Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales Talks AI, Misinformation and the Future of Online Knowledge

“When it comes to the kind of precision Wikipedians care about — and they’re very particular — we’re still a long way off. … I’m really interested in machine learning models or AI that can flag things and say, ‘Hey, I’m a bot. I read this and something seems off. Could a human take a look?’ … That’s a useful way to spend time, instead of randomly editing things that are already fine.”

At the , in June 2022, we had the pleasure of interviewing Jimmy Wales. Jimmy Donal Wales, born on August 7, 1966, in Huntsville, Alabama, is an American-born British internet entrepreneur widely recognized as the co-founder of Wikipedia, the collaborative online encyclopedia that has become one of the most visited websites in the world. His efforts to democratize access to knowledge have made him a prominent figure in the digital information age, with a career that spans technology, philanthropy, and online community-building.

Raised in an education-focused household, Wales attended a private school, the House of Learning, operated by his mother and grandmother. He later graduated from the Randolph School, a college preparatory institution in Huntsville. Wales pursued higher education in finance, earning a bachelor’s degree from Auburn University followed by a master’s degree from the University of Alabama. Though he began doctoral studies in finance at Indiana University, he left the program before completing his dissertation.

Before becoming a key figure in the open-knowledge movement, Wales worked as research director at Chicago Options Associates, a futures and options trading firm, from 1994 to 2000. His transition into the digital world began with the co-founding of Bomis in 1996, a web portal that helped fund his first attempt at building a free online encyclopedia. That project, Nupedia, was based on a peer-reviewed model but was hampered by a slow editorial process.

In response to these limitations, Wales collaborated with Larry Sanger to launch Wikipedia on January 15, 2001. The new platform adopted a wiki-based model that allowed anyone with internet access to contribute and edit articles, dramatically increasing participation and content creation. Wikipedia’s rapid growth surprised even its founders, as the site’s traffic doubled every few months in its early years. Wales described the scramble to build infrastructure and raise funds to support the expansion as one of the platform’s formative challenges.

By 2003, Wales established the Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit organization designed to support Wikipedia and its sister projects. He later ventured into the commercial side of the wiki model with the creation of Wikia (now Fandom) in 2004, a for-profit platform that hosts user-generated wikis, primarily focused on fan communities. Other initiatives followed, including WikiTribune and WT Social, both aimed at offering alternatives to mainstream social media platforms by fostering more reliable information-sharing environments.

In interviews, Wales has repeatedly emphasized his belief in the potential of online collaboration and the generosity of contributors. He has pointed to the motivation behind Wikipedia and Fandom users as fundamentally rooted in passion and community engagement rather than financial incentives or personal fame. He has contrasted this with the culture of social media influencers, arguing that the wiki community is driven by a desire to share knowledge and build meaningful connections.

While Wikipedia has remained committed to its nonprofit model, Wales has acknowledged that questions about commercialization have occasionally arisen. He has been firm in resisting advertising on the platform, stating that such a shift would compromise its mission. He believes the site’s credibility and focus on public service are reinforced by its financial independence and reliance on donor support. The Wikimedia Foundation continues to operate with financial conservatism, prioritizing reserves and long-term sustainability.

Wales’s perspective on misinformation and digital literacy reflects his broader concerns about the structure and incentives of online platforms. He advocates for media literacy, particularly among older internet users who may be more vulnerable to false information. At the same time, he has called on platform companies to be more accountable to users and to take more responsibility for the quality of content they amplify.

When asked about the idea of moving Wikipedia to blockchain technology, Wales has expressed skepticism. He has criticized the lack of substantive proposals from blockchain advocates and dismissed efforts to monetize Wikipedia through speculative technology ventures as antithetical to its values.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Wikipedia’s role as a source of reliable health information was put to the test. Wales credited volunteer-led groups like WikiProject Medicine with maintaining high standards of accuracy and providing timely updates. He noted the platform’s capacity to mobilize qualified contributors — from doctors to researchers — as one of its greatest strengths in times of crisis.

On the question of artificial intelligence, Wales has remained cautious but curious. While acknowledging that machine learning tools can assist with tasks like flagging potentially problematic edits, he has emphasized that the core of Wikipedia’s editorial process still depends on human judgment. He has voiced concerns about the premature use of generative AI for article writing, citing the importance of precision and accuracy in encyclopedic content.

Wales has received numerous honors in recognition of his contributions to the internet and knowledge sharing. In 2006, Time magazine named him one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World,” and in 2013, he was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame. He holds dual citizenship in the United States and the United Kingdom and currently resides in London with his third wife, Kate Garvey, a former aide to British Prime Minister Tony Blair. He has three daughters from his previous marriages.

