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https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/27/people-thought-i-was-a-communist-doing-this-as-a-non-profit-is-wikipedias-jimmy-wales-the-last-decent-tech-baron

..."In an online landscape characterised by doom and division, it stands out: a huge, collective endeavour based on voluntarism and cooperation, with an underlying vision that’s unapologetically utopian – to build “a world where every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge”. It has weathered teething troubles (such as a “joke” edit that suggested a loyal aide to Robert F Kennedy was in fact involved in his and his brother’s assassinations) to become a place in which civility and neutrality are the guiding stars, and levels of accuracy match those of academic textbooks.

Wales’s new book, The Seven Rules of Trust, is an attempt to distil the secrets of its success. They include things such as having a strong, clear, positive purpose (the slogan “Wikipedia is an encyclopedia” is a surprisingly powerful reminder that keeps editors honest); assuming good faith and being courteous; refraining from taking sides and being radically transparent. It’s a no-nonsense “lessons learned” book that might otherwise find itself occupying shelf space next to Steven Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO (subtitle: The 33 Laws of Business and Life) – but Wikipedia’s ubiquity, and the way it has dramatically bucked the trend of online toxicity – make it potentially far more significant.
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Not everyone is convinced. On the day I meet Wales, Musk suggests to his 228 million followers on X that “Wikipedia should be called Wokipedia (or Dickipedia 😂 ”. It’s the latest salvo in Musk’s rolling campaign to discredit the nonprofit site and generate interest in his own “Grokipedia” project, a plan for an AI-based encyclopedia that will be “a massive improvement over Wikipedia” and “a necessary step towards the xAI goal of understanding the universe”.

Musk’s hostility aside, does Wales see artificial intelligence in general as a threat? If people are increasingly relying on AI summaries, might Wikipedia’s dominance turn out to have been a blip? “I don’t think so,” he says, “but, I mean, that’s obviously on a lot of people’s minds these days.” It would be ironic, given that the site’s free licensing model means it can be used by anyone for anything – including as training data for large language models. “There are definitely threats to the web, but they’re not necessarily coming from AI,” he says. “I think the bigger threat is the rise of authoritarianism, governments, regulations, which make it harder to have a truly open global web where people are free to share ideas.” It’s true that Wikipedia is blocked in China, and faces sporadic censorship in Russia and elsewhere. Wales’s stance on this is not to give an inch – he has said: “We have a very firm policy, never breached, to never cooperate with government censorship in any region of the world.”....(more)