Jimmy Wales: belief

Transcript context

…Does that rule apply to itself? [laughs] It does, yes. In fact, it’s probably the most frequently ignored rule of all. Interestingly, it was a situation where, in today’s discussion, you would say I’m the first one — I care most about “let’s make the encyclopedia be encyclopedic and good quality and neutral” and all of that, and the rules are secondary to that. At the same time, I think the social processes and the rules and thinking about how do we design them is actually, in the long run, the important part and the hard part because when I look at a situation like what we had today, I say, “Gee, this is all hopeless. We got this one badly wrong.” I’m like, “Okay, but what exactly should we change?” Because these rules are not completely random. There are reasons for them. As somebody said, it’s like the garage band which gets nominated for deletion and requests reinstatement 15 times till people are sick of it because they’re no longer notable. It’s actually the reason some of the procedures are in place. It’s just to give us a mechanism for dealing with those things. But in some cases, those procedures go wrong. We have to really think about, “Okay, what went wrong? How do we make that better?” It’s a very different kind of model, as compared to moderation at Twitter or YouTube or somewhere like that, where it’s behind the scenes, invisible. This is an open dialogue. It’s a chewing on ideas and so on. It’s very, very public, although often impenetrable in the sense that it’s a lot of words. Which kinds of topics do you think Wikipedia is not so very well geared to cover instructively?…

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