So can you take me all the way back to your childhood and tell me what your upbringing was like?

Sure.

Well, I mean, I was born and raised in the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, Um, that's, that's my earliest church memories come from that.

My dad was an elder.

Um, but, uh, I asked a lot of questions sort of constitutionally.

That's just how I am.

And, um, I, uh, for example, I, I would ask, you know, well, if God has created everything, then what caused God and that kind of thing, you know, uh, the sort of basic questions that, that, um, thoughtful kids will ask.

Can you explain that?

So rule the group chat and download Apple Sports for free on the App Store or find it on your new iPhone.

It's a good question.

You can look at movements that were already underway in the first year of Wikipedia and trace their ultimate consequences to today.

So the idea that absolutely anybody including people who are very active and have a big voice in the community, could hold forth in that way anonymously.

That ended up making a really big difference.

Another thing is actually a negative feature of Wikipedia is the lack of a governance system.

So that was a big problem.

If

have to disclose any of that?

Well, of course they do.

And they do, right? But not in enough detail, in my opinion.

I think they need to basically make it clear what kind of grants they are making.

20% of their budget is for basically editorial kind of grants.

And a lot of that work seems to be politically oriented, I guess you could say.

And they have an association with the Tide Center, that's my understanding at least.

Do you think that is an alternative for someone using Wikipedia as a source for a more neutral answer?

There's a lot of very profound ideas in there, but I'll, I'll, I'll let you just expand on this or, or comment however you'd like to.

Sure.

Um, you know, uh, this is a response to a debate that's been happening in the last couple of weeks, I would say.

Um, especially, it's been going on for longer than that, but especially in the last coup- couple of weeks among at least the people that I interact with on X, uh, about the nature of LLM authorship and whether you can actually claim...

Well, actually, there's two different questions at least.

One is whether you should use LLMs to author text.

All right? That's one thing.

Maybe

Were there any in particular that you sort of found essential?

Well...

Not necessarily in those first hundred days.

I made a lot of use of the ESV Study Bible, which is very reformed.

I'm not reformed myself, but I agree with actually like 98% of what they say.

So I got a lot out of that.

But over the next few years, You know, well, I will say this also in that first hundred days when I read the Bible all the way through.

You weren't moved by any other element.

Yeah

... commentary, um, you get to a, a list of, of, uh, commentaries from, um, basically, uh, I guess you would say from, what, the 17th through the early 20th century, uh, Protestant commentaries, not Catholic.

Um, and, uh, uh, some great old stuff there, and it- it's very edifying.

And my favorite out of all of them, and I just wish I had time to read the whole thing from beginning to end, is, um, uh, Matthew Henry, Matthew Henry's commentaries.

Um, the, it's like a whole encyclopedia set.

It's so huge, the amount that he wrote, and it's all, like, stunningly beautiful.

Um, and the way that he has of, uh, ex- explaining in detail all of the little persnickety issues that come up when you're reading the Bible, um, is, uh, as I say, it's- Quite beautiful.

Yeah.

So what were those early days about?

Well, I can tell you some things that you might not have heard before.

You can think of Wikipedia as the extension of two different movements.

One is the The open source software movement that which is basically what what gave us Linux and the Apache web server and Firefox and various other pieces of software.

And the idea is that by people contributing to a commons, software commons in this case, everyone is benefited and so forth.

The whole idea then was that by contributing to a knowledge commons, we would arrive at a more enlightened society, generally speaking, I guess that's the thinking.

And then the other thing is, Well, it's what lay in the background of neutrality, right? So the idea is that a wiki involves anyone who wants to coming to a page and editing it.

Can you tell, was there a certain time that you pinpointed like, oh, something happened here and suddenly it was changed?

I mean, how have you been ostracized from the worldwide phenomenon you helped create?

Yes.

Well, basically, it's been about five or six weeks now.

And it all began last year, actually, when I posted nine theses on Wikipedia.

It was a whole reform proposal.

And without getting into the details of that, people didn't really... take the initiative and putting the reform proposal into effect.

So I decided I had to do that.

which is why it's sort of everything's topsy turvy.

I mean, how have you been ostracized from the worldwide phenomenon you helped create?

Yes.

Well, basically, it's been about five or six weeks now.

And it all began last year, actually, when I posted nine theses on Wikipedia.

It was a whole reform proposal.

And without getting into the details of that, people didn't really... take the initiative in putting the reform proposal into effect.

So I decided I had to do that.

which is why it's sort of everything's topsy-turvy.

