Jimmy Wales on Systems and Incentives | Conversations with Tyler

Hello everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I'm talking with Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia fame. Jimmy, welcome.

Thank you, it's very good to be here.

Let's say there is a benevolent donor of either money or time. Where in the Wikipedia system is the highest marginal return for that person?

Well, I, I think it depends on that person, uh, because If you're looking to make a marginal impact, if you have unique knowledge on some fairly obscure topic that no one else has, then you may be the best person or the only person in the world who can actually make a difference in that area. On the other hand, if you wanted to be, you know, the 11 millionth person who's keeping an eye on the Donald Trump article, Well, your contribution, while important, is probably going to be, marginally speaking, a little bit less. So I think it just sort of depends. I mean, certainly what we see oftentimes is that people who have the largest impact for the amount of time they're spending are people who are working in smaller languages in the developing world. So if you've got some knowledge there, you can have a huge impact just by helping to get the community going, building the community, and so forth. So it sort of depends on the skill set.

Even for a fairly fixed historical topic, take Shakespeare's play Hamlet. This year there have already been at least 35 edits to that entry. What exactly at the margin is being done there? Why does that happen?

Well, I mean, it's very interesting. Oftentimes, I haven't reviewed that particular article, but oftentimes, you know, things that are relatively stable, what we see are sort of slight improvements to wording, making something that seems a little bit confusing read a little more smoothly, adding some obscure fact. But actually one of the things that's very interesting, when we first got started, we took a look at and we imported a handful of articles from the 1911 edition of Britannica, which was in the public domain. So it was no longer under copyright, so we were allowed to use it. And, you know, we imported some articles and you would think, okay, since 1911, what have we really learned about Julius Caesar? Well, it turns out a lot. Even on very old topics like Hamlet, scholarship has carried on, scholarship continues, new things are learned, new perspectives are generated. You know, for things like Hamlet, the The impact of Hamlet on the world, of course, is still a thing that happens in the contemporary world. It's kind of fun to think about, you know, what— if we look at the Wikipedia entries from 10 years ago, what has changed in the last 10 years on some topic that you think would have been stable for the last 10 years? And I think it would be quite interesting to actually study that. And varied.

Do you think of Wikipedia first and foremost as an Enlightenment project, because it's obviously teaching people, a conservative project, it's conserving the best knowledge of the past, or is it also a radical project that it plays a role in mobilizing social movements?

A little bit of all three, I guess, although probably more, more of the Enlightenment project, which in its own way is quite radical in today's culture. I mean, certainly when we look at the tone and the style of Wikipedia, which continues to be quite dry, quite matter of fact, you know, the Wikipedia style, and contrast that with a lot of what's going on in our media culture, things like Twitter and so forth, where you do tend to have a much more outrageous style. In some ways, I think that that's— it's quite a radical project to say, okay, hold on everybody, why don't we slow down? And if we're going to talk about something like Obamacare— is my favorite example— um, are we for it or against it? Actually, before we know if we're for it or against it, maybe shouldn't we actually find out what it is? So shouldn't we just read a neutral, clear description as best we can, as we can find, to understand it before we come to some conclusion. And that's, you know, in today's culture, maybe a little bit radical, even though in another sense, obviously, it's quite old-fashioned.

If we put aside your official Wikipedia role and just ask you, Jimmy Wales, as an individual human being, are you an exopedian, a metapedian, or a mesopedian?

You'll have to define the three for me.

An exopedian is one who emphasizes the encyclopedia-like nature of Wikipedia and the knowledge-building component of the project. A metapedian is more of a focus on the social mechanisms, the processes, the rules, the community. A mesopedian is supposedly, they tell me, a kind of moderate. I mean, which of those is the greatest attraction to you?

I must be the moderate.

There are Wikipedia pages on all of these terms, by the way.

It's amazing, it's amazing. Yeah, I'm a moderate on that. I mean, I think for me, they, you know, and in fact, there was an interesting discussion today that I was involved with about, I think her name is Susan Greenfield, who is the, she's the, she's, nope, Susan Greenfield is a friend of mine. Anyway, I've forgotten her name, but she's the Democratic, she's running for the Senate in Iowa. She's the Democratic candidate, and Wikipedia doesn't have a page about her. And I was— somebody said this to me on Twitter, why doesn't we have a page on this politician who's the front-runner at the moment to be elected to the Senate in Iowa? And I said, gee, I don't know, let me go check. And what I found was this enormously convoluted, very, very Wikipedia discussion about the rules and the process, and that there was a deletion a while back because she was not notable when she first announced her candidacy, because she was not someone who we could find any information about. However, she has become notable in the last several months, including national media coverage. But the whole thing got caught in this web of complicated Wikipedianess. And I said, I cited our, one of our oldest rules, the ignore all rules rule, to say if some rule is preventing you from making Wikipedia better, then ignore that rule.

Does that rule apply to itself?

It does, yes. In fact, it's probably the most frequently ignored rule of all. But, you know, and interestingly, like, it was a situation where in today's sort of discussion, I think you would say I'm the first one. I care most about let's make the encyclopedia be encyclopedic and good quality and neutral and all of that. And the rules are kind of secondary to that. At the same time, I think the social processes and the rules and thinking about how do we design them is actually the— in the long run, the important part and the hard part. Because when I look at a situation like what we had today on that, I say, gee, you know, not this is all hopeless. We got this one badly wrong. I'm like, OK, but what exactly should we change? Because these rules are not completely random, right? There are reasons for them. As somebody said, you know, it's like the garage band which gets nominated for deletion and then requests reinstatement 15 times till people are sick of it because they're no longer notable, is actually the reason some of the procedures are in place. It's just to give us a mechanism for dealing with those things. But in some cases, those procedures go wrong, and so we have to really think about, okay, what went wrong? How do we make that better? And it's a very, you know, It's a very different kind of model as compared to moderation at Twitter or YouTube or somewhere like that, where, you know, it's sort of behind the scenes, invisible. This is an open dialogue. It's a chewing on ideas and so on. It's very, very public, although often impenetrable in the sense that it's a lot of words.

