The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - The inner workings of Wikipedia (Interview)

Episode Date: November 26, 2025

Let's hear how Wikipedia actually works from long-time Wikipedian, Bill Buetler! Bill has been heavily involved with this "8th wonder of the modern world" for two decades and even built a career on it, founding Buetler Ink –a digital agency known for its pioneering work in Wikipedia public relations. We discuss: the official (and not so official) rules, the editor cabal (which isn't one), the business model (which really isn't one), how an edit sticks (or not), how AI chatbots threaten the future of the site (or don't), and a whole lot more.

Welcome, friends. I'm Jared, and you are listening to The Change Log, where each week we interview the hackers, the leaders, and the innovators of the software world. We pick their brains, we learn from their failures. We get inspired by their accomplishments, and we have a lot of fun along the way. On this episode, we get the inner workings of Wikipedia from a long-time Wikipedia, Bill Butler. Bill has been heavily involved with this eighth wonder of the modern world for two decades and even built a career on it, founding Butler Inc, a digital agency known for its pioneering work in Wikipedia public relations. We discuss the official and not so official rules, the editor cabal, which isn't one, the business model, which really isn't one, how an edit sticks or not, how AI chatbots threaten the future of the site or don't, and a whole lot more. But first, say a big thank you to our partners at fly.io, the public cloud built for developers who ship. We love fly, you might too. Learn more at fly.io. Okay, Bill Butler talking Wikipedia on the changelog.

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Again, go to tigurdata.com to learn more. Today we have Bill Buehler with us, a Wikipedia expert. Is that fair to say, Bill? You are expert at Wikipedia. I will not deny it. So it's a yes? It's a yes. But, you know, as I was saying before the show, the thing is Wikipedia is so big that

even the most veteran of veterans don't know everything that happens there. So I will do the best I can. And if I don't know, I'll just say, you know, that requires more research. Yeah. It really is kind of like the eighth wonder of the world at this point. The fact that it exists, it's so huge, it's editable by anybody. It's got all kinds of intrigue and politicking and interestingness around it. I mean, it's really a fascinating creation that exists in the digital world, isn't it?

There's nothing else like, you know, for many years. would say that even Google has competitors, even, I don't know, Amazon, I guess, even Amazon has competitors, right? Walmart, but Wikipedia, until maybe, maybe very recently, if we want to go in this direction, there's really, there's no other substitute. And so it's also the thing that all the other big tech giants can agree on, you know, that they use it to underpin information. It's the canonical source of information on the internet. What does it mean practically, if you could just flex a little potentially right here at the top, what does it mean to be an expert or leave a self-professed expert in Wikipedia? Was that mean? Well, gosh, probably everybody

is self-professed if they say they are. It's the same thing as being a Wikipedia editor in the first place. What does it mean to be a Wikipedian? Because to some extent, it is just you have an account, you make edits, you want to advance the Wikipedia's mission. And, you know, you just kind of demonstrate it day by day. And when it comes to be an expert, I mean, I guess it would be you could ask my friends who are Wikipedia editors if I'm a Wikipedia expert, and I think they would say yes. That said, though, it is not hard, just like on Wikipedia, because it is so vast, it is diffuse. The community is very, the borders are porous. You know, people come and go it is you can just say you are but then you have to back it up and anyone can

dispute anything and i'm not an expert on certainly the technical side of how the squid servers work and all that but the community dynamics the uh like the guidelines that underpin the content that's where i'm that's where i'm strongest does wikipedia have things like rFCs where you you know or specifications for how you is there protocols that you can just like flex on and say, you know what? I know RFC 525 and online 7 it says X. I mean, RFC is very much a thing on Wikipedia. It's a request or comment.

Is that what your RFC is? I think there's a couple different flavors of it, but pretty much, yeah. I mean, so an RFC would be a formal call, semi-formal. Nothing is completely formal in Wikipedia. Call for editors to give comment on a difficult issue that editors are trying to resolve. And there certainly are policies that people will cite, and they'll do so in shorthand, like probably one of the more famous rules is, you know, neutrality. The policy that says you have to write with a neutral point of view.

And so the shorthand for that is WP colon NPOV, or oftentimes it's just NPOV. And so if you're in a discussion with Wikipedia editors and you drop, you know, some of these terms, that's one way to demonstrate you are, you know, speaking the language. You're in the know, you're in the circle. Yeah, right. What are some other things like NPOV makes sense? What are the other like shorthand principles that all the editors know about? I'll tell you one that's even more obscure.

They're like probably many people have learned about NPOV over time. I'll give you another one that is used by editors really in the know. And that is called not here. All caps, N-O-T-H-E-R-E. And this is when you're dealing with a problem editor. And if this, like, Wikipedia tries to give benefit of the doubt to new editors coming in. If they mess something up, you know, you want to assume good faith. And there's actually a policy says called assume good faith.

But at a certain point, like that can be abused and you have to no longer do that. And so not here is shorthand for not here to build an encyclopedia. And so that is sort of like, if two. veteran editors are discussing a third editor and one says the other is not here. That is like a signal that someone's getting ready to, you know, break out the ban hammer or, you know, put someone on suspension. What are the official rules? I know there's something like no first party sources or like there's like specific things

where if I'm just going to become an editor, I assume I go read a document that tells me like here's how it's going to work. Can you just lay the base foundation for how pages come to be or edits come to be principally, not technically. Yeah, let me start with the kind of the superstructure of the rules, and we can get into some of the more specifics. And so there's not one

document you'd be reading, it's many, many documents. And like, when I got into Wikipedia, you know, 20-some years ago, I just, like, I was a much younger man then. I was single and had free time, and I would spend my hungover Sunday mornings just reading endless

policy pages on Wikipedia. The hangover wasn't bad enough for you. You had submit yourself to more? It slowed me down enough that I could just like read. There's so long. These pages are so long. Okay. But there are policies that are absolutely mandatory.

There are guidelines, which are very strongly advisory. There's even a third level of rule, and that would be essays, community essays, where they describe perspective points of view, but they don't necessarily carry the weight of a policy or a guideline. And so the policies tend to be focused on editor behavior, such as not creating multiple accounts, you know, no sock puppetry, things like, you know, that neutral point of view. Some of them, some of the core, core policies are content focused. But once you get outside those core policies into the guidelines, then you have things like, how do you write titles of nobility? do you put spaces in between like say the name jr or like jr uing do you put spaces in between that last

time i checked on this you know don't you know come after me if it's no longer the case but yes you always put spaces in between like those two letters even if the person themselves does not how about the osford comma are you are they pro or against i think more pro but it's also not uniform like really because the site is so vast right again i reserve the right to be wrong on this one, but... That's interesting. Because the Associated Press has a similar nature. Does there any overlap between the Associated Press's version of that and how it shows up in journalism to Wikipedia's? There may be, but it would be more incidental. They're not following Chicago style or anything like that. They've developed their own style over time. And by the way,

another thing that they have to contend with is they have, you know, English comes in multiple flavors. There's American English. There's British English. And so, for example, a you what? Some of my very earliest edits to Wikipedia back in the late aughts was changing British spellings in the articles about the Sopranos TV show back to English because the show had a huge following in the UK. So a lot of, and British editors really punch above their weight in terms of contributing to Wikipedia. But if it is an American subject, it should be written in American English and vice versa. By the way, If there is not a clear, you know, country of origin, yogurt is one topic that there was an endless edit war many years ago about whether there should be an H in yogurt.

There's no agent yogurt. Is there an agent yogurt? Well, it depends on where you are. Or like gas versus petrol. You know, they say petrol over there. And I could be wrong with the last I checked. I thought I was still saying petrol. In that case, it's just whoever created the page first.

And now that was so long ago that no one remembers. Crazy. And you actually created a company around this because anytime you have a website as massive of that becomes like kind of the standard of record when things are on Wikipedia doesn't mean they're true, but it means they're at least vetted to a certain extent and people accept it as true.

And so PR is a huge aspect of that because you are in control of your page or a topics page. You probably want that to, if you're a public figure, you want to be painted in a good, light, maybe you want a scandal hidden, et cetera, et cetera. If you're a business, you might want to just maintain your reputation. I'm not saying you're doing a scandal as PR stuff, Bill. I'm not sure what you're doing, but I assume you're helping businesses engage correctly with

Wikipedia. How did you get into that? Yeah, I mean, the last part is definitely correct. We help our clients influence how Wikipedia writes about them, but also while following the rules of engagement for PR. So my career goes back to the early 2000s. I I was a political journalist early in my career working in Washington, D.C. And around this time, the political blogosphere, which I don't know if that even really still exists, it's all kind of like coalesced into, you know, substack is kind of coming in a little bit of a comeback. Yeah, true. Right.

But the political blogosphere was exerting influence. And so around 2004, I was writing a column about political blogging for this insider tip sheet. sort of like a forerunner of Politico. And like, well, Wikipedia kept showing up in the blog posts. It was one thing. It was like the one thing that editors of the left and right and center all seem to agree on that, like, this is an interesting resource that can help explain concepts. So I don't have to write them out.

And, you know, I got out of journalism and went to go work at a public affairs firm, digital public affairs firm. And I was the person in the office who talked about. Wikipedia the most, just because I thought it was fascinating. Although, truth matters, I'd never actually edited the site myself at this point in time. What I, what I had done was I was going to try to stand up my own wiki site. And naturally, I was going to create blogapedia. It was going to be a directory in the encyclopedia of all the blogs out there. This thing never got off the ground. And then one day, the CEO of the company asked if I would make a change to his, had a friend,

of Congress, what I make a change to his page. And so kind of looked into it and I was like, all right, things got a point here. And I was talking what I did first, that really did set the stage for the rest of it. And that was, like, I didn't just go make the change. I kind of like read up on the policy. And then I went to the talk page, the discussion section for that article and explained what I was about to do. And then I did it.

