A seriously ill newborn and a desperate father searching for answers: Wikipedia’s unlikely origin story

Wikipedia celebrated its 25th anniversary this year. Purveyor of knowledge, of deep dives and rabbit holes, of 65 million entries in more than 300 languages and wonder of the early internet years, it long ago became part of the wallpaper: democratic, unashamedly uncool and kept honest by a global collective of geeks.

Its founder, Jimmy Wales, “the God-King” as his acolytes called him, has marked the milestone with a book about trust, a precious commodity in a fractured world. There is more that unites than divides us, he claims, and differences can be entertained with civility, good faith and the better angels of our nature. He also admits to being a “pathological optimist”.

We meet in the Information Age Gallery at London’s Science Museum, a temple to invention behind its pillared façade of pale stone. Here is a monumental early transmitter made of wood and enamelled copper wire used to broadcast messages to the empire. Here, too, is Charles Babbage’s 19th-century Analytical Engine, which Ada Lovelace, child of Lord Byron and a brilliant mathematician, realised was programmable – and was a forerunner of the digital computer. Wales tells me he named one of his daughters after her.

Pausing briefly at the first Apple personal computer, we are led through a series of passageways to a meeting room, its door appropriately labelled Alan Turing, after the wartime hero and code-breaker widely considered the father of modern computer science. We sit on hard plastic chairs in shafts of April sunshine. Trim and grey-bearded in a floral shirt, Wales will be 60 this year; he lives in the UK with his English wife and their two daughters.

Let’s start at the beginning, I say: tell me about the House of Learning. This was the tiny private school in Huntsville, Alabama, founded by his grandmother Erma, inspired by Montessori principles. The firstborn of his family, he went there a year early to accompany his mother, Doris, who taught kindergarten.

“It was a little white house with black shutters, quite pretty,” he says. “There were four kids in my year; it was a big shock when I got to secondary school and there were 40.” He doesn’t sound like he comes from Alabama. “I lost the accent early, but my wife says when I talk to my mom on the phone I sound like Bill Clinton: ‘When ya’ll coming over?’ ”

He read obsessively: “Encyclopaedias, Nancy Drew mysteries, the Hardy Boys, classic children’s novels.” At 16, he got a scholarship to grad school: “It was a disastrous first year, I was too young, tooled around listening to Mötley Crüe and lost the scholarship.”

He supported himself through the rest of that study by working at a plant nursery, majored in finance and married fellow student Pamela Green. He followed with a master’s and a PhD – “I was into the cult of academia” – and, when the shine wore off, joined a trading firm in Chicago. “I’d split with my wife, I had no life, so I’d just go home after work and program: foreign trade, very mathematical arbitrage.”

He built a male-oriented content portal and moved to San Diego (“the weather was better”). “We experimented with a load of different things; probably I was no good at business.” In 2000, along with doctoral student Larry Sanger, he launched Nupedia, a free online encyclopaedia written by academics and experts; every submission had to be peer-reviewed and progress was glacial.

Late that year, Wales’s second wife, Christine Rohan, gave birth to a daughter, Kira. The baby had breathed in contaminated amniotic fluid and was seriously ill; a brand-new treatment was offered but it carried risks. Wales scoured the internet for scraps of information and read scientific papers he didn’t understand. In the end, none the wiser, the parents gave the go-ahead for the operation and the baby survived.

Wales has said that Kira’s birth jump-started Wikipedia. The site launched less than a month later and these days, Wales has written, has “excellent articles” on a vast array of medical matters, including contaminated amniotic fluid, providing a starting point – “Far from the final word,” he cautioned – to such difficult subjects.

The English-language entries grew exponentially in the first six years: “One of the reasons for our success was that we had no money for staff,” Wales explains. “We had to figure out how to do it within the community; anyone was allowed to contribute.” Did people get shirty and have fierce arguments? He smiles: “They still do today.”

