Jimmy Wales - The Wiki Guy - answers your questions

Jimmy Wales - Wikipedia co-founder - answers your questions
We speak to the one and only “Wiki Guy” as even he describes himself. Wikipedia and Wikimedia co-founder Jimmy Wales joins Gareth and Ghislaine on the show. He will be talking about his new project called Trust Café and answering your questions on amongst other things Wikipedia’s moderation policies and the impact of large language models on the online encyclopaedia. The programme is presented by Gareth Mitchell and the studio expert is Ghislaine Boddington.

The programme is presented by Gareth Mitchell and the studio expert is Ghislaine Boddington.

More on this week's stories:
Jimmy Wales
The Wikimedia Foundation
Trust Café

Everyday AI: Your daily guide to grown with Generative AI
Can't keep up with AI? We've got you. Everyday AI helps you keep up and get ahead.

Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

How to Start a Podcast Guide: The Complete Guide
Learn how to plan, record, and launch your podcast with this illustrated guide.

Transcript

00:00:00 Gareth Mitchell 

Hello, it's Gareth. This is Somewhere on Earth and it's Tuesday the 27th of February 2024. 

00:00:15 Gareth Mitchell 

And with us today is studio expert Ghislaine Boddington, greetings Ghislaine. And here we are again. 

00:00:21 Ghislaine Boddington 

Hello, Gareth. Hi. 

00:00:23 Gareth Mitchell 

Doing Somewhere on Earth and just to ease us into the rest of the podcast then what have you been looking at these last few days? Weeks. 

00:00:31 Ghislaine Boddington 

Well, I'm deep in a whole new research project actually linked to my University of Greenwich work and Kingston University, and it's all about conversational AI's that talk to you through phones and speakers and, 

00:00:44 Ghislaine Boddington 

so at the moment with my my producer and assistant, we're looking at these more these these AIs that aresupposed to learn with you and talk to you and be be natural and responsive. They've got emotional tones of voice much, much more advanced than Alexa and Siri, apparently, but 

00:01:00 Ghislaine Boddington 

there is a quite a worrying range of them out there, so we're testing out some. 

00:01:04 Ghislaine Boddington 

They're meant to help you with mental health and other problems in life, so exploring those because they're not highly personalised. And of course that means they could very easily be giving wrong advice because it's generative AI stuff, you know, so. 

00:01:16 Gareth Mitchell 

Those hallucinations could be a problem. 

00:01:17 Ghislaine Boddington 

Yes, exactly. So sadly, the most popular AI girl companion is the AI girlfriend. 

00:01:25 Ghislaine Boddington 

Millions and millions of men now have AI girlfriends and they get they can choose to have them text them numerous times a day, giving them praise and love all day long. 

00:01:36 Gareth Mitchell 

There you go. That's what men like. 

00:01:36 Ghislaine Boddington 

Makes it a bit tough for the rest of us. 

00:01:37 Gareth Mitchell 

Like, yeah, OK. 

00:01:40 Gareth Mitchell 

That says so much. Believe you me, Ghislaine. Fascinating. And let's keep an eye on that research here on the podcast. As you get further and further into it. Alright, let's carry on. Let's get into the podcast. 

00:01:54 Gareth Mitchell 

And coming up today. 

00:01:59 Gareth Mitchell 

We have a special one for you in our midst. It's only the Wiki Guy, as even he describes himself. Yes, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales joins us. He's also the founder, and these days a trustee of the Wikimedia Foundation. And he has a new, well, newish project called Trust Cafe. 

00:02:17 Gareth Mitchell 

And Jimmy never does things by halves as we all know. In fact, he does them by fours as he once told the New York Times, he said. I tend to eat things in fours, I'll eat 4 nuts, 4 grapes, 4 chips at a time. I don't know why. It's not really a superstition. I don't think anything bad will happen if I don't. But three potato chips. 

00:02:37 Gareth Mitchell 

Just doesn't seem right. 

00:02:38 Gareth Mitchell 

Tonight, well, Jimmy's rule of fours will be alive and well in this edition. We've picked out four listener questions for the Wiki Guy. Questions like discussions of Wikipedia's moderation policies, the impact of large language models, and maybe a few questions of my own. Let's see. This is the Somewhere on Earth podcast. 

00:03:02 Gareth Mitchell 

All right. Well, let's jump in then, Jimmy. And in fact, I did say that I maybe think of a few questions of my own. I have to earn my keep somehow. Shall we start with Trust Cafe? I mentioned it in the introduction. So what is Trust cafe? 

00:03:16 Jimmy Wales 

Yeah. So Trust Cafe is pilot project at Trust Cafe dot IO. 

00:03:21 Jimmy Wales 

And the idea is to take everything I've learned from the world of Wikipedia and of fandom, 

00:03:27 Jimmy Wales 

and think about how to reimagine what a social network could be like with a model where the community is actually in control. So the idea is the most trusted members of the community have the ability to rate things up and down, but it isn't based on sheer numbers. It's based on being trusted in the community, and the idea is that the algorithms 

00:03:48 Jimmy Wales 

will promote content from trusted members rather than just whoever gets the most eyeballs and most attention. 