Throughout his career, Wales has remained focused on the intersection of openness, community, and access to information. As both an entrepreneur and advocate for free knowledge, his work continues to influence how people create, share, and consume information online.

This interview was conducted in July 2022.

Thank you for joining us. Jimmy, obviously, as the founder of Wikipedia, can you tell us a little more about how that came about? Where do you see it fitting into the online experience today?

Jimmy: Wikipedia is now 21 years old. It sort of started with me typing “hello world” and launching the website, then inviting people to contribute. There’s so much to say about it — I could speak for two hours about the beginning of Wikipedia. In the first couple of years, our traffic was doubling every three to four months. The first few doublings are fun, but then it gets pretty intense. There was a big scramble to put together the nonprofit and raise money to keep things going.

Today, Wikipedia is part of the infrastructure of the world. It’s one of the most popular websites. As part of that founding journey, I also started what is now Fandom, the for-profit wiki company that’s all about fans and fandoms. It’s an interesting time because, as the world has become increasingly concerned — and rightly so — about low-quality information and toxicity online, we’re kind of a shining beacon showing that it doesn’t have to be that way. There are actually a lot of great, kind people out there. You can write quality content in a safe environment and have fun doing it.

And on that note, would you ever consider putting Wikipedia on the blockchain?

Jimmy: I don’t even know what that means. I can tell you, we’re pretty far along into that bubble, but I remember during the whole ICO craze, I was trying to wrap my head around it. More than one person came to me saying, “Put Wikipedia on the blockchain.” And I’d say, “Tell me what that means, because I’m interested, but I don’t understand.”

After a lot of hemming and hawing, they’d eventually say, “Jimmy, don’t you realize? In this market, if you just did this, you could probably bring in a couple hundred million.” And I’m like, I’ve had a good run. I don’t want my story to end with, “And then he defrauded people of 200 million.” I don’t think so. I need a positive, sensible idea first.

With any great company, there are always hurdles. What was the biggest hurdle that Wikipedia faced in its early stages?

Jimmy: What I always say is that I’m a pathological optimist, so I tend to think everything is fine all the time. That makes it a little hard for me to reflect on the challenges. But I’d say the biggest long-term challenge has always been what we call the health of the community. Are the people who are actually doing the work — creating the encyclopedia or building the fandom wikis — healthy? Are they happy? Are they doing productive things? That’s always been first and foremost in our minds.

And then, during that period of extreme growth, there were a lot of technical challenges. When you’re doubling every two or three months, you have to double your hardware investment just as quickly. That was definitely a challenge in the early days.

I’m really interested in the problem of misinformation. My question is, do we solve the problem by looking at the platforms and the way they’re structured, or should we avoid the kind of political mire that would cause by focusing on educating young people in media literacy? What’s the right approach — platform or individual?

Jimmy: I don’t think it’s necessarily an either-or. Clearly, we need to focus on media literacy for the most vulnerable people — which, by the way, isn’t necessarily young people. They’re usually pretty aware that the internet is full of nonsense. It’s people my age who are sometimes quite naive. If something looks plausibly good, they might believe it when they really shouldn’t.

So yes, educating consumers is really important. But I also think, without getting into regulation and my views on that — which is a whole other conversation — we as consumers should be pressuring platforms. We should be saying, “I’m not enjoying being fed a line of misinformation, and if this keeps up, I’m probably going to leave your platform and go somewhere else.” I think platforms need to take that seriously, much more seriously than they have so far.

Could you talk about the different strategies involved in using open source to build both a foundation and a business? It goes against what you’re typically taught in business school — making a product or service freely available for anyone else to take. How have you succeeded with that approach, and what advice would you give to others looking to follow in your footsteps?

Jimmy: One of the interesting things about Wikipedia in those early days was how people were thinking about content. There was this idea that “content is king,” and the way to build a popular website was to have unique, interesting content with a wall around it so no one else could use it. We took the opposite view. Everything was freely licensed. We said, “Take it, put it on your website, do whatever you want with it.”

Because the license required linking back to us, that generated a massive amount of traffic and interest early on. That openness also made people more comfortable contributing and participating. So for a website launching between 2001 and 2005, that approach was really powerful.

But I think the deeper lesson is that in many areas of business, being open and transparent — whether it’s sharing code, resources, or collaborating with partners — can actually strengthen your position in the long run. It doesn’t do you much good to have a unique advantage if no one is using your product. You’ve got to be generous with what you offer, and that openness often brings greater returns.