He made rules and appointed administrators, also unpaid, to settle disputes. “Everything had to be open, debatable and transparent; neutrality is important, people had to understand this is not an argument you can win.” In 2003, he set up the Wikimedia Foundation to employ staff to manage departments, raise funds from donations and support chapters around the world. But troops on the ground, working from bedsits and coffee shops and libraries, remained a merry band of volunteers (270,000 actively edit monthly).

Choice of language is much debated and some entries prompt a great deal of to and fro on talk pages before an edit is settled on. I had been reading a Wikipedia article on the Iran war, noting that “Iranian security forces massacred thousands of civilians”. What does Wales make of the choice of verb? He nods: “You’d hope that it had been thoroughly chewed on. One thing I’ve been harping on recently is the importance of attribution.” But the word has survived. “Maybe there were good sources, maybe it shouldn’t be there. Maybe it will be taken down.”

There are those who accuse Wikipedia of ideological bias, that it picks and chooses its sources. Wales sighs: “There was a report from a right-wing think tank claiming Wikipedia only takes from left-wing sources. Well, that’s if you think The Wall Street Journal is a left-wing rag. But we should always take accusations of bias in a calm way: ‘OK, let’s look, let’s chat.’ ”

Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger, who resigned in 2002, is a leading critic. “A view can be common outside of Western academia or green-lit media sources, but unless it’s documented enough by those [sources], then it’s persona non grata,” he told me.

Elon Musk claims that Wikipedia has been taken over by left-wing activists and called it “Wokepedia”. “OK, let’s look,” says Wales again, citing a 2022 documentary, What Is a Woman?, that is hostile to trans people. “The punchline of that film was the answer ‘an adult female’, which is what Wikipedia says. You’d have to be pretty biased to say that is ‘woke’.”

A self-confessed libertarian, Wales has been dubbed the last decent tech baron. Are all the others very right-wing? He shrugs: “Not all. I think with some of them it’s just embarrassing political pandering,” Wanting to be inside the camp? “Yeah. With Elon it’s just Elon, not clear where his broader ideology is.” But does MAGA generally have Wikipedia in its sights? “I actually feel that is fading already,” he muses. “Our response, anyway, has always been to stick to our knitting. Is that an English expression?” I don’t know, I say, but I like it.

A core rule of Wikipedia is empathy, he says, and no personal attacks. “We have a policy on biography of living people: if there is something negative about someone, it needs a really good source. If not, take it down.”

That doesn’t happen on social media. “Well, there are some steps in the right direction. X now has a community which can respond to something that is factually incorrect. That gives the community some power – not just to yell back at the person. Having a process that if you post misinformation it ends up being proved incorrect backed up by a source, that’s going to be embarrassing. It’s a bit of an incentive not to just spout off random claims.”

Does he approve of Australia’s ban on social media platforms for children under 16? “I do not,” he says. “My biggest objection is that it’s not really working. I’d like to see governments promote child controls on phones; Apple and Google both have excellent tools.”

Wales has been interested in new research emerging from surveys of people with ideological and extreme views. “The researchers got them together to discuss these views with AI and the surveys showed they had become more moderate because they could see the other side. People are much more nuanced than they appear. I do think AI can be helpful; the world has got quite punchy and we need all the talking we can get.”

Is Wikipedia threatened by AI? “It’s moving very fast but, at least today, the ability of large language models [AI] to write a Wikipedia entry is just not there.” So they do try? “Yeah, but they’re terrible at it, they just make stuff up. One of our German editors asked ChatGPT to recommend some books and -because he’s a nerd he decided to check the ISBN numbers [an international identification code for books] against the database and they were wrong, the books didn’t exist, but the recommendations were perfectly plausible.” So it wasn’t deliberate misinformation? “No, and if you call it out, it will apologise.”