And it stuck. And I got a thank you from another editor for it. And I probably wouldn't have done it exactly the same way today. But, you know, this was like showing some foresight, showing some kind of respect for the fact that other people had views about how things were done on Wikipedia, put me in a good headspace to kind of, you know, diplomatically work through issues. And in particular, the company I worked for at the time, it had clients like, you know, when they had back then was Domino's Pizza. and there's this teeny tiny scandals, even the wrong word, but a negative news story from the way back then

where someone at a dominoes somewhere was, you know, an employee was doing like disgusting things with the pizza and like blowing snot into it or whatever. And it made the news. So someone had added it to Wikipedia. It was true. It had a source in theory, well, that's what Wikipedia.

That's all you need for Wikipedia. But I was able to make the case that, you know, these were just some random, you know, low-level employees. This was not something that had buy-in from the corporate, you know, structure. In fact, the company responded quickly. And I got editors to agree that, you know what, this is trivial. It was not something that needed to be in the Domino's page. And so that was probably one of the big, like, aha moments was, if I make a good enough case,

I can persuade editors that the Wikipedia article should say something different, in part, as you said, because it has the past, And even more so now than then has the power to affect the reputations of, you know, the subject that covers. Is there a maximum length or there's like a point where it's like, because you could just put everything about dominoes you could possibly gather and a certain point becomes too much information. Not here. Yeah. Yeah. Someone who's adding too much. Not here.

Not here. How do you know when not here comes into play? They just just people have to make a call. I'll tell you what. I don't think it would come to play there because if you're adding too much, you're like here. to build too much of an encyclopedia, and that's... Right. Too much.

It's definitely such thing as too much. There is an answer to your question, and I believe it is around 100,000 bytes. The, it is, there's never, there's rarely hard and fast rules. This one says, as an article gets closer to 100,000 bytes, you should, like, consider splitting it. And so this is why you have articles that have, you know, like, there's a parent article, and there will be a child article. There'll be Microsoft is the article.

Then there was criticism of Microsoft, which is, you know, it could be nearly as long as the actual Microsoft article. Well, they've been around so long. I mean, at a certain point, there's just a lot, like there's a lot of history for a lot of these, whether it's an organization or a topic or, I mean, it's overwhelming sometimes to think about how you would even manage the information architecture of such a thing. And it sounds like it's somewhat organic and has grown over time. How many editors are there? So we had a friend of ours, Andrew Nesbitt on the show, a couple weeks ago, talking about ecosystems and open source and how he found that when it came to certain popular open source packages, there are about 15,000 people who are kind of underpinning the entire software world, so to speak. There's the old trope from the X-KCD comic, like it's one person in Nebraska who's like running all the dependencies.

Well, it turns out 15,000 around the world is pretty close to that. And I think with Wikipedia, I assume there's like a, I don't want to call them a cabal, but there's like, it got to be a core group of N editors who are kind of in charge. Do you know that number? Do you know that? Are you one of that group? Do you know that group? I am not personally in that group, but I know plenty of people in that group.

It's funny. Did you pull the word cabal out of thin air or did you pull that from doing some reading? I just thought of it because it seems like appropriate at the time. It is. Well, so there is even an essay on Wikipedia called, there is no cabal. Oh, really? The reason why that essay exists is because the cynical take on it is, yeah, there's not one cabal.

There's many cabals. And, you know, that meaning there are kind of groups of editors who will talk together offline. And offline coordination is frowned upon, but let's not pretend it doesn't happen, you know. It can happen in good ways. It can happen in bad ways. I think it's kind of value in neutral. But to your question about like what is like, because there's a similar to the, to open source communities for sure, which is an open knowledge community.

Open source is certainly a component of it. You know, I know it follows a power law where there is a small number of highly active editors up at the very top and the long tail of contributors who are, you know, might contribute here and then. So the numbers I'm going to give you are going to be very approximate and they're just kind of offered for demonstrative purposes, not to be quoted as accurate. And these numbers are very findable. But let's say that there's 3,000 editors who are editing every single day, often hours a day.

And they are really like the core group that keeps Wikipedia going. And a lot of them are not always writing the articles that you read. They are kind of arguing over policy, banning problem editors and kind of working out kind of the structure of the behind the scene, all the behind the scenes stuff, janitorial stuff at, you know, at best. I don't know about at best. But, like, you know, Wikipedia has an arbitration committee that is sometimes considered to be Wikipedia's Supreme Court. Like, that kind of, that's, they're in that 3,000. And you've got maybe, you know, 30,000 editors who are editing in a given month.

I'm in, I'm in that group. I don't edit as often as I used to in the early years, you know. And there's also definitely a life, a lifespan, you know, like there's a, you know, like there's a, I'm forgetting the term I'm looking for here. But, you know, like a course, a course of events where... Yeah, like a life cycle. Life cycle, that is what I'm looking for. You know, life cycle to being an editor where you kind of get in, you get real excited and

you add a lot of material, and then you kind of like drift away as you've already... Burnout is totally one thing. Shared all the knowledge you wanted to share is another. You know, there's a lot of editors who really don't create content. They just, like, kind of shuffle around categories and poke around here and there. And then to finish out. the down at the long tail and there's about 100,000 editors who are, and this one I'm a little more certain about 100,000 editors who make one edit,

minimum one edit per month. And so that's great that, you know, it is really the people at the very top who are, you know, doing the most of it. It's kind of crazy. So going back to your work and how that works, how your work works is like, when a company engages with you, do you then advise them how to engage with Wikipedia or is it like, hey, we really want Bill's edits and he has cloud because there's like a cloud system that's

part of humanity, right, that's built into this like as you edit to a certain extent. Like this guy's reliable because he's been not just doing, you know, this one company or this one topic. He's like there's clearly people that just come with their agenda and then there's people who are just there to edit and then they may also have it. And it's just, there's so many different angles. Oh, sure. How do you engage?

How do you tell brands to engage? Yeah. So we'll do both, by the way. myself or members of our strategy team. We have a six-person strategy team and, or seven, I suppose. But, you know, folks who are working on Wikipedia all day, every day, and we will, using our disclosed, you know, business accounts that say, I'm Bill and I work at Butler, Inc.

And, you know, my client is such and such. And I'd like to propose a change on this page. We'll do that. We also will coach our clients through leading out. outreach themselves. And so for large companies where they have a corporate comms division and they have more resources, they more, I don't know they have time for it, but they, like if a big company shows interest in Wikipedia and cares enough to put an employee on it and share information and talk with editors, that can be a good look. And so that is certainly a thing we do for

certain, especially like Fortune 50 clients. But also we will represent clients. ourselves and you know if you're having us do it then you really have to like we're going to decide what we're going to be willing to ask for or not if it's a if the company is the one who's out there with the disclosure it's all on them you know if they want to push a little harder on something that's in the gray area we might be willing to do that but like the fact is yes there is an aspect of reputation where we're likely to get faster replies myself for my colleagues because editors will be more likely

to recognize us. On the other hand though, there's thousands of editors out there and they don't all know us. So there are projects where we work on the talk page communicating for a company and we'll be talking to editors we've never run across before. So

there's no, Wikipedia is all shades of gray. There's never any one right way to do. Everything. So a lot of sites or a lot of tech companies because of their location and their employee base and stuff, they tend to lean to the left side of the political spectrum here in the United States. And there's lots of claims that Wikipedia also is, you know, captive to that.

And I'm curious, your perspective from in the trenches kind of guy who's getting changes done. Like, do you see overwhelming political leanings, generally speaking in Wikipedia? Do you think that that's bunk? What are your thoughts on that? So, you know, to the point about, you know, companies in their lean, I mean, they certainly did, I would say, in the Obama, you know, administration, Obama era, but like, especially in now Trump, too, I think that, you know, they kind of blow with which way the winds, you know, are going. So, they're very malleable. They'll go where the dollars tell them they need to.

Right, yeah, shareholder value to worry about. 100%. Wikipedia, I would say, and just for the record, I'm pretty centrist myself. I was a little more on the right when I was in my 20s. I'm a little centrist, not quite the left at my 40s, but like I've seen the full gamut. And Wikipedia definitely has a center left, even maybe a little bit left bias. And I would say that that has something to do with the fact that a lot of the contributors, many have an academic background that obviously leans heavily left, that journalistic values,

which sometimes do you have, often have, at least. even if not, I would say, like, a left-wing bias, they are at least, they parallel, there's a parallel perspective there. That said, right now, there's probably more right-wing criticism of Wikipedia than there has been in, you know, ever, really. And it's been kind of rising over the last few years. And it's not to say that there aren't some, you know, decent criticisms of the handling of certain topics. But I think a lot of them kind of willfully misunderstand how Wikipedia uses sources.

So like one of the big complaints would be, well, we can't use Breitbart or, you know, the New York Post or the Daily Mail to cite sources. And kind of blow right past the fact that like these are all publications that are known for, that are not known for their journalistic, you know, scrutiny, integrity. No one's going to flag you for using the telegraph or using like the Wall Street Journal. But, you know, the fringier sources, and now there are more fringy sources on the right. I think there's a whole interesting thing to be written about, many things to be written about why that's the case.

Why the right does not have kind of journalistic values as part of its, you know, animating values and the left does more. That's a huge topic. And, you know, it could be the rest of the show if you wanted to be. And I've read about this to be. I just wanted to tiptoe into it and then move on. Yeah, yeah. No, this is interesting perspective from you.