00:03:54 Jimmy Wales 

The idea is to say look, in most social networks, there's a real incentive to make inflammatory comments, to get into big, huge debates, because that's what gets you attention. Let's change the algorithm so that there's an incentive to post thoughtful, intriguing replies and comments. So it's still, you know, it's a 

00:04:14 Jimmy Wales 

little pilot project. We've got 2 developers and we're constantly tweaking the software and improving and learning and thinking and talking to our community, but hopefully in a few years’ time it will turn into something really interesting. In the meantime, I'm enjoying it. 

00:04:26 Speaker 4 

So that's all that really matters. 

00:04:26 Gareth Mitchell 

Well, that's that's important. How do people gain trust then? 

00:04:31 Jimmy Wales 

Well, it's pretty old fashioned really. In our community. You know we it starts in a top down way sort of algorithmically. I see people in the community who I think are smart and kind and boost their trust rating and they can boost other people's trust rating and the way you get trust from other people is it's very human, it's,  

00:04:52 Jimmy Wales 

post things that are sensible. Don't pick fights for no reason, don't quote 

00:04:56 Jimmy Wales 

low quality sources and things like that. Everybody understands this concept. It's just that social media has traditionally ignored the whole concept and it really they optimise for engagement and time on site and number of ad views and so forth. So it's a different approach that I hope leads to a different result. 

00:05:13 Gareth Mitchell 

Ghislaine you've been dipping in, haven't you? 

00:05:17 Ghislaine Boddington 

I have, yes, literally just this last week so, but very interested and I was very interested to see and it was just 

00:05:26 Ghislaine Boddington 

engaged in how I can see there’s various elements of it that you've chosen from different places. Different things put into one platform and that one platform is nice to have those all together in one place. Yeah. So I will be playing into it, but what I'm very interested in is actually looking at 

00:05:46 Ghislaine Boddington 

this kind of emergence of networks, which you know obviously has been in in the pipeline virtually for many years now since the early 90s late 80s, 

00:05:56 Ghislaine Boddington 

and I was wondering what you can see out there in terms of those emergent dynamic networks and ecosystems that you've been involved in so long? Yeah, knowledge sharing communities which have participation, which have collaborative participation in them. 

00:06:11 Ghislaine Boddington 

So is the Trust cafe really like your, a culmination of your experience on that to try and get us to this next level? 

00:06:20 Jimmy Wales 

One of the things I've always believed is what I call community design, which is a combination of 

00:06:28 Jimmy Wales 

sort of rules in the community, but also the software that supports those rules. So one of the reasons that Wikipedia works as well as it does is the actual design of the software, the ability if somebody comes in and does something harmful, anyone can go in and revert it, and then the community elects administrators. So now we're back to 

00:06:49 Jimmy Wales 

rules and so forth, and they can block people and so on. And so it's a whole complicated system that has evolved over time to sort of achieve a certain objective. 

00:07:00 Jimmy Wales 

And you know, my belief with the Trust cafe is that we can take that kind of idea of say, let's design the software and the rules and at every moment think about quality. Think about how, how are we going to promote quality discourse, how we're going to promote interesting people. And, you know, you can't completely ignore some of the traditional metrics. 

00:07:22 Jimmy Wales 

So if you say you know, Oh well, we don't care anything about engagement. Well, people have to like the site, right. So we have people come back and use the site again and again that tells you something positive or something negative. Sometimes. If it's just like super addictive, like, TikTok maybe. 

00:07:39 Jimmy Wales 

But you you want to also think about that and say, oh, I've created the perfect, you know, social network. No one ever gets in a fight, cause no one ever uses it. And there's no toxic content because nobody's posting anything. So you gotta think about popularity. But really, how do you get there and also take into account community control and thoughtfulness and kindness and and 

00:07:48 Ghislaine Boddington 

Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

00:07:59 Jimmy Wales 

building out a space that people are like, you know what? This is a home I like to be here. I felt bad about myself when I was on Instagram. I feel good about myself when I've been here for a year, I've met interesting people and I've learned new things and that's good. 

00:08:12 Ghislaine Boddington 

So the branches that you can go into and it says my branches and I haven't done this yet fully, but in my understanding of network and culture and the emergent dynamics of networks, etcetera, will they be kind of like are they like kind of hubs or clusters where a certain you know holding the network together and and? 

00:08:32 Ghislaine Boddington 

And will they have kind of interaction between them too in the longer term maybe? 

00:08:36 Jimmy Wales 

In the longer term, maybe I mean the the the closest analogy you might think of as a subreddit. It's a topical topic based thing, so for example, 

00:08:44 Jimmy Wales 

there's the Formula One branch, and there's one lovely guy. One of our early adopters, who posts every day about Formula One. I've actually become re learned my fandom of Formula One from, he's caught me up on everything and so yeah, the idea is, you know, you you can subscribe to or follow 

00:09:05 Jimmy Wales 

whatever branch you're interested in, and you go there and have a conversation, but obviously there's a lot of interesting things to be done with topics that live near each other in some sense and you know, cross posting and things like that. 

00:09:17 Gareth Mitchell 

So there's a real opportunity for people to be early adopters in this. You know, you mentioned the guy’s really early adopter of the site really interested in it wants to get some Formula One stuff up. So it's almost analogous to the the first hundred people to write a Wikipedia page. It's early days, so people can still shape how the whole thing's gonna work out. 