Wales is married to Kate Garvey, a former aide to the then-UK PM Tony Blair, who works for a well-known PR firm. “I always ask every AI: ‘Who is Kate Garvey?’ She is not famous but known a bit, a perfect category for AI. One said she had started a nonprofit to promote women’s empowerment in the workplace; that sounds like Kate but it’s not true. It said she started it with the wife of [former deputy UK PM] Nick Clegg, who I know from his work at Meta and our kids go to the same school. So it was very plausible and when I showed it to Kate she said, ‘That could have happened.’ ”

He shrugs: “But at the same time, it is an amazing technology and will only get better.” After the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated at a political rally in September last year, there was lengthy debate among Wiki editors about the entry. “We did a very good job there,” says Wales. “The debate was civil and reasonable even on the right, which usually slam us for everything. I could read 30 pages of discussion on something like this but a neutral summary – here’s what’s going on – is great; we didn’t have that technology five years ago.”

He is thinking about embedding a simple AI tool into Wikipedia: “For example, you could ask the tool,  ‘Why did Wikipedia editors decide to call this party ‘far right’? Please tell me about the debates that led to this decision.’ ”

So, has AI drawn users away from Wikipedia? “We are seeing some drop in human traffic – not all traffic, because the bots are hammering us – it’s hard to distinguish, but the best guess is an 8 per cent drop. This is mostly very light-touch traffic – ‘How old is Tom Cruise?’ – the AI summary is at the top, so there’s no need to click through. People still come for a deep dive, to explore. And the way Wiki functions is we are a bunch of nerds who like writing an encyclopaedia, and we’ll carry on whether people read it or not.”

Caddie Brain is one of those nerds; a former ABC journalist from Sydney, sent to report in the Northern Territory, who was shocked by the lack of information about its history, peoples and species. Years later, she returned with a grant to study the territory and set up a WikiCon (an editors’ convention): “We are a disparate group of history buffs; we get together to write pages, but it is really challenging as there is often so little to go on.” They visited towns and communities to glean stories for online WikiTours guides. “But people were often frustrated because they were the history, so to speak, yet it was difficult to write pages without references and sources.”

Now working as a storyteller and curator, one of Brain’s triumphs was to get a young Indigenous woman, Cissy McLeod, her own Wikipedia entry. In 1912, Cissy, reportedly 13 at the time, had saved her adoptive mother from drowning and was awarded a bronze medal from The Royal Humane Society, the first Indigenous woman in Australia to do so. “The page was flagged for deletion,” recalls Brain. “It was like, ‘Darwin was just a small outpost then, so who cares really?’ We got into some editing wars, but the page survived. It’s a consent-based process and with enough support, you’ll get it over the line eventually.”

Dubbed the last best place on the internet, can  Wikipedia itself survive? Jimmy Wales says he is thinking about the next 25 years: “How will people be accessing information; will they want a different model?”

Meanwhile, he is travelling to promote his new book, The Seven Rules of Trust. “I get to talk to lots of people; it’s very common that I meet heads of state; they are interested in Wikipedia.” He is off to Sydney soon. “I don’t know it well, but I’ll have three days there before I speak.” He should ask foodie friends for tips on some of the many wonderful restaurants. “Yes, I need to get on to that. I do most of the cooking at home and I love it, that’s what I do in the countryside – the kitchen is big enough, so I have room to make a mess.”

His life in London involves much socialising and networking: “I met John le Carré before he died and he told me he didn’t live in London because there were too many dinner parties. I agree. That’s why I like to get to the country.” Did he inherit his wife’s social circle? “I did, I married into the Labour Party. People ask, have I met Keir Starmer? I say, ‘Of course I have.’ ” Does the circle include what used to be called the Chipping Norton set – people such as former PM David Cameron, Murdoch media executive Rebekah Brooks and Elisabeth Murdoch? He smiles, “My house is in the Cotswolds but not near them.”

There is a knock on the door and Will, the very helpful minder from the museum, indicates it’s time to wrap up. We stretch our limbs and walk out into the sunshine. Wales says his wife is currently in Australia, so he plans to bring his daughters to the museum on Sunday. They are 12 and 15 – ideal ages for the Information Age Gallery, we agree.

Jimmy Wales appears at Brisbane Writers Festival (May 19), The Capitol in Melbourne presented by The Wheeler Centre (May 20) and at Sydney Writers’ Festival (May 21 and 24).

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