[laughs]

Uh, and, and that will really help to, uh, contextualize the answer.

All right.

So, um, I, uh, I developed a, a tool for listing the latest policy discussions, um, uh, ranked according to how important they were to, um, our goals as the WikiProject Intellectual Diversity.

So which discussions, which poli- policy discussions, um, did we need to look at if we wanted to push toward more, you know, um, intellectual openness essentially? Um, I, uh, I went to w- uh, uh, sorry, I went to social media.

Um, I have 90,000 followers on, on X, and, uh, eventually I managed to gather, uh, almost 30 volunteers.

Um, and we'd taken all the steps necessary to be approved as an official WikiProject, and you would think that this would be, you know, an easily acceptable project, WikiProject Intellectual Diversity.

What if the resurrection didn't literally happen? What if this is another great literary story with a deep meaning and truth behind it? Forgiveness, redemption, starting over, heavens on Earth, and so on and so forth, and you've missed the point of the story by saying, "This has to be literally true."

Let's talk about some of those problems and how they have steered Wikipedia over the years.

Sure.

Um, I think the most important one is the reliable sources policy itself in general.

Um, it, uh, and, and again, it was not this way in the early days.

Uh, it, some of these rules were not introduced until, like, uh, 2005, 2006 when things really started changing a lot in terms of the policy.

Um, generally, um, you're not...

You're discouraged from using primary sources, and the reason for that is that if you use a primary source, then you're going to be giving your own interpretation of that, which sounds like original research.

But tell us from your perspective, what happened recently to get you blocked from editing Wikipedia?

Let's talk about some of those problems and how they have steered Wikipedia over the years.

Sure.

Um, I think the most important one is the reliable sources policy itself in general.

Um, it, uh, and, and again, it was not this way in the early days.

Uh, it, some of these rules were not introduced until, like, uh, 2005, 2006 when things really started changing a lot in terms of the policy.

Um, generally, um, you're not...

You're discouraged from using primary sources, and the reason for that is that if you use a primary source, then you're going to be giving your own interpretation of that, which sounds like original research.

But tell us from your perspective, what happened recently to get you blocked from editing Wikipedia?

Yeah.

I was interviewing a friend of mine called Constantin Kissin from Trigonometry podcast.

And I noticed that he had tweeted, we didn't know that somebody had killed, stabbed a lot of people on a train in England.

And he said, this is not an English thing to do.

English people don't go around stabbing lots of people on trains.

So I asked ChatGPT, what do you think about Konstantin's tweet? And it was very, it shut it down.

It was like, this is terrible.

the the uh citizens of the old soviet union were able to read between the lines of pravda and so that same sort of thing

I suppose on an individual level, an individual can pay, hey, can you make my Wikipedia entry? And then on a global scale, maybe someone like Qatar, maybe one of these countries, any country, America, Israel, could be influencing Wikipedia

pages.

Absolutely.

Nothing's stopping them.

And the very idea that...

Spycraft now, to a great extent, involves information warfare.

One of the biggest prizes to win in the media landscape now would be Wikipedia.

do they have these kinds of online battles and wars where people are changing it and then someone changes it back and so on? So who wins? How do you stop that?

And therefore, you know, since this has come to me from so many different directions, and I don't have the time to go check it out myself and read the original documents, what did the Mussolini, was he a Marxist? What was the Nazi platform? Since I don't, I can't do any of that, I'm going to sort of take it as settled from multiple different sources that fascism is right-wing." And I think what you're describing in miniature [laughs] is kind of the same thing occurring internally at Wikipedia.

Yeah.

Um, yes, I think you're, you're onto something.

I mean, we can, we can quibble about how actually fascism, uh, a- arose.

You know, Jonah Goldberg wrote a well-known book about that very question.

Um, and, um, it, it's, uh, Liberal Fascism.

Um, it, it, it's very, it's very good.

I just thought I'd-- we'd perhaps close out with asking you to reflect, uh, and comment on this astounding assertion by Elon, who has proven very visionary in so many areas.

I suppose the other side of that argument, if you abolish all source blacklists, is, you know, can some really horrible, I don't know what, like Mein Kampf, is that, you know, something like that, could that be a source of news?

Here, what we're talking about is the perennial sources list on Wikipedia.

So it's a page on Wikipedia that lists hundreds, actually, of media sources of various kinds.

And they... are color coded, the ones that are colored green can be used, the ones that are yellow or red or gray are either cautioned or strongly advised against or absolutely forbidden.