00:09:33 Jimmy Wales 

Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely. And there's, you know, you know, so far we've got 

00:09:39 Jimmy Wales 

a small community. You know we like right now the way the software is set up, we don't even get indexed by Google other than the homepage and that's because we are deliberately trying not to grow too fast. 

00:09:51 Jimmy Wales 

So I talk about it rarely. 

00:09:56 Jimmy Wales 

On a podcast here and there. And then I get some interesting podcast type of people coming in and that's good. I have never tweeted about it. You know, I'm just saying we need to grow the community thoughtfully and organically to try to get the base of something that could be really interesting. 

00:10:11 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah. And is there some technical side of that as well, just cause obviously it's expensive to 

00:10:15 Gareth Mitchell 

scale a new business or website or Apple or what have you. Is that partly it, because obviously you're not on a kind of ad based revenue maximisation model where you can just buy a chunk of servers at AWS. And so is that is that 

00:10:29 Gareth Mitchell 

Kind of part of it as well then. 

00:10:30 Jimmy Wales 

Yeah. I mean, there's some interesting things going on. 

00:10:32 Jimmy Wales 

Uh, so first of, yeah, we don't have ads. Uh, we have a voluntary payment model, so you can sign up to be a patron and you get a little badge saying you’re a patron and all that. We're not even close to profitable. I pay for it for the most part, but we've got lovely people who are supporting us. But what's interesting going on in the tech world these days is something called 

00:10:53 Jimmy Wales 

Serverless and the idea is to have functions as a service and and services on AWS and Google and so on where it scales down to 0 if no one's using it and it scales as high as you 

00:11:05 Jimmy Wales 

want to go almost instantly, which gets 

00:11:07 Jimmy Wales 

a small group of people out of managing servers, and I mean I remember the early days of Wikipedia I would 

00:11:14 Jimmy Wales 

literally order a stack of servers and drive down to the data centre and screw them into the racks myself. You know, we had to physically buy servers. Now we just get whatever capacity we need in the cloud as we need it, which means that the tech part of scaling should scale with the traffic in a linear fashion and then the revenue should scale hopefully in a linear,  

00:11:34 Jimmy Wales 

if people sign up and pay hopefully, if they think it's nice. Yeah, but you know, for now, it's. 

00:11:38 Gareth Mitchell 

Money would be nice. 

00:11:42 Jimmy Wales 

The main cost is the the development cost. 

00:11:45 Gareth Mitchell 

Sure. All right, Jimmy, thank you. Should we have some listener questions like this one from Gowri Abhiram and she's going to mention you've got some other adventure, it's inside the wiki, something rather anyway, Gowri has a question about that. 

00:11:49 Ghislaine Boddington 

Yes, yes. 

00:12:02 Gareth Mitchell 

And asks why is truthful information sometimes removed from Wikipedia? I say this from personal experience continues Gowri. In January 2022, my husband, myself and my son visited Savali, an agricultural site in Maharashtra and travelling from Hyderabad. 

00:12:20 Gareth Mitchell 

As calculated by the filmmaker Chris Riley, this location is the equivalent place on Earth to the landing site of the Perseverance Rover on Mars. Doctor Riley proceeded to add a paragraph about our visit to the Wikipedia page on the Perseverance Rover, but that paragraph was removed within a short time from that page. 

00:12:40 Gareth Mitchell 

And presumably because there is no coverage about it on our local media and therefore it couldn't be verified. And then Gowri goes on to say our visit was covered by the BBC Podcast Digital Planet 

00:12:52 Gareth Mitchell 

and also through an article written by Dr Chris Riley on Medium, along with some photos of our visit in February 2022. The removal of the details of our visit from the Wiki page isn't of much importance or consequence, but what about other important information that may be wrongfully removed? How will that be 

00:13:12 Gareth Mitchell 

prevented, asks Gowri. 

00:13:13 Jimmy Wales 

So this is this is fascinating and I'm I'm going to sound like I know what I'm talking about, but that's only because I was sent the question early. So I did a bit of homework cuz I thought this is an interesting case. So the first thing I would say is 

00:13:25 Jimmy Wales 

that when we think about an entry like the Perseverance Rover, that is a a encyclopaedia article about the Rover, about the scientific mission, about the space programme and all of that sort of thing and probably this visit to a parallel point on 

00:13:46 Jimmy Wales 

Earth by you know, some people doesn't really belong in that entry. It's not what people are expecting or hoping to find when they go to that entry. But I did ask myself, OK, well, for this place, I understand it's a small village and I don't think at least I couldn't find an entry in Wikipedia about the small village at all. 

00:14:06 Jimmy Wales 

That means possibly this is the most notable thing that's ever happened to the village is the fact that it somehow corresponds as the sister point you might want to  

00:14:14 Jimmy Wales 

call it and that means in that small area in that small village that actually might be relevant, might be important if someone is saying, gee, I'm travelling, I'm I'm going through India and I'm going through a series of places and I'm I'm in rural India and I say oh, what is this village and I look it up and I'm I said oh, that's actually interesting. This is the parallel point, you know. And there's some pictures of this visit  

00:14:34 Jimmy Wales 

that these people did so sometimes it is really about where does it go in Wikipedia. Now, I'm not sure it goes in Wikipedia at all. I'm not really sure on that level, but 

00:14:44 Jimmy Wales 

that's often the case, and usually you know we have a lot of discussions and debates in the community. You know, it's a constant dialogue, a constant discourse about what should be in Wikipedia, what shouldn't. And the most important thing that comes out of that is merely being truthful is not enough. 

