The Seven Rules of Trust: Why It Is Today’s Essential Superpower
by Jimmy Wales
Bloomsbury
ISBN: 978-1-5266-6501-0
Probably most people have either forgotten or never known that when Jimmy Wales first founded Wikipedia it was widely criticized. A lot of people didn’t believe an encyclopedia written and edited by volunteers could be any good. Many others believed free access would destroy Britannica’s business model, and reacted resentfully. Teachers warned students against using it, despite the fact that Wikipedia’s talk pages offer rare transparency into how knowledge is curated.
Now we know the Internet is big enough for both Wikipedia and Britannica.
Much of Wikipedia’s immediate value lay in its infinite expandability; it covered in detail many subjects the more austere Britannica considered unworthy. But, as Wales writes at the beginning of his recent book, The Seven Rules of Trust, Wikipedia’s biggest challenge was finding a way to become trusted. Britannica must have faced this too, once. Its solution was to build upon the reputation of the paid experts who write its entries. Wikipedia settled on passion, transparency, and increasingly rigorous referencing. As it turns out, collectively we know a lot. Today, Wikipedia is nearly 100 times the size of Britannica, has hundreds of language editions, and is so widely trusted that most of us don’t even think about how often we consult it.
In The Seven Rules of Trust, Wales tells the story of: how Wikipedia got from joke to trusted resource. It began, he says, with its editors trusting each other. For this part of his story, he relies on Frances Frei‘s model of trust, a triangle balancing authenticity, empathy, and logic. Editors’ trust enabled the collaboration that could build public trust in their work, which is guided by Wikipedia’s five pillars.
Wales’s seven rules are not complicated: trust is personal, even at scale; people are born to connect and collaborate; successful collaboration requires a clear positive shared purpose; give trust to get trust; practice civility; stick to your mission and avoid getting involved in others’ disputes; embrace transparency. Some of these could be reframed as the traditional virtues, as when Wales talks about the principle of “assume good faith” when trying to negotiate the diversity of others’ opinions to reach consensus on how to present a topic. I think of this as “charity”. Either way, it’s not meant to be infinite; good faith can be abused, and Wales goes on to talk about how Wikipedia handles trolls, self-promoters, and other problems.
Yet, Wales’s account feels rosy. Many of his stories about remediating the site’s flaws revolve around one or two individuals who personally built up areas such as Wikipedia’s coverage of female scientists. I’m not sure he’s in a position to recognize how often would-be contributors are quickly deterred by an editor fiercely defending their domain or how difficult it’s become to create a new page and make sure it stays up. And, although he nods at the hope that the book will help recruit new editors, he doesn’t discuss the problem of churn Wikipedia surely faces.
Having steered the creation of something as gigantic and seemingly unlikely as Wikipedia, Wales has certainly earned the right to explain how he did it in the hope of helping others embarking on similarly large and unlikely projects. Wales argues that trust has enabled diversity of opinion, and the resulting internal disagreement has improved Wikipedia’s quality. Almost certainly true, but hard to apply to more diffuse missions; see today’s cross-party politics.