And there's a lot of stuff that basically is blacklisted that, in effect, anyway, is not really able to be used on Wikipedia.

So all I'm saying is get rid of that list.

The list is not helping their credibility at all in the processes at all.

And it's really important, isn't it? I think it's more important than most people realize.

I suppose the other side of that argument, if you abolish all source blacklists, is, you know, can some really horrible, I don't know what, like Mein Kampf, is that, you know, something like that, could that be a source of news?

Here, what we're talking about is the perennial sources list on Wikipedia.

So it's a page on Wikipedia that lists hundreds, actually, of media sources of various kinds.

And they... are color coded.

The ones that are colored green can be used.

The ones that are yellow or red or gray are either cautioned or strongly advised against or absolutely forbidden.

And there's a lot of stuff that basically is blacklisted, that in effect, anyway, is not really able to be used on Wikipedia.

I think that's probably by design.

But no matter how many times I went back and said, so does that mean that Constantine might be right? It still was saying, no, no, this is racist, this is bad, and so on.

Right.

So there do seem to be guardrails for those who care about what they call misinformation, right? But within those guardrails, they're actually, at least for now, and this might change in the future, I find that it's possible to use chatbots to explore a very wide range of views.

The thing that... need for, actually, is to train them on a lot more books and journal articles than are now represented.

I think that is something that...

I worry, I guess, in the sense that there's a lot of heretical information to be found in academic libraries, as anybody who has studied almost any topic in depth knows.

As soon as you get beneath the surface, then you realize that out beyond the edge of the things that you're encouraged to believe, the things that would be on Wikipedia, there's a lot of other stuff that...

So, Rockipedia or Wikipedia, or if they go with the journals, they're going to show a disproportionate amount from that view.

Certain men.

Yes, and also I think because the left has looked at Wikipedia as what it is, one of the most influential media properties in the world, institutions in the world, probably the single most influential one now, the left has viewed it as one of the institutions to march through.

Mm-hmm.

And I think they have done that.

I think they started doing that even when I was still there, right? And there's certain sorts of games they play.

It really helps that Wikipedia is, for the most part, anonymous.

So most of the people, even the people at the top with the most influence over editorial policy and decisions, as people are mostly

So do they have these kinds of online battles and wars where people are changing it and then someone changes it back and so on? So who wins? How do you stop that?

Why was that?

Originally, in the first three press releases that Jimmy put out, I was called co-founder by him.

And I was described that way in the first press reports.

And it was quite uncontroversial until 2005.

And I had just started making criticisms of Wikipedia.

And then for the first time, Jimmy Wales said, well, actually, the person who told me about Wikisoftware was this other employee.

And that he started leaving me out of the origin story at that point.

Which, what would those be?

What would you say to him?

I do not speak to him.

I would like to pick his brain about the things that I mentioned in...

the nine theses.

I would like to have a long conversation with him about them.

I mean, it's very easy for Wikipedians to dismiss some of the things that I have proposed there, but if you push on certain issues, it's really difficult to maintain, to resist my proposals.

Like the idea, just for example, to go back to the, Thesis 7, the idea that Wikipedia has been around for 25 years and still has no public feedback system at all, that's just weird.

I think that's probably by design.

Plus, get a free professional measure at Blinds.com. Rules and restrictions apply.

Who are the Power 62? Last September, I launched an effort to reform Wikipedia.

And the idea is that Wikipedia would simply be much better for the world if it simply made a few changes.

The Power 62 is a name that I gave of these...

Editorial leaders, so they'd be the members of the arbitration committee, which is like Wikipedia's Supreme Court.

The bureaucrats, that's so-called because they have the ability to name the administrators who have the ability to block accounts.

Mm-hmm.

Do you know who they are? But no.

Why was that?

Originally, in the first three press releases that Jimmy put out, I was called co-founder by him.

And I was described that way in the first press reports.

And it was quite uncontroversial until...

And I had just started making criticisms of Wikipedia.

And then for the first time, Jimmy Wales said, well, actually the person who told me about Wikisoftware was this other employee.

And that he started leaving me out of the origin story at that point.

But no matter how many times I went back and said, so does that mean that Constantine might be right? It still was saying, no, no, this is racist, this is bad, and so on.

Who, what was that process?

It's a good question.

Um, you can look at it from an organic point of view.

I can't tell you what was going on behind the scenes, if there were any, you know, puppet masters that were controlling the process.

I don't know.

What I can tell you is that over the years, conservatives, libertarians were just pushed out.

Um, they, in many cases...

Oh, and where can interested people find that?