I think the way to maybe approach that without going left, right, or center is to talk about how power is distributed. Because you mentioned there's no cabal, right? So if there's no cabal, how is power distributed, how you acquire power, how do editors squash other editors, how are their clicks, things like that? I think that's kind of like maybe a version, Jared, of what you're talking about because it's not quite that, but it's like how do you leverage your own bias and your own power. Yeah, I mean, so you can definitely discuss it in terms that are not explicitly left, right, political. You know, there's a kind of a truism that if there is no visible hierarchy in an organization

or a community, then it becomes an invisible hierarchy. And so that is 100% true at Wikipedia. And, you know, to my knowledge, nobody has ever, say, mapped out exactly what that looks like. If you were to look at the Wikipedia's own maintained list of the most active editors in Wikipedia, within that top 50 or so, you're going to find some of those editors who are just by virtue of being there all the time, the ones who they know the most policy, they have the most connections. And so, you know, in certain topic areas, there are topic areas that do get captured by the contributors.

Most of those are not necessarily at the most, you know, highest level, most active pages. A lot of times that's in, you know, a little out of the way places where most editors don't care to spend any time there. And so, you know what, when I talk about the rules of Wikipedia, I mentioned the policies of the guidelines. I didn't mention that there are five pillars of Wikipedia, which are like Wikipedia's an encyclopedia, Wikipedia has no firm rules, et cetera. et cetera, things like that.

There's a sixth pillar that people sometimes refer to, and that is, you know, the person who cares the most ends up getting their way. Wow. Yeah, it's not perfect. That can be life sometimes, too. Yeah. Just like, well, you care more than the rest of us. So go ahead, man.

Just go ahead. It's, that can be shaky when it comes to like what's true or not. Like the person that cares the most gets their edit. It's like, well, how about the most truthful thing? But when we all disagree about what's true, I mean, those are really hard problems, aren't they? It is. I mean, you remember Stephen Colbert back in the early days of his Comedy Central show, coined a word was wikiality. And wikiality was, you know, it's the truth that we all agree on because, you know, because we just agreed with the case.

And so it was, you know, it was couched as a criticism of Wikipedia, but also was more broadly. Oddly intended to comment on shared delusions that, you know, in his case, he was definitely criticizing the American right, that, you know, but certainly shared delusions have no political home. You know, they could be all over the place. And so, there's a bad version of that, and there's a good version of that. And one of the things about Wikipedia that I find really to be fascinating, probably one of the reasons why I got drawn to the project in the first place was life does not have a black

and white answers for many, many things. You know, one plus one equals two, yes, but, you know, the right form of government is something that, you know, can change over time, even, you know, as like democracy works in the United States. It has had a harder time in other countries. It's not because democracy itself is, like, bad or wrong in some of the place. It can be about what the culture around it is. And so there's just no way that you can set it and forget it with Wikipedia or with all

the topics it covers and so you have to there's there's no substitute for the daily task of rolling up your sleeves getting in there and making sure that things stay correct and like that's why wikipedia's job will never be done it is a it's an ideological informational battle that's um yeah that rages on around us and never will go away if it goes away then there's a problem right like If we all, if Wikipedia, like, calms down, that is when I get worried. As long as people are arguing about it, you know it's healthy. Okay, friends, Augment Code. I love it.

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are doing what they do, just as a mental model, I know it's not actually true. I just say, just imagine that they're kind of reading Wikipedia to you. Like they basically read the page so you don't have to, then they summarize it. I mean, obviously, that's a simplification and not always true. But certainly these things have all read Wikipedia and continue to, right? That is probably the most succinct way of putting it, that they have read it and continue to.

And continue to. Well, I'll try to think of why it might go away is because maybe there's a demand for the information, but not for the website, so to speak, you know? Oh, yeah. And then there becomes either a perverse or inverse incentive to even edit if there's no demand for the website. I mean, I feel like a lot of our internet underpinnings are kind of up in the air right now of like, where will they be in 10 years? And I'm not so sure about Wikipedia because it's certainly, it's tantamount to these things right now. Right.

And new things they need, but why edit it if, you know, there's no there there? It's a really fascinating question because a conversation that Wikipedia editors are, you know, having themselves. And the foundation that runs Wikipedia also is very much focused on this issue. I am a little more bullish. I've been around for Wikipedia about 20 years, and I've seen many predictions of its demise. I remember I was even like interviewed for an economist story back in, I want to say like 2012.

It was called WikiPeaks, you know, play on WikiLeaks, but WikiPeaks. It was like, has it reached its zenith. Oh, that's like a Twin Peaks thing. Okay, yeah, the peak of Wiki, gotcha. Right, right. Or like peak oil, you know, that's that concept. And so I've seen, you know, rumors of its death have been greatly exaggerated in the past.

And I will say that I do think the core community doesn't do it for the clicks. You know, they do it because it's a hobby. It is something that I oftentimes will like editing Wikipedia, especially the people who are just like recategorizing things and kind of going about their way, like just working through multiple articles and making the same kind of change over and over. It's like knitting. It's like, you know, a repetitive way to relax. Soothing 100%.

I have friends who will sit down off for hard days' work and just kind of click through their, you know, edit list and like make the same change over, over, over. And there's a weirdly satisfying thing in doing that. And that's one, that's one mode of like motivation for Wikipedia editors. Of course, there are many. And as long as Wikipedia itself continues to underpin what Google, what chat, GPT is putting out there, its influence is going to be continued. I would say that because of the rise of AI search and the widespread awareness that AI has read and continues to read, I love that formulation. I'm going to steal that.

Please do. Yeah, that they, like, it's more important than it was, you know, two years ago where people have realized that. So it's more front of mind. So, you know, I'm not to get too much into my business specifics, but like, this has been a really interesting year. It was kind of a rocky first half of the year, and I think that had something to do with the election and, you know, brands kind of sitting on budgets waiting to see. But then by the middle of the year, the AI, like this is really the year in multiple ways where AI became part of, you know, business workflows. People got to figure out how to make use of it, even outside of technical circles. And so the second half of the year has been crazy for us.

We really have not seen this kind of interest in a long time. All of a sudden, there's now, it's not just Google as a driver. That was historically the driver of clients to us because Google relies on Wikipedia. It shows up at the top of so many search results. Now there's a whole second driver and that's chat GPT. It's interesting to think about that, though, because you got these non-interfaces, interfaces to Wikipedia, right? Like you said they're, the website not being there, Jared. I think we still need.

I think that's what you're seeing is we need this source of truth. I think so long as we have that centralized and societally elected source of truth, then Wikipedia still has a pretty good underpinning in terms of its foothold to being just that. I can't imagine like that the LLMs extracting that and being trained on that supplants that because you still need those are those are distributed you've got various frontier models they're not all controlled by one and so they're disparate sources of truth if you want to call them that and they're really just copies of the truth not the actual source right i still value personally this is where i'm personally at i still value the original database which is wikipedia so

right i'm i'm bullish as well what if you're extracted from that for five or ten years are you still going to value that or what are your kids going to value that how do you mean Well, your kids don't even, might not even know Wikipedia is back there behind the scenes doing its thing. Yeah. Now, to your point, and I agree with you guys, that that doesn't mean, that doesn't mean that getting your information in there isn't still important because eventually it makes its way out of the GPTs, maybe. But they can also opt to not use your, so you're kind of a degree of separation away from your edit actually being useful because they may or may not use it in the final output. Whereas anybody who goes to the web page, they're going to read your sentence as long as your sentence stays, right? yeah so there is like a decrease value of an editor for those who are not editing because it relaxes

them but they're editing because they want some sort of interest i have no problem with people editing for self-interest i the only edits i've ever made on wikipedia was adding links to our podcast no it's fine because we are a source of information like there's a public figure on our show they said something interesting you go put it in the page you get a link back to your podcast like that's self-interest but also is adding value to the wiki so it's totally fine I got no problem with that. Did those edits stay? Have they remained?

I don't know. Well, the problem was, I think I realized, I thought maybe they were going to be, they're all no follow links, aren't they? Like, every link is a no follow? They are no follow. They are no follow, but, you know, still value being there. Yeah, I think there's still value being there. It was kind of like a ROI question of like, how worth it,

is it for me to go be doing this? And the answer was like, maybe I should call Bill Buehler, Inc. And have them do it for me? Because it's like, it's like, because who, because, okay, my personal use, like, I never look at the sources very often. And when I do, I even less often click through to a source. And so if it was a follow link, I would at least be getting Wikipedia juice. And I think that was worth it.

Yeah. But without that, I was kind of like, and then I think I got one denied. And I was like, well, this sucks. I mean, this is why they know follow it. Exactly. Because they don't want it. Yeah, I understand why they know follow. It would be so many more edits if they didn't.

Yeah. But yeah, I just kind of gave up at the end of two or three. And I was like, this is not worth the squeeze. Yeah. This is why we work with SEO firms a lot less than we work with PR firms. That makes sense. Trying to tell a story about a client and SEO, try to push a website up. I will say, though, that's started to change just a little bit in this AEO, GEO era where, you know, like the links between, actually less adding links.

And I'm thinking more of like creating links between pages to like strengthen the relationship between, say, you know, a client's page and, concept they want to be associated with i'm not saying we're seeing a lot of that but it's just a conversation it comes up more often than it did for a long time which is they almost never came up well here's a sustainability question because we're in the current time of year when wikipedia grants us the awesome please donate button with the picture they sure do the sob story which for my money i'd rather you just charge for the website not do that but i understand like people have their opinions on it i like the fact that's free for everybody so i understand why they go the route they go.

