Wikipedia Cofounder Jimmy Wales on How to Build Trust

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 4 November 2025

⏱️ 32 minutes

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Summary

When Wikipedia was founded in 2001, the idea that people around the world could come together to create an accurate online encyclopedia covering virtually any topic seemed far-fetched. But today many people see the website as a trusted source of well-curated and -cited information. That's because of careful decisions that its leaders made about how to operate. Cofounder Jimmy Wales explains how introducing a simple purpose, insisting on certain rules of engagement, and other strategies helped the organization to build trust with contributors and users -- and maintain it even in a world bombarded by misinformation. Wales is the author of The Seven Rules of Trust: A Blueprint for Building Things That Last.

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0:16.3	Thank you. I'm Alison Beard.
0:33.6	And I'm Audignacius, and this is the HBR Ideacast.
0:36.4	Thank you. And I'm Adi Ignatius, and this is the HBR Ideacast.
0:55.8	So, Adi, picture a moment when a new source of information comes online, turns into a go-to for people everywhere, sometimes to the chagrin of professors and bosses, but becomes a household name and really changes the internet.
0:58.8	So we're doing AI again.
1:02.3	Actually, I am talking about Wikipedia, the online crowdsourced encyclopedia, which for a long
1:08.7	time generated a lot of skepticism, but today is actually seen as a pretty
1:13.2	trusted source of information.
1:15.4	It's an example of an organization that actually created something positive on the internet.
1:21.3	And my guest today is the co-founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales.
1:25.0	Interesting.
1:25.6	So I interviewed Jimmy Wales years ago when I was at Time
1:28.6	Magazine and Wikipedia was just getting established. And I actually tried to challenge him.
1:33.0	There was a Wikipedia entry about my father who had been the Secretary of the Navy in the U.S.
1:37.7	And there were a number of iterations. Some of them had facts that were completely wrong. And I
1:42.9	challenged him on it. And Will said,
1:45.3	yeah, okay, but in the end, the final iteration was correct. And he mentioned that he had been
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