Lawfare Daily: Wikipedia, Ref-Working, and the Battle Over Reality
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 9 December 2025
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Wikipedia is more than an encyclopedia. It’s a key part of the internet’s information infrastructure—shaping what people know, what AI models learn, and what the public sees as true. But in an era of geopolitical conflict, AI disruption, and fracturing trust, Wikipedia has come under attack.
In this episode, Renée DiResta talks with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales about his new book, “The Seven Rules of Trust,” and about how Wikipedia has managed to remain one of the most trusted sites on the internet. They explore the principles that helped build that trust and the outside pressure it’s come under—from American congressmen, to Russian censorship campaigns, to Elon Musk’s Grokipedia.
What does it take to make institutions trustworthy in a low-trust era? What happens when reliable sources become a battleground for power? And how does a community continue to build shared knowledge while partisans are redefining the rules of truth?
For further reading, see:
- “The Right-Wing Attack On Wikipedia,” by Renée DiResta in The Atlantic
- ”The War Over Ukraine—on Wikipedia,” by Catarina Buchatskiy in Lawfare
- “Russian Court Fines Wikipedia Owner for Article on Ukraine,” by Anna Chernova and Olesya Dmitracova, CNN
- “The CDC Should Be More Like Wikipedia,” by Renée DiResta in The Atlantic
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Nearly every news alert in 2025 has raised questions, some old, some new, about the law and national security. |
| 0:07.5 | And now you get the chance to ask Lawfare directly. It's time for our annual Ask Us Anything Mailbag podcast, an opportunity for you to ask Lawfare this year's most burning questions. |
| 0:18.3 | You can submit your question by leaving a voicemail at 202-643-8474. |
| 0:26.7 | Or by sending a recording of yourself asking your question to Ask Us Anything Lawfare at gmail.com by December 16th. |
| 0:36.7 | So one of the things we look for when we're looking at sources is like, oh, when they do get |
| 0:42.3 | something wrong because everybody does, what do they do about it? |
| 0:45.8 | You know, how transparent are they about what happened and how they're going to fix it? |
| 0:50.2 | It's the Lawfare podcast. |
| 0:51.8 | I'm Renee Duresta, contributing editor at Lawfare, here with Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and author of The Seven Rules of Trust. |
| 0:59.5 | So the way Wikipedia works is very different from social media, for example, where you can just flood the zone. |
| 1:07.5 | You know, like you can have 10,000 bots all saying similar things and just flood |
| 1:12.5 | the zone with it. That's going to get you nowhere in Wikipedia. Today we're talking about what it |
| 1:17.1 | takes to keep an open, collaborative platform trustworthy in a time of deep distrust and political |
| 1:21.6 | pressure. So I love the fact that you opened your book with Stephen Colbert's joke about wikiality, |
| 1:29.1 | back when Wikipedia was seen as kind of chaotic and maybe unreliable. |
| 1:36.2 | He tells us joke about elephants and how we can change what elephants are just by editing |
| 1:40.7 | the page. |
| 1:41.8 | But Wikipedia has now become the sort of scaffolding of the internet. |
| 1:45.5 | It trains AI. It powers search, shapes how billions of people understand the world. When did you |
| 1:50.3 | realize that it was becoming that kind of infrastructure? It's a good question. I mean, it sort of emerged |
| 1:56.3 | over a period of time. I mean, I remember a few specific moments. We had the John Saganthaler incident. |
| 2:07.5 | So John Sagan Thaler Sr. was a very well-known journalist who stumbled across his Wikipedia |
... |
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