Video transcript · 4 min · 696 words
Jimmy Wales on his book The Seven Rules of Trust: transcript
Jimmy Wales gives a short Wikimania talk about his upcoming book, The Seven Rules of Trust. He says Wikipedia became one of the few trusted things in a low-trust world, partly because it trusts its editors, and he describes how the book was written and published.
Key points
- The book took about two years to write and is due out on October 28 in the US, UK and other English-language markets, with a German edition on the 31st.
- Wales says there is a wide decline in trust in journalism, politics and social media.
- Wikipedia went from being seen as a joke to being one of the few things people trust, while remaining very trusting by letting anyone edit.
- He says the angry behavior seen on platforms like X comes from how those platforms are designed.
- The US and UK editions have different covers because they have different publishers, Crown and Bloomsbury.
- He wrote the book with Dan Gardner, who interviewed people such as Tom Friedman and an Airbnb founder, and a chapter is offered as a Wikimania digital download.
Chapters
Full transcript
0:01Oh, I promise, I'm an easy paper. Great. So, I just wanted to pop up here for a minute. I might have been doing a whole five minutes to tell you about my book, The Seven Rules of Trust. I spent about two years working on it. I spent about two years working on it uh the seven rules of trust uh and it comes out in uh october 28th in the us and uk and other countries in english and then in german on the 31st and then in about 11 or 12 i've lost count 11 or 12 other languages um over the next several months the most recent language that i heard about is coming out in ukraine and i'm quite happy about that um and uh that's very exciting so uh what is the book about so you know we have seen this enormous decline in trust in society we see a decline in trust in journalism a decline in trust in politics we have social media that's full
1:03of misinformation disinformation toxicity frankly we have politicians who aren't trustworthy and and that's part of the problem. And yet, Wikipedia has gone from being kind of a joke to one of the few things that people trust in the world. We aren't perfect, we aren't perfectly trusted, but people generally think, oh, you know what, Wikipedia, I like that, that's a good thing. They play it straight. And so, and the other interesting thing about Wikipedia is in this world of increasingly low trust, Wikipedia remains incredibly trusting.
1:38You know, we say come and edit. We trust you. You can click edit and make a change. You don't even have to log in, even today. So that seems to people, it was always mind-blowing to people, but it's probably even more mind-blowing now. If you go on Twitter, for example, or X, and you just look around for a while, you think, oh, the general public is full of crazy, angry people. You couldn't possibly let them edit anything, but it turns out, actually, that's a product of the toxicity of the design of the platform. So this book is about trying to think about, okay, what are the lessons that I've learned, what are the lessons that we've learned through the years, how to rebuild trust, how to build a trusting, a blueprint for things that last and why it's today's most essential superpower.
2:22Somebody asked me, why don't you have two covers? Is it to sell more to collectors? And I thought, ooh, that's a good idea, but no, it's because the U.S. edition is published by Crown and the U.K. edition is published by Bloomsbury, so they're just different publishers. That's why they have different taglines. I didn't make those up. Those are just what the publishers put on there. Anyway, the book is coming out and I hope that lots of people will read it and I hope you'll enjoy it. There's obviously lots of stories from Wikipedia. I wrote it with a guy called Dan Gardner because when I Spent my first year just writing the book by myself. I basically just wrote down a bunch of great stories And then I'm like actually don't know how to turn this into a proper book Though Dan joined me and helped me finish it and he was amazing and one of the things he brought to the project was Interviewing interesting people so we've got interesting stories. We interviewed Tom Friedman from the New York Times We interviewed one of the founders of Airbnb who had a big trust crisis early in their business and so anyway I hope you like it there is a QR code but you don't have
3:27to scan it there you can actually it's on here and we have a bunch of these and Lena my assistant has them and we'll be handing out in the back and on this exclusive to Wikimania there is a digital download of a chapter that I selected because it has a lot of stuff about Wikipedia in it and I hope you enjoy it. So, great.
Source and licence
Recording: File:Jimmy Wales on Trust, Wikipedia, and the lessons he's learned - Lightning Talk - Wikimania Day 3 - Nairobi.webm by Jimmy Wales (2025-08-08), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0. The transcript, summary and chapters on this page are shared under the same licence (CC BY-SA 4.0).
The transcript is machine speech-to-text by the TidyTools Audio & video transcriber; the summary, key points and chapters were written by Claude from that transcript. Both may contain errors: check the recording before quoting it.