Of course, every situation is different, but in general, openness can be a huge strategic advantage.

I wanted to ask about the incentive strategies for contributors at Wikipedia and Fandom. How would you say they’re similar or different, considering the structure of Wikipedia as a foundation and nonprofit, and Fandom as a for-profit company?

Jimmy: This is a great question, and it was actually one of the first things I thought about when setting up what was then called Wikia. I wondered, are people going to want to do this? Is Wikipedia only successful because it’s a charity with an educational mission?

It turns out the motivations are slightly different, but they’re more similar than you might think. People care about their communities and about the things they’re passionate about. With Fandom, when I talk to the top admins on some of the wikis, of course they love Star Trek or Star Wars, but they also love the people around them. They enjoy being part of that community. They want to have fun with their friends and do interesting things together.

That’s a motivation rooted in generosity. I contrast that with the kind of motivation you often see with influencers on Instagram, for example — where the goal might be to get famous and land endorsement deals. That’s fine, no judgment, but that’s not what you’ll find in the wiki world. There, it’s more about people saying, “I love this thing, and I want to connect with others who love it too.”

Just following up on that, I have two questions. The first one is, when you were deciding to create Fandom, was the existence of Reddit — and the way subreddits cover everything, including fan spaces — a big consideration?

Jimmy: I think we’re actually older than Reddit, so that wasn’t really an inspiration. But yeah, part of it comes from the basic observation that humans are social. Most people are basically decent. They like meeting others who share their interests and having fun together. That was definitely part of what was on my mind.

I remember being on some email mailing lists where people were having these really in-depth, high-quality discussions. I thought, wow, this is really interesting. People are generous with their time. They want to share what they know. They want to talk about things they’re passionate about. So the question I asked myself was, what do they need? What can I do that helps them fulfill what they already want to do?

First, as we all know, Wikipedia relies on donors and community contributors to survive. Do you think that if the model changed to monetize the site, people would still contribute the same way?

And second, has that ever crossed your mind as a potential path for Wikipedia?

Jimmy: Great questions. So, yeah, Wikipedia has done very well financially. We’re always very conservative with money. Every year, we try to bring in a little more than we spend, so we can build our reserves. The model has worked really well because people love Wikipedia.

Sometimes people say, “It must be very hard to turn down what would be an enormous amount of ad revenue.” But the truth is, it’s not even a topic of discussion at the board level. It’s just not interesting to us.

Now, Wikipedia has a unique place in the culture, and it’s a good theoretical question — could it have been successful under a different model? Could it have been ad-supported? Maybe. I mean, one of the questions when we started Fandom was, will people want to voluntarily contribute to a site that has ads? I thought they might. I didn’t know, but we tried it, and it worked. And now, obviously, people contribute a huge amount to platforms like YouTube and others that are ad-supported, so it’s become normal.

Could Wikipedia have gone that route? Possibly. But one of the things that would’ve been different — and not in a good way — is that Wikipedia is extremely mission-driven. “A free encyclopedia for every person on the planet in their own language” is the only thing we do, and we’re laser-focused on that. If we had adopted a more commercial model, we probably would’ve started getting interested in other things. And that’s not necessarily bad — it’s not a criticism — but it would have taken us in a different direction.

Fandom, for example, is all about exploring new ideas, markets, and fan identities, which is great for that platform. But it wouldn’t be great for Wikipedia. I remember one time, someone suggested that Wikipedia should launch a free webmail service — this was around the time Gmail came out. And I just thought, I don’t think so. That’s not who we are.

Just on that point, do you think advertising is killing the web?

Jimmy: No, I don’t think advertising is killing the web. But I do think there are some serious problems out there. Where I see an issue is in the prioritization of content based on virality rather than quality. That leads to all kinds of bad outcomes.

It’s one of the reasons social media has become so toxic — the algorithms are designed to prioritize whatever gets the most engagement, which often ends up being people acting badly. You have to be really careful about that.

But advertising itself is a perfectly fine business model.

My question is how Wikipedia has been dealing with the amount of information from the COVID-19 dynamic. You have new research papers coming out every day, so it must be a challenge, right?

Jimmy: About the pandemic — yeah. I could talk for hours, but I’ll try to keep it quick. There’s a group in English Wikipedia called WikiProject Medicine, and there are parallel groups in many other languages. They work together, and they’re very firm about addressing misinformation and disinformation.

We’re really proud of our coronavirus and COVID vaccine coverage. It’s been a kind of bedrock example of what you hope Wikipedia would do. And yeah, it’s a challenge, but one of the great things about Wikipedia is that when you’ve got a situation like that, you get a huge number of people who want to help.

