from WNYC Studios. I'm Brian Lerer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Thursday, December 11th.

Happy birthday, too, Wikipedia. The crowdsourced online encyclopedia turns 25 on January 15th. It hits that

quarter of a century mark as another political target of the American right, alleging Wikipedia

is biased to the left. Some call it Wocopedia. Elon Musk even launched an AI alternative

called Grockapedia, never mind that Grogapedia told a user recently

that Musk is more fit than LeBron James, but political division is hardly the only Wikipedia story.

It has millions of articles, has logged billions of searches, appears in many languages.

Like us, it's a not-for-profit information source, and it has now

inspired co-founder Jimmy Wales to write a 25th anniversary book called The Seven Rules of Trust, a blueprint

for building things that last. He sees trusting strangers as being at the core of Wikipedia's

success, but way beyond Wikipedia, he addresses

head on the decline in trust that is such a defining feature of our country and our world,

and he hopes to contribute to turning that around. Jimmy Wales joins us now. Jimmy, thanks for coming

on. Congratulations on 25 years and welcome back to WNYC.

Great. Well, thanks for having me on. It's an exciting time and I'm kind of amazed. It's been 25 years. That's a long time. Let's do a little of the origin story first for our listeners

who may not know it. You started Wikipedia 25 years ago when your newborn baby was very ill, I see. Can you tell that story?

Yeah, so I had been working for about a couple of years on a project called Newpedia,

which was the same vision to have a free, neutral, high-quality encyclopedia in all the languages of the

world. Newpedia wasn't working.

It was very top down.

It was very untrusting, actually.

And I was getting very frustrated, and I was sort of near the point of giving up.

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