Jimmy Wales: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, so I don’t think so, not broadly. And I think you can always point to specific entries and talk about specific biases, but that’s part of the process of Wikipedia. Anyone can come and challenge and to go on about that. But I see fairly often on Twitter, some quite extreme accusations of bias. And I think actually I don’t see it. I don’t buy that. And if you ask people for an example, they normally struggle and depending on who they are and what it’s about. So it’s certainly true that some people who have quite fringe viewpoints and who knows the full rush of history in 500 years, they might be considered to be pathbreaking geniuses. But at the moment, quite fringe views. And they’re just unhappy that Wikipedia doesn’t report on their fringe views as being mainstream. And that, by the way, goes across all kinds of fields. I was once accosted on the street outside the TED Conference in Vancouver by a guy who was a homeopath who was very upset that Wikipedia’s entry on homeopathy basically says it’s pseudoscience. And he felt that was biased. And I said, “Well, I can’t really help you because we cite good quality sources to talk about the scientific status, and it’s not very good.” So it depends, and I think it’s something that we should always be vigilant about. But in general, I think we’re pretty good. And I think any time you go to any serious political controversy, we should have a pretty balanced perspective on whose saying what and what the views are and so forth. I would actually argue that the areas where we are more likely to have bias that persists for a long period of time are actually fairly obscure things, or maybe fairly non-political things. I just give, it’s kind of a humorous example, but it’s meaningful. If you read our entries about Japanese anime, they tend to be very, very positive and very favorable because almost no one knows about Japanese anime except for fans. And so the people who come and spend their days writing Japanese anime articles, they love it. They kind of have an inherent love for the whole area. Now they’ll of course, being human beings, they have their internal debates and disputes about what’s better or not. But in general, they’re quite positive because nobody actually cares. On anything that people are quite passionate about, then hopefully there’s quite a lot of interesting stuff. what’s better or not. But in general, they’re quite positive because nobody actually cares. On anything that people are quite passionate about, then hopefully there’s quite a lot of interesting stuff. So I’ll give an example, a contemporary example where I think we’ve done a good job as of my most recent sort of look at it, and that is the question about the efficacy of masks during the COVID pandemic. And that’s an area where I would say the public authorities really jerked us all around a bit. In the very first days, they said, “Whatever you do, don’t rush on and buy masks.” And their concern was shortages in hospitals, fair enough. Later it’s like, no, everybody’s got to wear a mask everywhere. It really works really well. And then now I think it’s, the evidence is mixed, right? Masks seem to help, in my personal view, masks seem to help. They’re no huge burden. You might as well wear a mask in any environment where you’re with a giant crowd of people and so forth. But it’s very politicized, that one, and it’s very politicized, where certainly in the US, much more so. I live in the UK, I live in London, I’ve never seen on the streets the kind of the thing that there’s a lot of reports of people actively angry because someone else is wearing a mask, that sort of thing in public. So because it became very politicized, then clearly if Wikipedia… No, so anyway, if you go to Wikipedia and you research this topic, I think you’ll find more or less what I’ve just said. Oh, actually after it’s all to this point in history, it’s mixed evidence like masks seemed to help, but maybe not as much as some of the authorities said. And here we are. And that’s kind of an example where I think, okay, we’ve done a good job, but I suspect there are people on both sides of that very emotional debate who think, this is ridiculous. Hopefully we’ve got quality sources. So then hopefully those people who read this can say, oh, actually it is complicated. If you can get to the point of saying, okay, I have my view, but I understand other views and I do think it’s a complicated question, great, now we’re a little bit more mature as a society. Well, that one is an interesting one because I feel like I hope that that article also contains the meta conversation about the politicization of that topic. To me, it’s almost more interesting than whether masks work or not, at least at this point. It’s like why masks became a symbol of the oppression of a centralized government. If you wear them, you’re a sheep that follows the mask control the mass hysteria of an authoritarian regime. And if you don’t wear a mask, then you are a science denier, anti- vaxxer, an alt-right, probably a Nazi.…

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