Factually! with Adam Conover - Exploring the Depths of Wikipedia with Annie Rauwerda

Episode Date: December 17, 2025

While it feels like the very concept of an accepted collective reality has crumbled around us, Wikipedia has gradually revealed itself to be our accepted arbiter of truth. How did this social project, built on the backs of countless volunteers, come to be the one site on the internet that we all pretty much agree to be “true”? Or mostly true, at least. Annie Rauwerda is a Wikipedia editor known for her incredible social media account Depths of Wikipedia. Today, she joins Adam to give an insider view on how the Wikipedia community tries to navigate our insane modern moment. SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a headgum podcast. I don't know the truth. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's all right. That's okay. I don't know anything.

Hey there. Welcome to Faxually. I'm Adam Conno. over, thank you so much for joining me on the show again. You know, if you're anything like me, you love Wikipedia. I use Wikipedia multiple times every day. It's on the home screen of my phone. It is one of my most trusted sources for finding information about the world around me. Anytime I have a thought about history or science, I have some question. Boom, I open up Wikipedia and I get a pretty reasonable and reliable answer all the time. But I do this so frequently that I often forget how

miraculous of a project Wikipedia is. Because think about this. At a time when every other source of information on the internet is getting worse, Google is becoming less useful. The web itself has less reliable information than it used to. It's more chalk full of AI slop and content farms. At a time when people are turning to AI itself rather than to human created information, Wikipedia is more reliable than ever. It's one of the few places on the internet that you can still go and find good information created by humans. On top of that, we live at a time of increasing ideological and partisan polarization when groups of people reject consensus reality and want to impose a false version of

a reality upon us. We see that in how the Trump administration is attacking academia, the news media, even the very idea of knowledge itself. There are movements around the world that are trying to rewrite reality and rewrite history. and Wikipedia has actually proven to be shockingly resilient to those attempts as well. Despite numerous attacks from the right wing and other ideological groups, it has largely stayed reliable and objective. And there are two points that make this even more shocking to me. First of all, Wikipedia is run entirely by volunteers.

Volunteers, edit, and write every single fact you see on Wikipedia, which means that all of that resistance to the forces of misinformation is being done by people in their free time, nobody who is being paid to do so. That is absolutely incredible. And secondly, I want you to consider for a second that we could live in a world in which Wikipedia doesn't exist. There's nothing about the structure of the internet that forced Wikipedia to happen. It's simply as an accident of history, we get to live in a world in which it does. So how has Wikipedia prevailed and continued to exist and thrive when all of these force are arrayed against it, the ideological movements that seek to undermine knowledge, the rise of

AI, and the declining trust in media overall. How did they do it? Well, on the show today, I have an absolutely incredible guest. Her name is Annie Rawerda. She runs the wonderful Instagram and other social media accounts, depths of Wikipedia. She's one of the most prominent Wikipedia editors and community members in the world today. And she has had a front row seat to exactly how this incredible project has grown and persisted over time. Now, before we get into this interview, which I know you're going to love, I want to remind you that if you want to support this show and all the information we bring you every single week, head to patreon.com slash Adam Con.

Over five bucks a month gets you every episode of the show ad free. You can also join our wonderful online community. We would love to have you. And if you'd like to come see me on the road in the coming weeks, I'm headed to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Madison, Wisconsin, Fort Wayne, Indiana, Louisville, Kentucky, Houston, Texas, And then at the end of February, I am taping my new hour at the punchline in San Francisco, February 19th through 21st. Please come out, head to Adam Conover.comover.com for all those tickets and tour dates. And I'd love to give you a hug at the meet and greet after every single show.

And now, without further ado, let's get to this interview with the incredible Annie Rawerda. Annie, thank you so much for being on the show. Adam, thanks for having me. I met you a couple years ago because of your wonderful social media project, Deps of Wikipedia, which is like maybe the only good thing on social media. I don't know about the only. There are a few others. There are a few more,

but there's a lot of bad stuff too. Well, just so for folks who don't know, just tell us really quickly what the depths of Wikipedia project is. In 2020, I started posting interesting or unusual articles on Instagram, and it's spread to Twitter and the Twitter clones

and TikTok sometimes I post. And then I started doing live shows sometimes. And really, I just got involved with Wikipedia, which I talk about sometimes, but I think there are still a lot of people that don't know that I edit it all the time. I feel like I came for a list of sexually active popes

or stolen and missing moon rocks. And then I stayed for all the people that write these because they're even better than the articles themselves. Yeah, and you sort of become a little bit of like a one woman like Wikipedia booster or something. I'm very honored to be. See, I just think that I'm like, some people call me the Wikipedia girl.

all. I've been getting the Wikipedia lady more, which makes me feel like, man, I graduated. I'm a woman now. Well, I think the reason your accounts are so popular and so beloved is because you're really showcasing what a wonderful thing Wikipedia is. It's like full of wonderful intellectual knowledge treasures. What is it that makes Wikipedia special and what is it especially that's allowed it to resist, you know, this tidal wave of misinformation specific, you know, that's sweeping the internet. Well, that's a really big question. It's funny because 20 years ago, it would, you would say the opposite. You would say Wikipedia is the title wave of misinformation. So what is it that makes me Wikipedia special? For me, I mean, there's so many answers,

but it's just, of course, it's that it's real people that are coming together. And they're kind of like, they're fighting and they're finding a shared reality. It's kind of rare that you find that online. There's so many different filter bubbles where people are all just in their separate worlds. Whereas Wikipedia forces you to, I don't know, you have to say whether hummus is a Palestinian cuisine, Arab cuisine, Israeli cuisine, or Turkish cuisine. I can't remember exactly what that fight is about, but I remember it's very tense. That was a fight among Wikipedia editors to decide how hummus is going to be described. I don't, I have not been active in the hummus.

talk page. That wasn't a good example. Oh, recently there was like an ink. What is the scope of the muffin article for once and for all we need to decide. Are we including English muffins in this article? Or is it separate? And it was like a big, like there was a big chart.

There weren't that many participants in this one and it wasn't as heated. It was not as heated as I was expecting. But that was the reason you could go on the talk page. So you're talking about like disputes between Wikipedia editors on what to put into the articles and not. I think What makes it special is that people are collaborating.

And even though there's a lot of feel, not necessarily feelings, but just like, there's a lot of passion. There are a lot of opinions. There probably are a lot of feelings behind the scenes that you're not necessarily seeing written down because people try to be fairly objective in their arguments. It's just real people. It's kind of messy and it's human. And there's also something so charming about how big it is and its scope. Britannica, awesome, by the way. I am a fan of Encyclopedia Britannica.

it's not like I'm anti. Why would I hate other encyclopedias? But some people, I don't know. I think that all encyclopedias that are doing a, I don't know, try to do their due diligence with facts are great. But in Britannica does not have a list of stolen and missing moon rocks. Yeah. Yeah. I like the things that are fairly trivial. Probably would not be covered in a more buttoned up academic encyclopedia. But despite the fact that Wikipedia is not buttoned up an academic, it's, it's, it's, it's. really highly reliable as a source of information for the most part. Wikipedia would never say that. No, Wikipedia would never say that. Why? Why not? I think Wikipedia is, well, first of all, any encyclopedia is a tertiary source. And so, like, reliable is relative. But if you're, if you're writing an academic article and you're citing sources, you definitely should not be getting it from Wikipedia or any encyclopedia. You shouldn't cite Wikipedia, but as a layperson who wants to learn about

something quickly, Wikipedia is highly, like, is generally very accurate. The articles are generally very thorough. Generally, I think that you can generally rely on it. You should always check the citation. And Wikipedia does not cite itself. So, well, so for those who don't know, like, how does Wikipedia work? I know everybody, everyone knows that, you know, it's the encyclopedia. Everybody can edits, right?

but I think people imagine from that like anarchy and chaos and just you know people whenever there's sort of a little experiment on the internet Reddit will have these you know days where okay we've made a big drawing that anyone can scribble on or whatever and it becomes like a war right or a chaotic I read this New Yorker article when they did the first R slash place which is where you get to draw but each person gets a pixel yeah and I remember so that was created by the wordel guy at Josh Wardle. Maybe you know him.

And he said in the New Yorker article, they painted him as just this like ball of anxiety just sitting there being like, don't draw swastika, don't draw swastika. And they didn't. And so the end of the article was like, and you know, humanity prevailed. Goodness prevailed.

Well, and so Wikipedia is sort of a story of humanity prevailing because I think when initially, you know, the project was over 20 years ago, when it was originally released, people were like, oh, how could this have good information on it? And now there's been like the collaborative distributed, you know, semi-anonymous project has like grown and built so much like infrastructure for itself. Like it within the community that like it's sustained and it's continued to grow.