Which kinds of topics do you think Wikipedia is not so very well geared to cover instructively?

I mean, I think there are, you know, there are cases where Wikipedia is biased, not because of any intention of people to be biased, but just because no one cares about that thing except fans of that thing. So I always give the example, if you look at our articles on Japanese anime, they tend to be quite positive because nobody actually cares about Japanese anime except for people who love Japanese anime. It's sort of a binary thing. There aren't people who, unlike, say, famous politicians where people do take sides, you know, if you don't like Japanese anime, you probably don't watch it and you don't write about it in Wikipedia. And so oftentimes, and that's fairly harmless, right? It's Japanese anime, and if the articles are not sufficiently critical, that's probably not a huge issue. Other cases are, you know, I think there are certain kinds of disputes where the amount of energy that we put in to trying to keep the articles good quality is probably far out of proportion to the results, although the results are quite good. So I don't mean that the results aren't good. So if you look at something like George W. Bush. And you think about, here's this article and it's this long, it's very detailed. And then you say, how many human hours were spent hammering away making this what it is today? And it's an enormous amount of time spent doing it. You probably could have done it in a smaller amount of time if you just sat down 4 or 5 thoughtful people and said, let's work on this. On the other hand, there's something interesting and something valid about this open public process where everything is open to challenge and a further debate and a further debate.

Do you think it's the case that Wikipedia shifts the relative social balance away from philosophy and toward history? So if I want to read about the life of Napoleon, Wikipedia is clearly a very good place to go. If I want to understand better what is beauty, it's less obvious to me that I should start with Wikipedia. So aren't you making history more central to our thinking? It doesn't have to be bad, but do you think that's true?

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because I think if you wanted to understand the concept of beauty as understood in philosophy, Wikipedia would be a good place to go, but what you would be reading about in a sense is the history of philosophy, and so therefore I am sort of agreeing with what you're saying. Yeah, yeah, it's history again. You know, there's an old sort of meme, and it is largely true that if you go to Wikipedia and you go to any entry, and then you— once you get past the pronunciation and you click any, like, the first link of everything, then it takes only a few clicks and you end up at philosophy. So if I went to your biography in Wikipedia, it probably takes me 4 or 5 clicks by just clicking on the first link of each thing that I come to, and then you end up at philosophy. And that's just simply because of the genus-species nature of a definition or an explanation of something. So, I'm not sure that means philosophy is central in the sense you're talking about.

Now, as you know, Wikipedia is open, it's free, it doesn't have ads. It's a kind of dream of the early tech utopians. Why is it the only surviving dream of that kind that has persisted?

Well, I mean, it's an interesting thing, and I'm not sure it's the only, but it's certainly the most famous and the largest. And, you know, I think there's, there's a few different reasons. Um, I, I think so. I've been on a real kick lately to talk a lot about how business model drives, uh, outcomes, and in sometimes in surprising ways, or they're not that surprising after the fact, but they were maybe not anticipated. And so, you know, for Wikipedia, it isn't so much that it's a nonprofit, although that probably has a certain impact as well. But the fact that Wikipedia does not have an advertising business model means that the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization behind Wikipedia, really faces a different set of incentives. Even as a nonprofit, you have to think in a business-like way. You have to say, well, how are we going to pay the bills? And how do we— achieve our mission. So if you think about advertising-driven social media, the real incentive is to show you as many ads as possible so they really obsess over time on site. And it's driven them to create addictive products. It's driven them in many cases to prioritize agitation and, and argumentation in a negative sense. Over education and learning and thoughtfulness. Simply because if you, you know, if you went to Twitter and you found out the 3 things you wanted to know and you left, they wouldn't get a chance to show you very many ads. But if you go to Twitter and you see 18 people who are wrong and you've got to sort of straighten them out, you might stay for hours doing this very addictive hobby. And so when we think about things at Wikipedia, so for example, You know, we could probably increase engagement if we use some of the very basic machine learning techniques to start showing people random promotional links to other things in Wikipedia and then have the machine learn over time how to show you links that are more interesting so that you, you know, you end up staying on the site longer. Now, it might turn out that that's completely normal and thoughtful. And in fact, if you go to a, you know, a well-known economist, that it turns out that the way to keep you on the site longer is to show you other concepts of economics and economic theory. But it might turn out, and probably would turn out, the best thing to do is when you go to look up Tyler Cowen, to show you on the sidebar, you know, links to Kim Kardashian, Donald Trump, whatever the hot topic of the day is, and so on, which is not really what you want from an encyclopedia. And so I think when we think about that, our incentive structure at Wikipedia is not to optimize time on site. It's to say, look, every now and then, normally at the end of the year, we say, hey, you know, would you donate some money? And nobody has to donate. And so the only reason people do donate, and this is what donors tell us, is, you know, they think this is meaningful, like this is important to my life, like this should live, this should exist. So, we've got, you know, kind of a year between the time we ask you for money to become a part of your life and make it meaningful enough for you to say, "I want to click and I want to contribute to this." And that's just a completely different set of incentives in front of us in terms of how do we optimize that.

