Why Wikipedia Runs on Trust

About this episode

Jimmy Wales discusses the role of trust in building and maintaining Wikipedia as the world's largest encyclopedia.

Wikipedia serves 11 billion pages a month and almost nobody questions it anymore. But how did millions of anonymous strangers, unpaid and from every culture, manage to build the world's largest encyclopedia together and keep it honest? The answer, according to Jimmy Wales, is trust — and trust by design. In this conversation, Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and author of The Seven Rules of Trust, talks about what it actually takes to build trust at scale. We discuss why assuming good faith works better than suspicion, why civil conversation is rare online but does not have to be, and what the Nixon checkers speech teaches us about transparency. We also look at how organizations can recover from a trust crisis, and why, more often than people think, they can.

People in this episode

Host: Severin de Wit

Guest: Jimmy Wales

Topics covered

• trust
• Wikipedia
• online collaboration
• transparency
• trust crisis
• civil conversation

Keywords

• trust
• Wikipedia
• Jimmy Wales
• transparency
• online trust
• civil conversation
• trust crisis

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Wikipedia

Books & works: The Seven Rules of Trust

More episodes of TrustTalk - It's all about Trust

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• The Trust We Assume, the Consent We Feel · May 19, 2026 · 22 min
• San Francisco: Where Progress Meets Distrust · May 6, 2026 · 24 min
• Trust Me, I'm Emotional · April 23, 2026 · 20 min
• Leading with Trust · March 26, 2026 · 24 min
• When We Only Trust People Like Us · March 4, 2026 · 27 min