And like as maybe gotten more reliable over time or at least that's for sure the case. And so how does that happen, right? There are a lot of ways that that happens. when you look at 25, well, it's 25 years old, almost, on January 15, 2026, that's when it's the 25th birthday. So, I don't know, it can rent a car. But when you look at it back in the early days, there were no rules literally. It started with no, like, there was no one that sketched out, like, this is approximately how this place is going to work. It was just kind of an experiment where it's like, let's see if anything happens here. And nobody really thought it would. So there

were no rules to start out with. And they came very slowly. They got built over time. And so the very early days, it was truly a free-for-all. You could just write whatever. But even in like 2005, six, seven, eight-ish, it was much more of a free-for-all than it is now because there were very few and very poor anti-vandalism tools. Now, if you are sitting in the back of math class trying to write like, I don't know. Yeah, penis, penis. Yeah, Mrs. Smith is a loser you will probably you might not even get it to go through because there are a bunch of bots and tools and like the track VPNs way better there's just like the tech went from being like I don't know um like muskets to to like drones and there's also like editors who are using their own

like semi automatic tools to like watch many pages at once and like you know see what's happening on those pages. But how do you go from having a, you know, sort of anarchic situation to one where you can actually have a debate among editors about like, you know, what goes in the muffin article or something perhaps a little bit more cultural political like who invented hummus or what? I mean, that's, I would say you can't get more political but than that. It's a nexus of food people have very strong feelings about. And then, of course, we're getting into the middle.

least. Well, I do think that, I mean, hummus is a great example of how there are proxy wars everywhere. Like, when you're seeing, like, carnage in Gaza, you're not thinking about hummus. But when people are arguing about hummus, they're probably thinking about that. Yes. And so. And so this is one of the most difficult, you know, debates and disputes to resolve. Yeah, the world can't solve it.

In humanity, right? In Pakistan, India, like, there are so many things that are, I just keep popping in to agree. But the Democratic Party and other organizations have been pulled apart by their differences over, you know, Middle East policy or whatever. And yet on Wikipedia, like, it seems like in so many cases, the Wikipedia editors are able to, you know, come to some sort of like solution or compromise or you'll go look at the article and go, I see why this would be contentious. And yet, you know, here's a reasonable answer and conclusion to it on the page. Like, how does that happen? Well, I'm glad that you're saying that because. There are a lot of people that would disagree with you.

Okay. Especially with the recent example of the Middle East politics. Sure. That's why it's being investigated by the House Oversight Committee right now, purported anti-Semitism. It's according to studies by the ADL, which some of their studies are less scientific than others. And to me, it feels like a silly thing. Yes. But and there's also so much pain that goes on behind the scenes.

There are people that get blocked that have been really long time editors. great contributors. There are, oh, man, maybe, maybe I'll try to remember and you can put them in if you do, like, photo editing. But some of the best animal shots are by this lady who is awesome, like such a good animal photographer. Like photos on a week. Yes, photos of animals and they're like, there's like two groundhogs that are like kissing. That's one example. Whatever. I'll try to find her later. She, and she does it for free. She doesn't want to get paid. But like, she's getting and like really good magazines are using her photos

because they can't take anything better and she got blocked for being just like I don't know a little bit obstinate about Middle East politics there's so many people like that where it's like there's definitely a not death toll but there are great contributors

to Wikipedia that I don't know so okay so it doesn't always go well behind the scenes but sorry I'm being too I'm being too negative Nelly but yeah I mean there is like There's always an end to the, there is a resolution that comes from every discussion, and that is not true on many, many platforms. Yeah, and I think that one of the things that impresses me the most is that, again, you've got this distributed community of people who are coming together from all over the world. People can join the community whenever they want.

I can just log in and create an account and start being a member of the community. And yet there are like really strong norms. and rules that are enforced by the community, that like the community itself built up over time, right, in a sort of quasi-democratic way where it's like, let's put this rule in place, let's put that rule in place. And my understanding is not all the community members

even agree about every single rule, and yet it's created sort of like an pretty orderly conflict resolution process for a lot of conflicts, maybe not for the really, really, really dicey ones you know there's a lot of pain but uh you know there's there's a lot of of wikibis been able to protect itself from a lot of like bad information by creating like this really rigorous process whereas something like the encyclopedia pretendic would have to

that from the top down to see wikipedia do that from the bottom up just people coming together and volunteering their time is like it's a it's a miracle you never yeah I guess it's it's rare to see people being so passionate, putting forth so much energy for the public good, for the commons. I guess I don't see that very often in my day-to-day life. Maybe I should be going to the community garden more or something. I'm sure if I looked for it, I would find it. But I just see people exploiting, exploiting. And then to go on Wikipedia and seeing some of the smartest people I've ever met in my entire life, people that have like very rich lives and families and jobs. And like, they could be doing something else, choosing to fight about hummus on

Wikipedia, just because they, they want Wikipedia to be better so that everyone has a better source of information. To me, that is like, it gets me out of bed in the morning. It makes me not dislike humans. Right. It's like so much of the time when you're, when you're looking at humanity, you're like, oh my God, humans do so much bad stuff. And then you look at something like Wikipedia and you're like, ah, but we do so much good stuff. Like, yeah. And there are vandals, so many of them. There are people that are worse than vandals, like people that just like sit there all day and just try to destroy Wikipedia. There's like weird people that do a lot of things.

But for the most part, I mean, there are people that have to chase them around and keep them out like in way more human labor than you might expect goes into just patrolling like weird like maybe site cases who for them, Wikipedia is their outlet. But people do it because they're just like, well, this is our, this is our information source. It's amazing. I mean, in many ways it seems to me like Wikipedia is like the last. bastion of some of the techno-utopianism of like the late 90s, early 2000s of like once we

have built all these communication tools that bring people together, oh, we'll just advance human knowledge and and people will understand each other better, et cetera, et cetera. I think of, you know, the original vision of the World Wide Web or of like open source software. Wikipedia is very much in that vein. And it kind of feels like the last one standing. Like there's still people who are into open source software, but they don't seem to be as messianic about it. No one's like Linux is going to change the world

the way they were on SlashDot in 2003. Oh, man. Reading those old posts were so. I was just at the internet archive and I would say that they can join the club of... They sure can. And it was there, they hit one trillion links saved in the Wayback Machine. Yeah. And I got to be on... I went to the party.

They had a party in the street with a live band and I'm on CNN saying, I can't remember what my exact quote is, but I think I said like, cyberpunk is alive here. or something like that. And I mean, the Internet Archive is also under threat right now, right? Because it's being...

They're under threads from many directions. Many different sources. But like, we forget that these big pieces of Internet infrastructure, the Internet Archive and Wikipedia, like, they don't have to be there. We could be on an Internet where neither of those things exist. There are huge powers right now that I would say are actively trying to tear them down. Yeah. What are those powers?

Um, well, they, so Ted Cruz and also the U.S. House oversight committee. By the way, I'm not the political expert here. So just, by the way, everything I'm saying is a citation needed after it. Um, check. Yeah. You don't cite things while you're talking. No, I know that's the thing. But I don't know. Sometimes I like, we'll talk about Wikipedia and people will think that I'm being super factual because I'm like, the, they're like, oh, she edits Wikipedia. She must always say stuff that it's right. And, um, no, you're definitely not true. You're a human. You're a human. being you're just talking off your brain off the dome the way all of us are see um now i can't even remember what i was saying now i now i want to say some misinformation ted cruz okay uh he's the zodiac killer um is that on wikipedia there isn't i think there's probably a specific article about about the me the whole meme yeah there definitely is actually yeah um what was i gonna say oh so there are two there yeah to the house right now has been um putting pressure on Wikipedia. They're trying to basically, they want to reveal

the identities of people on the arbitration committee, which is the Supreme Court of Wikipedia, basically. And it is anonymous, which in some ways is very weird, because they are the ones that take the like intractable

fights on Wikipedia. And it's only a few, they only take a few cases per year. Wow. A handful, a few. I don't know. and this is like how does and so like things like um poland's role in the holocaust that's something that is just thorny thorny thorny like any direction you're going to find people that like will bristle at some aspect of what the resolution is going to be and so they're just making decisions about like this is this is what we're going to do for now

and often those cases get reopened um like Israel Palestine stuff has been contentious well other ones then you get some that are a little bit less, like less high stakes, which is kind of funny, but if they're coming, if they're going all the way to the arbitration committee, they're definitely really serious. So like there's a guy, there are a few people who are just like really kind of militant maybe in their patrolling of capitalization in titles. And so that recently was an arbitration committee case and it was a little bit fun because it was less depressing. But anyway, really contentious issues, geopolitics, genocides, and capitalization. Capitalization and the dashes, like M dashes, N dashes.

Uh-huh. A lot of that stuff just gets to be like, punctuation stuff. Two spaces after a period. That, see, and that's another one, but that one is, um, basically you just have to, I'm not even going to get into it. Um, so. You'll wait into Gaza, but not into punctuation.

