The Seven Rules of Trust: Why It’s the Most Important Superpower Today Jimmy Wales Bloomsbury (2025)
Jimmy Wales, an Internet entrepreneur from Huntsville, Alabama, who now resides in London, is best known for creating Wikipedia, which began in January 2001. The online encyclopedia now has more than seven million articles and has become a standard guide for anyone searching for information.
The Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization based in San Francisco, California, runs the project with about 700 employees, but Wikipedia still relies entirely on unpaid volunteers to write and edit its articles: hundreds of thousands of people contribute to the site each month, under a set of rules set by the community to handle disagreement, limit self-promotion and achieve consensus.
wells book, the The seven rules of trustreleased in October, tells the story of Wikipedia’s origins and how the project highlights lessons in earning and maintaining trust. Wells spoke to nature On the importance of scientific transparency and the rise of artificial intelligence.
Anyone can contribute to Wikipedia. Does the site lack respect for expertise?
Everything on Wikipedia is a cult of expertise. We have rules about citing quality sources: newspapers, journals, academic journals, peer-reviewed literature, and books from reputable publishers. This is very different from allowing anyone to offer a random opinion.
It is true that you do not have to be an expert to write a Wikipedia article. But for many subjects, having an amateur passion is a great way to start. It’s like journalism: journalists have to write about topics they’re not experts on, but hopefully consult and quote experts. Then the journalist can understand that.
Your seven rules of trust are: Be personal; cooperation; You have a mission; Give trust to get trust; Civilian survival; Don’t take sides. And be transparent. Which is more relevant to scientists?
“Be transparent” is very important. This is not a warning that science needs to become more transparent, but rather an observation that science is very transparent. Obviously there are areas where this could be improved, but I think this statement is generally true.
There was a study on the “retraction penalty,” which found that making a correction to a scientific article is better for the author’s citation than trying to deceive him (SF Low et al. Science fiction. representative. 33146; 2013). I thought this was very interesting research. The conclusion is logical, but it’s nice to see science confirming this.
Wikipedia prides itself on presenting balanced views. Is this difficult?
This will always be a struggle. We think a lot about “wikivoice”: when do we say something in the Wikipedia voice? Declaring “this is the truth” is very risky.
We look for consensus not only in the sources, but also in the Wikipedia community. If you have Wikipedians in good standing who speak and edit in good faith, and no one is willing to stand up and say, “Actually, I think the evidence is still mixed,” then you can go ahead and use wikivoice.
It’s really important that we be as intellectually diverse as possible. If you ask an English speaker who invented the airplane, they’ll say the Wright Brothers – a simple fact we all learned when we were six years old. But if you ask a French person, they might say something different: Brazilian inventor [Alberto Santos-Dumont] Who lived in France. We try to consider all sides of the issue. If we are not aware of all aspects of the issue, it becomes more difficult.
How are you trying to increase the diversity of Wikipedia writers and editors?
We run ‘edit-athons’ programme. They succeeded in adding women in science to Wikipedia. But it’s hard. We have to think carefully about the site environment: is it open? Is it welcoming?
I don’t have any statistics. I’m afraid the demographics haven’t changed enough. We talk about it a lot. I want more people from different backgrounds to edit Wikipedia – so anyone reading this, please come and help us.
You do not mention “accountability” as a pillar of trust in your book.
The concept exists. Our writers may use pseudonyms. Many do. But Wikipedia operates on a culture of accountability, not a culture of gatekeeping. All the edits you make are linked to your account, and people can see your track record and history. If you’re not doing a good job, people will call you out. Accountability is incredibly important.
Do all editors act in good faith?
We see bad faith actors seeking business by saying “I’m a Wikipedia administrator” (and they’re not), claiming they can help write one-sided articles. I think it’s a bigger problem for their victims than it is for Wikipedia, because Wikipedia will require sources, and if the sources aren’t there, the edits won’t be committed.
Do you see more problems now that AI bots can write materials?
This is something we have to be vigilant about, but it’s not a big problem yet. Sheer size is not really how Wikipedia works. If you start making ten edits per minute, you’ll be banned immediately. This is clearly a robot doing something heinous.
In fact, we do not prohibit the use of artificial intelligence. We say, be very careful with that, and you are responsible for what you put in Wikipedia.
Many people write articles in a language that is not their first language, so they use artificial intelligence to help them with grammar. That sounds great to me – great, more sharing.
Do you see generative AI as a threat to trust?
The problem of hallucinations – when large language models produce responses containing meaningless or fabricated information – is still very bad. The more ambiguous the topic, the worse the hallucination becomes.
The sentences produced by chatbots sound very reasonable, so I think this is a problem for trust. I hope people react to this with a renewed interest in journalism, old-fashioned fact-checking, and human oversight. If people think that major news services are just “part of a conspiracy,” we are lost.
Can AI be good for trust?
Wikipedia is very transparent, but in some ways it is so transparent that it is opaque. If you want to know why a particular article is written a certain way, go to its talk page, and you can read all about it. But sometimes, that’s 100 pages of discussion. Who has time to read 100 pages?