How contingent do you think is the history of Wikipedia or something like it? So, if you and the people you were working with had not come along when you did and done what you did, and it were simply left, the field were left open, would Wikipedia be more like maximizing engagement, a for-profit company? It wouldn't be called Wikipedia, but it would be some kind of online encyclopedia, something maybe more like a Facebook model. Or do you think there's something intrinsic about your enterprise that it was going to be a not-for-profit no matter who did it?

Um, it's a very good question. I mean, I think in many ways it's contingent. I mean, I think it didn't have to exist at all. And so the idea of a publicly written encyclopedia using a wiki model is not necessarily something that was inevitable. And then a separate part of that is, was it inevitable that we would choose a nonprofit, non-advertising business model? Definitely, that was not inevitable. That was a set of conscious choices that we made. I used to joke it was either the best decision or the worst decision I ever made. But then I stopped even making the joke, because even if I said it was a joke, I would get headlines saying, oh, Jimmy Wales regrets that he's not a billionaire. It's like, that's not what I said, actually, and it's only a joke anyway. It's clearly a great decision. But the— ultimately, I think it didn't have to be this way. I mean, I think it could have been different. In fact, you could imagine several different models. Let's say that I was still in charge of everything, and instead of putting it into the nonprofit structure, I'd kept it in a for-profit structure, but it pursued sort of like Craig Newmark of Craigslist, you know, a model where I say, look, I'm going to maintain complete control of the stock, and I'm not going to raise venture capital money. I'm going to run it as a very profitable hobby and get some donations, or maybe I'll stick a little ad here or there, but I'm not going to try to monetize, you know, like crazy. That's possible, although hard to really imagine, just as I think Craigslist is hard to really imagine, you know. It's like Craig's made a ton of money, but he could have made 10 tons of money, and he's just the kind of person for whom a ton is plenty. So, you know, it's an interesting question, really.

What are the greatest threats to the future of Wikipedia?

Well, this is what I always have trouble with, because I always say I'm a pathological optimist. And so that's part of why Wikipedia exists as it is, because I just think we can find a way and it'll all work out and it'll be fine. But the things that I would say that we focus on and think a lot about are really, it's about community health. So how do we make sure that the community is happy, productive, not full of trolls, thoughtful, kind, all of those great Wikipedia values, which are like all communities, all groups of people, we have a certain set of values that we aspire to, and we live up to them to a lesser or greater extent on a day-to-day basis. And how do we make sure that we are still mostly doing the right things, that we're mostly getting it right, knowing that it can't be perfect? Because financially, I feel like we're OK. The fundraisers do very well. We're very conservative with money. So I think that as an immediate threat or an obvious threat, not so much, although technology shifts. And so, you know, will the technology move people to voice assistants where they don't actually come to Wikipedia, but they just get the information from us and end up not donating money? That's a possibility. But that's kind of it. And obviously, there are other potential threats, but I feel confident that we can defeat them. But as I say, I'm a pathological optimist. There's a lot of noise these days about repealing Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, without which Wikipedia couldn't exist. I mean, it's completely impossible. And I can talk more about that. I can talk for an hour about that if we wanted to. But because we've got some noise around that, not only from the right— I mean, Donald Trump has been tweeting all caps, "Repeal Section 230." I'm not sure he even knows what it is. But from the left as well, you know, because people are concerned about the power of the big tech companies and they wonder if Section 230 has something to do with that and so on and so forth. And so I think that is under threat and I think that is a serious threat to anything that's open on the internet.

There's something called Conquest's Second Law, which I believe is itself on Wikipedia, and it suggests that all organizations that are not explicitly right-wing over time evolved to become more left-wing. We've seen this with the Ford Foundation, Pew Foundation, Rockefeller. Do you think Conquest's second law is essentially correct?

I don't know. I wouldn't think so, although I don't know. I have no idea. I mean, I think we definitely have organizations that I wouldn't say you could easily categorize in contemporary terms as either left or right wing. And I'm thinking in particular of the Catholic Church, which have maintained quite steady certain kind of values and ideas for a very, very long period of time with minimal shift over time. And if you try to characterize religion as either right or left wing. I think typically in the US, you would tend to say right wing. But if you look at the current Pope and certain elements of the church's positions, you would say they're pretty left wing in other ways. I mean, I don't think they easily fit into that. But the broader point is, can an organization maintain an explicit set of values over a very long period of time that is neither left or right wing in its nature, and I think so. I mean, certainly it seems possible to me.

But let's say in the US at least that politics continues to polarize along educational lines. Now, obviously, most Wikipedia contributors, people on the board, are going to be well-educated one way or another, if only self-educated. Is it then really still possible for Wikipedia to maintain what would be seen as a neutral stand by people on the other side?

I mean, I think that's a really, really tough question. I think we can slice it up a little bit and get a little more refined and say, can Wikipedia maintain a neutral stand? Yes, that I think, yes, objectively speaking, yes. But that would be recognized as such by some people on the other side, or that would be universally recognized as stuff as such, that could be quite hard. I mean, we're in an era where there's such a decline in respect for traditional journalistic institutions across the board that you begin to think, you know, the way I think about, I think about quality publications that matter. And so I think about, you know, the Wall Street Journal tending to be a bit more on the right and the New York Times is tending to be a bit more on the left. And then you think, yeah, but where does Breitbart fit into that? Where do some of the new media publications fit into that? And where do people who believe that all of those things are part of some sort of elite conspiracy to, you know, hide the truth about pedophiles or whatever? It becomes hard. I mean, I think it's very hard when you have people who have given up on the concept of objectivity, the concept of neutrality. And that isn't necessarily just on the right. Certainly when we, when we think about postmodernism and some of the critiques of the ideas of neutrality and objectivity that come from that end of the world, it's sort of a deeper philosophical question, I would say.

How well and how fairly has the media covered Wikipedia?