Um, so the arbitration committee, they're making these, decisions. They're very well reasons. They explain everything. A lot of them are anonymous because there are people that get very, very angry about whatever the decision is. And unlike the Supreme Court justices in the United States of America, they're not getting paid. And a lot of them have a lot going on in their lives. And there's a real risk. I think that the harassment that Wikipedia admins face, which most of the arbitration, the whole arbitrage in committee, I think, are administrators that's just that the harassment that they face is is more significant than you might expect just because there's like weird fringe people that think that they are yeah so

powerful and anyway so so to docks them to me feels like scary I just want them to be okay they're just nice people doing this in achingly good faith and I know I guess I could docks them if I wanted to they cut this but I just did Don't do it. They're all just really nice people. Genuinely, just like so, just like, a variety of ages, variety of genders, just like, thoughtful. They just want, yeah.

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Are there elections? Yeah, there aren't. They're about to happen. Wow. And so when people are anonymous, is it because they're under a username and no one knows what their actual name is? So they're just like, you know, bubble master. Guerrilla warfare.

But she not, later she said that her name is Molly. Got it. And so when the arbitration committee makes a decision, like, how is it enforced? Does just all the rest of the Wikipedia community say, okay, we agree to abide by this? Well, no, a lot of people don't pay attention. Well, think about the government. It's like, it's kind of hard to enforce anything, but the people that care about it the most are probably going to notice when there are violations and they're going to flag things. And this is actually something where I am not the best person to ask because I don't wade into the really thorny stuff.

Sure. You end up get, my favorite thing to do when I edit Wikipedia is just like writing content on pages or I'll sometimes get into disputes, but just like I don't like to stay there very long. Yeah. And I don't have fun arguing online, which is I think a lot of people don't, some people love it, which is fine. Some people, it's just Velcro for the brain. They just can't get away from it. Well, then they have to get blocked eventually because it's like, oh, you're just here.

It's like you're just here for the zip line, but it's like you're just here to argue. Look, I mean, I'm with you. My knowledge of the Wikipedia rules is I know just enough to like cause a little trouble. So like my, my history of Wikipedia was I started editing it in like 2004 when I was the best time to start because you don't get now if you make a kind of a small it feels like a small mistake when you start because nobody tells you the rules you can just like make a mistake that you don't think is that big of a deal like if you like edit a bunch about where you work people will be like oh wow be our person coming in trying to clean up your thing and then they might see that you're um well i guess now it's harder to see where your IP addresses but they might be like oh and you also are located there blocked Uh-huh. Whereas you're just like, oh, I was just trying to write about the thing I know about. Yeah.

Anyway, so. That's what I was doing at the time. I was like editing the articles about my senior thesis and philosophy. Like I was, I remember editing the article about. Tell us what your thesis. It was on the mind body problem in philosophy of mind. Like goes from the machine. What is the, yeah, what is the connection between the mind and the body?

What is it? Well, I don't know. No. God, no. No, never. I, like, my, my thesis was about why. the question is so difficult to answer and like what is it about this particular question that seems to elude an answer that satisfies anybody um like nobody really comes up with an answer

that makes almost anyone happy to that question it's like uh this sort of seemingly very deep contradiction how can consciousness be in something physical um but i was writing about that i remember there's there's a philosophical concept called qualia which is the way that an experience feels to you um that i like did a bunch of editing on I edited, like, the page for my college and stuff like that. And so I got to know, you know, a bunch of the Wikipedia rules about, like, okay, don't, you know, like what a verifiable source is and et cetera. And now I sort of use those to, like, if I see an article that has a bunch of bullshit in it,

I know how to, like, flag that to people who will, like, maybe do something about it. You know what I mean? Like I was looking at a page for a political, candidate who I who I didn't like in Los Angeles and I was like wait this is full of bullshit like this he clearly hired a PR person local politics yeah definitely don't be afraid to go on the talk page of any local politician whose article looks wacky and be like hey I think this looks a little bit weird because it probably is yep and so I I just like flagged that I was like wait this is clearly he hired like a reputation management firm to like put a bunch of shit that

didn't belong on Wikipedia. And so I just knew how to like alert some. I went to some page was like, hey, I found some suspicious edits. Well, someone helped me clean this up. And then a bunch of Wikipedians were just like, you know, and we all like sort of jam edited the thing. And what was funny about that was this guy probably spent like 10 grand or something to like hire some PR person to like write. And we like undid the work in a moment. It's funny. There's a lot of, there are tons of pretty much every like celebrity celebrity has PR people that will do. all sorts of things. And some of them do a great job with Wikipedia.

There are places where you can go to make requests. And there are some, like, I don't even want to say. Jack Antonoff's assistant is one example. Amazing. Genuinely, amazing. Whoever you are, we love you. Whoever this assistant was, I think it was like a female coded username, like Jenna 369. That's not real.

But so I'm just going to say she was like just being so thoughtful. Everything made total sense. And I remember multiple Wikipedia admins were like, if only every assistant were like you. And she was editing his page. She wasn't editing his page. She was requesting edits because when you're getting paid to edit for someone else, like, you're going to have a bias no matter what. And basically she was just like saying like, hey, these are my requested edits.

Do these make sense? And everything she did was just, yes, that totally makes sense. Because, okay. Except for maybe a few things, but they were so minor that everyone was like. So there's a good way and a bad way to do it. Like Jack Antonoff wants his page to be a little bit more current. It was silly things like I think his neighborhood was outdated At one in one place in the article

They had the Grammy count wrong Which is a pretty bad error I would say I would care if I had a Grammy that wasn't on Wikipedia So the bad way to do is go in and like edit it surreptitiously And make yourself sound great delete your Like deleting your controversy section People will notice They will probably catch you

But if instead someone goes on the talk page The discussion page for the article and goes, hey, I'm Jack Antonoff's assistant and, you know, we'd like to request this edit and here's a citation and does the community find this to be an appropriate addition and then you guys can add it. Like, that's like sort of the politically

positive way to do it, right? Yeah, for sure. There are policies on everything. Policies or guidelines or unofficial things that norms that everyone follows. It's hard to find them, but if you search enough, there are pages that explain exactly what to do if you have a conflict of interest, but you have a totally legitimate edit to make, which is, it happens all the time.

And people are definitely not powerless. You're allowed to, like, have your voice heard, but there are a lot of times where people will try to change something in their own article, and they won't provide a source because they're like, well, obviously, I wasn't born in Kalamazoo. I'm, I know, but then people will revert them because they have no idea that this is, this is the person. And even Jimmy Wales, who founded Wikipedia in 2001, his birthday is like, quote unquote, wrong because his mom, who was, who was there for his birth, she says that it was after midnight. And the doctor says it was before. It might be vice versa.

So he grew up celebrating his birthday on a day that's different from the birth certificate. And so his birthday on Wikipedia is he thinks it's wrong. Whoa. But which does it say? Oh, it says the one that he thinks is wrong. Yeah, I can't remember. But it's the one from his birth certificate. They're like citing his birth certificate.

They're citing some, well, basically get, this is a little bit in the weeds. I'm pretty sure they're not citing the birth certificate. But I don't remember the details. It's fine. What fascinates me about this is we're talking about like, look, Wikipedia is millions of people coming together, probably millions, at least hundreds of thousands editing. Definitely in the hundreds of thousands. Millions probably if you go across all languages and all of time. Like in the past 25 years. So it's like a microcosm of human

society, right? Because you've got all these people who are coming from different backgrounds, different places. No one really controls who's part of the community. People just come in and out. You can be anyone. You could be anyone. And a lot of people have, are there for a good reason, but a lot of people are there for ulterior motives, right? Because they want to promote something or suppress something.

So of course people will use it as a billboard. Absolutely. And there's now a sort of democratic decision-making process with elected leaders who make a final call and all these sorts of things, right? And there's conflict

and there's drama behind the scenes and like there's hurt feelings and sometimes people are banned and et cetera. But ultimately, I think both you and I agree the end product is really good and wonderful, right? It's like, yeah, it's messy. It's a work in progress, but it's really good compared to everything else we have. It's kind of amazing.

I'm never going to be like, oh, yeah, Wikipedia, like that's a super reliable source. Of course not. But man, it's really pretty good, don't you think? Yeah, I mean. Made by random people for free, people that aren't getting paid, people that are just doing this for fun. It's crazy. When you say it's not a super reliable source, you mean in like a strict academic sense. It's not an end-all, be-all.

