‘Although I have often described myself as a “pathological optimist”,’ Jimmy Wales told me via email for an Esquire story I was writing in May 2020, ‘I don’t think I really understood the depth of the impact that we would have. I certainly didn’t foresee how some very early decisions against collecting, sharing, and selling data would end up setting us fundamentally apart from the sector of the Internet that people are increasingly uneasy with.’
The techlash against Facebook and Twitter has left Wikipedia largely unscathed. Or rather, Wikipedia is saddled with many of the same sorts of criticisms and shortcomings it has always had. Wales calls these ‘difficult questions about behaviour’.
‘We are humans, and people do get into arguments, and people who “aren’t here to build an encyclopaedia” show up to push an agenda, or to troll or harass. And dealing with those cases requires a great deal of calm and sensible judgment. It requires building robust institutions and mechanisms. If we were to deal with some problems in the community by allowing the Wikimedia Foundation to become like other Internet institutions (Twitter comes to mind), where policing the site for bad behaviour is taken out of the hands of the community, we’d end up like Twitter – unscalable, out of control, a cesspool.’
I asked Wales what he thought of his own Wikipedia entry, which includes his nickname (Jimbo), his background in the financial sector, and his involvement in an online portal that specialised in adult content.
‘It’s as right as the media about me is right,’ he replied. ‘I don’t think it mentions that I’m a passionate chef, which is a pity. But I think that’s because it’s never been covered in the press. You can mention it – that’ll set the world to rights.’*
Wales is now chair emeritus of the Wikimedia Foundation. When I asked him to describe his present role in the empire, he made an unusual comparison. ‘I think UK audiences will understand this better than other audiences. I view my role as being very much like the modern monarch of the UK: no real power, but the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, and the right to warn.’
I wondered whether he regretted not being a billionaire like all the other pioneers on that top ten chart: did he never regret not monetising Wikipedia in some way? (‘Just a bit of advertising,’ I suggested facetiously. ‘Think of what good all that money could do …’)
He replied, ‘No, I’m content with where we are. In 500 years Wikipedia will be remembered and (if we do our job well in setting things up with a long-term perspective for safety) still be informing the public. I doubt many of our commercial colleagues will even be remembered, much less still here.’*
Writing in the New York Review of Books in 2008, Nicholson Baker conjured a cute image of Wikipedia’s early methodology.
It was like a giant community leaf-raking project in which everyone was called a groundskeeper. Some brought very fancy professional metal rakes, or even back-mounted leaf-blowing systems, and some were just kids thrashing away with the sides of their feet or stuffing handfuls in the pockets of their sweatshirts, but all the leaves they brought to the pile were appreciated. And the pile grew and everyone jumped up and down in it having a wonderful time.
But there was a problem. Not long into adolescence, ‘self-promoted leaf-pile guards appeared, doubters and deprecators who would look askance at your proffered handful and shake their heads, saying that your leaves were too crumpled or too slimy or too common, throwing them to the side.’ What is and isn’t valued knowledge, and how best to present it, has been the recurring headache of every encyclopaedia editor in history. Add in the digital world’s perfectionists, elitists, sticklers and bullies, and you have a recipe for chaos. So certain policies and guidelines evolved to keep the leaf pile both useful and valuable.
While its freeform open-access ethos still holds (anyone can contribute new articles and edit old ones) the appearance of new material on the site is subject to approval from the rest of the editing community. You cannot, for example just go in and write that your teacher or boss is a feeble-minded moron, however accurate that may be, and expect it to be hyperlinked to the site’s many other feeble-minded morons, or the history of feeble-mindedness, or the Ancient Greek derivation of the word moron. If you have some sort of published evidence, though, that’s a different matter; very early on, Wikipedia decided that it would not publish original unsourced material on its site, relying instead on information published elsewhere.
The funny thing is, Wikipedia used to be considered a joke. When, around 2005, an editor emailed to say that he was putting together an entry on my work and would I be prepared to supply some additional information, I let the email pass. I wasn’t sure it was genuine. And even if it had been, Wikipedia was unreliable and prone to so much misinformation that I didn’t think much of being a part of it.
Although many early elements were sound, large portions resembled a six-year-old’s birthday party. Some entries have become famous for their uncompromising subjectivity; among the most elegant was an early article on the poodle, which remained on the site for some time and stated simply, ‘A dog by which all others are measured.’ Nicholson Baker found incisive early entries on the Pop-Tart: ‘Pop-Tarts is German for Little Iced Pastry O’Germany … George Washington invented them … Popular flavours included “frosted strawberry, frosted brown sugar cinnamon, and semen”.’
Although most large errors are corrected by a system of flags and checks (many Wikipedians enjoy nothing more than controlling bad new entries like minesweepers on a beach), a large number of new small errors are inserted every day, either mischievously or inadvertently, and some persist for a long time. Often, the closer one is connected to the truth of a topic, the harder it can be. One is not allowed to edit anything with which one may have a personal connection (and therefore insider knowledge). One cannot edit one’s own biography, for instance, or ask anyone associated with you to do it. Case in point: the entry on the bestselling chronicler of the human condition Yuval Noah Harari. On 28 October 2020 he appeared on the podcast The Tim Ferriss Show, and Wikipedia came up at the very beginning:
Yuval Noah Harari: It’s good to be here. Thank you for inviting me.
Tim Ferriss: We’re going to start in an unusual place, perhaps. And that is with correcting my pronunciation on a word, M-O-S-H-A-V. How do you pronounce that, and what does it mean?
Harari: M-O-S-H-A-V. Oh, that’s actually a mistake on Wikipedia. It’s a moshav. It somehow got around that I live on a moshav, which is some kind of socialist, collective community, less radical than the kibbutz, but one of the experiments of socialists in Israel like decades ago. And it’s just not true. I live in a kind of middle-class suburb of Tel Aviv.
Ferriss: So this is an example, for those listening, of something that some people call the Wikipedia echo effect because I actually—
Harari: Yes. I tried to correct it so many times, and it’s just, I gave up. It’s stronger than me. [Wikipedia stated that Harari lived at the moshav with his husband.]
Ferriss: Right. So, at some point, it got into Wikipedia, then it ended up in the Guardian. Then, other people cite the Guardian, and it just will not go away. So, it just keeps coming back.
Wikipedia has thousands, and probably tens of thousands of these kinds of mistakes, and it would be strange if it didn’t; given that it is the largest store of global information ever assembled, and given that it is written by humans, it would be untrustworthy if it didn’t. It would also be untrustworthy if these kinds of errors weren’t corrected, and at 08.54 on 1 November 2020, three days after the podcast with Harari was released, Paco2718 removed the line stating ‘The couple lives in a moshav (a type of cooperative agricultural community of individual farms) in Mesilat Zion, near Jerusalem.’ Paco2718 also removed three references in which this statement appeared in Haaretz, the Sunday Times and the Financial Times. In the six months before this correction, Paco2718 had made small amendments to entries on Socrates, the Barack Obama ‘Hope’ poster, and the Big Bang. In the six months after, he made small changes to Brontë Family, Republican Senator Ted Cruz and Mount Everest. His brief biographical entry on his Wikipedia user page reads ‘Hi! I am Amir. I don’t understand how everything works here but I am doing the best I can.’