Jimmy Wales trusts the process
27 comments
·December 17, 2025embedding-shape
neerd
Ehhh, I think he’s earned it given one of the “founders” has had basically zero input on anything modern Wikipedia has become.
mmooss
People like Wales have a bizarre blindness to what's happening in our society:
> Jimmy Wales: If you look at the Edelman Trust Barometer survey, which has been going since 2000, you’ve seen this steady erosion of trust in journalism and media and business and to some degree in each other. ...
> What do you think has gone wrong?
> I think there’s a number of things that have gone wrong. The trend actually goes back to before the Edelman data. Some of the things I would point to are the decline of the business model for local journalism. To the extent that the business model for journalism has been very difficult, full stop, you see the rise of low-quality outlets, clickbait headlines, all of that. But also that local piece means people aren’t necessarily getting information that they can verify with their own eyes, and I think that tends to undermine trust. In more recent times, obviously the toxicity of social media hasn’t been helpful.
How about a political movement's explicit, extremely aggressive all out assault on social trust, specifically journalism - an 'enemy of the people', target of law enforcement and laws, etc. And how about toxic capitalism's (emphasis on 'toxic', not all capitalism) actually valuing and aggressively embracing complete abandonment and manipulation of trust in order to profit by any means possible (e.g. stereotypical private equity squeezing money out of nursing homes)?
What planet to people like Wales live on? They are so used to ducking this issue that they almost can't see it anymore.
Sebguer
The planet of wealth.
charcircuit
You can only trust wikipedia as much as you can trust the news media. If everyone in the news media is against you or ignores you then it's not possible to get a secondary source to fight misinformation or other narritives that one side is pushing.
pveierland
I believe this is wrong for many topics. The news media is strongly incentivized to sensationalize and continuously produce content for their readers and viewers. Wikipedia is able to cover many topics that are less contested in a slower and more tempered manner, as the content does not need to be marketable or immediately available. As an example, for STEM topics I'd trust Wikipedia far more than any news media.
charcircuit
>as the content does not need to be marketable
For a reputable secondary source to consider writing something it does need to be marketable. This can result in situations where there is an event that happens where only the sensationalist pieces were deemed marketable enough for people to write meaning that the writers of the wikipedia page do not have the option of using non sensationalist sources.
greggoB
I'm struggling to make sense of this. Parent is saying news media has a financial incentive to grab attention, Wikipedia does not. Best I can make out, you've moved the target by suggesting it's not about how the content of the article itself is written, but rather about the sources it supposedly has to use.
jancsika
Not really.
1. I just checked Epstein's Wikipedia entry-- it lists the very recent Drop Site News allegation of his and Wexner's ties to the Iran-Contra drug smuggling operation. And that in a whole section on the topic of intelligence ties going back years.
The links covered in that Drop Site story were left out of a recent NYT article that covered a lot of the same period of Epstein's life. (I also haven't seen that Drop Site News story picked up by any of the other mainstream news sites or shows.)
NYT is prominently listed as a reliable source, Drop Site News isn't. Yet I can still read a nice summary of that Drop Site Story on Wikipedia.
2. Also checked the entry on Bin Laden killing. It not only includes a substantial section on Hersh's account that was widely criticized by both other journalists and the Obama White House, but that Hersh story also has its own entry.
> You can only trust wikipedia as much as you can trust the news media.
I'd reword this to say if you can trust that at least one reputable journalist has covered a given subject, a Wikipedian has most likely already included a summary in the article for you.
Edit: clarification
jibal
I trust it a lot more than its critics, especially if they say nonsense like "If everyone in the news media is against you or ignores you ..." -- when that happens, the rational conclusion is that you're in the wrong. But in fact it virtually never happens, yet it's a prerequisite for the claim "it's not possible to get a secondary source to fight misinformation or other narritives that one side is pushing" -- if there's any validity at all to the claim that it's misinformation and that it is being pushed by "one side" then it necessarily follows that there's another side that is your source--and if there isn't then you're making your claim up out of whole cloth. (Which in fact is usually the case for people who make these sorts of claims.)
P.S.
> No it isn't.
Of course it is. As others have pointed out, "the news media" is diverse, and includes FN, NewsMax, OANN, etc.
Unsurprisingly there's a lot of bad faith in the responses here ... my quota for responding to such dreck is exhausted.
f33d5173
> when that happens, the rational conclusion is that you're in the wrong.
No it isn't. The news media has a bias like anything else. They have traditionally been against all sorts of groups and topics that they are now in favour of.
> But in fact it virtually never happens,
If it sometimes happens, and if you can take the inside view of a particular topics, then you can determine if it is one such instance.
