Jimmy Wales: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. In general, putting it separate from everything else makes it seem worse, and also, it doesn’t put it in the right context. Whereas, if it’s a live flaw and there is a controversy, there’s always potential controversy for anyone, it should just be worked into the overall article, ’cause then it doesn’t become a temptation. You can contextualize appropriately and so forth. So that’s part of the whole process. But I think for me, one of the most important things is what I call community health. So yeah, are we going to get it wrong sometimes? Yeah, of course. We’re humans and doing good, quality reference material is hard. The real question is, how do people react to a criticism or a complaint or a concern? If the reaction is defensiveness or combativeness back, or if someone’s really in there being aggressive and in the wrong, like, “No, no, no, hold on, we’ve got to do this the right way.” You got to say, “Okay, hold on. Are there good sources? Is this contextualized appropriately? Is it even important enough to mention? What does it mean?” Sometimes one of the areas where I do think there is a very complicated flaw, and you’ve alluded to it a little bit, but it’s like we know the media is deeply flawed. We know that journalism can go wrong. I would say particularly in the last whatever, 15 years, we’ve seen a real decimation of local media, local newspapers. We’ve seen a real rise in clickbait headlines and eager focus on anything that might be controversial. We’ve always had that with us, of course, there’s always been tabloid newspapers. But that makes it a little bit more challenging to say, “Okay, how do we sort things out when we have a pretty good sense that not every source is valid?” So as an example, a few years ago, it’s been quite a while now, we deprecated the MailOnline as a source and the MailOnline, the digital arm of the Daily Mail, it’s a tabloid. It’s not fake news, but it does tend to run very hyped-up stories. They really love to attack people and go on the attack for political reasons and so on, and it just isn’t great. So by saying deprecated, and I think some people say, “Oh, you banned the Daily Mail? No, we didn’t ban it as a source. We just said, “Look, it’s probably not a great source. You should probably look for a better source.” So certainly if the Daily Mail runs a headline saying, “New Cure for Cancer,” it’s like probably there’s more serious sources than a tabloid newspaper. So in an article about lung cancer, you probably wouldn’t cite the Daily Mail. That’s kind of ridiculous. But also for celebrities and so forth to know, “Oh, well, they do cover celebrity gossip a lot, but they also tend to have vendettas and so forth.” You really have to step back and go, “Is this really encyclopedic or is this just the Daily Mail going on a rant?” Some of that requires a great community health.…

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