Jimmy Wales: belief

Transcript context

…Well, at every moment, because you mentioned mainstream and fringe, there seems to be a tension here, and I wonder what your philosophy is on it because there’s mainstream ideas and there’s fringe ideas. You look at lab leak theory for this virus. That could be other things we can discuss where there’s a mainstream narrative where if you just look at the percent of the population or the population with platforms, what they say, and then what is a small percentage in opposition to that, and what is Wikipedia’s responsibility to accurately represent both the mainstream and the fringe, do you think? Well, I think we have to try to do our best to recognize both, but also to appropriately contextualize. And so this can be quite hard, particularly when emotions are high. That’s just a fact about human beings. I’ll give a simpler example, because there’s not a lot of emotion around it. Like our entry on the moon doesn’t say, some say the moon’s made of rocks, some say cheese, who knows? That kind of false neutrality is not what we want to get to. That doesn’t make any sense, but that one’s easy. We all understand. I think there is a Wikipedia entry called something like the moon is made of cheese, where it talks about this is a common sort of joke or thing that children say or that people tell to children or whatever. It’s just a thing. Everyone’s heard moon’s made of cheese, but nobody thinks, wow, Wikipedia is so one-sided it doesn’t even acknowledge the cheese theory. I say the same thing about flat Earth, again, very- That’s exactly what I’m looking up right now.…

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