> if there's any validity at all to the claim that it's misinformation and that it is being pushed by "one side" then it necessarily follows that there's another side that is your source
Your source may not be considered valid by wikipedia, for reasons that are fundamental to wikipedia as an institution, but incidental to an individual trying to determine the truth. One particular example is where an individual can reference primary sources (including personal experience) which are not covered or referenced by "reliable" (wikipedia term of art) secondary sources.
mmooss
> If everyone in the news media is against you or ignores you ...
The 'news media' is an incredibly diverse range of disconnected groups of people, especially in the Internet era. Look at the front page of HN. You hardly see the leading journalism organizations (e.g., NY Times, network news, etc.).
That "everyone" is against you is a conspiracy theory.
charcircuit
I am talking about cases where 99% of people ignore the topic and potentially 1 person writes on it in a biased way. Diversity doesn't matter if everyone ignores it.
dragonwriter
> If everyone in the news media is against you or ignores you then it's not possible to get a secondary source to fight misinformation.
Well, no, because secondary sources are not limited to news media sources (and for current events, primary sources are allowed.) If literally everyone creating media of any kind other than Wikipedia itself relating to a subject is in on a conspiracy to suppress it, yes, you are SoL on Wikipedia.
charcircuit
>literally everyone creating media
The WP:Reliable Sources rule limits who can be used as a source. And it's not about the other side being supressed, but that there is not enough interest for someone to write a balanced article on it.
jibal
This, like most of your claims, is simply wrong. Unreliable sources are unreliable because they are unreliable, not because "there is not enough interest for someone to write a balanced article on it", which is a mass of confused pronouns. You seem to have the policy on reliable sources mixed up with the policy on notability.
alex1138
Yeah, exactly. Maybe before 2020 I would say Wikipedia is the gold standard (meaning those were my political views/biases, not that I think it got worse after 2020 although it probably did) but I've seen too much in the last few years to trust anything approximating mainstream notions of "misinformation". There's official narrative being enforced
biophysboy
Social media is much more feelings driven than mainstream media. They are basically tertiary sources, 2+ steps removed from actual source material.
greggoB
> but I've seen too much in the last few years
Can you share at least your top 3 examples? Claims of an "official narrative" frankly just sound kookie when made without a shred to back them up.
mmooss
Maybe before November 2024. Now MAGA supporters control CBS News, Fox, and others; and ABC News, the Washington Post, etc. openly comply with their demands.
alex1138
Literally everything to do with covid. I can list "at least 3" right there. Masks don't work, the vaccine has killed people, epidemiologists (credible ones) warned against lockdowns. Wikipedia will tell you otherwise I'm sure
There's other things as well I could probably think of but when you have politically motivated actors going on edit wars and the fact Wiki may even be controlled by the intelligence agencies we have a problem
(And why does Youtube put Wikipedia entries as official truth under certain videos?)
jibal
> There's official narrative being enforced
There's no such thing and it's not happening. WP mechanisms don't even allow for "official narratives" to be "enforced".
> Literally everything to do with covid. I can list "at least 3" right there. Masks don't work, the vaccine has killed people, epidemiologists (credible ones) warned against lockdowns. Wikipedia will tell you otherwise I'm sure
You were asked for examples, not antivax talking points, or things that you're "sure" of without a shred of evidence. Wikipedia tells the truth--which includes the data on the efficacy of masks and the ratios between people dying from vaccines and people dying from the diseases those vaccines mitigate. And the credibility of epidemiologists is not measured by which ones some ideologue agrees with--but Wikipedia covers a broad range of statements made by epidemiologists. And the fact that Wikipedia articles say things that some ideologue disagrees with does not entail that an "official narrative" is being enforced.
P.S. The response displays the complete lack of intellectual integrity that was already evident.
alex1138
They're not "talking points". I'm getting it from sources people censor because they don't want to actually listen
With all due lack of respect, screw you
nephihaha
Wikipedia is not what it claims to be. It is signed up to the SDGs which are a top down UN directive rather than a truly grassroots programme.
A lot of Wikipedia is a joke.
The most glaring problem of all is that most of its labour is unpaid, despite its content being used by commercial ventures such as Amazon.
jibal
I think the low quality of the criticisms of Wikipedia speak to its high quality as a source of information.
> but the encyclopedia’s founder believes that transparency is the key to survival
Slightly ironic, given Wales is a co-founder of Wikipedia, not the founder. Probably would have been nice to ensure the article got it correctly, considering the drama that happened around it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Wales#Co-founder_status_...