I mean, pretty well, pretty fairly. I mean, it's an interesting thing because there was a time, and even at that time, I did feel that it was a temporary phase. So there was a time when it was a popular thing to do to kind of troll through Wikipedia, find something wrong, and then write an inflammatory story about something was wrong in Wikipedia. And I said at the time to, you know, the community, to volunteers, that, you know, there was a period of time when it became fashionable to write very easy, cheap news stories about something horrible on eBay. You know, you would see, oh no, someone's selling their baby on eBay, or they're selling their soul on eBay, or they're selling the baby's soul on eBay, or they're selling a gun, or whatever. And after a little while, people realized actually it's not legal to sell your baby on eBay, and it's against the rules of eBay. And if somebody posts it as a joke, it just gets taken down. And over time, the media more broadly got bored of writing a story like, oh no, someone vandalized Wikipedia. I mean, I remember one case in particular when a famous celebrity died. What was her name? Anna something. She was a— she married a really old guy for his money and so on. Anyway, she died of a drug overdose, and somebody vandalized Wikipedia and wrote something terrible about her. And then I got— and it was a huge story the day she died because she had struggled with roses, very famous tabloidy person. And one of the journalists said, does this show something deeply wrong with the Wikipedia model? And I said, it shows something deeply wrong with what's going on in journalism that this celebrity dies and I get 8 phone calls about vandalism on Wikipedia. Like, that's absolutely not the point. So there have been times when I felt, oh, that's actually not fair. But in general, we've been treated well. And I think Certainly over time, a lot of the worst fears that people had about Wikipedia, that it was just going to degenerate into a troll fest or something like that, haven't proven true. And I would say in recent years, once we've seen how bad social media can be, we've been, you know, we've been treated very, very nicely.

What's the biggest problem with how Wikipedia has covered Wikipedia? There's a whole page, as you probably know, you know, why Wikipedia isn't so great. Is it too negative on itself?

Well, I mean, when we set ourselves the mission to do something like that, we are very thorough and good at it, as we are Wikipedians. And no, I mean, I actually think that's really healthy. I mean, I think that, you know, I've said to people, you know, if you want to understand critiques of Wikipedia, there's a really good page about that in Wikipedia. And I think that's great. I think that's fantastic. I would say, you know, we The areas where I think we struggle the most, and I alluded to this earlier, just talking about a thing that I just happened to be involved with this morning, we've become very bureaucratic in a certain kind of way. We've got a lot of history, we've got a lot of rules, we've got a lot of procedures. They're all there for a reason. They all arguably do more good than harm. And yet, it It is hard for people, new people, to get involved. It's hard for people to understand certain things. There was a good example, was we got a little bit of negative press because a famous author wrote quite a— it was actually, I thought, quite an amusing piece about how something about his ideas was wrong in Wikipedia. And he emailed us a correction to say, no, that's not what I think. And he got something back saying, "Do you have a source?" And he's like, "What better source could I have for what I think?" And that was— it's amusing and funny, and it's sort of like, "Oh, isn't that terrible? Wikipedia won't accept an author's own words as a source." Except that the issue was he emailed us from a random-sounding Gmail address. There was no proof it was actually him. He had a blog. He could have easily written a post on his blog explaining something. And so it was It was actually more subtle than that. It was like, no, we actually do care what he thinks and we're not out to do this, but because he didn't understand Wikipedia, and by the way, it's not his job to understand Wikipedia, I'm not saying that at all, you know, like we had an outcome that was okay, not optimal.

How has the rise of mobile shaped the content of Wikipedia? So take a not too controversial article, say the Napoleon Bonaparte one. More and more people are reading it on mobile, more are editing it on mobile. What's the invisible hand mechanism that connects the rise of mobile to how the actual words on the page might end up being different?

So that's a great question, and I define a great question as one that no one's ever asked me, so very good. I would say that the connection is probably less than it should be. So Wikipedia editing is still overwhelmingly a desktop phenomenon. Part of that is that the mobile editing experience isn't great. In the past, I would say the mobile editing experience isn't great because we need to invest more money in making it better. But today I would say actually it's probably about as good as it can be. I'm sure we can still improve it, and there are people who are working on that. But the issue is it's a small form factor. Like, how do you actually make it easy to edit Wikipedia on a mobile device? It's quite difficult. And we look at things for mobile participation like, is there a way for people to quickly do a spelling fix or something like that? And then the content, you know, so it's written largely on the desktop, and therefore there is a divide in a sense between reading and writing. But that probably doesn't matter so much, because I think the reading experience for Wikipedia on mobile is perfectly fine. In some ways it's better, because the scan distance for reading is a little shorter. But You know, it probably could be a little more optimized for reading on mobile devices.

Now, you don't allow paid-for editing, but I've known people who are paid editors on Wikipedia. They write things. They're not, for the most part, slanting content. They're trying to fill in gaps or add detail on maybe the person they work for. To what extent do you think Wikipedia is actually somewhat parasitic on non-transparent paid-for editing? And you get rid of the worst manifestations of it, but it's still a big part of the underlying foundation?