00:15:03 Jimmy Wales 

Lots of things are true, but don't really belong in an encyclopaedia. So the way we normally think about this is, 

00:15:12 Jimmy Wales 

could we have an entry here? I just see a water bottle on the table. The listeners can't see it, but it's a thermos brand water bottle. Could we have an entry about this particular water bottle on this table? Well, no, there's nothing interesting to say about it. 

00:15:27 Jimmy Wales 

Could we have an entry about the thermos company? Well, of course it's a big company. Could we have an entry about this particular model of water bottle? Well, maybe sometimes, you know a particular brand of shoe or a particular type could be interesting enough. 

00:15:42 Jimmy Wales 

But you definitely can't have an entry about everything that's true. And so then that gets us into a whole fascinating world. And there's hundreds and hundreds of pages in Wikipedia asking the question, what is notability in the sense of Wikipedia? What? And, you know, one of the things which was identified by the question is independent 

00:16:02 Jimmy Wales 

high quality third party coverage media coverage of some sort. And so they had that in this case. But that's not always enough. We also have to ask ourselves, is this relevant to the reader? So someone's showing up and they say, oh, I want to read about the Perseverance 

00:16:18 Jimmy Wales 

Rover. They will be interested in where it landed on Mars. They're not so interested in parallel point on earth, but a small village. Yeah, they might find that interesting. 

00:16:29 Gareth Mitchell 

OK. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense, Ghislaine. 

00:16:31 Ghislaine Boddington 

Yes. No, I think it does. It does make a lot of sense, but I'm just to, you know, hit back to the, the the question about what may be wrongfully removed at this moment in time, we know there's a huge rising number of people who  

00:16:46 Ghislaine Boddington 

really want to change information to suit their own views? You know, whether it's a bias politically or culturally, or whatever gender or whatever. So I guess that must be complex for Wikimedia. Maintaining a debate rather than getting pulled into kind of battleground of opinions. 

00:17:03 Jimmy Wales 

Yeah, of course. This has always been the case, though. This is nothing new about the last few years. It seems that way sometimes, but it's nothing new for Wikipedia, and it's nothing new for the world. But of course. 

00:17:17 Jimmy Wales 

Often people will come to Wikipedia, particularly when they're coming, they've never edited before, and they assume 

00:17:23 Jimmy Wales 

that Wikipedia is a battleground, and sometimes you'll see it described this way in a in a way that we inside Wikipedia as the editors and the people working on it really find annoying. If you come to Wikipedia with the idea that you're supposed to come and write great wrongs and fight for a particular perspective, and that somehow 

00:17:43 Jimmy Wales 

as the outcome of all the clashes, the truth will emerge,  

00:17:47 Jimmy Wales 

well, that turns out just to be not true. Like if people come in and they just want to yell at each other. I mean, go back to Twitter. It's you're very welcome there. What does work is 

00:17:58 Jimmy Wales 

people coming in who maybe have a different perspective, maybe they have a different background, different sets of knowledge, who approach each other with kindness, assuming good faith and saying, OK, let's let's work on this. So my classic example is. 

00:18:13 Jimmy Wales 

a controversial topic like abortion, and you can imagine a kind and thoughtful Catholic priest and a kind and thoughtful family planning advocate, and they come together to work on the entry, and they can both understand Wikipedia is not going to say abortion is a sin. 

00:18:34 Jimmy Wales 

But it will say, according to the Catholic Church, this is the position on abortion, and the Pope has said this, and critics have responded that and if you have people who are kind and thoughtful 

00:18:45 Jimmy Wales 

they can actually work through it and get to a presentation that they're both proud of to say, look, if you don't know what the controversy is and you really want to learn, all sides presented fairly, this is a great thing. You should read this and it turns out even people who are quite ideological, if they are intellectually confident, they're actually comfortable with that. 

00:19:06 Jimmy Wales 

If you knew as much about the issue as I do, you would probably agree with me. Whereas people who are less confident in their ideas tend to be the ones who go crazy yelling at people because they're actually afraid 

00:19:18 Jimmy Wales 

that they'll be shown to be wrong and so they want to yell to shut the other side up. So that is my sort of view of human nature and the view of the way these things work. And in practise it works out pretty well. So you do have to be careful. People do come in with organised agendas of various kinds. And then we also, you know, we have a policy 

00:19:38 Jimmy Wales 

of you know, following reliable sources and so what does that mean? Well, it does mean if all consensus of all humankind is in one direction, we're probably not going to give the other direction very 

00:19:54 Jimmy Wales 

much space and as we know, as a human species, we've gotten things wrong before, and someday we'll look back and I'm sure if the in an earlier era they had a very kind and thoughtful group of people writing an encyclopaedia, they might portray, you know, using leeches in medicine as a grand idea when now we think  

00:20:15 Jimmy Wales 

probably not so much, although I read recently that it 

00:20:17 Gareth Mitchell 

It's becoming 

00:20:17 Jimmy Wales 

Wasn't as. 

00:20:18 Gareth Mitchell 

a thing again. 