Yeah. But you know, what Reddit does is they let everybody contribute to Reddit, and then they take all the information and they sell it to Open AI to be trained on. And Reddit has advertising. It's a for-profit company, right? True, true, true. Yeah. Wikipedia's not, yeah.

Yeah, exactly. But they're sustainable in that way. Like, they're not just sustainable. They're actually, like, profit generating. You think that Wikipedia could potentially just, I mean, they are the world's source of truth of many topics. Right. Couldn't they just charge the model trainers for that and not,

have to, like wouldn't humanity be better off if Open AI and Microsoft and Google were paying Wikipedia and then they wouldn't have to take donations? Well, the, they would have to change their license, you know, their Creative Commons license that's, you know, that you can use it. Anybody is free to use anything on Wikipedia, remix it, even use it for commercial purposes, and all you have to do is say you got it from Wikipedia and you're covered. And that's a very kind of liberal license that they have chosen. Copy left as opposed to copyright, very permissive. And so that is, you know, it's kind of like Jimmy Wales.

You know, Jimmy Wales was profiled in the New York Times Magazine about a decade ago with the unfortunate kind of demeaning headline, Jimmy Wales is not an internet billionaire. You know, among the people who founded top 10 global websites, those guys are all, you know, billionaires many times over, with the exception of Jimmy Wales. And the problem is, and it's not a problem. Honestly, Jimmy Wales' wisdom, his smart decision at the time was that if he had tried to make advertising and make it a for-profit site and then limit it that way, it would not have become, not have grown to be what it is. You know, contributors really were drawn to the altruistic nature of it and that the sense that they were all kind of, you know,

kind of collecting all the world's knowledge. If they were trying to monetize it, then the whole thing would collapse like a house of cards. So this is still true today. If they were to start charging for it, they could, and then you know what? I should be careful. There is a one part of the Wikimedia Foundation that is charging for some parts of it. And so the Wikimedia Enterprise is a for-profit company inside the Wikimedia Foundation. And I guess I should say they were a one-time client of hours a few years ago, not now, but I still have friends there.

And they do offer up a professional version of the Wikimedia API, which is much more reliable, it has guaranteed up times, and an SLA, which the regular Wikipedia API, which my firm does use for monitoring software that we built and maintained. It is. It's an unwieldy API that, like, it is, as Wikipedia's knowledge is useful, but untamed, so too is their free API. And so they're never, however, going to, like, charge, say, the AI companies for the main, unvarnished product. But what they did do a few months ago was they did, it's like, the Wikimedia Foundation was annoyed with the big AI companies for, you know, putting strain on their servers by crawling the pages, using up a lot of their, a lot of their server time. And so what they did is they put out a couple of different,

like cleaned up versions of it that they were here. Hi, open AI, high Anthropic. Please, please, please, you know, please crawl this one. Don't crawl our main site. We'll give this one away for free. You can crawl it, but they can't do it to their licensing, force them to use it. They're not charging for it.

Does anybody use it? I don't know the answer to that. And I'm not even sure the foundation knows the answer. So there's a lot of, you know, interesting questions like this that we won't know the answer to, I suppose, for a long time. You know, and to your question earlier about will people contribute if they don't see the page,

show up in search results? So they don't, you know, there's not the same glory in their work. in the limelight of the top of Google search results. I will say that for the current generation of editors, for the people who've built Wikipedia, that does not matter. They do it because they love it. The real question,

and this has been a conversation I've heard at a few Wikipedia conferences in the last few years, as Wikipedia approaches its 25th birthday anniversary in January, it will be celebrating 25. You know, the people who started Wikipedia, they are all 25 years older now. And, you know, obituaries for Wikipedia editors have been, I don't know, the beginning feels like it than getting more common.

It would make sense as they all get older. Sure. And I know a handful of people who have been editors who have passed away from even old age. And so the real question is, will there be the next generation of editors? Will they come on and continue the work? And that's, so that is a source of anxiety for sure. Yeah, I don't know the answer to that. I don't think any of us do.

I certainly know that, you know, Adam and I are sort of perhaps you are as well, Bill, kind of raising up the next generation currently. And sometimes their ignorance of the way things work strikes me. And then I realize, well, you're their dad, Jared. You got to teach them about this stuff. Yeah. But I think a lot of people don't realize Wikipedia is user generated content. They just think it's like this encyclopedia that lives on their phones.

It's just magically there. I mean, right. It's like the internet not being run by Linux, Jared. It's like the same question. I'm like, I couldn't believe that that people don't understand that the internet doesn't run on Linux. Like, who doesn't know that? Well, I guess a lot of people. Oh, yeah.

A lot of people. Yeah. So it doesn't surprise me that this fact about Wikipedia is largely unknown by general population. Man, you got harder, you know, harder issues in your life, you know, affording your mortgage, being able to actually even buy a house, you know, affording the college degree you just got. or even being able to, you know, put your kids through college or afford, you know, the grocery bill you just have to pay for. Like, we were just shopping for groceries. And I was like, everything is up dramatically. Like, wow, Thanksgiving this year is got to be like, okay, all we can do is turkey and potato.

That's it. Okay. I'm being facetious, but it's my grocery bill this time. I was like, wow, that's dramatically more than like I'm remembering. So. Yeah. Well, my son, my son is. but four and a half years old.

Adam, I heard you mentioned on a recent episode that your kiddo is doing one of those ninja classes. Oh, yeah. He's a up-and-coming ninja. He's competing and everything. He's loving it. Little Billy Butler is also now a ninja in training as of just a few weeks ago. Wow.

Good. Yeah. It's super fun. Especially the age of four. I mean, if he keeps up with it, one, my son's back is what I call swole, if that translates. I think it does. Yeah, it does. And I'm like, I've hugged this child for my whole entire life.

And now when I hug him, I'm like, I'm envious. I'm like, dang, man. I want my back to be swole like that, you know. It's never too late to become a ninja, Adam. I know, I know. I know. But yeah, will he edit Wikipedia? You know, I mean, someone of his generation will, even if my son does not exactly.

Yeah. You know, Jared, you mentioned the point, though, it's your job. I think that's exactly why this kind of podcast exists. And also why we bleep all the curse words, because we truly want to, and I guess for a while it's been the hacker generation, but I guess it's now becoming beyond just simply hacker with shows like this. But I feel like that's the job of content creators like us and guests like you to come on and share this truth and this depth of our world. And the things are important and the reasons to show up and how to do them. Because if not, then who else is going to do it besides the folks like us who are, you know, in their 40s and nerds? Like, that's our job, right?

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I mean, it is like there's certain, it's more than a job for me, you know? Like I got interested in Wikipedia before I realized that there was going to be a career in it for me. And so certainly at my, that Bueller Inc. for the clients that we take on, the work that we do, like, you know, one of our core values is just will our work make the encyclopedia. better for its readers. And one, like that is a, I think it's a good moral position to have. It also happens to have the advantage of like, that's what makes for successful projects. Like, you know, the editors will agree with us to make changes if what we bring to the table makes it better for the readers. That's the thing. It's like, can Wikipedia serve its readers

well? And like, sometimes there are challenges where the rules themselves get in the way of making Wikipedia better. And I'll give an example of a current one with a client who's a semi-retired venture capitalist who was divorced some years ago, but the Wikipedia page says he's still married. He's like semi-retired. He's not out there making news anymore. So like, you know, what's he going to do? Go, you know, do an interview just where he can say he's divorced. He won't do that. But there's a novelist, the woman who are at the novelist, the woman who are at the The Station 11 TV show is based on. She gave an interview to Slate back in 2012 to say, I'm not married anymore, just so Wikipedia would change it.

And so the fact that it would be so hard to change things like that because of Wikipedia's like standard of sourcing, like we couldn't use like the court documents to verify, you know, his marital status for reasons that I could explain, but I don't want to bore your audience is like these, these Wikipedia. runs into these limitations where, you know, trying to do the right thing could sometimes produce a worse encyclopedia. Yeah. See, that I think is kind of weird. So at the risk of boring everybody, if there's a court document that says that this thing is true and Wikipedia's desires to be a source of truth or I'm not sure what the desires are, it seems like that would be what it is.

It's like, well, you have evidence that this is true. Why is it invalid evidence? Like, what is the rule? All right. So I'll cite some more policy. see at you. Let's see. So there's going to be the primary sources. There's going to be the biography

of living persons. And then there's going to be another one that's actually an essay, but it's very influential. Start with the essay. And this one really throws people for a loop oftentimes, that Wikipedia's goal is verifiability, not truth. And this owes something to the fact that truth

is a really difficult subject. Again, one plus one equals two, true. You know, matters of perspective, much harder to say what the truth is. And so that's, that is one thing. It's like Wikipedia is not a place to write down things that you know are true. Verifiability is the most important thing. Verifiability. But is it a court document verifiability? Like, it's a court document that says they got divorced. Here's where we get to the primary sources part of it, which is, you know,

there are primary sources, which would be court documents, government reports. Then there are secondary sources, which would be like news articles. You know, the cover. of those primary sources. There's also tertiary sources of which Wikipedia is one or a textbook would be like compilations, compilations. Anyway, back to primary, secondary sources. That's why I said it

would bore us, Jared. He's like, he warned us. I'm not bored. Let's go. I want the answer. I want the answer. These are the core. Like, we're really like seeing the matrix here in terms of how, you know, how the wiki sausage gets made. There's a show title for you. Yeah. Yeah.

