Welcome to GapFest Reeds for November 2025. I'm David Plotz, one of the hosts of the

Slate Political Gap Fest. I'm joined by Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia and the author

of a new book, The Seven Rules of Trust, a Blueprint for Building

Things That Last.

Jimmy Wales has used the story, the unlikely story, I would say, of Wikipedia and the

rules undergirding it to lay out a set of principles for organizations and institutions.

And he makes the case very inspiringly, in my view, that we can build

better things by having purpose, by assuming trust and good faith, by adopting certain norms of

civility, by being independent and transparent if we do it in the right way. The book is really

inspiring. Jimmy, welcome to Gapfest Reeds. Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having me on.

So all of the rules that you talk about are valuable, but I'd like to focus on a few that felt

maybe most radical, but also most obvious. And I want you to, I will go through them. I want you

to briefly explain them and why they're important and how Wikipedia or some other

entity embodies them. So what does have a purpose mean? Yeah. So, you know, have a purpose that's

sort of, it's radical and obvious. I like the, I like the way you put that. For Wikipedia, I would

say, you know, imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.

The idea that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia is the purpose.

So we've always thought about Wikipedia as building a high-quality, neutral encyclopedia.

And that clear central purpose is, helps us organize our thinking, helps make decisions and so

forth.

So one little example I love to talk about is early in the history of Wikipedia, Google launched

Gmail and somebody said, oh, why don't we offer free webmail accounts?

...