When I compare it to, you're going to find local politicians that have like a, you know, glowing PR, like languageful article. Yeah, totally. But when I compare it to everything else on the internet, right? Like, the, the quality level of the rest of the internet has gone down. Like, if you, a lot of people comment on this, if you are looking for the answer to a question, even something as simple as like, you know, something about a video game or whatever, it's like most of the links you see are garbage. now. They're like to content farms or, you know, weird slop. The Google AI summary that's like, yes, put glue in your pizza. But like the Wikipedia article, you're like, okay, that's written by real people and I have a

sense of how reliable it is. And the answer is pretty good. And they're not going to bombard me with pop up ads that destroy my phone. Yep. And it's also a nonprofit as opposed to something like Reddit or whatever where it's like ultimately for profit. And so like, you know, we live in a world where, you know, often it's really easy to be pessimistic about humanity, you know, like, like, okay, America, the country is also messy and has people pulling in different directions and has like a self-made democratic system of adjudicating things. And it's easy to look around America and go, oh, seems like it's not going that well. Like, we're not tackling climate change. We're not doing all this other stuff we're supposed to be doing. You know,

things have gone in a bad direction. Um, but Wikipedia is this world where like it, the results have been good, right? And why do you think that is? Like, what is, what has made Wikipedia work? See, okay, I am already kind of like, I'm not even sure if I agree with what you said. In a lot of ways, in a lot of ways, America's doing okay. And it's so easy to find all the bad things. It's so easy to find the bad things. But man, like, clean water, pretty good. Oh, the water's kind of clean. I know. They just rolled back the thing about testing for bacteria. so maybe this is what I'm saying where you know like you look at the history of America there's all these points we're like oh my God democracy worked we had civil rights movements we had the new deal

we have all these things that were like you know we built something new that people needed and now we're watching a lot of it be undone and removed you know like 50 or 70 years later and that that's what makes you start to be yeah I don't really have a good I have never like I don't really have a good way to look at it objectively like whether America's good or bad I don't think it really is we could set that aside why does it work work. I think, well, okay, there are a lot of things that people will do for free. People love to work for free when it's a good cause that is not taking advantage of them. And when they know that their work is going somewhere, that it matters. And it won't be like a, I don't know, you

won't have some like erratic billionaire just like wipe it all away. People love to do things that matter and they don't have to be paid for it to do it. And Wikipedia is great proof of that. Um, back in the early days, like the first year of Wikipedia, they got like all these great, great contributors and they were doing all this for free. And at the end of the year, they were all talking and chatting and being like, how are we ever going to make money here? Like, how are you guys going to stay afloat? And Jimmy Wales was like, well, maybe we'll have ads someday. And it was like a bomb went off. People were like, you can't advertise next to the content I wrote for free. I'm not going to like, I'm not going to write this stuff for free just for you to profit off my back. And the Spanish

Wikipedians, they left. It was called the Spanish Fork. And it was, so the last line before leaving, the leader of like the Spanish Fork, he was like, good luck with Wikipedia. Whoa. And that was the big burn. Mike drop. And then they left and they started their own encyclopedia. It was called like something La Encyclopedia Libre. I can't remember. But, and they had their own separate encyclopedia for a long time because they were like even the thought that you would maybe advertise next to my content and make money off of me is unthinkable we won't contribute um so that I would say is the big like that's so the reason people contribute and the reason people do so much good for free is because um like it Wikipedia is not going to profit

off of them they're not doing this for the benefit of Wikipedia they're doing it for people uh But another thing is that the license is a Creative Commons. I don't, CC buy essay 4.0, which basically me, I don't really know what that stands for, but it means that anyone can use it, anyone, they can even profit off of it. You just have to say this is from Wikipedia. And so that means that like Wikipedia's content can go anywhere, Graw-Capedia, which Elon Musk started a couple weeks ago. If you scroll down to the bottom of many of the articles, most probably,

it says this content has been adapted from Wikipedia and it has the same license. And what that does is it means when you're a contributor that wrote, I don't know, 200 articles about extinct dinosaurs or something, you know that even if Wikipedia, even if the Wikimedia Foundation totally fumbles the ball, even if they like, I don't know, let's say the platform gets ruined, well, at least all of their content will be used on some other platform that rises up. Yep. So yeah, the contributors can always walk and they know that it's like their information is going to go everywhere. It's like the and I don't know. I hope I feel like that's the the structure of Wikipedia is kind of like designed to bring the best out of people that it's a

nonprofit that has a you know mission for the good of humanity and it's also structured in such a way where people know that their work is going to go towards that mission as opposed to like Reddit for example relies on a lot of volunteer labor. They have the moderators are like there's like millions of these volunteer moderators. But Reddit is like, we own everything and fuck you. Like for their community. Yeah, we're siphoning off all of our, all of your data that you provided to us for free and we're selling it to Open AI. And also, no more APIs. Goodbye. Yeah. Man, they are. I, I'm kind of mad about Reddit, but I mean, imagine if Reddit was run, you know, more like Wikipedia, right? Or like it was when it started before

Y Combinator. Well, talking about... I don't know if it was... Talking about the capitalism piece of it, right? Like, almost every tech company on the internet is using Wikipedia to some degree. If, like, even before AI was sucking

up Wikipedia. I have a lot of thoughts with this. Like, yeah, I want to hear them. Like, Google, you know, the fact that people think of Google as a good place to get information is largely simply because Google links to Wikipedia or sucks, you know, a piece of information out of Wikipedia and like puts it in their little summary box. And now AI is like reading Wikipedia. And so like if you imagine a world

where there is no Wikipedia, all of those tech companies have a lot less to sell to the public, which means they are profiting off of all of this volunteer labor. Do they put enough back into the system of Wikipedia to make that a worthwhile trade? Or how do you and other wikipedians feel about that? I'm just going to start with like, that is true, I would say, that people probably like or maybe liked in the late

2000 and early 2010s when Google was a little bit more iffy. Maybe 2000s. I don't really, it's so long ago, I don't really remember, but at the time, Google definitely there was like, it's not confirmed, we don't know what the

actual, what's it called page rank. Which, by the way, it's named that because of Larry Page, not because of the web page. That's bizarre. Anyway, anyway, we don't know what the page rank, like, algorithm is for Google, but people were like, you're definitely boosting Wikipedia, right? Like, why is Wikipedia always at the top? And it's probably just because people know it's a reliable click. It's not going to assault them with ads.

It's like usually better than nothing, even if it's not great. And also, they just, I don't know, Google's just trying their best. And they're like, let's. So, yeah, I think that did Google preferentially put Wikipedia at the top early on? probably but then in 2017 maybe I'm guessing around there that's when they started doing the knowledge panels where it's that little like info box that that pulled up when you search like Google tries to give you the answer on the search page to your question without you having to click on anything yeah and that I they announced it south by southwest and they didn't tell

Wikipedia they were doing that and so there's a there's an article somewhere where I think that the the president of Wikipedia at the time was like, wow, we are so surprised to hear that this. Okay. Sure. But right around that time, like 2017, 18, 19, that was like Wikipedia. Well, I mean, it was, it was like becoming an adult, 18 years old. And, and it really, like, Facebook, Google, YouTube, which is Google, all those big companies started kind of just like off-sourcing their fact-checking to Wikipedia, which is Random people, by the way. Yes. So, like, when you watch a video about COVID, sometimes there's, like, a thing on YouTube that will pop up and say, check Wikipedia for information about COVID-19. That's a lot of pressure to put on random strangers,

but, like, okay, that wasn't Wikipedia's idea. Wikipedia, like, most of the editors I know were like, damn, you don't, you're like how many billion dollars, a trillion dollar company, you don't have your own fact checkers. But, okay, if you want to rely on random people, sure. So, yeah, it gave Wikipedia a lot more power in some ways. And I think that maybe when you, like, there's, there's quite a bit of conservative backlash right now. And I always wonder if some of that is because, like, the establishment, the mainstream, I don't know, all these mainstream platforms started really overrelying on Wikipedia.

That's really fascinating. And then I just remembered the end of your question, which was, are the tech companies paying back? How do contributors feel about it? I don't really know. I'm not a good voice for all contributors, not even a little bit, because there's just so many all over the world. And the ones that I know and talk to every day

are mostly English-speaking ones on English Wikipedia that live near me. But Wikipedia editors are not very vengeful about that sort of thing. They're just like, yeah, take advantage of it, scrape our data. That's why we put it up there. But are tech companies paying back? Of course not.

No, they like leach off of anything that's free and anything open source. The big ones at least, the big tech like behemoths. And I think like Google will like donate to the Wikimedia Foundation and stuff. But it,

um, but donate the foundation, that doesn't go to the volunteers, right? That goes to like the technical infrastructure of Wikipedia, which is like not super complex. It's a, It's a big, it's a big ass wiki, right?

But it's, it's not like it's, you know, an AI or, or, you know, YouTube or something like that. It's a top 10 website. So it's like there's definitely, uh, complicated things with the servers and everything. Sure. And there's a lot of, um, like, staff that works on international. Because there's 300 different language versions of Wikipedia. And English is the big one, but there are efforts to, I don't know, boost Ketwa, Wikipedia. Right.