It's a really good question. I mean, it's something that we struggle with, and we know that it does go on, and we know that we don't approve of it. And around the margins, there are a lot of different kind of angles on, on what that looks like. And so I think one of the first things to, to note is that we, we try to make a distinction between paid editing and paid advocacy editing. So the difference is, let's say you're a university professor and your university says, actually, as a part of your evaluation, we are interested in our professors being involved in the public dialogue, the public debate, and actually, if you can contribute knowledge to Wikipedia and show us that, we consider that a positive thing and you'll get a good review based on that. Well, then in some sense they're being paid to edit Wikipedia, but they aren't being paid in the same way that the PR department of the university would be paid to make the university look good. And in fact, they probably wouldn't have much interest in making sure that, you know, the page about the university itself is good. And so that's paid editing, but not paid advocacy editing. So paid advocacy editing is really the problem. And in that case, people are of different minds. I'm quite a hardliner on this. I just think it's not something people should be doing at all. And in fact, I think what we need to do to cope with it is have better mechanisms that are less combative for people who have a conflict of interest to actually contribute constructively by not editing pages, but by making suggestions in some organized fashion that will actually be paid attention to. But that, that gives rise to a lot of other problems. One of the problems is You know, there's the old saying, which I should know who said it, but, you know, it's very hard to get someone to understand something when their paycheck depends on them not understanding it. And so, you know, if you're being paid to spruce up the page about your boss and, you know, your idea of what's neutral filling in the gaps and our idea might be substantially different simply because you come to it with a an advocacy bias, and that's problematic. But I think what works for people is if they come in in good faith and talk to the community. That's by far the most effective way to get things done. But we also know there are people who are doing paid editing, and it's something that we basically disprove because we also see the abuses of it, where people go around trying to charge people a lot of money, pretending things that aren't true about what they can get done, and so on and so forth.

Now, I'm the rare person who actually has no sock puppets. Why not allow sock puppets? What exactly is wrong with them? So what if a person has more than one identity out there, as long as you can monitor the identity that is operating on Wikipedia?

So, I mean, that's a great question, and in fact, we, we do try to make a distinction between a sock puppet and a legitimate alternate account, and we actually have procedures whereby you can declare a legitimate alternate account to the arbitration committee so that you're sort of insulated from any bad harms if it's found out. So some of the keys are that we rely on trust. And one of the things that is really important to us, we do a lot of what we call not voting. So it's voting, but it's really a straw poll. It's the votes are typically not they're not the final word. And if somebody comes into a discussion and pretends to be 5 different people arguing that something should be deleted, and there are 2 actual different people arguing that it should be kept, that's deceptive and it kind of skews the balance. And so people who are reviewing that say, well, I sort of think we should keep it, but I see there are 5 people here with a different opinion, so maybe I Maybe I'm wrong. And so that bulking up your impact by double voting on something by pretending to be different people is super problematic. The other kind of problematic sock puppeting is sock puppet to conceal your conflict of interest. So I remember we had one notorious case of a PR firm that had engaged in quite a lot of problematic editing and one of their accounts and made, you know, a lot of edits and pretended to be a retired fellow who was a car collector, and there are all these pictures of old cars and so on. They had a whole persona created that seemed like a lovely chap who just liked to edit Wikipedia, but in fact was just somebody at the PR firm who was just giving a cover. And I just think that kind of deception is problematic. The kinds of good examples of you know, multiple accounts would be someone who wants to edit in a controversial area. I mean, as an example, let's say, you know, you're a well-known person and suppose you took an interest in our entries on pedophilia, not because of any prurient interest, but simply because you think this is actually an important topic of social impact, and, and well, you probably wouldn't necessarily want to be known at your university as the guy who edits the pedophilia articles on Wikipedia. Like, that's just not easy for people to be open about, even if you're doing all the right things. And so you might say, yeah, I actually want to edit, uh, you know, in some areas of World War II history under this identity, but I'm going to do some work over here, and I really prefer it not to be tied back to my real life identity. And that's kind of okay, right, as long as you're not voting in elections with two accounts and things like that.

Do you believe in what the Europeans sometimes call the right to be forgotten on the internet?

I have a real problem with the right to be forgotten as it is currently enshrined in European law. And, you know, I think it's a complicated subject, but Here we go. So first of all, I think privacy is very important. And I think that a lot of internet services need to be much more thoughtful about people's privacy and really think harder about this. I also think a lot of governments need to think harder in the new era about privacy versus transparency about public information about their citizens. So As an example, I live in the UK, but I'm registered to vote in Florida. And so I registered for a mail-in ballot. And I got an email saying, you know, here's your ballot information, blah, blah, blah. And you can go and I can look up my ballot, not how I voted, but I can look up my home address, which I normally try to keep very, very secret. I probably shouldn't even mention this because trolls will now know where to go and look for it. My home address is there, and all you need is my name and my date of birth, and you can get my home address. And I'm like, that's not really necessary for public transparency, or is it? It's a good question like that. I think we need to struggle with some of those questions. So right to be forgotten— my biggest beef with right to be forgotten in the UK currently is that Google can be forced to take down links to content that is perfectly legal on publishers' websites. In fact, the case that got this all underway is a link to a newspaper article, which is still online, but Google is not allowed to link to it. And there's no judge involved. And so when we think about this kind of in an American First Amendment context, what you would say is it wouldn't do— it wouldn't pass First Amendment scrutiny to say, oh no, it's perfectly legal to publish this magazine. It's just not legal to offer it in stores. Like, you're not allowed to, you have to hide it. And we would say, hold on a second, that's just not right. Like, that is a violation of the freedom of expression if you can't distribute your content, because clearly if you're not findable in Google, that's a problem. Like, nobody's going to read the piece. And so, and there's no easy right of appeal. I mean, you can appeal to Google, and I do believe Google's doing the best they can to balance people's privacy interests with freedom of expression interests. But I don't think it's Google's job. I don't think that we want to have a company, however well-intentioned, to be tasked in society with deciding those kinds of issues where really, if something is such an egregious privacy violation that it should be censored, boy, I really want to have a judge involved. I really, I think that is something that we need to not have handled at the company level.

Now, in the middle of all these conversations, we have a section, overrated versus underrated. I'll toss out a few ideas. You tell me if you think they're overrated or underrated.

