Wikipedia founder says trust is broken — here's how to rebuild it
Add Axios as your preferred source to
see more of our stories on Google.
Jimmy Wales wrote "The Seven Rules of Trust" with journalist and author Dan Gardner. Photo: Courtesy of Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales wants us to trust.
Why it matters: Trust in institutions, and in each other, has reached crisis levels, and the consequences are rippling into every aspect of modern life.
- "I think we've kind of hit something close to a rock bottom," Wales, a Huntsville native, told Axios.
Catch up quick: Wales published "The Seven Rules of Trust" in October, presenting his "view on how to mend division in society through the building of trust," per its Wikipedia page.
- For years, Wales has kept up with the annual Edelman Trust Barometer, a measure of public trust in institutions like government and media, and has witnessed the "daunting and dismaying decline in trust," he said.
- "At the same time, Wikipedia has gone from being kind of a joke in the early days to one of the few things that people trust," Wales said. "Wikipedia is completely open: anybody can join, anybody can edit, and it's not full of lunatics."
Zoom in: Wikipedia is built on trusting anyone to write and edit articles, and that model turned out to be wildly successful.
- The site has seen about 508 million visits per day for the past decade, per the Pew Research Center, ranking as one of the most-visited websites in the world.
Driving the news: Wales writes that the U.S. ought to treat this crisis in trust as a national emergency. No one can single-handedly solve the trust problem in government or media, but one person can do something.
- "That's what the seven rules are really about," he said.
How it works: Wales took the lessons learned from the way Wikipedia trusts people and turned them into those seven rules, including "Make it personal," "Be positive," "Be trusting" and "Be transparent."
- In the book, Wales encourages every organization, "from corner stores to national government," to conduct a trust inventory and ask how each decision it makes affects trust.
Friction point: That can be a daunting task in today's online ecosystem of polarization and misinformation, and even Wales said he's deleted X from his phone.
- Social media gives an impression of other people that's quite negative, but "pretty much everybody you meet is a perfectly nice person. They're not a crazed lunatic, and they're not angry," he said.
- "That's part of the point of the book," he said. "Actually, people are basically pretty decent, and let's not forget that."
The bottom line: "There's a lot of room to improve, and I think we will," he said. "But I'm always a pathological optimist."