Perfect. Wikipedia really, really, really wants to be based on secondary sources. Wikipedia editors don't want to be in the position of arguing about interpretations of primary sources because there may be like a government transcript, like a Senate hearing. How do you decide which sentences of like a three-hour, you know, Senate hearing do you quote in a relevant article? So Wikipedia editors avoid arguing all of that by outsourcing those judgments to

professional journalists who are covering that material who have context for it and, you know, who apply editorial judgment. So no one has applied a, you know, editorial judgment that, in this case, to even say that the divorce was noteworthy in itself. I mean, it kind of like, here's where it's perverse. It does kind of defy logic that if the article says he's married now, We have a court case that says that he is no longer married. We should be able to use that, right? So Wikipedia editors are thinking about, well, if we apply this rule broadly, can that get us into trouble if you cite? So there is, no, back to the third item is the biography of living persons policy.

And that says, you know, for information about living persons, if the information is contentious or poorly sourced, it should be left out. So this would be, I don't know if you would say this is contentious, but it is poorly sourced according to Wikipedia's guidelines. And so you don't want to be using primary sources to make claims about living people. It could affect their reputation. In the most cases, it is used to keep from adding information to, like let's say the person got pulled over for DUI and there was not in the news, but you could find a court record of it. Does that need to be in there? Wikipedia editors would say, if it wasn't in the press, then it wasn't that important, so we don't need to cover it. Of course, if it wasn't the press, then it's going to be added, and that can be hard to get out.

But this way, it's just kind of a perverse outcome, that it's keeping Wikipedia from being fully accurate because it is following rules that are well-intentioned and work out right most of the time, but then there are these, like, edge cases. And I will say there's actually, there is a very unpopular and very, little followed policy. It's basically a dead letter today. It's called ignore all rules. It says, if the rules of Wikipedia are making it harder to improve the encyclopedia

than ignore the rules. I like that one. It seems great. It seems like a good, helpful thing. But then you get back into applying editorial judgment calls. And I think here we are at Wikipedia, being a quarter century old, everybody knows how important it is, there's a lot of, like, caution around sticking your neck out. And so, you know, there are so many arguments about all kinds of issues, large and small on Wikipedia, that sometimes

editors can be just cautious and, like, you know, if I don't have to get involved in this thing, I don't really care about it. I'm going to, I'm going to, you know, excuse myself from the conversation or just never show up. And so, like, I've been, you know, kind of working on this guy's talk page for a couple years and, you know, not constantly, but trying to, you know, different angles every now and then and still hasn't got there. Is that to remove or to add? So I think that either one could be a acceptable outcome if we can, you know, use the court record, which is publicly available to say that, you know, he's divorced.

That would be fine. Also, the reason why he is notable has nothing to do with his family life. So you could remove that. And I think it would not affect the public's understanding of. you know this person's accomplishments got to get a wikipedia editor who cares enough about it to see it my way and it hasn't happened yet well friends i'm here with a good friend of mine again kyle galbraith co-founder and CEO of depot dot dev Kyle we are in an era of disruption right I would also describe it as rethinking what we thought was true and I guess that's kind of the

definition of disruption but from your perspective how are teams reliability teams teams, CICD, pipeline teams. How are they all rethinking things? And where does Depot fit into that? In the conversations that I have with customers, a lot of DevOps teams, platform teams, site reliability teams, they're really looking at this new era of software engineering

that we're all living in. And they're starting to question, like, the bottleneck is no longer the act of writing code. The bottleneck is shifting. The most time-consuming part is integrating the code. It's everything that comes after. It's the build. it's the pull request review, it's the deployment, it's the getting it into production.

Once it's in productions, it's scaling up support teams to support it. It's adding documentation, all of these downstream problems. And so through the lens of Depot, what we're really starting to think about is there's a very realistic possibility that within the next two to three years, maybe even sooner, that we're going to enter a world where an engineering team of three people could theoretically have the velocity of an engineering team of 300 people. And what's the consequences of that? What's the consequences of the code velocity spiking up to that level with such a small team? There's no way three engineers are going to be able to code review all of the code that's being created if there's

three engineers and 297 agents also grading features and fixing bugs. So that's just like from a pull request perspective. But then you'd think about it through a build lens too of if your builds take 20 minutes with three humans, and now you're going to have three humans and 297 agents also running. Well, like, you definitely don't want your builds taking 20 minutes, because now, like, the entire pinch point is the build pipeline. And so we're starting to think a lot about how do we eliminate the bottlenecks that come downstream? And what can we do with Depot that streamlines that? So obviously, friends, we are in an era of disruption. Things are changing. You know it. I know it. That's how it is. And the thing with.

production and what Kyle's talking about here is how in the world do you get your bills to be faster how you get them to be more reliable faster more observability around those deployments you need it it's required and depot is there to help you so a good first step is to go to depot.dev get faster try their trial is too easy again depot.dev is where to go it all begins at depot.dev and also by our friends at framer stop jumping between tools you know most design tools lock you behind a paywall Framer flips that script entirely. It's a free full-feature design tool that does something most site builders cannot. It's actually designed for designers. I've been trying this out. I think it's awesome. You need to check it out. Framer already built the fastest way to publish beautiful websites, production already websites, but the design pages, they've redefined what it means to design for the web. This is not a Webflow clone or or a WordPress competitor, it is a true design platform, vectors, 3D transforms, gradients, wireframes, all the tools you can actually use, and they're all free.

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Because you've tried, you're making attempts. You know the protocols, you know the RFCs, you know, the rulings, et cetera. The one piece of advice you could go back to is the one you gave before, which was go do some media coverage and just say it in media. And then, you know, you got your golden ticket. Yeah. I mean, I have yet to press the Ignore All Rules case. That's sort of like the break glass in case of emergencies because it's kind of the last ditch. And I might do that at some point.

You know, and almost more to kind of, I don't want to say prove a point because there is also a rule on Wikipedia that says, don't break the rules just to make a point. That would be WP colon point. I'm not a fan of people who say double click necessarily. I like those people. So I'm not going to say double click. I'm going to say zoom in, which is my other take on it. Can you zoom into the practicality of the edit? So you write it up, you submit the edit.

You know, how does that work? What is the interface you see? Is there a discussion possibility? Do you know the name of the editor who's denying your request? Help me get into the double-click version of that. Yeah, I had to. I love those people, by the way. They're the coolest double-clickers.

Wait, are you saying you love people who say double-click? Let's double-click on that. Let's close that tab. That's all you had to say, Adam, was double-click on the edit moment. All right, Bill. What does it feel like? What does it look like? We're zooming in now and double-clicking.

And, you know, every Wikipedia article that you read, every page that's part of the encyclopedia has right behind it, you know, metaphorically speaking, a talk page. This is the place where Wikipedia editors hash out their disagreements. And this is where, as a paid editor, as a conflict of interest contributor, this is where I am invited to come. participate. They don't really want me making direct changes, and that's fine. As long as I can get a fair hearing, no problem with that. That can be a bit of an issue sometimes. You go to the talk page, and at the top of the page, you can click add topic or edit this page. In terms of what you see, you know, Wikipedia has a markup editor, wiki text. It's kind of like, you know, HTML has certain code that's similar. It's very simple coding language.

a markup language which I'm proficient in my team is proficient in but there is also a visual editor that they rolled out many years ago

where you can do a whizzy wig version it's not as powerful but for most purposes it's suitable we'll use the markup editor and we will

write a message at a header you know write an explanation of here's what I want to change here's why here's what I think it should change too I will cite

policies and guidelines that are relevant but I also don't want to overdo it I trust that editors can see through the way that I am writing that they know that I'm not some rando off the street but I know what Wikipedia's rules are all about and I try to make a

start off like a simple request that is kind of undeniable fact-based edit requests much easier to make than you know again matters of perspective are more challenging. And, you know, I embed links to the relevant, like, section of the page I want to change and all that.

I will even, like, put into, like, block quotes with formatting to make it as legible as possible. So people can go look me up and find my user account and see me doing this. It's all public, obscure, but public. And then I add four squiggly, four tildas at the end. That applies my signature. I hit preview, check it. I hit preview several times to like just get it just right.

You guys want to double click. We're like triple clicking now. Triple click. Triple tilda at this point. Triple tilda clicks and all. Quadruple tilda. If you do a triple tilda, it's going to leave off the date. But you want to have the time stamp there.

And they'll know you're a feister at that point. Like this guy triple tilded. It feels better. Bro, do you even wiki? And I had published. And then I, you know what else I do, actually? This is a tip for anybody who themselves is representing a brand and wants to actually get someone to reply to their request eventually. Is to add a template to the top of the message below the heading, above the body of the message.

It's the edit COI template. It opens up, you know those squiggly brackets. You open with two squiggly brackets, you write, edit, COI, and then you close up the two squiggly brackets, and it creates a template that says, the user writing below has asked someone to review this change because they have a conflict of interest. And this puts your request into a queue on another part of the site, where volunteer editors who are interested in reviewing paid editor requests, which is too few editors from my perspective, of course.

It's just not what editors got into Wikipedia to do in the first place. Some people do find it fun, but not enough. And it can be able to pay in the ass. My team takes pride in getting right to the point, not wasting anybody's time, not asking for things that you can't have. I almost caught myself there. And, you know, not everybody does. A lot of, you know, people will show up and try to do it,

And they don't really know how to ask or they'll write like a big, you know, wall of text that is makes it, you know, if it's TLDR, your request will sit there for a long time. As it is, your request will probably sit there for anywhere from a few days to a few weeks anyway, just because of the backlog and because it does not work in chronological or reverse chronological order. There's no first and last out. It's like people just grab the edits that. Oh, that's interesting. So it gets to there for a long time. if it's not of interest to somebody. You know what?

I actually happen to have the page. Okay, here we go. There are currently 243 requests as of 407 p.m. Eastern on November 19, 2025. That's higher than I've seen it in a while. Probably not the highest it's ever been. 407? 243 open edit requests. Yeah.