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The deal is exclusive to listeners and frames sell out fast, so order yours now to get it in time for the holidays. Support the show you're listening to right now by mentioning us at checkout terms and conditions obviously apply. Thank you, Aura Frames. Thank you, listener. What I think is really interesting is that, like, the tech companies have basically destroyed all of the for-profit, like, knowledge generation companies, right? Like, so much of digital media and media overall has gone out of business, you know, apart from, like, the New York Times and a couple other papers, you know, the idea of someone being paid.

to research information and put it on the internet is like that that's a almost a job that doesn't exist anymore because the tech companies have like centralized all the eyeballs and centralized you know everyone coming to them it's part of google's effect right google if they just put the answer up and you never click through to the page then you don't see the ad on that page so the company doesn't get the money um and those companies have like lost a lot of business and they've like had to cut what their uh their output Wikipedia doesn't have that problem because nobody at Wikipedia is paid. Right? So Wikipedia survives.

Which, by the way, I like the foundation. You should donate to the foundation whenever they ask if you, but not the shirt off your back. Like if you have no, if you genuinely have no money and they're like, we need $2.75, you're allowed to buy food for yourself. But, um, but if you get, if you donate to the foundation, um, that's great. You're supporting the foundation.

You're supporting some like, uh, essential infrastructure. But also some of it like, I don't know. Basically, yeah, the foundation will say, If we don't have as many clicks, we don't get as many donations. And that is true. But what I find interesting is that, like, we're relying on volunteers so much to create, like, the knowledge that exists on the Internet, right? That, like, it's become harder and harder to find any way to make money by putting information

on the Internet. And that means that, like, Wikipedia has become more and more load-bearing. And specifically, the unpaid volunteers have become more and more load-bearing. And that's like, you know, you've got like, think about a gigantic company, you know, with billions of dollars of GPUs, like open AI, how much that is relying on. On Michael Bink, this like audio engineer in California who is fighting off all these long term abusers that are trying to like, I don't know, fill it with racial slurs. Exactly right. Like, and it's just this one guy who fights off all of the long term, like, the PD abusers. I can think of so many examples off the top of my head.

Right. There is, want me to just like, there is a guy. in Alaska, who I think is a commercial weed farmer based on his photos that he uploads. And he has been on the arbitration committee. He does a bunch of patrolling. He's been around forever. There are a bunch of retirees that are just like powerhouses. There is like a retired copy editor.

There are a bunch of people that work in like food service or jobs that aren't necessarily academic. But they are just very academic people, whether or not they have like formal, formal qualifications, and they write these gorgeous, like beautiful articles, arguments. There's a mom in Idaho, this is my favorite maybe, who she has two kids with, I don't know what their disabilities are, but pretty severe special needs. And they watch a lot of kids shows on TV. And she got so curious about Sesame Street and the history of like the Wiggles and all these shows that she wrote just like long, extensive articles with the best quality ratings, like, featured articles on all these kids shows and it is so reading them is just amazing also figure skate

her name is figure skating fan and um she's great so there's all these random people what you're describing is these are people who are there's a teenager in morricious the little island kind of by madagascar who wrote all of the Beyonce articles for a long time that's wonderful just because they're a Beyonce fan which some of the sometimes the fan like fan editors are big like there's a Megan Trainor fan right now, who is awesome, but the Megan, Megan Train is on the front page of Wikipedia all the time, because if you're on the front page of Wikipedia, it just means that some Wikipedia editor really improved this article and wanted it to be on the front page. Like, it's basically, it's like the fridge. Like, I want mom to put my, yeah, not that it's

children, but it's like I want, I want my, um, yeah, my beautiful artwork to be on the fridge. Yeah. So what you're describing is people who are, uh, improving Wikipedia as a hobby. Like they're either retirees or they have a job. And they're like, oh, you know, every night I like to work on my Wikipedia articles, right? And make them a little bit better. I feel like I'm contributing to a project. Great. What I'm trying to figure out is, is it good or bad that so much of our knowledge on the

internet is created by that type of person? Because on the one hand, I look at and go, they're being exploited. Their free effort is being, you know, used by all of these companies to make massive amounts of money that they don't participate in. On the other hand, I look at it and go, well, they're creating it for free out of the goodness of their hearts because they know that it'll be used freely by anybody who wants to use the knowledge, right? And that's the thing that's really hard to answer.

If only they weren't being, I don't, I think that people don't, people, people are rarely editing Wikipedia out of this like self-sacrificial, like, I'm holding this big cross, altruism. It's not that. It's more just like, well, I'm interested in this thing and I want to do something that matters. For a lot of people, this is the greatest legacy that they will ever have. When they die and are disintegrated into the ground, there will be, I mean, who knows what will have you happening. But, but like, there will probably be AI that's trained on words that they wrote and they did something.

Well, that's not what I would want to. I don't know. After I die and AI will be trained on the words I wrote. Sorry, that's not very hopeful. but like there are a lot of people that don't have yeah yeah like if you if you want to quote unquote matter in the in the story of humanity and the story of knowledge yeah anyone can do it anyone can have a big role sorry that wasn't very now I'm feeling stupid but no no that was grace I don't know I don't really have very much hope about the future of knowledge but yeah I mean well the thing that's hard about back to what you were saying about digital media it's tough because Wikipedia really I mean realized so absolutely. heavily on digital media, citations, like there are, everything you should have a citation. Right. If you can't find a citation, then you can't put it on there.

And there are so many topics that just are very poorly covered. Yeah. And so you can't write Wikipedia articles about them. That's such a good point. And Wikipedia itself relies on the work of media journalists. It's like fully reliant. And I think that they're kind of, I don't know, it's a, what's the word for when relationships are, it's like a biology thing. toxic relationship?

No, like when there's like a little like, codependent. No, when there's like a little bird that's like on top of the elephant paracetic relationship? The opposite. They're helping. Symbiotic. That took me away too long.

Thank you. We clicked through a couple Wikipedia pages. Yeah. Okay. It feels symbiotic at this point because digital media did, I shouldn't say all of them. But most digital media outlets, even the successful ones, did not maintain their archives. And so articles that were beautiful that they spent $5,000 writing and publishing 10 years ago. You can't even find.

The links are dead and you wouldn't ever be able to find them if they were not on the Internet Archive and Wikipedia. So there's that. There's also, I mean, books, Wikipedia sites, books, but most of those are not digitized. And so. But that's the really sort of like baller citation on Wikipedia is when you go, what's the source for this? And it's just like lists the name of a book.

Like someone went to the fucking library and got the information out. Yeah. And like that makes, that's a lot harder for someone who's motivated by an old. ulterior motive to remove when it's like, no, you got to go argue with a real life bookman. And you know what happens is every time you see like an unlinked book source, there is probably somebody, probably multiple people that like, that like went out of their way to go get that book just to check, just to check that this person did the right thing. Because a lot of the times, the things that have book citations are featured articles, which is like the highest quality

ranking. And those ones go through a bunch of peer review where all of the peer reviewers, have to, whatever they do. I don't know. Maybe they like buy it with their own money. Maybe they drive, I've heard of, I know this, um, he at the time he was a teenager named Eddie and he would get his mom to drive him two hours to this local history center to get sources. And the mom was so sweet. She, she did it. But I guess that image, like that's not what you're thinking of when you think of Wikipedia editors. You're thinking of like some guy at his desk, but it's like, just this like really sweet kid who's like, mom, I really want to, I really want to work on this article about Upstate New York. Can you take me to the vocal history center?

Let's talk about the sort of ideological backlash, which you mostly see on the right against Wikipedia, although I'm sure there's some on the left as well. You said, like, you know, the House Oversight Committee is trying to investigate Wikipedia. Elon Musk recently created his own AI Wikipedia called Grogapedia because he felt that Wikipedia was biased. Yeah, Wokepedia. Yes, he's called it Wokepedia. Which I, Wikipedia versus Wocopedia. What was Wikipedia?

That was a Spanish fork. Good luck with Wikipedia. What do they mean by paedia? Like if Wikipedia was accepting ads? It's paid. Wikipedia. Yeah. So what I find fascinating about this is that so many media sources get like sort of corrupted by, you know,

these ideological campaigns to change, you know, what we know about the world. Like there'll be an ideology like conservatism, which says what most people understand as reality is false. Here's how reality actually works and, you know, wants to impose that upon everybody else. And so you'll end up with, you know, even media like the New York Times or whatever, we'll say, we'll start going some say, some say, right, or will, you know, bend to that a little bit. Whereas when I go and look at Wikipedia, even when I go look at like a contentious, an article for something that I'm like, oh, the right wing has a really strong opinion about this. like climate change or something like that, right? You go and read the articles. You're like, no, this is actually the factual version.

