Jimmy Wales: belief

Transcript context

…Two last questions. First, can Wikipedia truly survive without you? I know you’re calling your role ceremonial, but you’re a kind of focal point, a final layer of adjudication. I once said to Vitalik Buterin in my chat with him, “Ethereum relies on you. Even when you do nothing, you’re the Russian sage in the background, like in an old Dostoevsky novel.” Are you, in fact, the American — now partly British — sage in the background of Wikipedia who underpins the whole thing, even when or perhaps because you do nothing? It appeals to my ego to imagine such that, obviously, without my sage wisdom and guidance and calm ceremonial neutrality, the whole thing would fall apart, but frankly, I really doubt that. I do think that it is a complicated matter that I give a lot of thought to, and which I have given a lot — it’s not a new idea. How do we construct systems and models and procedures and processes in the community that strive for maintaining our values in the long run and improving the encyclopedia and building something that we value? I think we’ve done a pretty good job of that. We struggle at times, as I say, with excessive bureaucracy, but people are aware of that, and so on and so forth. For me, I think the hard bits and the complicated bits are probably around the interface between the community and the Wikimedia Foundation. I’m not so sure that we have a long-term settlement of those issues that I feel confident can maintain without a lot of effort, not just on my part, but on the part of core people who are around to make sure that the foundation is both able to act as necessary, but doesn’t become . . . Imagine that they’re going to pursue a model like a Twitter or Facebook moderation model, where they’re going to take on all the jobs of moderation, which, frankly, wouldn’t scale or wouldn’t work. That’s the area where I do feel I’ve got some work to do still. Last question: what will you do next?…

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