243. For paid edit requests. Yeah. Where somebody asking about their brand, you know, their boss, their employer, their client. Is that worldwide? Is that coming from your firm specifically? Worldwide for the, yeah, no. Yeah, so it is the edit request queue for the edit request queue for the edit C-O-I template,

COI being conflict of interest, right? So it's worldwide for the English language. You know, Wikipedia has many different language additions. English is by far the largest and the one that gets the most attention. This is where the significant majority of our work is done. You know, we do some work in other languages, but. Wikipedia is the one that people in other countries care about. You know, like the business language of India is English.

So that's where that's the Wikipedia that Indians care about. So if you have to get the editor's interest, is there the equivalent of edit bait, you know, like something you can put in there or it's like, hey, this is going to be a fun one for you to review or anything like that? That's a really good question. I don't think I have a good answer for it, you know, because we're not choosing for the most part,

We'll take on clients that we think have a good point to make and that we are willing to work for. And the things they want to change are the things that they ask for that we agree are feasible. So probably the closest thing would be if we have a client with a page that needs a lot of work, we will start off. I said a version of this earlier. We'll start off with something real simple. We don't want to barge in and ask, can you change the most controversial element of this page? we want to start off with something that like everybody can agree on let's build some trust let's let's show that we're here that we are here to build the encyclopedia even though we're doing so from a you know a paid perspective that's about the best i could say what about bad actors i'm sure you're not as a contributor you're not necessarily the one who's charged with this but certainly there are people that aren't like yourselves even if you have conflict of interest you're trying to make the encyclopedia better there's people that are trying to destroy it there's people that are trying to defame it there's people that are trying to defame it There's people that are trying to, you know, just completely take over certain pages, certain topics, spam.

Right. Promote themselves, win an argument. Like those are the... Yeah, there's tons of interests that are against the betterment of the encyclopedia. How does that? How does that usually play out? So there is another group of editors sometimes overlaps with the editors who answer edit requests from the disclosed rule following paid editors like my team. But there is another group that runs a page, which is worth a look. It could be fascinating. It's called the Conflict of Interest Notice Board. This is where editors will go to report what they see as suspicious activity. Like, you know, I've seen the pattern of edits on this editor.

You know, they've made 30 edits and they're all to like this one businessman. Like that's a crystal clear pattern that this is someone working for, you know, that businessman. and so editors will go in and investigate and they may roll back edits they usually will not just block someone for conflict of interest editing and some of this has to do with that fear that we won't have editors in the future that like anybody who chooses to open up the browser window and make an edit even if it is not immediately constructive is a better bet to become a Wikipedia editor down the line than someone who's never edited in the first place it's kind of the the same principle why you know you buy a pair of shoes and then you know on the internet on amazon and then like the ads follow you around for the next couple days asking you to buy shoes again you know if you've already shown interest in this topic you're more likely to buy that thing even if i i just did that i don't don't show me shoe ads well you know um i have i have a friend who has a long time wikipedia editor and her very first edit to wikipedia was vandalizing it

because she thought it was funny. She was also a teenager at the time. And like a lot of people don't realize like, like, wow, I actually was able to edit this. And it went live. That little aha moment, sometimes people get, you know, show up and they don't know what they're doing. And like, I'm a, I don't know, they might like write a page about their best friend to impress their best friend. And then the page gets taken down. But they're like, oh, well, what else could I do?

At least that's what they're hoping for. how does a page become a page and how does a page not become a page i assume it's similar to an edit but it's like a much bigger thing because now it's like this deserves a page i think that's probably a bigger decision than this sentence should be modified or maybe it's the same exact rules how does that work yeah you know if if we're talking about regular wikipedians who are contributing without any kind of conflict of interest you know they can just like click on like if you see a red link on wikipedia you see fewer them today than you did years ago.

But a red link on Wikipedia means there's no page behind that. You could click on that and just start, you know, creating the page. Or you could, you know, figure out how to create the new space and, you know, post it up. If you don't really understand how all that works, or if you have, you know, like a financial interest in the topic, there's a project you can go to called Articles for Creation. This, too, has quite the backlog. but this is where you could, like, write a draft entry and submit it for volunteer editors to review. And if you hit all the right points, if the subject is notable, and that's the term of art on Wikipedia,

because there's a guideline called Notability. That's a whole kettle of fish. If you want to get into it, we can. And if it's approved, it goes on the live encyclopedia, where it stays, presumably forever, as long as it continues to be deemed notable. But yes, articles are deleted too, either because they were never, you know, notable in the first place or that's usually the main reason. You know, the idea is once notable, always notable, but also standard shift, opinions shift. And so there's a process also called articles for deletion, funny enough.

And that's also a really fascinating one to follow because, boy, that can get emotional. And people can come in and like try to like desperately beg, plead. you know, please leave my Wikipedia article. And look, here, I've got mentioned in all these news articles, you know, but a lot of those mentions, well, they might not be the kind of, you know, sources or the kind of mentions. Like Wikipedia wants to have articles about, say, businesses that have really received true public attention and not just within an industry vertical, a niche, but, you know, has been covered by major press, more than once, profile pieces, not passing mentions,

and not like showing up in a listical or certainly not a paid placement. You know, the Forbes Contributor Network and all those blogs, a lot of them really are well written and they look professional, but Wikipedia will not accept Forbes contributor pieces. If it's from the magazine, now we're talking. But if it's from the Forbes contributor, it's an unpaid blog, really, not truly professional. It's not, you know, has not been fact-checked or edited.

And so, yeah, deletion of pages, we, like, so at my company, we do sell a service that is creating pages. We're very selective about whom we sell it to because we don't want to sell something we can't deliver on. And that's a real, that's a real challenge. We don't really sell a service that's saving your page from deletion. We'll be like, you know, this is what's course in two weeks. If it survives, we can help you, you know, improve it. But if it's not, but if it is not, then you, you'll be. You probably need more sources.

I think it's kind of wild that I'm assuming that there's a lot of PR companies like yours. Maybe how many would you say there are in the world that are like you? You mean they focus on Wikipedia? Yeah. So there is a very limited universe of, you know, what I would call guideline compliant, rule following. It's like on one hand, I can count the number of agencies that do what we do. And we were the first.

We started, I started the company back in. 2010. There are a handful of big PR firms that have someone on staff who does this work credibly. But then, and here's one of the challenges of operating in this space, is like if you were just to go, you know, do a Google search for, you know, Wikipedia help or Wikipedia editor for hire, how to create a Wikipedia page, you're going to find these really like hard sell aggressive, you know, fly-by-night companies that many of them are the same, you know, person or small network operating overseas. They will offer 100% guaranteed results. And they will, you know, they'll claim to have all kinds of testimonials, but they're never from real people.

And they will take your money and run. And at best, like, at best they will do a, at best they'll take your money and run. At worst, they might, you know, create a page you hate and then create, create an issue. And I guess there's a middle category. There's a handful of agencies that will do this work, and they'll either claim to be following the rules, but I've seen their work. I know they're not.

Or they just hope their clients don't know any better. Because Wikipedia is still a esoteric thing, but clients don't know what the rules of engagement are. So that's sort of three categories. And we're in the smallest one. I guess I don't really have a question, but more like an area where I'm high. hovering here. Because I'm thinking I'm back to like Jimmy Wales is not a billionaire. Maybe you've

got a large swath of PR folks like you all, some that are credible, some that are less credible, but certainly a cottage industry of economics around editing and contributing to Wikipedia. And I'm just thinking like how that plays out in terms of maybe do you all even give back to Wikipedia as part of your revenue? model to maintain the source of truth being there and just like I guess just the again not really a question but just more around the economics of it because you guys are making money jimmy's not making billions at least i don't know you know right yeah the money doesn't go to him anyway would it yeah don't cry for jimmy he's doing well yeah i'm getting asked right now to donate two bucks

or something like that to wikipedia it's like you know i don't i'm just looking at the economics around Wikipedia is really on like zooming into that, I suppose. So, you know, you raised the topic of fundraising came up earlier and I didn't really get, didn't really go out it. You know, Wikipedia, all right, it's about to be donation season again, fundraising season.

And that hard sell, their own hard sell that you mentioned, is contentious among Wikipedia editors. And not just because the money doesn't go to them, it does not go to them, of course, but because Wikipedia, those fundraisers They're extremely successful.

Wikipedia's budget is like $100 million every year. And, you know, they raise what they spend and it goes in and out. And, you know, there are over 100 employees, not counting contractors at the foundation. And it's not clear that a lot of what the work they do actually makes the encyclopedia better. It's almost kind of its own thing. It's this NGO that, you know, there's, I don't know, you know, conservatives would say that it supports woke causes. and that's an interesting thing to unpack. But a lot of it is just trying to improve the ecosystem of editors,

but the money, it's difficult to spend the money well because they can't directly pay for content. That's in their charter as well. So editors in the past have, a couple years ago, there was an editor revolt of sorts where they pressured the foundation to tone down some of that alarmist rhetoric about how Wikipedia will go away. And guess what?

Like the fundraising tanked that year, and they had to lay off a bunch of people. And I mentioned that Wikimedia Enterprise was a client of ours. That was really the reason why they had to let us go. They didn't know the budget. I hope they don't get mad about me saying that if they hear this. No hard feelings, truly. But, I mean, that is what happened. Now it's clear.