00:20:19 Jimmy Wales 

It wasn't as crazy as we may have thought for a while, but, 

00:20:23 Jimmy Wales 

but you know, we accept that, you know, as as we learn and as things change, we will discover things about our common understanding, the world that we're mistaken. That's fine. That's I'm completely comfortable with that. The alternative for us would be to equally host every kind of crackpot crank theory. And that doesn't really make sense. So I always say,  

00:20:44 Jimmy Wales 

for example, in our article on the Moon, doesn’t 

00:20:48 Jimmy Wales 

say, some say rocks, some say cheese. who knows, you know, that's not neutrality, really. But if there's a a legitimate historical conflict. I once met with a Member of Parliament in Lithuania who was comparing a particular entry in Wikipedia, and he was comparing the English version and the Polish  

00:20:52 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so. 

00:21:08 Jimmy Wales 

version and the Lithuanian version, and it was about a battle between Lithuania and Poland in the 19th century 

00:21:15 Jimmy Wales 

and he said, well, the Lithuanian Wikipedia says basically the Lithuanian perspective and the Polish Wikipedia says the Polish perspective, the English Wikipedia, he's like, it's really good. It addresses what is a real historical conflict there in, in amongst historians, there's actually 

00:21:36 Jimmy Wales 

some complications around interpreting the evidence, and it's like you could really understand what that conflict is about if you read the English version. 

00:21:43 Jimmy Wales 

And his question was, how do we get the Polish and the Lithuanian versions to be? And I said, give us some time and also you can speak those languages, you know, going at it. 

00:21:51 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, yeah, yeah. OK. Alright. That's a good example. And and there is by the way, a Wikipedia article on medicinal leeches. Just check that. So there we are. Right, Jimmy, we have a question via voice memo for you now. OK. 

00:21:59 Jimmy Wales 

Great. Fantastic. 

00:22:09 Stefano Ghazzali 

Hi, this is Stefano Gazzali with the two-part question for Jimmy Wales. So my first part of the question is how do you think generative AI and large language models will affect knowledge repositories like Wikipedia and 

00:22:29 Stefano Ghazzali 

Stack Overflow and the second part of the question is how do you think the open knowledge community will react to this with the fact that 

00:22:41 Stefano Ghazzali 

large language models have the likelihood to hallucinate, so how can we validate the information that we're being given? Thanks very much for the opportunity. 

00:22:56 Gareth Mitchell 

Thanks for your question. Brilliant question Stefano. Appreciate it. So, Jimmy, there you go LLM's and hallucinations. Your thoughts? 

00:23:03 Jimmy Wales 

Yeah. Well, Stefano, that is a great question and it's really the the question of this year. I think as these models have become accessible to the public for the first time. 

00:23:13 Jimmy Wales 

And they're really amazing. And they're really deeply flawed at the same time. So when I think about 

00:23:21 Jimmy Wales 

Wikipedia and I think about Stack Overflow. They're very, very different use cases. 

00:23:26 Jimmy Wales 

And in fact, I think for Stack Overflow I think there is a problem, so I'm I'm sort of the perfect typical user of Stack Overflow. I don't write on Stack Overflow because although I'm a programmer, I'm a pretty bad programmer, but I like programming as a hobby and I whenever I'm going to do some programming I get an error message. 

00:23:46 Jimmy Wales 

I Google, the error message and I go to Stack Overflow and I read 

00:23:50 Jimmy Wales 

what somebody else had the error and then people explained to them how to fix it and so on. Great. Fantastic. Now I just go to ChatGPT and I paste in the error message and I say can you explain this to me and I get a very good explanation and it tends to be quite good and not hallucinatory. It seems to be much better at tech questions than some other areas. 

00:24:10 Jimmy Wales 

It isn't always perfect, but even when it's not perfect it it will give me sort of, and well, here's 6 things you should try and I can go through them or you know, here's how this actually. OK, it's pretty good. I find it very useful. Wikipedia is a different use case, but I do think there is a sense that for readers in some cases it's sort of the equivalent 

00:24:30 Jimmy Wales 

except for the hallucination problem, which is severe. 

00:24:36 Jimmy Wales 

I I always enjoy telling the story. One of the things I love to ask ChatGPT, 

00:24:42 Jimmy Wales 

is who is Kate Garvey? My wife. So Kate is not a famous person, but she's been in the news a bit. And she worked for Tony Blair for 10 years. And she's mentioned in several books. And. And she's doing work with the UN and so forth. But she's at that perfect kind of margin 

00:25:02 Jimmy Wales 

where ChatGPT sort of knows who she is, but sort of doesn't, and very confidently makes things up. So it once told me that she set up a nonprofit organisation to fight for women's empowerment in the workplace, and she set it up with Miriam Gonzalez, who is Nick Clegg's wife. 

00:25:22 Jimmy Wales 

Which is kind of plausible because we know Nick and Miriam and Nick works in my industry now and at Facebook. And and I showed it to my wife and she said, I mean, that's that could have happened had we been at the right dinner like it's not she she in fact runs. 

00:25:37 Gareth Mitchell 

And that's just the scariest thing. 

00:25:39 Gareth Mitchell 

These nations, isn't it? So this this bring this back to Wikipedia. 

00:25:39 Speaker 4 

Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

00:25:41 Gareth Mitchell 

What that means for you, because I suppose behind that, I guess where you're going with this, yes, is well, you could read a Wikipedia article that seems very convincing. 

