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Welcome to the Restisbury's leading with me, Alastair Campbell.

And with me, Rory Stewart. And today we're going to interview Jimmy Wells. And Jimmy

Wells is the founder of Wikipedia, which is, as everybody listening, I think for once, I

don't need to do one of these explainers for internationalists, as everyone

listening will know, is the world's great free online encyclopedia, which I think now has 99 times

as many entries as the old Encyclopedia Britannica, in English alone. A huge thing, and something

which from the beginning was astonishingly revolutionary. Instead of the old

encyclopedias, which used professors, paid monies to write their specialist articles, it trusted

that essentially crowdsourcing, getting members of the public to come in and just contribute to an

article, they would be able to map

out human knowledge.

My goodness, they've done it.

They've done it in medicine.

They've done it in history.

They've done it in science.

And it's become, in a sense, the underpinning for many things.

A great deal of what we are relying on in AI and large language models relies on them reaching into Wikipedia.

It's unpaid volunteers, largely working in this, and it's a non-profit foundation lying behind

it.

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