Yeah, now it's clear. The truth comes out, you know, now we're an hour and 15. Get the transcript, put it on Wikipedia. The economy, right. The economics, though. I want to get to the economics or the ecosystem, right? So, you know, I have wished in the past that Wikipedia had developed an ecosystem like, say, Linux. I don't have tried making this argument in the past that, you know, like there's no such thing as the red hat of Linux. if there was, sorry, the red hat of Wikipedia. If there was, I think we would be it. But there is this, and this also gets to Wikipedia having kind of like a left-leaning

disposition. I've mentioned academics, but there's also kind of an anti-corporate atmosphere around Wikipedia, which is what a principal challenge of the work that we do. But it's also a reason why our service is viable to begin with, because it is difficult to work on company topics. Like, if you're a regular old Wikipedia editor editing and your own spare, time, and you just happen to be really interested in writing corporate biographies, other Wikipedia editors are going to look at you and be very skeptical because few editors get into

Wikipedia because they want to work on corporate profiles, unless it's like Nintendo or, you know, something beloved. Yeah, things that are beloved. So, like, I'm kind of like, I'm still working at this, you know, speaking of PR firms in Wikipedia and firms that I founded, you know, Buttele learning's been around now for 15 years, but just this fall, I launched a new, a new proper PR firm focused on Wikipedia. So it's called the Notability Company. You know, my firm is not a traditional PR firm. So we are partnering with an agency principal who is a seasoned PR leader. And so we came together and we started this, it's just really the two of us right now who are running it.

But the whole idea is to generate earned media that, Wikipedia cares about. And so if it's a marathon, not a sprint, it is not easy to do. But the thing is, like traditional PR firms are not focused on the type of results that produce the kind of stories that Wikipedia likes. The Notability Company aims to settle that. And so this is very much startup. It's, you know, we really launched it about five weeks ago. But I'm optimistic for it. I do think there should be more of an ecosystem around Wikipedia because it's so important and it's like it's too important to be entirely left to the volunteers. There are organizations and nonprofits besides the foundation that are focused on different aspects of Wikipedia. There's a Wiki Project

Med Foundation that is focused on medical health related articles. There is a Wiki Project or There's a Wiki Education Foundation, which partners with universities. If our children, you know, a few years from now, don't hear their teachers telling them to not use Wikipedia, it'll probably because the Wiki Education Foundation did its job, you know, helping teachers understand how it can be a pedagogical tool and, you know, not something to be totally avoided. Yeah. So good question. Great topic. One of the things you say, I'm on your LinkedIn right now, the Notability Company, you say we help brands and nonprofits, forgive me for promoting you here for a second. We help brands and nonprofits earn the coverage that makes Wikipedia possible.

I know you may have buried some of that in terms of like what you do and what you can do to get the edit, right? Out there, but like in practical terms, what exactly does that mean? in practical terms it means generating news coverage professional media coverage profiles in here's the thing we've not talked about too much reliable sources you know Wikipedia wants to be built out of sources that are independent of the subject that have a track record of you know, doing, you know, putting out factual information. Again, here's where journalism heavily figures into what Wikipedia does. And so it really wants coverage that, you know, explains why the subject is significant.

And so, you know, not every prospective client of the Notability Company is going to be a good fit for, you know, for our service. but for a company that is, that is growing, that is doing something interesting, for a non-profit that is doing good work, but their, you know, publicity that they've done before and their earned media, like, knowing the PR industry where, like, performance PR, you know, that guaranteed results, but it's like the publicist writes it and places it on a website that looks journalistic, but isn't really, like Wikipedia editors are not fooled by that. It also doesn't mean you have to be in the New York Times of the Wall Street Journal to get that. But like, you know, your hometown daily paper, if it even still is daily anymore, you know, you want to get like articles about your accomplishments and why you're interesting.

If it's a biography of a person, you know, do you want that kind of profile that starts off in media res and, you know, talks about that thing you're doing? And then in paragraph 7, it jumps to like, you know, born and raised in small town, Ohio. That's that coverage is hard to get. That is, you know, Wikipedia editors know that. The thing is, though, PR firms are not really focused on that. And so, like, I, that is a great question. And in fact, probably the next step of kind of developing the service is providing examples of, you know, what I want to do is actually want to do is, go grab some articles that have been recently created

either by my firm or just, you know, new company articles. And then like back engineer, you know, go to those references and kind of like, look for the commonalities between those stories. And that will, you know, in a few weeks' time, I'll be able to give you more of a generic broad descriptor. Right now I'm just sort of describing like, you know, the kind of in-depth profile pieces that, you know, tend to go for the more, you know,

tend to more famous types of people and companies get it. Yeah. That's it. That's all predicated on the value of Wikipedia being Wikipedia, right? Because, I mean, there's a paid service. It sounds like you're going through a lot of work to find to reverse engineer or engineer way into it by, you know, examining previously accepted articles or whatever may have been facts or information that a lot of editors to, you know, hit the accept button. Right, right. Is that a big business that you're going to build? I mean, like what can it be, will it be bigger than your current?

Is it going to be big? And I mean, can you quantify some version of big? Yeah. Well, we'll find out, right? You know, it's like the reason why I wanted to start it was because for many years, we get, you know, people come to us and say, can you create a page about us? And most of the time, the answer is no. Like I would say probably, I don't know, 80% of the inbound inquiries we get are about creating a Wikipedia

article for them. But probably 80% of the actual work that Butler Inc. does is improving existing pages, especially for large, well-established companies. So there's really like an imbalance, you know, there's a symmetry to it. But I've been thinking about how to, like, is there a way to monetize or address that interest? And, you know, even though Butler-Rank definitely is in the PR space, you know, we're not a traditional PR agency. We don't do that or in media. And so for many years, we'd say, you should go to your publicistice, you should go to your PR firm and get more in media, but we found that those firms were not focused on the right kind of coverage. And so the notability company is going to be focused on only that kind of coverage.

And so we think that we could be either their sole PR firm or we could be an add-on to their PR firm. And, you know, Buehler Inc. is a company. We have many direct clients, but we also get a lot of referrals from PR firms where they don't do Wikipedia work. It just sounds like a headache. Oh, I know a guy. You know, we got just the people.

Let me send you over to them. I mean, that's where it's how I built my book of business in the first place way back in 2010. Car right now niche. Still a source, absolutely. What about the the notability, I guess, to use your brand term? Yeah. Of the places you want to get earned media. Are those becoming fewer and far between because of, I would imagine, there's a lot of,

add supported creators out there and I'm not even sure is a creator a notable source like how do you define what what is the test to say okay notable not notable or credible notable right so the the term of art in this case is reliable uh reliable sources sorry about that my bad no no no I mean like erase what I said but nobody can remember these I I mean I'm trying my best you know I was trying to use your brand term if it was on point slightly off well notability is on point because they're trying to make people notable by getting them into reliable sources. There you go. Bam.

Very well done. Nailed it. Jared. Congratulations. I'm tracking. I'm tracking. But your question is totally on point here. And it's not even a new thing, right? Just the general decline of ad supported media of, I mean, any media.

Well, you know, I'm old enough, world enough. But like, you know, remember that in the 2000s, like the magazine apocalypse, you know, happened 15. 20 years ago. It's been in decline pretty much the entire time that we've been adults. And, you know, I have friends who used to work for, I have a friend who used to work for Newsweek magazine, worked in, in D.C. in New York. And, like, she could, like, call cars to the office to take her home at night. And she had, like, an expense report. Those things used to just print money, Newsweek, which, by the way, still exists as a website, but it is now kind of like a right-wing, you know, like shadow of itself.

Like the brand lives on, but it's not the same publication at all. And like that era is super gone, never coming back. And now we are potentially on the precipice of another collapse as the publisher's sites and internet are losing out traffic to chat GPT as it's answering the questions that people would search for them. Here's where Wikipedia is in a better space. It doesn't need, you know, it doesn't have advertising. but the sources that it depends on.

It needs reliable sources. And the sources are going away. Or they're completely losing their credibility in the public's. I mean, at least in the United States, the powers that be press-wise, which are all kind of like owned by corporate interests and stuff like that, they've never been less relied upon. So many people don't even trust them anymore.

But if Wikipedia does, I mean, maybe that will be, if anything may be leading towards its, trend down and influence over time, it might be that. Yeah, it's a long-term risk. It's absolutely a risk. And I would say it definitely has a negative impact on the growth potential of my business. Because if there was more journalism about more companies, then that would be more sources that we could cite. There'd be more, you know, profile pieces establishing notability. So we are swimming against the currents a little bit there. Let me also ask this in a different way. Speaking, again, back to the ecosystem where I would

like to build up an ecosystem. Here's a project that I cannot own. So I'm giving this away to anybody who wants to start this and you can reach out to me to get my guidance on it. But like there should be a publication, which is basically like a fact check.org for Wikipedia. It would be a place where, for example, my client could, you know, get just a simple fact check, you know, of the of his marital status. And you would build the, like you'd build the news organization around what the reliable sources guideline says. If you are to reverse engineer that guideline,

you could start up a publication that is a reliable source for sure. And so creators, creators don't follow any of this, you know, whether, you know, most YouTubers, certainly no TikTokers. I mean, YouTube is definitely has more credible. reporting then again TikTok let alone Instagram

but like yeah someone should you know someone should create a publication that exists to help Wikipedia you know verify sources and I to be clear I do not mean citation laundering I don't mean

trying to skirt around the rules I mean like hire some journalists do some actual reporting and fact checking and you know how you fund that and why anybody would want to do so other than that.

Yeah, that's a great question. I think it, you know, I have some ideas on how it would be funded by PR, AI, and, you know, philanthropy. I have these ideas. Please come talk to me about it. But I couldn't. I, as much, I know, I'm a former news guy, as I said at the top. I would love that thing to exist and, you know, but Butler Inc. can't run it.

