Jimmy Wales (Photography by Tom Pilston)
11 min read
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales warns that a ‘political showdown’ with the Labour government he backed at the last election may now be necessary to protect a free and open internet
Jimmy Wales is a Labour supporter. He married into the party when he tied the knot in 2012 with Kate Garvey, who was Tony Blair’s diary gatekeeper in No 10 for a decade. He knows Keir Starmer and Peter Kyle personally, and likes them. Yet he is now threatening a “political showdown” with the government.
The Online Safety Act, legislation passed under the Conservatives and enthusiastically taken up by Labour, aims to protect internet users by boosting the transparency from major platforms and the control of people over what kind of content they see.
The most significant restrictions will apply to Category 1 services – those with over seven million average monthly active users and the provision for them to share their content with each other, both of which Wikipedia has. These rules include introducing the ability of users to filter out non-verified users.
On social media, if a user blocks another, they no longer see their content. Simple. But applied to Wikipedia, a free online encyclopaedia that relies on collaborative editing, it looks a lot more complicated.
“This makes no sense whatsoever,” says Wales. “If you and I are in a debate about the contents of an article, and we’ve both been editing it, and I decide to stop you from doing any further editing on the article, I can just block you. You wouldn’t even be allowed to read the article. This is crazy.”
“It’s really very poorly thought-out legislation. It feels like it was passed because they felt like they needed to do something, and this was something,” he adds.
“The problem it’s trying to solve of people in social media harassing you – well, this is not a problem in Wikipedia. You can’t harass people on Wikipedia. You get banned immediately. And so that whole framework applied to Wikipedia is just nonsense, and yet Ofcom don’t seem to be able to find a way to see their way around that.”
Ofcom, the regulator responsible for implementing the legislation, has not yet determined that Wikipedia is Category 1. This was a key reason that the legal challenge brought by the Wikimedia Foundation (the charity founded by Wales which hosts Wikipedia) failed over the summer: the judge said it was “premature” to rule on the proportionality of the regime before it had been enacted.
“Politically, what are they going to do? They could block Wikipedia. Good luck with that”
But what if those rules do apply to Wikipedia, as the wording of the act currently suggests it should?
“We’re in talks with Ofcom, but we will not be identifying users under any circumstances. We will not be age-gating Wikipedia under any circumstances. So, if it comes to that, it’s going to be an interesting showdown, because we’re going to just refuse to do it. Politically, what are they going to do? They could block Wikipedia. Good luck with that,” says Wales.
“We didn’t cave into the Turkish government; we didn’t cave into the Chinese government. We have users we know of who are editing in Iran. We have users who are editing in Russia. Their personal safety depends on their privacy. And we think it’s a human rights issue that we’re not going to identify those people.”
This “poorly drafted legislation”, he warns, could lead to “a ridiculous political showdown”.
Wales suspects, and hopes, it will not come to that. But the government declined to write an exception into the law and, as things stand, it would seem that Wikipedia could only avoid Category 1 if it cut the number of UK people who can access it by about three-quarters, or radically change the functionality of the site.
This must be a shock for the 59-year-old Internet entrepreneur. Originally from Alabama, he has lived in London for over a decade and these days runs in the same circles as the Prime Minister. While Labour was in opposition, The House was told Wales had been invited to join an informal digital advisory board and had accepted. He confirms that but says: “I never heard from them again.”
How does he now feel about having backed Labour at the election? “I’m not a single-issue voter. Maybe I should be.” He did not agree with the entire Labour manifesto but was “fed up” with the Tories: “That picture of the Queen alone at her husband’s funeral and then finding out the night before they had a party in Downing Street, I was like, ‘That’s it. I’ve lost trust.’”
Wales has now penned a book about that exact subject. The Seven Rules of Trust explores the founding of Wikipedia, from the personal reasons for its creation to the philosophical underpinning as shared by businesses like Airbnb. It reads a bit like a self-help book – sometimes for the reader, at other times for society.
Compared to the era of Barack Obama versus John McCain, when “sensible” people reigned and Wales was “quite proud of the US”, he is depressed – as you would expect from this centrist dad – by the current political climate. “We’ve gotten to quite a bad place,” he concludes.
His stated mission has been to educate governments, policymakers, about the importance of a free and open internet. Does he see that as a failed one in the UK?
“When we see Graham Linehan arrested at the airport by a bunch of armed officers for tweets he made,” he replies, referring to the Irish comedy writer whose arrest over social media posts about trans people led to the Metropolitan police ending non-crime hate investigations, “that’s pretty symbolic to a lot of people that freedom of expression is seriously under assault in the UK.”
He points also to the case of Lucy Connolly, who was jailed for inciting racial hatred in the wake of the terrible Southport attack last year: “The tweet was horrible and bad, but I don’t think there’s any reasonable way to interpret it as anything other than an inflammatory remark on Twitter. It wasn’t a direct threat of violence.”
At the suggestion he sounds somewhat like Elon Musk here, Wales hits back: “Elon Musk, though, is all over the map on this issue. He has also called for journalists from 60 Minutes to be in jail. His free speech credentials are very, very thin, so I don’t want to be lumped in with that.”
Asked if there any limits to the internet he would support, Wales draws the line only at activity that is already illegal, such as revenge porn (“That’s not freedom of expression, that’s abuse”) and direct threats of violence.
