Jimmy Wales: evaluation

Transcript context

…So is it possible if the majority of volunteers, editors of Wikipedia really disliked Donald Trump, are they still able to write an article that empathizes with the perspective of, for time at least, a very large percentage of the United States that were supported of Donald Trump, and to have a full broad representation of him as a human being, him as a political leader, him as a set of policies promised and implemented, all that kind of stuff? Yeah, I think so. And I think if you read the article, it’s pretty good. And I think a piece of that is within our community, if people have the self-awareness to understand. So, I personally wouldn’t go and edit the entry on Donald Trump. I get emotional about it and I’m like, “I’m not good at this,” and if I tried to do it, I would fail. I wouldn’t be a good Wikipedian, so it’s better if I just step back and let people who are more dispassionate on this topic edit it. Whereas there are other topics that are incredibly emotional to some people where I can actually do quite well. I’m going to be okay. Maybe we were discussing earlier the efficacy of masks. I’m like, “Oh, I think that’s an interesting problem. And I don’t know the answer, but I can help catalog what’s the best evidence and so on.” I’m not going to get upset. I’m not going to get angry, able to be a good Wikipedian, so I think that’s important. And I do think though in a related framework that the composition of the community is really important. Not because Wikipedia is or should be a battleground, but because blind spots, like maybe I don’t even realize what’s biased if I’m particularly of a certain point of view, and I’ve never thought much about it. So one of the things we focus on a lot, the Wikipedia volunteers are, we don’t know the exact number, but let’s say 80% plus male, and they’re a certain demographic: they tend to be college educated, heavier on tech geeks than not, et cetera. So, there is a demographic to the community, and that’s pretty much global. Somebody said to me once, “Why is it only white men who edit Wikipedia?”, and I said, “You’ve obviously not met the Japanese Wikipedia community.” It’s a joke because the broader principle still stands, who edits Japanese Wikipedia? A bunch of geeky men, and women as well. So, we do have women in the community, and that’s very important. But we do think, “Okay, you know what, that does lead to some problems,” it leads to some content issues simply because people write more about what they know and what they’re interested in. They’ll tend to be dismissive of things as being unimportant if it’s not something that they personally have an interest in. I like the example, as a parent I would say our entries on early childhood development probably aren’t as good as they should be because a lot of the Wikipedia volunteers… Actually we’re getting older, the Wikipedians, so that demographic has changed a bit. But if you’ve got a bunch of 25 year old tech geek dudes who don’t have kids, they’re just not going to be interested in early childhood development. And if they tried to write about it, they probably wouldn’t do a good job, ’cause they don’t know anything about it. have kids, they’re just not going to be interested in early childhood development. And if they tried to write about it, they probably wouldn’t do a good job, ’cause they don’t know anything about it. And somebody did a look at our entries on novelists who’ve won a major literary prize, and they looked at the male novelist versus the female, and the male novelists had longer and higher quality entries. And why is that? Well, it’s not because, ’cause I know hundreds of Wikipedian, it’s not because these are a bunch of biased, sexist men who like, “Books by women are not important.” No. Actually, there is a gender breakdown of readership. There are books, like hard science fiction’s a classic example, hard science fiction: mostly read by men. Other types of novels, more read by women. And if we don’t have women in the community, then these award-winning clearly important novelists may have less coverage. And not because anybody consciously thinks, “We don’t like a book by Maya Angelou. Who cares? She’s a poet. That’s not interesting.” No, but just because, well, people write what they know, they write what they’re interested in it. So, we do think diversity in the community is really important. And that’s one area where I do think it’s really clear. But I can also say, actually that also applies in the political sphere, to say, actually, we do want kind and thoughtful Catholic priests, kind and thoughtful conservatives, kind and thoughtful libertarians, kind and thoughtful Marxists to come in. But the key is the kind and thoughtful piece, so when people sometimes come to Wikipedia outraged by some dramatic thing that’s happened on Twitter, they come to Wikipedia with a chip on their shoulder ready to do battle, and it just doesn’t work out very well.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.