You know, that would kind of defeat the whole purpose. Absolutely. Arms length and stuff like that. Yeah. At the very least arm's length. Yeah. That's interesting. Here's a free idea. I can't do, but it's really good. So you should come and do it if you're keen. There you go. Right. So let's end on this, if you're willing, Bill. I just posted a Wikipedia page into the chat. I'm not sure if you can have access to the chat there. Got it here. I do not have a Wikipedia page, nor do I deserve one. However, my name does appear a few times.

Oh, yeah. Through this podcast, this is Eugene, Eugene Rochko's page. He's the creator of Mastodon. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Noteworthily, he just recently announced he's really. designing as CEO or something like that. But at the bottom of that page, we have a section called media coverage. Yep, there it is. In which case it says in a 2018 podcast with Jared Santo and Adam Secoviak from Twitter and GitHub, Roshko described in depth the origin of Macedon. Now, I am not from Twitter and Adam is not from GitHub. So this is incorrect.

And how, in your expertise ways, would I go about correcting the record here because that's wrong? Yeah. This, this is a pickle. And for more than one reason, one, you have the, yeah, I can't solve all problems, you know. Okay. Well, tell us how bad this is here. Look, for, you know, for 98.7% of all Wikipedia articles, this is, you know, no big deal. This is Wikipedia having information. I mean, the fact of the fact that it's wrong is, is the issue, right? Right. I don't care one way or the other, but it's just wrong. Like, it should be right, you know? This is a case where I would say, if you went in and changed it, you would not be, I'm willing to say this at an hour and a half in. You know, I don't think it would be the worst thing in the world, right? Because you actually, your intentions would be to correct the thing already there.

Yeah. And it would be better for it to be corrected than incorrect. Yeah. That said, though, like if you were to go post an edit request, like our clients do, you might find an editor pointing out that, you know, the source goes back to, you know, your own website. Does it not? And, right. Is there a link back to our site? I didn't notice that there was or not. Let me see here. Hold on a second. The citation. This is interesting. It's using a citation format. Number 26. Hold on. Well, yeah. Okay. So here you are. But then when you click on it. Now I found it now. Okay. Join the Federation. Mastodon awaits. And so it goes to, yeah, the change log page. You know, look, I think it's at least an open question, um, whether change log would be considered a reliable source. I think the short version would be no, especially if he is the person who said it. I would say that you guys, if you guys are, you know, kind of doing research

and you are offering commentary, you are well established as a, as a podcast, uh, experts in a field um if either of you have written on these subjects in you know say like for like i don't know i write change log news every week so like yeah i'm not a journalist but we are documentators of the news yeah right right no i i see not just because i'm on your show right right now i'd be willing to give you you i can get this changed that you're trying to say benefit of the doubt benefit of the doubt because of the additional like you don't just do the interviews you also do news reporting as well and covering the coverage and I think that that counts for something totally you are more professional news uh thank you more professional media you know outlet than most

podcasts are and so I just I'm just here for the compliments bill yeah so if I wanted to change this like basically all I would like to say is you know we're not from Twitter and GitHub we're from the change log yeah and then like do I just click edit and then I just change the text and say look I'm Jared. This is wrong. Do you want me to do it? I mean, I'm not, I don't have any money, but. I'm not going to use my business account. I'm going to use my personal account.

This is Bill personal. This is Bill's worth. This is what you came for. I would like you to submit that. That would be amazing. I mean, that saves me from having to even remember my password because I haven't seen it for years. I tried to actually log in, Jerry, while we're on this pod.

And I guess the email that I use for Wikipedia, for my account. Maybe I don't have access to it. I won't tell what it is. So I got to go through the process of proving I'm me basically at this point to get my true account back. I think I might have one edit out there. Did you not use an email account when you set it up? I think so because whenever I'm trying to log in, it is telling me to verify with a code to an email that is blocked from my visibility. And I checked the ones I think it would be. and the code is not there. So at this point, I'm thinking,

I don't, I don't know. I don't know which email account is using. There's only two that I would have used. So, and it's not in either of those accounts. Yeah. I'll tell you what, you know, I'm going to make this change because it's at least I'm going to make it correct.

I will add this. Like the sentence is not like it adds like massively critical information that like, in the podcast he described the company he built. But I'm going to write. Yeah, I'm not even sure. Maybe I'm the one that created this edit back in 2018, back when I was trying to get my website on the... But I wouldn't have put it from Twitter and GitHub

unless I was trying to make them think I was important. Well, I'm going to do the favor of not, you know, looking into that right now. I'm going to just correct the thing in front of me, which most Wikipedia editors do, right? It's better to make a small edit that makes it a little better than to like, you're not on the hook for going back and, you know, determining the absolute best possible version of the page.

Yeah. Honestly, that's a reason why my company exists because we will do that deep research and try to write the best version of the page. Most Wikipedia editors are just, you know, kind of like mosing along and they might see something in the news. Oh, that's not on the page. Let me add it.

This is one reason why Wikipedia biographies sometimes are so scattershot because that's literally what happens. Like 13 people added 13 different sentences over 13 years and no one's ever applied, you know, any editorial, you know, hand to it. Anyway, if you reload the page now, you will see. that um it's fixed you are from the change log and not yes we'll see if it sticks wow this is amazing i think it will but i think it will speaking to the uh power and the coolness of wikipedia for a moment i just mentioned that eugen just announced his retirement yesterday it's there it's

the last one on the other i asked go stepped down now the weird thing about this is the citation for that particular sentence yeah which is the second to last sentence prior to the media coverage section, links to his Macedon post? Yeah. Isn't that a primary source? It is, and it is not the ideal source because I've been working on this issue with my client. You know, one potential option that's been floated to me would be to have him post

something on his, you know, Twitter or X account, which I think he doesn't want to do either, frankly. So there is a deep, so I happen to be familiar with this area of policy right now. It is the BLP primary is the shortcut, and it says that you, it can be occasionally all right to use self-published sources for biographies if it comes from the person and if it, like, you know, updates something that was already wrong, for example. So it's not the most ideal source. There's a thing. Again, for like, again, 99% of Wikipedia articles, this is fun. it's useful and if it's not useful

most pages are not controversial yeah they're going to accept this until maybe somebody comes by and is like hey that's wrong and then it's like well this horse is bad and then maybe it would go away gotcha more likely it stays for a long time because it's because it's right you know a lot of Wikipedia is you know doing the best possible job in the moment

and it isn't until you get to those really hard pages that are either in politics or in matters of lawsuits and, you know, other things that big businesses are kind of inherently, a contested subject. If not outwardly controversial, they are at least closely scrutinized. Eugene Rochko, you know, first I've heard of him, obviously, I created a Mastodon account and posted on it once a long time ago. And I love the photo.

Wikipedia photos are, you know, I know we're laid into this, but like, speaking of ecosystem. One thing that does exist is there's a project called wiki portraits run by some friends of mine and they like go to Sundance and South by Southwest and the Cannes Film Festival and they set up a pop-up studio and they take headshots of people so they can put quality photos on Wikipedia. They're not a for-profit company. They got they have a grant to do it. But like that's kind of a cool thing Because, yeah, Wikipedia, photos of the living persons, like, they can't use copyrighted photos. That's just also part of the guidelines or part of the, part of the site, you know, licensing. And so you get some hilarious, you know, photos where it's like a basketball player from behind that somebody, like, you know, snap the photo from the sidelines.

You'll still see that. I think that kind of maybe lends to the community feel, you know, kind of the. Yeah. It's authentic. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Still built the volunteers.

Well, Bill, I'm glad that I waited until 90 minutes in to get my edit request submitted because you happily obliged. And there it is. I mean, correction. I just like when the true stuff is out there, Adam. I mean, Adam, you never worked at GitHub, did you? No, no, I have not. You don't want that to be public record, right?

Like, that's just not true. No, I mean, it's not true. It's not valid information. It's just a weird thing. Yeah. And trivial, it was definitely no big deal to remove. And look, perhaps in this way, I have a little. a little bit of, you know, veteran privilege where highly unlikely someone comes along to

undo that. And besides, I'm right. It's on that other person to prove that you. And so that's really the thing. Can they prove that you work? And they're never going to prove that because we're not even public figures. Like, they're going to be like, well, like, how would you even know? Can't prove a negative. So, well, you do one search and you don't find GitHub. You find the change off. So it's like one search. I don't mean, are search results part of the second party, third party validation systems? I don't know where you land. You land on a reputable source or a reliable source. If a link to say that you work for GitHub or Twitter is buried on page four because of misinformation,

but the truth is on page one. I mean, you got to add one-on-one together, not get 11. You got to get one. Sorry about that. All right. That's where we end the show.

One plus one. He goes one. I mean, come on. What is truth? What is truth around here? That's cool. Super geek real quick. I mean, like, cool thing on their cash busting.

You push, submit, it busted the cash on this global website, and immediately it was updated for Omaha in Austin, Texas. So that's, oh, yeah. That's cool. Well, 25 years, they've ironed out the kinks, man. It's a marvel. It is a eighth wonder of the world, absolutely. Absolutely. Bill, thanks so much for telling us all about it, man.

This has been awesome. Thanks, guys. This is a lot of fun. Thanks, Bill. Definitely. in addition to saving themselves precious time listening to the ads change log plus plus members are getting a super fun bonus on this episode i don't want to spoil it for you so here's a teaser bueller bueller bueller um he's sick stay tuned plus plusers and if you're not one yet join today at changelog.com

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And so do we. Okay, that's all for now. But we'll be back in your earholes on Friday. talking elixir, nerves, home automation, and even Karate Kid. Yeah, Karate Kid with our old friend, Lash Vickman. Talk to you then. Game on