It has not been watered down. It has not been, you know, corrupted in this way. So it feels like Wikipedia is more resilient against that kind of misinformation coming from, you know, political ideological sources than other places are on the Internet. Why do you think that is? There are definitely some articles that are not as balanced. the smaller ones that don't get as much traffic where you don't necessarily have somebody

that's going to patrol it as much. Those sometimes are more vulnerable. I always feel like I need to say that because there's going to be someone that's like, wait, but I saw an article that sucked. Yeah. It's tough because Wikipedia is only as good as the sources it sites. And a lot of the backlash has come from that,

from the discussions about which sources are sufficiently reliable. there's a list of them that uses stoplight colors and it kind of oversimplifies the reality because it's not like every article from the New York Times is truly green light.

Absolutely not. First of all, you should never cite an opinion piece unless it's about maybe the author unless there's like a very there are very few situations where you should be citing an opinion piece. There are a bunch of topics from the New York Times that have been debunked

and you should just like, anyway, Everything is much more complicated than green light, yellow, light, red light. There are a bunch of red light sources that are fantastic for certain things. Vice is yellow. And I shouldn't even say yellow light. But it's just because, like, Vice, I mean, it's either like the best piece of journalism you've ever seen about a topic or just like horseshit. Yeah. Which that's how it's always been.

And that's kind of why, I don't know, it's kind of why Vice is fun. But a lot of the conservative backlash has been because of limits. to like Bright Bart isn't generally shouldn't be cited except for specific instances. And then there's been a lot of just like back and forth about Fox News. It's just too big of an entity to have a simple answer. But some of the recent stuff like the lawsuits about the voting machines and I don't know, various instances where corrections were not issued, it makes it really difficult to draw broad

broad like rules about reliability because a lot of the local stuff that's covered by Fox isn't covered anywhere else it's great it's like fine but it's just really yeah it's just really tough

because conservative media is so I don't know maybe fractured would you say that's true like it's a lot of podcasts it's a lot of substacks and then you have a few

big like broadcast networks which like OAN and Fox and some of those have the greatest track record with accuracy. Of course. Which I'm saying, of course, I just am like really trying to be like, I don't know. So yeah, and so that just makes it hard for Wikipedia because Ted Cruz is like if you can't cite Fox, then how are you possibly going to be?

But like, if you hate the mainstream media, you will definitely have problems with Wikipedia too. So. But like Wikipedia manages to often correct things that are in the mainstream media. Like you said, like, the New York Times will make errors that, that Wikipedia, like, doesn't fall for. And also, I'm pretty sure, like, if I go look at the Wikipedia entry for January 6th, right, it'll describe it accurately and it won't say it was like a patriotic march of peaceful protesters, right? Or, like, in Elon Musk's Groghapedia, a lot of people were posting the Hitler article where it described him as a politician.

So, like, and that's really remarkable at a time when, you know, the right. White Wing is literally trying to bend like academia, like trying to, you know, change how colleges teach, you know, topics. They're trying to change the way history is taught, the way, you know, like literally our knowledge base for the world. It's been remarkable to see Wikipedia sort of stick to its guns and continue to be as reliable as it is, you know, even facing that backlash. It really makes me sad.

It's like, it's definitely, it's this one. strand, it's this strain of, of right-wing politics in the U.S. and elsewhere. That's, that's really attacking knowledge. It's not all of, it's not everyone, but, man, that, I just find it to be so nefarious. Whatever, anyway. Well, like, yes, is there something about, again, Wikipedia is just a volunteer project of people coming together and setting up some rules for themselves, you know, about here's how we're going to decide what's true and false.

and yet that pretty simple thing has been able to have a sort of immune system reaction to misinformation despite it not having a huge amount of money doesn't have a huge endowment like Harvard it doesn't have a lot of people who are paid to do the work

it doesn't have access to fancy equipment or whatever but you see big organizations bend the knee and say okay we won't talk about slavery anymore or whatever the fuck and you see Wikipedia not doing that You know it's a volunteer project. Is the volunteer nature of it, like the strength that allows it to do that? Yes.

Yeah. The thing about what you were saying about how, in a sense, it's beautiful that people are coming together with this volunteer collaborative work. In a sense, it's beautiful. In a sense, it's exploitative. I do agree. There are some people where I look and I'm just like, man, oh, man, you do so much for the world. You should have more than $20,000 a year that you may get your part-time job, that you do just to support yourself so that you can. for some people it's like this is their life's work but it's not what um it can't sustain them

and you're like maybe they should be paid a living wage to do it for sure and maybe if there were people who we could pay more people would be able to edit Wikipedia right because you have to have the free time yeah for sure for sure um so i like could not agree with you more there is this really tough thing where anytime anyone's paid for anything it introduces a conflict of interest that would be difficult to deal with on Wikipedia and who's paying and who's being hired. And there are a bunch of questions about that that make the whole idea of how it would even be hypothetically rolled out, which I really don't think this is something that is going to be happening soon. But it just is tough.

I mean, what you're, I think where I come down on this is that like there's a, role for people to be paid to do knowledge generation, you know, for there to be for-profit companies that create knowledge and, you know, such as newspapers that pay people to go learn about the world and write things down. I'm all about newspapers. We need that, right? Newspapers.com, this is not, do you know, do you know it? I should, I should not interrupt you.

This is your podcast. I'm doing the thing that they're in comments of podcasts. They're always like, man, another guy interrupting the woman on a podcast. I'm the opposite. You're the guest. Look at me. I'm the opposite right now. No, people.

Women in mailfields. People love on this show that women talk over me. Oh, I should, I should let you talk. No. I'm going to let you finish. Just you tell me about newspapers.com. Oh, it's just so dumb. I'm just, I'm just, this is not even that good of an anecdote.

There is a website called newspapers.com and it is run by Ancestry.com, which is run by Mormons, the Mormon church. Basically, they, they saved all of like the records so that they could pray over the names of people that had died because I can't remember the rule but it's like maybe they will go to heaven and some one of their levels of heaven I don't remember they're like we can get people to go to heaven like after the facts if we pray for them and because they have all these levels anyway um so they have all these great newspapers they like blew up the side of a mountain kept them there and then um I really want to visit it but it's really locked down but they have newspapers.com

which is this like pretty well indexed archive of newspapers mostly American newspapers But it's really good. You can search keywords. It's $50 a year. But if you have 500 Wikipedia edits, I feel like I'm like a salesman right now. If you have 500 Wikipedia edits, you can get it for free with the Wikipedia library. And the idea is that like if you're a publisher, if you are newspapers.com, if you are like anyone that is putting out this stuff, you want it to be cited on Wikipedia because so many people look at the citations, then click it. You will sell way more books if your book is cited on Wikipedia. So a lot of them will make their stuff available to Wikipedia editors.

Wow. So I'm on newspapers all the time. As you should be. What I was going to say is, like, we need a healthy, like, for-profit, like, knowledge generation industry where people are paid, and that's, like, falling apart in America, and that's bad. But also, there's, like, a huge amount of good from, like, an all-volunteer project, Like something about the volunteer mission-based nature has made Wikipedia more resilient.

Also means there's like gaps in what it covers and who is able to edit Wikipedia because there has to be people with enough free time and enough free money to do it as a hobby. But like it's a little bad that like it's become so load-bearing on the internet, but that's also its strength. There's also, I mean, there, if you are upset about some aspect of Wikipedia, which you should be. Like it's very normal to come. If you read enough, you'll find something that bothers you. And maybe it's, maybe it's an end dash where there should be a hyphen.

And maybe it is something way more, I don't know, serious, important. And at some point, like, you can just change it. You don't have to go online and complain. You don't have to go and be a talking head on the news and be like, wow, biased coverage. Can you believe it? You can just go in and change the hyphen. And like, you know that my brother in Christ, you made the sandwich meme? It's like that.

Like, my brother and Christ, anyone can edit, which there are. rules. Like, there are like a few barriers. But in general, if you care enough, you can, you can do something about it. And that is, I mean, it's really hard to, um, to poo, poo Wikipedia. When, when, when everyone can just respond with that, when everyone's like, okay, well, why don't you, why don't you participate in the active discussion that's happening right now? It's a lot of work to participate. It's a lot of work to learn the norms and stuff. But if you really care, you can. And if you learn the rules, you can do, a little bit of editing, you learn some of the rules and it'll help you a lot of the way.