I think a lot of people who care about these issues — doctors, researchers, and so on — understand that Wikipedia is probably the most important vector for public health information in the world. People turn to us. They trust us. So we have to earn that trust.

As a founder of a very mission-driven company, what are the main tradeoffs you’ve had to make to keep executing your mission and stay true to it? And what would you recommend to founders who are building their own mission-driven companies to help them cope with those challenges?

Jimmy: I think part of it is that because Wikipedia is a charity, a nonprofit, it makes it easier to stay true to the mission. It’s a very clearly focused mission because the mission is right at the top of the hierarchy.

Now, we still have to be businesslike. Wikipedia has to be financially sustainable, and that’s really important. I think for companies, I’m really fascinated by the B Corporation movement — double bottom line kinds of things. It’s really interesting. I think they’re hard and really complicated, but they can also be successful if you get the alignment right.

The alignment is when you’ve got a mission that people believe in, that you believe in, and that your employees believe in — and it’s profitable. That means you’re able to attract better talent and get more passion out of people because it’s something meaningful to them. So it doesn’t become a conflict between “should we do our mission” or “should we make more money.”

Obviously, it’s easy for those goals to diverge, and sometimes that’s okay, and sometimes it’s unfortunate. But I think social entrepreneurs should look for those moments where you’ve got an idea that’s genuinely good for the world in some way, and it also looks like a solid business idea. That’s brilliant. That’s an amazing spot to be in.

I’m really fascinated by Wikipedia. I remember when I was a child — and I might be showing my age — we had encyclopedias, maybe 20 volumes, and they cost hundreds of dollars. Every time we had to do a research paper, we’d flip through them, but some of the information was outdated.

What Wikipedia has done — and a bit of what Fandom has done — is create global access to information online. Right now, that kind of access seems normal, but at the time, it must have been an extraordinary idea. Something no one would’ve really thought of.

What do you think the next big leap in access to information might be? Do you think there’s going to be another revolution in how we share knowledge? Or do you think it’s going to be more incremental — just steady development of the current model like Wikipedia?

Jimmy: I don’t know. That’s my answer to that. But I do have a few thoughts.

First of all, I think an encyclopedia will always remain relevant. It’s a piece of the knowledge structure that makes sense to people. I’ve been really fascinated by the rise of informal education versus formal education. If you look at the number of people earning college degrees globally, it’s pretty stable. It goes up a little, down a little, depending on the country and context. But it’s fairly steady.

If you look at the number of people engaged in informal learning — whether that’s just reading a ton of Wikipedia or, especially around computer programming, learning a new language through an online course — that’s become totally normal. You’ve got Khan Academy and a lot of other really interesting resources like that.

All of that is really powerful and has a very positive impact. If you want to upgrade your skills or retrain — for example, if you’re a programmer and realize the language you’re best at is becoming obsolete — you can just go online and learn the new one. That’s really interesting. Now, that’s not true for every profession, but where it applies, it’s incredibly powerful.

So that shift is already happening. Is there some amazing revolution beyond that? I don’t know. I’m watching to see.

What do you think about AI being used to edit Wikipedia articles? I remember I was an active moderator and admin about 17 years ago, and a lot of the work was just editing little things and fixing the language. AI could definitely help with that, but it could also speed things up in a way that introduces incorrect facts. What are your thoughts?

Jimmy: Yeah, it’s really interesting. Right now we have certain tools — they’re not widely used in the community — but there’s a scoring system you can turn on in your account. You can filter recent changes to see edits the machine learning model thinks are bad edits but made in good faith. I have mine set up that way because I find it interesting. It’s not vandalism, just someone trying to help but maybe not doing it well. I like looking at that kind of thing.

How accurate is it? It’s interesting enough. Are we anywhere near having a bot write Wikipedia entries or even doing high-quality machine translation from one language to another? Not really. I think when you get into models like GPT-3 and similar ones, they’re impressive in terms of generating plausible-sounding text.

But when it comes to the kind of precision Wikipedians care about — and they’re very particular — we’re still a long way off. I do agree with you though. I’m really interested in machine learning models or AI that can flag things and say, “Hey, I’m a bot. I read this and something seems off. Could a human take a look?” Then the human can say, “Nope, bot, you’re wrong,” or, “Oh, that is interesting.”

As long as the model is good enough to make that interaction worth someone’s time — where it flags something the person knows about and it turns out there’s a real issue — I feel good about that. That’s a useful way to spend time, instead of randomly editing things that are already fine. So it’s interesting, but we’re still at a very early stage of figuring all that out.

Thank you very much for your time.