Wikipedia was hit in 2019 by a DDoS (distributed denial of service) cyber-attack, which overwhelmed the website and brought it down temporarily in several countries including the UK.
Wales does not know much about that or any potential recent increase in malicious activity – he has stopped working on the tech end – but confirms that web crawlers are a live problem. “The number of bots crawling Wikipedia, and pace at which they’re crawling Wikipedia, has dramatically increased,” he says.
A million people looking at the same page when a big event happens is no problem, but when a million pages that are not usually looked at are being crawled, it becomes expensive: “We can’t cache all of Wikipedia.” It’s the difference between the behaviour patterns of humans and those of bots. (He encourages crawlers to use Wikipedia’s own tools for developers instead.)
ChatGPT this year surpassed Wikipedia in monthly visits. Wales is confident, however, that Wikipedia can survive the age of artificial intelligence.
“The hallucination problem is still really bad,” says Wales, who finds large language models most useful for brainstorming. He regularly tests ChatGPT by asking it, “who is Kate Garvey?”, his wife, and gets answers that are “always wrong, always amusing, and always plausible”.
It once claimed Garvey had set up a nonprofit to promote women’s empowerment in the workplace, with Miriam González Durántez, Nick Clegg’s wife. This is perfectly credible and on-brand: the two couples know each other “from the school gates” and from Clegg’s Facebook work; and Garvey runs an agency that promotes the UN’s sustainable development goals. But it was not true.
He also asks to whom she is married. One answer was James Purnell, the Brown era Cabinet minister, who she did actually live with “back in the day”; another was Lord Mandelson. “I said, ‘Isn’t Peter Mandelson quite famously gay?’, And it got very woke with me, and said, ‘Oh, it’s not appropriate to speculate about people’s personal sex lives, and gay people can get married in the UK’,” he laughs.
(When The House performed the same experiment, ChatGPT answered that Garvey was married to former Conservative minister Rory Stewart. “The couple are well connected across politics, media, and humanitarian circles,” it asserted confidently.)
Wales is a strong advocate of VPNs – virtual private networks, which he says everyone should use for their own online safety – and says he would “never use an AI based in China and trust that the data is safe at all”.
He is wary, in fact, of all cloud-based services and concerned by Meta’s plans to use information from users’ chats with AI bots embedded in its platforms to personalise ads. “I thought, ‘Wow, that’s really quite a thing, because a lot of people do talk about very personal things with AI, and they probably shouldn’t’.”
The Wikipedia co-founder’s tech prediction is that over the next few years it will become common for the ordinary laptop to run a “decent local AI model”, as he already does.
“I could only wish my political opinions had some sway in Wikipedia. They don’t”
It is not just the Online Safety Act and AI that proposes to radically change the course of Wikipedia’s future, though. Larry Sanger, the other co-founder of Wikipedia who has been very critical of the project since leaving it a year after its launch, has proposed a set of fundamental reforms. (He explored some in an interview with conservative political commentator Tucker Carlson, whom Wales “can’t bear”.)
One of his accusations is that the site has a left-wing bias, which should partly be addressed by scrapping its sources blacklist.
“First of all, the idea that I’m left-wing is a mistake. I’m not. I’m very, very centrist,” says Wales, who recalls that when he first moved to the UK he found it “hard not to be a Tory” under the Cameron government. “I could only wish my political opinions had some sway in Wikipedia. They don’t.”
He rejects the demand to drop the blacklist, saying “the idea that we should take sites that routinely publish crazy conspiracy theories and nonsense just doesn’t make any sense”. While Breitbart News and American conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation are blacklisted, mainstream UK publications The Sun, The Daily Star and The Daily Mail are among Wikipedia’s “deprecated” sources.
“Deprecated doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to use it. It just means you should prefer a better source if you can find one. And I 100 per cent stand by that. That’s not about the political stance of the Daily Mail – it’s about the quality of the publication. They defend by saying they rarely lose a libel case. I’m like, that’s not good enough,” Wales says.
“My suggestion to any serious, thoughtful conservative billionaires is they should be funding some seriously intellectual right-wing sources.”
How about letting the public rate articles? That “doesn’t sound like a completely terrible idea”, he says, but adds that such systems are usually gameable and do not produce useful results.
Sanger’s suggestion of a Community Note-style system, as on Musk’s X, is dismissed on the basis that is what Wikipedia already is. (Wales likes Community Notes and reveals he spends most of his time on X doing them.) “Another thing he said is that we should do away with consensus as the standard. I just think that’s completely mad,” Wales adds.
The most pointed critique, perhaps, relates to the anonymity of administrators who govern Wikipedia. Sanger claims that 85 per cent of the most powerful accounts are anonymous and they can “libel people with impunity” in the US, as legal protections there often shield the Wikimedia Foundation from liability for user-generated content.
“I think it would be very, very dangerous for some administrators to be publicly identified, and I think they would quit,” replies Wales. “That’s particularly true when we see a rise in political violence on all sides.”
Wales has started his own social networking service, Trust Café, but it is small, and they are still working on the software. His distaste for Musk is clear, but does he ever look at the tech billionaires and think, ‘why am I running a nonprofit’?
“No, I don’t!” Wales replies. “I’m not poor, I mean, I live in Kensington.” As an afterthought, he asks: “How many bankers in London make far more money than I ever will, and how boring must their lives be compared to mine?”