You don't have to get into it every single day. But like when I'm editing, when I'm reading Wikipedia, sometimes I'll read something where I'm like, oh, that's bullshit. Like somebody with an axe to grind or somebody ideological or somebody with a profit motive has put in some bullshit. And then I'm like, oh, it's not cited. I know how to delete something and say, there was no citation for this. Or I know how to delete something and say, this is not neutral.

or I know how to, okay, if it's a little bit contentious, maybe I'll go make a note on the talk page and say, here's why I did this or whatever. And that knowledge allows me to just like edit Wikipedia a little bit more effectively. I don't like really get into it. I don't spend a lot of time doing this. But if you like learn a little bit about how the system works,

you can like participate in the life of it a little bit more. And people like that, like you, people that make a few edits here and there are kind of like the lifeblood of it. Like, Aaron Schwartz, who is awesome, and he died a long time ago, 2008, maybe. Yeah. Anyway, he is a legendary guy for the whole internet. He invented RSS feeds. Reddit, didn't he?

Anyway, he created everything good. And he tragically, he was, like, persecuted by, like, the justice department for... For releasing free academic articles. Yes. And then, and then I think he took his own life. It was pretty, very tragic. Yeah, well, he was going to be used as an example. It was going to be a massive sentence.

And anyway, so he... was a very active Wikipedia editor and he also researched Wikipedia and he put out this study way back in the day. So it's a little bit out of date but I I'm pretty sure that this still holds the talking point was like

Wikipedia has a bunch of small contributors but then the really active contributors do most of the work and it's hard to quantify what most of the work even means but he found that the people that edit here and there as a whole, just because there's so many of them, this like massive crowd

surrounding the super contributors, he found that actually know that the crowd is doing most of the work. And the super contributors are just patrolling the crowd to make sure like, oh, you tried to help, but you actually, we've actually decided that it's not a hyphen, it's the M dash or whatever. That's cool. And I would say that that is kind of the case mostly. I don't know. Everything's complicated, but.

Yeah, no, because I was imagining that those dedicated. editors of whom there's there's probably less than most people think right like like how many like the number of administrators who are allowed to block people they're in english wikipedia it's less than a thousand it's like 700 800 and so under that how many dedicated contributors might there be five figures like 20,000 30,000 like people who are logging every day and getting into the arguments you know would you guess you're saying different things people that are logging in every day and people that are getting into arguments fair enough You know, people who are like dedicated community members who think of themselves as

Wikipedians and that's their hobby and part of their identity. And like at this current moment. Yeah. How many do you think? We could find the stats for this really quickly. Okay. So everyone's going to can fact check me, but I don't know. It's in the tens of thousands maybe.

Okay. Yeah. But to edit every day is a lot. And there are so many people that used to edit every day from 2014 to 2016, but then they went to college and they were then they went to grad school and they got busy. Then they had a kid. There are a bunch of people that have kids and then drop off the face of the earth. Yeah, pretty much everyone who knows kids drops off the face of the earth.

They stop mattering and their kids are all that matters now. I'm joking. So that like group of let's say 10,000 people or 20,000 people is like they're putting a lot of work in. But what they're doing is sort of like shaping what the much, much larger group of people who log into Wikipedia and make a couple edits here and there do. They're like patrolling the crowd. I love that metaphor. Like they're helping the flock go in the right direction.

The swarm. Yeah. And when you look at what the work of Wikipedia has been over time, over the past 25 years, it started out with no rules and there was really no patrolling either. Maybe there was a little bit of patrolling, but not really. And increasingly, if quality has gone up, it's just because more human labor has gone into patrolling.

There's a lot of enforcement that has to happen. Um, you can, people, uh, try to enforce the norms of Wikipedia and then people enforce the enforcers and then everyone's checking each other. And that's kind of how it works. And, uh, what was I going to say? Anyway, I guess like when you look forward, like, what's the future of knowledge? I don't really know what the future of knowledge is. But, um, when, uh, so like, like traffic to Wikipedia, it's really hard to quantify how much of a dip it's taken from, um, from large language models because the most annoying thing about these things is that they just like scrape they're just like exploiting the fuck out of the servers like they're just like

annihilating the servers all the bots are scraping the fuck out of it and so it's really hard because the bot traffic is up by a lot and the real human traffic is down maybe probably by a little bit and that reduces contributions

to Wikipedia it also means awareness brand awareness donations to the foundation and yeah so if Wikipedia is like no longer like the delivery method someday in the future of knowledge

if it's coming through chatbots or like I don't know this what her Scarlett Johansson type things I don't I don't really know if it's coming through that then maybe Wikipedia's role is not to be the creator and the writer of knowledge but more

the enforcer like just fact-checking, that sort of thing. But, I mean, what do you think is lost if people, you know, five years from now are predominantly getting their questions answered via chat GPT, which is scraping Wikipedia versus Wikipedia itself? The thing that you would lose is, well, I'm sure there are a lot of answers. But when I read something on Wikipedia, I love to know how it was formed, who wrote it? There's a Chrome extension and Firefox, which is called Who Wrote That? Question Mark. Get it. It's so awesome. If you're logged into Wikipedia, you can just click it. And then you'll hover over the text and it'll show you which contributor added it when. And you can just click and be like, oh, that's when it got added. Cool. And there are things that are really contentious that you can ask chat GPT. And it will probably give you, like, I don't know, some like fairly sanitized, inoffensive.

or at least not super offensive version of things. But sometimes it's like, man, I really want to know, like, how did this get to be decided? Right. Where did this come from? And you can, there are, I know there's like, what, scholar mode where you can get sources better? For Wikipedia, what I, yeah, for Wikipedia, what I appreciate is,

like, you can just see, like, the human fighting that went into it. And you're not getting a summary of the human fighting. You're seeing the human fighting if you want to, if you care about it. Yeah, I mean, large language. I only care when it's something I really, if it's a topic, I already really care about, that's the only time that I am like really that I really appreciate that I can see all of the blood sweat and tears. Yeah, you can like go into the sources. You can also go into the edits and see

who did it. You can participate. A chat gpt. This is wrong. Yeah. Large language models are a black box. You by definition cannot see where the information comes from. I mean, a large language model might give you a source, but you don't know how it was trained, what the training data is and like what is happening in the background like in its sort of you know neural net that is producing the information neither do the people who built it it's like sort of by design that way whereas Wikipedia you can you can see the whole process of human knowledge generation by people's sausage factory and it's really messy there you don't want to see how the sausage gets made unless you do unless you're addicted to it unless you can't stop it's just I have this vision unless you want to make sausages

anyway what what's like uh what's really jumping out to me here is I have this mental image of, you know, the large language models, there's like a million GPUs humming away in like a data center somewhere in like, you know, rural Virginia or whatever to produce that answer. Whereas Wikipedia, there's like a million human brains whirring away around the world to produce the text. And like, which would you rather have? Which do you think is more reliable?

Well, I mean, I think that both humans and servers are like, they have their faults. But I mean, I really do like flesh and blood humans. What was I going to say? I said this before, I think. But I like what you said, like the vision of human brains worrying. I like the thought that like right at this very moment that we are talking and that anyone is listening, like right now, there is somebody who's like getting a cramp in their hand because they're typing so much on Wikipedia. And maybe they're fighting about some stupid bullshit. There are probably people that, like, their feet are, like, bouncing up and down because they're like, they're like over caffeinated writing about some, something.

There's like human. They're like, English, the English muffin is not a muffin. Right. It's a bread. And, yeah, I really want to go through. Every time you make a contribution, you're supposed to leave a little edit summary. Like, I don't know. Yeah.

I removed the word ugly from this article or whatever. And I really want to go through and download them. and find the ones where people refer to their flesh bodies, their corporal, corporeal form. Find the edit summaries where they're like, I hurt my hand, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Just because it's charming now that, now that so much the content generated from the internet is not from people who have hands or souls. Are you? I shouldn't even say people. It's from entities. Are you worried at all about the future of Wikipedia? And what does a world look like?

where Wikipedia doesn't exist, because we could live in one. Oh, yeah, definitely. It's like, that is for sure a prospect. And it's, I don't really know what the biggest threat is. Like, I'm definitely just saying, I don't know that much about anything, but the, I mean, the political threat right now in the U.S., when the servers, the main servers, there are React servers elsewhere. I can't remember the type of server names.

But the foundation is registered. registered in the U.S. and the main servers are here and the political climate is not one that makes me feel like it's like super stable. Yeah. And so that is definitely a threat. What would a world look like without Wikipedia? Are there discussions within the Wikipedia community about like, hey, we got to have some servers elsewhere? They're, okay. So I don't remember the names of these two types of servers.

And I wish if I were, if this were virtual, I would be Googling and I would say it right. but the server that like there's like a main one and then on a bunch of different continents and they just added one in Singapore a couple years ago yeah basically but there are names it's like there's React servers

and then something servers whatever yeah so there's talk of that it would be a big like technological just like it takes a long time to do that to move the foundation with nonprofit stuff I'm pretty sure that

so it takes a long time too I don't know not really my, I feel like that's not really my job, but. Fair enough. But a world without Wikipedia, I can't remember what your first question was exactly, but I remember thinking to myself, most of the volunteers that are doing this are not doing this, they're not like drawing paleo art and then obsessively reading like the scientific studies about these fossils, and then just trying to, like, fact-check each other's paleo art on these

forums where they create the images for articles about, like, I don't know, extremely extinct animals, like, or the people that are writing about roads, every highway, the people that are, there's a teenager, not, he used to be a teenager. Now he's probably like 25, but his username is Epic Genius, because he made it when he was probably like 13. He wrote an article about every subway station in New York City. Wow. And they're pretty good articles. Like if you check, they're usually like pretty hefty.