Got it? Great. Yeah, fun.

Growing up in Huntsville, Alabama, overrated or underrated?

I would say underrated.

Why?

Underrated. Well, Huntsville is a really interesting place. So I grew up in Alabama, which is not known generally to be a, super high-tech place, but Huntsville, Alabama is where the NASA scientists are headquartered. So they're at the Space and Rocket Center, which means that, well, for a time in the early '60s, Huntsville apparently had the highest number of PhDs per capita of any place in the US. So Huntsville is quite a high-tech town. And yet, at least for me, what, what I feel was important as well was not just the high-tech piece of it, but it is Southern in a good way. Like, people are very polite. People are friendly. It's kind of an openness of culture, which I think has served me very well with Wikipedia, because I'm basically just friendly to people, and that's actually very helpful. So underrated.

Transhumanism, overrated or underrated?

A bit of both. Probably overrate— I'm not sure how it's rated, actually. I think 99.9% of all people have never even heard of the idea, and probably people who are massively into it overrate it, and everybody else sort of underrates it. So maybe that's—

The Marleybone section of London.

Oh, well, let's just say overrated. It's very nice there. I actually used to live there. I live in, in Notting Hill now, but it's really nice. But if you're talking about living anywhere in London, I think you have to say, take a look at the property prices and you'll say this whole place is overrated. It's outrageous.

Black-Scholes option pricing theory, overrated or underrated?

Oh.

I know you have an opinion here.

Well, again, I mean, I think there was a period of time when it was definitively overrated, uh, because it's a genius sort of innovation, a very, very clever model, and, uh, actually revolutionized a lot about how people thought about finance and enabled a lot of interesting stuff in derivatives. Of course, as a model describing reality, it's got serious weaknesses, which is why it's been replaced over time with more sophisticated models. So probably by today people think, oh, Black-Scholes, that's like a little toy model that doesn't actually show anything. That's underrating it. But maybe at the beginning when people thought it was the second coming, that was probably overrated.

And your piece criticizing Black-Scholes, is that the first thing you ever wrote?

I don't think I ever criticized Black-Scholes. I wrote a piece that was an extension. I always like to think it was It was the last extension of the most obscure possible thing, which was the pricing of index options when all of the underlying assets follow a log-normal diffusion. So it was in the Black-Scholes tradition, but it was sort of the last little tick of something, and it was a huge complicated mathematical mess. But it wasn't a critique of Black-Scholes, it was just trying to extend it to a different, uh, sort of case.

Ayn Rand's Objectivist Epistemology: overrated or underrated?

I would say underrated there. And I think that's an interesting one because clearly her politics and sort of ethics and other aspects of her thinking are hugely controversial and, you know, whatever. We could say lots of things about that. But her epistemology, I think, is very interesting. And I'm not an expert, but I used to be quite keen on this area and I read a lot and I thought a lot and I think there's some real insights and interesting insights there about concept formation that have not been appreciated by people who just think, oh, she wrote these long ranting novels about capitalism. And I think there was more to her thinking than most people realize. So underrated.

What's the weakest part of her philosophy?

I mean, I think that one of the biggest issues is that her writing exhibits a lack of kindness. And, you know, one of her core values was chewing on ideas, something she loved to do in her life, and it's something that she advocated is chewing on ideas. And what that means is, you know, really thinking things through, considering alternatives and so on. That you wouldn't necessarily know because once she chewed on the ideas long enough, she has quite a sort of flamboyant and dramatic way of presenting them, as if she's just ranting to you about, you know, the world as she sees it. And so I think that's, that's kind of problematic. I think it would be better if, if her public image were more about, let's be thoughtful and think and reflect on complicated ideas, because the simple answers are probably not the correct answers.

How have the last 5 years or so of our experience with the internet caused you to revise your self-described libertarianism, if at all? Like, is it working?

It's a very good question. I'm always very cautious about the label libertarian just because I find the Libertarian Party to be quite questionable on many things. I guess where I come down is I would say on many, many issues I like the concept that we have in US law around the First Amendment of strict scrutiny. Say, look, if we're going to have the government intervene in something, we need to be very thoughtful about that, because we know very well from economics that many interventions don't work the way most people think they work, and they actually can cause a lot more harm than good. And so something very simple— I mean, the classic simple example would be you know, let's raise the minimum wage to $40 an hour. Okay, I think most people get that actually probably isn't a great idea. That isn't actually going to help poor people very much at all, maybe a few of them, but mostly not. And so it's the sort of thing, you know, it's like, I guess over through my life, as I've gotten older, I've become more a centrist in the sense of gradualist. I think when I was 21, I might have been sort of, you know, crush the state and eliminate all this and freedom is fantastic. And now I'm really saying, look, if you're going to get anywhere and you're going to improve the state of the world and you're going to avoid authoritarian tendencies and you're going to avoid overreach by government, you're going to have a prosperous society, you need to be very thoughtful about how you change rules, very thoughtful about how you get somewhere. My sort of classic example would be zoning laws. If you just overnight eliminated all zoning laws, I'm not sure you would get to the same place you would have gotten to had you had a more market-oriented solution from the beginning, because zoning laws in some ways roughly replicate what a more market-oriented system might have come to. And so they probably, you know, it's— I don't know, I guess I'm a gradualist in that sense.

So you've become more Hayekian, you might say.

Yeah, maybe, maybe. That's possibly, not sure.

What would your management advice— excuse me— what would your management advice be for Facebook?

