Articles by Harry Booth

Technology

Wikipedia Co-founder Jimmy Wales on Rebuilding Trust Online and Off

Grokipedia isn’t the only AI-driven threat to Wikipedia. Some 65% of the nonprofit’s most server-straining traffic now comes from bots, some of which scrape the site to feed into chatbots for training. Instead of clicking through to Wikipedia, search-engine users can now often find their answers in—sometimes wrong—AI-generated summaries. That’s if they don’t go straight to ChatGPT or Claude. Wales says all of this means islands of human-generated content like Wikipedia “become more important than ever.” He says his principles of trust are just as relevant to AI developers, “because every time you get an AI answer and find out that the AI hallucinated and just made that up, it reduces your trust.” That’s where the “real world” comes in. Part of Wales’ pitch is that most of us already practice trust in “very routine ways,” such as getting into a rideshare or sharing an elevator with strangers. He points to Braver Angels, a U.S. group that hosts in-person conversations between people with opposing politics. Participants often emerge “a little more understanding ... a little more ready to think about compromises,” Wales says. The challenge is designing institutions and online spaces that tap into those impulses. Wikipedia’s collaborative culture, at its best, is a web version of that: slow, structured, and imperfect.And for internet interactions, Wales’ best advice is disarmingly simple. Direct your attention toward activities that build trust. Audit your feeds. “If you find yourself spending too much time using social media and being fed information that you don’t trust, then stop doing that,” he says. He offers one specific nudge: delete X from your phone.