00:25:50 Gareth Mitchell 

I mean. 

00:25:51 

For sure. 

00:25:51 Jimmy Wales 

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So it can be very convincing. It's very plausible. 

00:25:57 Jimmy Wales 

And that's actually the scariest thing about the misinformation that comes out of ChatGPT is that it is so plausible. And so that's a problem. So for us, if we, if we want to think about how we're thinking about it and how we think about large language models in the world of Wikipedia, so first, there's no there's no sense that large language models can just replace the work of the Wikipedia 

00:26:19 Jimmy Wales 

community. In fact, it's not even particularly helpful because the areas it's strong at 

00:26:27 Jimmy Wales 

are already like huge Wikipedia entries. Like. If you say who is Barack Obama, it's gonna give you a perfectly decent answer. It's more the things we're working on the the the small village in India and things like that where you don't really want it to make things up. And you really want to verify and so forth. 

00:26:43 Jimmy Wales 

But I do think there's some interesting possibilities, so one of the ideas I've been toying with 

00:26:48 Jimmy Wales 

is consider a a short Wikipedia entry with only four or five references at the bottom. 

00:26:54 Jimmy Wales 

Could you feed in that entry and feed in the text of the five sources and say, is there anything in the Wikipedia entry that is not supported by the sources? Or is there anything in the sources that probably should be in the Wikipedia entry? And if it can do that with a reasonable degree of accuracy to suggest an edit it to a human to say h well this article says 

00:27:16 Jimmy Wales 

the person was born on this date. Should you add that? And then you go. Yeah, OK, that's a good idea. And would that be a fun thing for people to do? Because always with Wikipedia, it has to be fun to do. People aren't slaving away, not having fun. They're writing things they think are interesting. But if they find it useful and helpful, why not? That sounds kind of cool. Also. Imagine 

00:27:35 Jimmy Wales 

scanning over all of Wikipedia and saying find me entries that are both popular. So you would have to have a matrix of popularity. 

00:27:44 Jimmy Wales 

And seem biased OK. Because a lot of people who are working on Wikipedia are very interested in fighting against biased entries. But how do you find them? You know, we don't really have an easy method of measuring it, but if ChatGPT can say oh, this contains a lot of biased language, then as a human you can look at it and you might agree, or you might not. 

00:28:04 Jimmy Wales 

Maybe it's just misinterpreting. 

00:28:08 Jimmy Wales 

So those are the kinds of things I think are worth exploring. Then also we're thinking about, you know, our search at Wikipedia, if you go to Wikipedia and you type Queen Victoria in the search box, it's going to be fine. You're going to find the article about Queen Victoria. If you ask a question. Now it's just going to find the keywords that you happen to enter. 

00:28:28 Jimmy Wales 

But what if you said, why do ducks fly south for winter? 

00:28:31 Jimmy Wales 

Well, you know that's in Wikipedia somewhere, but where is it? Is in the article on ducks. Is it article on bird migration? Is it somewhere else? Is it all of those? If it can read all of Wikipedia and not make things up, that's really important and say, well, according to this entry and that entry, here's a basic reason with links to go and read more that gives people a new way of interacting with this knowledge 

00:28:54 Jimmy Wales 

ba0es that might be quite fun and might be quite 

00:28:56 Jimmy Wales 

interesting. So we've got our machine learning team who are busy, busy looking into these things thinking about what do they mean, how can we do it? What is the, what is it all mean and you know, one of the things is the large language models actually have a very weak ability to actually tell you where they learned 

00:29:18 Jimmy Wales 

something because they're basically giant probability estimates of what the next word might be given a bunch of prior worlds 

00:29:26 Jimmy Wales 

and so they've chopped all the data up into atomistic words. And then it's amazing that it works at all, and yet it does. And so sometimes, you know it, if you ask it how it made that, how does it know that it will give you a source that 

00:29:42 Gareth Mitchell 

it made-up out of thin air. All right. OK. All right. 

00:29:45 Gareth Mitchell 

Me. Thank you. Right now this one is from DK Mok who says dear Someone on Earth team. I'm excited to hear that Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales will be a guest on the podcast. I'd love to submit a question for consideration. 

00:29:56 Gareth Mitchell 

He goes, I understand Wikipedia relies on financial donations from ordinary users, and I'm concerned about the viability of this going into the future. Those who depend on Wikipedia are most often the least able to pay, and the cost of living crisis compounded by climate disasters means many who'd like to donate no longer have the means. 

00:30:16 Gareth Mitchell 

Here in Australia, continues DK. Here in Australia, many nonprofits are struggling to stay afloat. How can organisations that provide essential services like Wikipedi, Signal and Blue Sky find reliable, robust and ethical funding in an economically unstable future? Really enjoying the podcast. Keep up the good work. 

00:30:36 Jimmy Wales 

Yeah, Jimmy. Yeah, very good. Well, so our funding model is, you know, we're a charity, a nonprofit organisation. 

00:30:44 Jimmy Wales 

The vast majority of the money that funds Wikipedia comes from the small donors, which I think is very important. Sometimes people see the banner and they say, oh, why don't you just make Apple and Google and Microsoft and Facebook pay for it. And I said, let's think that through. I think our intellectual independence is quite important. And the idea that we depend 

00:31:06 Jimmy Wales 

for our resources on the general public helps us to stay on the straight and narrow in terms of thinking about don't be biased, don't go in one direction. Don't you know whatever. Whatever. 