Oh, for Facebook. I mean, so management advice, I don't know. I always say I'm a terrible manager, but in terms of, you know, if I were giving advice to Facebook, I think they've got a real hard problem. So to be a little bit sympathetic for a moment, although I've been quite critical of Facebook in many ways, you know, one of the things that we find easier at Wikipedia is that Wikipedia has never been a place that's a wide-open free speech forum. And so we don't have to really deal with some very complicated edges around what advocacy is crossing lines that are just too offensive. Because really at Wikipedia, you're not supposed to be advocating for any particular thing at all, except for how do we make Wikipedia better? How do we describe these ideas fairly? And so if you come into Wikipedia with some sort of an agenda, however mild, that's probably not the right thing to do. And so for us, these kinds of things, we don't say, oh yeah, but people should be allowed to say whatever they want. Oh, but what if it's so offensive? Like, and they have to deal with that. And it's really hard because the point of Facebook and Twitter is to just post whatever you think and your ideas. And, and then therefore you're going to find some people have completely horrific ideas. So given that they've got a very difficult problem, what I would say is they need to really think harder about the model that they're using for moderation, which I think doesn't scale very well. So hiring people in sweatshop conditions to make content judgments, or trying to get AI, which is not really ready to judge the nuances of human conversation, to do it. Neither of those is scaling very well. None of those works very well, as opposed to what I think is really more important, is put more power into the hands of the community. Now, what does that look like for Wikipedia? We know that. What does that look like for Facebook? That's a hard problem. I don't have a simple solution for that. For them. The one thing about Facebook that I think is really, really interesting is because of the structure of ownership of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg has probably, you know, one of the strongest CEO positions of any company. He's— it would be very difficult for anybody to oust him as CEO. And therefore, he can make decisions that would be death to a CEO who has to really panic about quarterly results. So he can say, look, I'm going to make some decisions that are going to reduce engagement on Facebook, but that are going to prevent a situation where the whole world thinks we're destroying Western civilization. And we're going to maybe make half the money we were going to make, but in the long run, it's good for shareholder value. Because we can demonstrate that if we carry on our current path, everybody's starting to hate us, and that's not good for business. He could do that. He has the power to do that, and nobody could really fire him for that. And that means I kind of say hold him responsible in a way. I mean, I hold all CEOs responsible for doing morally right things, but it's a little easier to understand, uh, you know, if you're a company that says, look, if I, I know what we're doing isn't great for the the world, but it's not illegal. And if I stop doing it, I'm going to get fired because the shareholders will revolt. Then it's like, yeah, you've got a tough problem. For Mark, you know, he doesn't need any more money. He's got plenty. And so therefore, he is in a position where he can make decisions that are best for Facebook in the long run. I am not suggesting that he violate any fiduciary duties, but that he can take a long view. In a way that most CEOs unfortunately can't.

How well is the Facebook Supreme Court going to work?

The Supreme Court idea at Wikipedia— not at Wikipedia, at Facebook— I don't know how that's going to work out. I think it really— I'd like to know more about the structure of it and what actual power they have. If it's merely an advisory body filled with, you know, worthy types that Facebook isn't going to listen to, clearly that's going to absolutely do nothing. But if they're willing to take seriously the idea, and I think they do take this idea seriously, that it isn't up to Facebook to be the judge of what's true or not. I mean, I think that's something that they don't want, that responsibility. And yet, because it's a place where disinformation is being shared in a way that is damaging the world and is problematic, they also have to take responsibility. So, you know, it's like, where do they draw the line? I always remind people, if we had a different set of historical facts and, you know, 5 years ago— well, I think it's longer than that now— 10 years ago, Facebook had suddenly said, we've actually decided to start shaping the public conversation by deciding what news is of quality or not, and we're going to de-emphasize things that we think are low quality, we would all freaked out and said, oh my God, it's Orwellian. Facebook is now trying to decide for us what's true and what's not true. Now, suddenly, we're in this opposite universe where everybody's demanding, Facebook, you must do something. There's disinformation on your platform. So they're, they're in a tough spot. And so I don't, I don't know. The Supreme Court, good, yeah, don't know. They better have some power, otherwise I'm not sure.

What is it you think that you might know about the education of children that other people do not?

Oh, that's a, that's a good question. I mean, I, I don't consider myself an expert on education, but I have 3 children and I have my own experience.

You are then an expert on education.

I mean, for me, and I also can reflect on my own education, so for me, I think I, you would, you could put me in the camp that says there is a big downside to traditional education in terms of if you aren't careful, you can get into a very rigid process that is not good for creativity. And so, you know, this is— I'd say my ideas in that area are similar to unfortunately recently passed away Sir Ken Robinson. And, you know, for me, when I was young, I had a very unusual educational upbringing. Sometimes it was reported it was Montessori, but it wasn't technically Montessori, but It was very open and we had lots of free time, and I basically spent a lot of time reading the encyclopedia. And incredibly valuable just to have time to explore, be encouraged in following your curiosity, as opposed to rigidly sitting in rows and sort of meeting testing standards and all of that. Having said that, I'm not opposed to having standards for schools, and tests are a good way of measuring that. But I think we need to really focus a lot on creativity, because if we look forward, the world faces a lot of problems, and we're going to need a lot of innovation to solve some of these problems.

If you had $100 million to give away, putting aside your own enterprises, what would you do with it?

