(Reuters) - As co-founder of Wikipedia and a trustee, of its host organization, Alabama native Jimmy Wales has guided the online encyclopedia's evolution through attacks on its accuracy and online vandalism.
Those crises look tame next to new challenges his baby must confront like conservative criticism of its sourcing and AI mining of its content.
In a recent interview Wales seemed confident his baby will remain relevant. He hopes to strike more deals modeled on one with Google to have corporations pay for training access. We also discussed the merits of anonymity and how moderation protects free speech among strangers.
A transcript of our conversation follows, edited for length and clarity. If you want a look at the start of our discussion see the accompanying video on this webpage, which I'm publishing just like the cool kids do - and I welcome your thoughts on this format via email.
Wales: Consistent interactions over time (create) a culture of civility. That's part of what's wrong with a lot of social media. A lot of the people who are screaming at each other on Twitter are kind of not building a relationship and sort of having a longer dialogue. It's just drive-by, flaming by trolls.
Q: You argue for the notion of facts in these interactions. But there are media critics like Jay Rosen who talk about this point of view of "neutrality" as bland and distracting from credibility because you don't really know where this universal voice is coming from.
Q: When you cite Wikipedia or some of the Subreddit communities, what does seem to set these communities apart and able to get to some shared understanding is rules that, let's face it, cast some people out. A criticism of this kind of approach is the argument I'll call free speech.
Wales: There's a lot of subtlety and nuance around these kinds of questions. My classic example is, if we talk about the moon, we don't say, some say rocks, some say cheese, who knows, right? Like that's not reasonable. At the same time, you don't want to be mindlessly majoritarian. You do want to acknowledge in a fair way when there is substantial disagreement and dissent.
Wales: It's one that we always have to go back and visit. There are a plethora of low-quality, very populist right-wing outlets that just aren't good enough. And that's unfortunate. If any right-leaning billionaires want to do something good for the world, fund some really intellectual work, fund some high-quality news outlets that aren't populist, that really care about journalistic values. That would be fantastic.
Q: Also it seems hard for these language models to admit that they don't know something.
Wales: Actually, this would be my main advice to the people who are training the models is, could you please teach them to say, 'honestly, I'm not sure.' That would be a great answer.
Q: Let's talk about AI and what it means for the Wikipedia project. Probably some of your own editors are using AI to develop articles.
Wales: We don't have much in the way of formal policy. One piece that probably could be considered formal policy is like using an AI to help you with your work, if you get something wrong, you're just as responsible as you were before. In other words, it's not an excuse to say, oh, I used AI, not my fault.
Q: What do you think about LLMs using Wikipedia to train themselves?
Wales: Yeah we're a big part of the training data for all the major LLMs. Everything in Wikipedia is freely licensed for people to do as they please with it.