00:31:16 Jimmy Wales 

And so it's really important that that model has worked for us and it's still working. So we you know we we run the organisation in a very conservative way. I don't mean right wing, I mean careful. 

00:31:31 Jimmy Wales 

We try to bring in more money than we spend every year and build up our reserves. We have a separate endowment fund, which is partly funded from our general budget, but also that's where we direct a lot of major donors into the endowment fund because it's one step removed from the content. 

00:31:50 Jimmy Wales 

And that it, all works. I mean, right now we we always have to take fundraising seriously, but we're OK. And I think the broader questions that you ask are constantly on our minds about, you know, how do we keep Wikipedia safe in the event of a major economic crisis, worldwide depression or something like this. 

00:32:11 Jimmy Wales 

Can we make sure that we can weather a period of time and the answer is I believe yes, we can. You know we we've built up reserves and we're OK. Now the bigger question about nonprofit struggling that I don't have a simple answer to that. I wish I did, but we're in part, we're we're lucky 

00:32:29 Jimmy Wales 

as compared to a lot of knowledge projects, because we are so popular, so only a small percentage of people actually donate, but that's enough. So some of the other things that you mentioned, I think Blue Sky is actually a for profit. But the other things like Signal and so forth, they also ask for donations, they are funded 

00:32:49 Jimmy Wales 

in some cases, by their founders, who have a lot of money and things like. 

00:32:52 Jimmy Wales 

Yeah, but I think it's really important that, you know, when you get that little message from Signal or whoever to say, could you support us? Yeah, chip in a few quid. And I think it's really important. 

00:33:02 Ghislaine Boddington 

I mean it is I noticed. Yeah. And I think this is up to date that you're the 7th most visited website in the world and the only not-for-profit. 

00:33:13 Ghislaine Boddington 

In the top ten if not. 

00:33:14 Jimmy Wales 

I I think more. Yeah top 50. 

00:33:16 Gareth Mitchell 

That tells you something. 

00:33:17 Jimmy Wales 

Thing. Yeah, yeah. There's nothing. Yeah, nothing. 

00:33:18 Ghislaine Boddington 

But there's that does say a lot, doesn't it? Yeah. 

00:33:19 Gareth Mitchell 

Which I guess is is decades concern and maybe that of DK and many others. What a lovely funding model that makes us all feel very good about ourselves, but really, is it sustainable? And I I think they obviously you put your case that it is. 

00:33:30 Jimmy Wales 

Yeah. I mean, we've been doing it now for 

00:33:33 Jimmy Wales 

over 20 years and ohh. 

00:33:34 Speaker 4 

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is it over? Yes, it's over. Yes. Yeah. 2001. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's been nearly 25 years. Yeah. 

00:33:35 Gareth Mitchell 

His post.com bubble? Yeah, it's 2000. A month. 

00:33:39 Gareth Mitchell 

Well, it's, it's. 

00:33:41 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, it's kind of bedding in all right, I think. All right, final question then, um from this is either Jan or Yan Sale. I'm going to assume Yan, but it could be Jan, here we go. 

00:33:53 Gareth Mitchell 

I'm a long time supporter of Wikipedia and have donated monthly for a number of years now to support it. I love the idea of a public global knowledge base, but there's a problem. I tried to write up and post a page about one science fiction author, fairly well known and has won a couple 

00:34:08 Gareth Mitchell 

of awards, and I wrote up a long article about one of his sci-fi book series that I really love and hope that this would help others to find really good series and the sci-fi universe that he built. Unfortunately, I ran into a problem here, as the author had started by self-publishing there weren't many other reviews or talk about except to the places where he publishes. 

00:34:29 Gareth Mitchell 

Like for instance Audible for the audio version and Amazon, etcetera for the book. So the Wiki person who looked into this and should have approved it just rejected it as it couldn't be 100% verified. 

00:34:42 Gareth Mitchell 

As you can understand, I'm paraphrasing here by the way, but as you can understand, says Jan, and I'm very disappointed. And the problem is there's no way for me to appeal these things to a higher authority as far as I know. So if you get to a review that doesn't like what you've tried to write, you're kind of in limbo. So this has putting me off writing stuff for Wikipedia. So which is a shame. Let's all 

00:35:01 Gareth Mitchell 

hope that Jan will continue writing for Wikipedia and my interpretation of that question Jimmy is it it?, maybe if the Wikipedia review the Wikipedian happens to be really into that sci-fi author, there's a pretty good chance that page would have stood. I'm gonna put it to you. 

00:35:02 Ghislaine Boddington 

Positioning, yeah. 

00:35:17 Jimmy Wales 

It it's a great question and you know it's it's a problem that is very hard for us to solve in a sense because OK, so we have something that's that's fantastic and it's gained traction outside of normal channels. So the books have not been reviewed by. 

00:35:38 Jimmy Wales 

The New York Times. They're maybe not New York Times bestsellers, but they're selling well. And so there hasn't been much media coverage. And so there's no third party sources. It's self published work and so on and so forth, so. 

00:35:52 Jimmy Wales 

It's hard for us to write a biography in that case. We don't know anything about the author to even write about the book series. What can we really add from a, you know, because we're not journalists and journalism is really, really important. 