He didn't write them all, but many. He finished. Ryan, so awesome. I don't think that people in general are doing what they're doing to make Wikipedia so great. Like you're not planting, you wouldn't go to the moon and like plant the Wikipedia flag. It's just like I wanted to like share this knowledge. I wanted it to be out there. So if Wikipedia dies, in a sense, it's sad.

I mean, I would certainly be sad. I like Wikipedia. I have a shirt with like a Wikipedia dog on it. Yeah, you brought me a Wikipedia editor. The whole vibe and brand of Wikipedia itself, I really love. But so there would be something lost, but the knowledge is never going to be lost. That's the thing that's good. Everyone has copied it, which means that it, like, will never go away.

Yeah. Everything that's ever, like, on the ladder of knowledge, like, as humans have progressed, Wikipedia is there. Like, it has affected so many things that came. after it, there are, um, when you look at the misinformation that got added mostly in like that 2006-7 era where, oh, 6-7, um, where, where you could, we're like, there wasn't very good vandalism patrolling. There was just so much bullshit. Like, the name of the Pringles guy became Julius Pringles because someone was like, ha, ha, what if it was Julius? And it never got

removed. And Kellogg's literally incorporated it into its marketing materials. Wow. Like, Wikipedia, and it's not supposed to write history. And this. problem is, like, not fully resolved, but it's a lot better than it used to be. Like, basically, that's proof that, like, people have been relying on Wikipedia so much that you can't, you can't reverse its impact. So, yeah, I don't know. But we also want to continue to grow Wikipedia and have it be better over time and not, like, stagnate or just be something from the past. So let's end here. How can we all help make sure Wikipedia continues to exist? And how do we contribute?

Okay. Well, if you've never contributed to Wikipedia, you totally should. And there are so many ways that you can do tiny things that are very helpful. If you're checking a citation and it's a dead link, that's kind of probably annoying for you. You're like, oh, dead link stupid. Go on archive.org, archive it. And then press the edit button and then just like replace the citation. You could do command shift X. No. I don't remember. I don't remember. I could do it. People can figure out their own keyboard shortcuts. Yeah, I'm sorry, I shouldn't, I'm being too complicated. You could just like archive the link. That's so, so helpful. There's a bot that does that, but people also help. You go find the archived one on the internet archive and you replace the link in there so that it's the one night.

Yeah, that's one thing you can do. If you see citation needed, you could just go look for a citation. And if you can't find one anywhere, you can remove the sentence. You're allowed to do that. There are so many things. If you see something that looks like fishy, go in the edit history. And oh my gosh, turns out this like really bogus looking sentence just got added by some like someone, someone that didn't even make an account. It's just some random IP address.

Yeah. You can just press revert. It's probably van. If it's like, I don't know, something's really dumb. Just like just press revert. It's vandalism. Here's why I know this is wrong. Yeah. And you have to look up like just look up like rules in general, like Google like rules about reverting vandalism and you'll usually find a page.

And there's a discord you can join where people are so nice. Like on Wikipedia, it's kind of formal. It's like this like, I don't know, if people kind of act like it's this like weird academic professional thing when they're talking to each other. But on the Discord people are very friendly and it feels a lot more human. And this wasn't a great answer. But basically, if you want to be somebody that makes like a couple edits a year here and there when you feel like it, you totally should because I don't know.

First of all, it's fun. Second of all, people like that are always needed. And third of all, there's really no third of all. Annie, thank you so much for being on the show. Where can people find you on the internet and find... Wait, I want to hear about one more, before we go, one more depths of Wikipedia type page that you have loved looking at or thinking about lately.

Okay, so I have never told anyone about this, but want to hear one that I was looking at last night? Yes. Okay, Darwin, Australia is way up in the north, in the northern territory. I've never been to Australia, but I read this on Wikipedia. and it's kind of like a hippie vibe that's it's so far away from everything but also it keeps getting destroyed like there it got bombed in world war two whoa also it had a hurricane or some big

tropical storm in the 70s and so it just has this like there in the 70s there was nowhere to hang out because there was no all the bars got burned down or excuse me they got destroyed by the hurricane so that's the vibe and they their stereotype as being a little bit backwards hippies um boondocks. In 1974, a bunch of random journalists were like, let's meet on this rock, and they ended up forming the Darwin Rock Sitter's Club, where they sit on a rock, just this one, like, big rock. And the rule is that they just have to sit there and drink beer. They drink as much beer as they can, and they sit on a rock, and eventually they created

rules where they have competitive rock sitting, who can sit on the rock and drink beer the longest? And reading the article was just delightful. I guess, yeah, it's verbally, like, I don't remember all the funny stuff, but, like, there were eventually other rock sitting clubs that popped up. They've remained friends a bunch. It turns out when you sit on a rock and drink beer for 12 days straight together, sometimes you discover that you have feelings for each other. So there have been many marriages from the rock sitting club and online, they have a website and some of them are like, hey, you were there for that 12 days sit, like, but we don't know where you are. Like, please, like, reply to us. we're still friends.

It's really cute. I don't, so. See, this is what I love about you and what I love about Wikipedia is it's like, wow, the internet is still full of weird and wonderful things, you know? Like talking to you, it reminds me of being on the internet in like 2009 when it was just full of fun, creative, interesting people doing cool things. Do you remember the lolcat Bible? Yes, I do.

That was a wonderful time. Where Ican has cheeseburger. Yes. became a full dialect and they translated the Bible into it. I do remember this. That was like, oh, that was a nicer time in internet culture, you know?

And I feel like you and Wikipedia are like one of the last remaining vestiges of it. I hope that there are more. I mean, there were, there was a time when there were a lot of web nonprofits bringing up. Like in 2000s, yeah, the late 2000s. And a lot of them, have not, they've either like, um, the ones that people thought were coming didn't come

or the ones that came have kind of been defanged like Mozilla. Um, yeah. So it's a bummer. Man, the web used to be good. There, there were really good intentions. And I think the one thing that makes me like less, uh, sad is that all of the good stuff on the internet is still there. All the people are still there. You just have to dig underneath the slop. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for digging underneath this. underneath the slop for us. Where can people find you on the internet? On some slop sites.

Yeah, for real. You follow, yeah, the episode of Wikipedia on like TikTok, Instagram. Yeah. I'm on blue sky now. I have Twitter. I check the DMs there. And where can people see your edits on Wikipedia? What's your Wikipedia?

I don't tell people. I try to be a little bit private, but you can find me. And if you really care and if you're nice, if you're not a creepy mean person, maybe I'll tell you. Ah, wonderful. Annie, thank you so much for being on the show. Thanks for having me. My God, thank you once again to Annie for coming on the show. She doesn't have a book, so let's just say if you want to support her work, support Wikipedia.

And of course, if you want to support this show directly, head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of the show ad free. For 15 bucks a month, I'll read your name in the credits. This week I want to thank Quinn M. Enoch's, Trey Burt, Patrick Ryan, Shannon J. Lane, Matt Claussen and Joseph Ginsburg. Once again, patreon.com slash Adam Conover, if you want to support. If you want to come see me live on the road,

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Washington, D.C., Fort Wayne, Indiana, Madison, Wisconsin, Houston, Texas, San Francisco, California, at the punchline where I'm recording my new hour. Head to Adamconover.net for all those tickets and tour dates. I want to thank my producers, Sam Routman and Tony Wilson,

everybody here at HeadGum for making the show possible. Thank you so much for listening. And we'll see you next time on Factually. That was a HeadGum podcast. Hi, I'm Nicole Byer. Hi, I'm Sashir Zameda. And this is the podcast, Best Friends. And we're here at HeadGum.

So this is just a podcast where we just talk. We're best friends. We talk. And then we have a segment. where we answer questions and queries. So the audience members can ask questions about friendships and we can answer them to the best of our abilities. Yes.

We are professional friends. We are professional friends. Subscribe to Best Friends on Spotify, Apple Podcast, Pocketcast, or wherever you get your podcast and watch videos on YouTube. New episodes drop every Wednesday. That's the middle of a work week. I was deeply unhelpful to you during that whole thing. You are.

I felt the support. I was so, okay. I was trying to be supportive. Yeah. But I was like, I don't know, reading seems pretty hard right now. It's a lot. I think you did good. Thank you so much.

You're welcome.