Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales on How to Build Trust

KQED's Forum

KQED

Politics, News, News Commentary

4.6 • 656 Ratings

🗓️ 3 November 2025

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Wikipedia, the crowdsourced encyclopedia, is one of the world’s most visited websites, with 11 billion page views each month. Its founder, Jimmy Wales, credits its success to one thing — trust — which he sees at odds with our increasing loss of faith in institutions and in each other. In his new book, he lays out what he calls a “blueprint for building things that last” in volatile times. We’ll talk to Wales about the site’s history and why right wing figures like Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson are attacking it. The book is “The Seven Rules of Trust.” Has Wikipedia earned your trust? Guests: Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:35.0	From KQED.
0:40.3	Welcome to Forum. I'm Nina Kim.
0:47.7	Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that can, for the most part, be written and edited by anyone, relies on trust.
0:53.4	Trust that the crowdsourced information is contributed in good faith and generally accurate. And in this day and age, when trust in institutions and in each other is waning,
0:59.0	it's striking that Wikipedia remains one of the most visited websites in the world,
1:04.0	with billions of page views every month.
1:07.0	Founder Jimmy Wales has been thinking about why Wikipedia has been able to keep people's trust for so long.
1:12.9	It was founded in 2001.
1:15.0	He's written a new book called The Seven Rules of Trust, a blueprint for building things that last.
1:20.9	And listeners, do you use Wikipedia?
1:22.7	Has it earned your trust?
1:24.5	Jimmy Wales, welcome to Forum.
1:26.3	Hi, thanks for having me.
1:28.7	So Wikipedia, I was reading your stats, gets 11 billion page views a month, and that's just the English language.
1:35.3	Wikipedia, there are more than 300 Wikipedias and other languages? Yeah, we're truly global
1:41.1	in a way that most things aren't. And is it possible that people use Wikipedia
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