00:36:05 Jimmy Wales 

So there are cases like this that are actually really ,they they stump me because I think it's unfortunate, but I don't think the right answer is to say, well, anybody can come and write anything they like because then you really open the door to complete chaos and a loss of quality overall. I'll give a completely different example that I think 

00:36:25 Jimmy Wales 

structurally, philosophically is really the same problem. 

00:36:29 Jimmy Wales 

What about in cultures and places? It's like in Sub-Saharan Africa, where there's oral history, but not so much written down. How do we grapple with that? Because if there's no written down history, there's no editors deciding judging books. There's no history written in the traditional manner. 

00:36:50 Jimmy Wales 

Then you just say, how do you know this? Well, my grandma told me. OK, well, that's that's actually knowledge, right? It's probably valid, but it's hard to verify. 

00:36:55 Gareth Mitchell 

Exactly like so and. 

00:36:58 Gareth Mitchell 

And on that basis Homer it would never have made it to have a Wikipedia entry. I just heard Homer. Yeah. 

00:37:01 Speaker 4 

Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

00:37:05 Speaker 4 

Yeah. So. 

00:37:05 Jimmy Wales 

But you know there's there's loads of things that I could say about my mom that are all true, but they 

00:37:10 Jimmy Wales 

don't really belong in Wikipedia, and so I think that's an interesting question. Is what are the boundaries of what an encyclopaedia can cover, versus maybe a different type of work, a different type of reference? You know that's a more open-ended 

00:37:23 Jimmy Wales 

sort of encyclopaedia of self published authors where you might say actually in that context we're going to we're going to open it up and and the references you need are your your Audible sales numbers and your, you know. Yeah, your Amazon numbers and things like that. 

00:37:37 Gareth Mitchell 

Like, I was thinking that revising the the verification criteria maybe to take account of new publishing. 

00:37:42 Jimmy Wales 

Yeah, and. 

00:37:43 Ghislaine Boddington 

And I think that I think that would be, yeah, possibly that that would be definitely looking ahead to the next 10 years because there are so many things that do not get. 

00:37:43 Jimmy Wales 

Within the community. 

00:37:52 Ghislaine Boddington 

You know an academic source or a journalistics or so many things, and nothing about live performance. I work in in from live performing background well time based work of all types you know happens across now two hours and then it disappears. Yeah. And it's gone. Sometimes it’s recorded, sometimes it's not. Sometimes there's a critic writes about it, but actually pretty rarely because there's very little 

00:38:13 Ghislaine Boddington 

footage for coverage, for, for the etcetera 

00:38:16 Gareth Mitchell 

papers. And yet it's as culturally relevant as anything that may be more permanently or easier to easier and inverted commas to verify. 

00:38:21 Ghislaine Boddington 

Like the oral documentation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

00:38:24 Gareth Mitchell 

I look look, I mean it's a huge issue, but I think we should wrap it up there. We can carry on chatting in the subscription edition of this podcast. But final request though from Jan wants listener #47 as a Star Trek Star Trek fan says says Jan so that 

00:38:45 Gareth Mitchell 

is subscriber #47. 

00:38:48 Gareth Mitchell 

Say I like the Star Trek reference 42, adjusted for inflation. 

00:38:53 Gareth Mitchell 

47. So really quickly, can we convene a very quick SUDS committee here and and Jimmy, maybe you could even though you probably don't know what on Earth I'm on about, but do you think well as long as Ghislaine agrees, if you say that Jan, Ghislaine does you just need to say it's OK for Jan to have 47, but you can  

00:39:09 Gareth Mitchell 

veto it. Yeah. OK. It's not a trick question, by the way. 

00:39:10 Jimmy Wales 

Yeah, but it's a Star Trek reference. I thought it was Douglas Adams. 

00:39:15 Gareth Mitchell 

Well, the 42 thing is, yeah, but the the number 47 is a kind of recurring joke across quite a lot of Star Trek. I think that even the writers got bored of it after a while. Yeah, OK. 

00:39:24 Jimmy Wales 

Definitely I in fact, one of the things I I joke is like my my role in Wikipedia. I'm I'm not the CEO. I don't work there. My role in the community 

00:39:32 Jimmy Wales 

is completely powerless constitutional monarch. 

00:39:36 Jimmy Wales 

That does give me the ability to make decrees from time to time, so by the authority vested in me by myself, I decree 47 is OK. 

00:39:46 Gareth Mitchell 

Well, I should think that's very much made. You understand? That's that is OK that seems to be validation there. So we'll accept that. Thank you, Jimmy. 

00:39:47 

Great. It's as. 

00:39:48 Jimmy Wales 

Official as you're ever gonna get. 

00:39:55 Gareth Mitchell 

And folks, you can get in touch the usual places. Of course, our e-mail is hello at somewhere on earth.co on WhatsApp, we're code 447486329484. 

00:40:06 Gareth Mitchell 

We have Kaziah and Dylan behind the glass for you this week doing the audio here at Lanson's Team Farner. Our production manager is Liz. The editor is Ania. We have had Ghislaine Boddington here to give us expertise and excellent company and I'm some bloke called Gareth, that will do. Thank you, Jimmy and see you soon, folks. More in the subscription. Bye 

ENDS 

40’24