuilding trust online and off

JIMMY WALES DESCRIBES HIMSELF AS A “pathological optimist.” And yet, when the co-founder of Wikipedia spoke with TIME in October, he still seemed somewhat surprised that his online encyclopedia actually worked.

- BY HARRY BOOTH

“Wikipedia is very trusting, in a way that always seemed a bit crazy,” Wales says. If you think about the chaos of social media, Wikipedia’s model of allowing anyone to edit any entry seems “completely insane,” he says.

We're speaking because Wales just penned his first book, The Seven Rules of Trust, which tries to distill what Wikipedia and a few other bright corners of the internet—Wales cites Airbnb, Uber, and Ebay—can teach us about rebuilding trust in a world awash in skepticism. Since Wikipedia’s launch in 2001, trust in politicians, mainstream media, and “to some extent each other” has all plummeted, Wales says—with consequences extending beyond political deadlocks. Wales, 59, was friends with Jo Cox, the British Labour Member of Parliament who was murdered in 2016 by a far-right extremist days before the Brexit referendum. He believes the rise of politically motivated violence is “a natural result of this feeling of a complete breakdown of societal norms and of the idea of trust—of being able to say, ‘Look, I disagree with you, but I trust that we can have a dialogue and we'll find a compromise and we can move forward,” he says. And yet, “Wikipedia has gone from being kind of a joke to one of the few things people trust.”

Lately, though, that breakdown of trust has started nipping at Wikipedia’s heels. Billionaire Elon Musk, who was once a big fan of Wikipedia, has turned on the encyclopedia, as has White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks, conservative commentator Tucker Carlson, and even Wales’ estranged co-founder Larry Sanger, who have all claimed Wikipedia is biased.