That's a really good question. Well, I— I liked seeing today that apparently Michael Bloomberg is spending $100 million in Florida for ads to defeat Donald Trump. So I'd be very tempted to go that route. But I actually, I was disappointed to read something the other day, and I haven't followed up, so I don't know what the general public conclusion is, that he had promised $100 million to help people who had been disenfranchised in the state of Florida. Because they had not paid some fines or some sort of fees to the government, and therefore their right to vote had not been restored, even though they had met all other conditions. And he was going to donate a lot of money. And then I saw an NGO who said, actually, the money never showed up. And a lot of other people donated, but he didn't. And they were unhappy with him. So I don't know about that. But I think those kinds of things, which I mean, actually, if I step back, probably defeating Donald Trump isn't how I would— if I had one chunk of $100 million. But I think it's really about— for me, it's about how do we think about restoring a sense of decency and thoughtful public engagement, where, you know, we have an election, and I look at the policies, and I say, I'm going to vote for this person because I agree with that policy. And you say, oh, I'm going to vote for the other person because I disagree on that policy. And then we have an interesting conversation about the policy, and we may not agree, but we feel at the end of the day we've chewed on some ideas. Whereas today, you know, it's sort of the ranting and the scandal mongering and all of that. It's just, it's not healthy. It's not really getting us leadership that we need.

How happy are billionaires?

I know quite a few of them. They seem pretty content.

How happy are famous people?

That's a good question. Obviously, that varies quite a bit. I suppose, actually, to be fair, it probably varies with the billionaires. That was kind of a flippant answer. I don't think money buys happiness. But the truth is, you know, it buys freedom. And so people, you know, they can pursue interests and do things like that. The, the fame. I mean, I'll give an example of someone who I know reasonably well, uh, is Sean Parker, and he is both famous and a billionaire. And if I think he were given the option to choose to give up one or the other, he would definitely give up being famous, uh, because the, the grief he's gotten in his life around his extravagant wedding and things like that are completely not aligned with the things he's interested in. He's super interested in cancer research, right? And he donates money there. And that's, you know, whenever I talk to him, he's really passionate about certain areas of medicine, not because he's trying to make money. It's just like, that's what he's interested in. That makes him happy. And being famous on the side is actually annoying. That, that's me assessing him. I haven't actually asked him that, but—

How happy are people who have power?

Oof. I mean, that's a good question. I mean, the word— even the word happy, I mean, what immediately comes to mind is President Trump. He seems pretty— I don't know, does he seem happy? I don't know. It's an interesting question. I think different people have different personalities around power. So some people have it because they want to do constructive things in the world and they like having power and so on, and they're probably pretty happy. Other people, I think they're just lost souls and they just want power and then attempt to be happy and maybe it doesn't make them happy. It's a hard question. I mean, I remember a few years ago I was on the street corner in New York City. I was just about to go into the UN, it was during General Assembly, and the street was blocked off and then an enormous motorcade went by, hundreds of motorcycles, New York police, then the Secret Service, Trump, and then hundreds more motorcycles. And I thought, for a man who probably— and I don't believe in diagnosing people of medical conditions without knowing them— but probably qualifies for some sort of medical diagnosis of narcissism, this can't be good for him, but he must fucking love it.

How happy are people who seem to have power but cannot in fact exercise it due to constraints?

Oh, that's an interesting question. I mean, I think again, it really depends on who they are and how they got there. You know, I mean, I would sort of put that myself in that category. People think I have a lot of power over Wikipedia, but I'm very ceremonial and I give advice and I try to be thoughtful and people do listen to me. So I have influence, but not power. And I'm very happy about that. For me, I'm very, very content about it. So other people, though, may have come to that situation in a way that they expected to have power and they don't. So then they must be quite unhappy.

Two last questions. First, can Wikipedia truly survive without you? I know you're calling your role ceremonial, but you're a kind of focal point, a final layer of adjudication. I once said to Vitalik Buterin in my chat with him, Well, Ethereum relies on you even when you do nothing. You're the Russian sage in the background, like in an old Dostoevsky novel. Are you in fact the American, now partly British sage in the background of Wikipedia who underpins the whole thing even when, or perhaps because, you do nothing?

Well, I mean, it appeals to my ego to imagine such, that, you know, obviously without my sage wisdom and guidance and, and calm ceremonial neutrality, the whole thing would fall apart. But frankly, I really doubt that. I do think that it is a complicated matter that I give a lot of thought to, which is— and, and which I have given a lot— it's not a new idea, but like, how do we construct systems and models and procedures and processes in the community that strive for maintaining our values in the long run and improving the encyclopedia and building something that we value. And I think we've done a pretty good job of that. You know, we struggle at times, as I say, with excessive bureaucracy, but people are aware of that and so on and so forth. I think, you know, for me, I think the hard bits and the complicated bits are probably around the interface between the community and the Wikimedia Foundation. I'm not so sure that we have a long-term settlement of those issues that I feel confident can maintain without a lot of effort, not just on my part, but on the part of core people who are around to make sure that the foundation is both able to act as necessary, but doesn't become— imagine that they're going to pursue a model like a Twitter or Facebook moderation model where they're going to take on all the jobs of moderation, which frankly wouldn't scale, it wouldn't work. And so that's the area where I, I do feel I've got some work to do still.

Last question: What will you do next?

Oh, well, I mean, I'm, I'm really focused a lot these days on WT.social. So WT.social is rethinking social media, trying to create a new social media platform with a different business model. I would say it is a pilot project. We've got about 500,000 people on the platform, but many of them are not active. And so we've got a core community working on that. That takes up a huge amount of my time. And I can tell you, this is not announced yet, but as this won't go out until November, it will be announced. I've got this goofball idea that I'm really excited and having fun with, which is I'm putting together a system so that children can visit Santa Claus. This is why I've got the Santa background here. Children can visit Santa Claus virtually this year because people shouldn't be going to shopping malls and standing in long lines to sit on an old man's lap with coronavirus going around. So you can sign up and visit Santa Claus. So that's what I'm working on this week, and I'm having a lot of fun with it.

Jamie Wales, thank you very much.

Great.