NATIONAL BESTSELLER From the founder of Wikipedia, a sweeping reflection on the global crisis of credibility and knowledge, revealing the rules of trust that transformed Wikipedia from a scrappy experiment into a global utility used by billions of people and how those rules can help others build things that last

An important book . . . both hopeful and practical. Yuval Noah Harari, bestselling author of Sapiens and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

From the beginning, people predicted Wikipedia s demise. Instead, this global experiment in sharing knowledge and expertise online has become part of the fabric of modern, connected life. Today, every month, people view Wikipedia 11 billion times just in the English language. The Internet s encyclopedia has become a global utility, like water or electricity, and we rarely pause to consider the extraordinary fact of its existence.

Long before it became the biggest collection of knowledge in the history of the world, Wikipedia had to overcome its greatest challenge: getting strangers on the Internet to trust each other. They had to trust that others would not be abusive or uncivil. They had to trust that others would not unfairly change or erase their contributions. They had to trust that people had good intentions.

Trust, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales says, is a treasure. But it is not inanimate, like gold or gems. Trust is a living thing that can and must be cultivated. This book will show you how. And it will reveal how his organization, this one-time punchline, has become a global authority in the same two decades when the public s trust in everything else, from government to social media, has trended backwards.

Every community on earth depends on trust; it underpins our capacity to know things, and it is at an all-time low. Inspiring, approachable, and packed with candid lessons from the early days of Wikipedia, The Seven Rules of Trust is a guide to kickstarting a positive loop of accountability and creativity and to building things that stand the test of time.

Autorentext

Jimmy Wales is an internet entrepreneur who is best known as the founder of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation. Named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People, he was also acknowledged by the World Economic Forum as one of the top 250 leaders across the world for his professional accomplishments, his commitment to society, and his potential to contribute to shaping the future of the world. Born in Huntsville, Alabama, he lives with his family in London.

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the founder of Wikipedia, a sweeping reflection on the global crisis of credibility and knowledge, revealing “the rules of trust” that transformed Wikipedia from a scrappy experiment into a global utility used by billions of people—and how those rules can help others build things that last

“An important book . . . both hopeful and practical.”—Yuval Noah Harari, bestselling author of Sapiens and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

From the beginning, people predicted Wikipedia’s demise. Instead, this global experiment in sharing knowledge and expertise online has become part of the fabric of modern, connected life. Today, every month, people view Wikipedia 11 billion times—just in the English language. The Internet’s encyclopedia has become a global utility, like water or electricity, and we rarely pause to consider the extraordinary fact of its existence.

Long before it became the biggest collection of knowledge in the history of the world, Wikipedia had to overcome its greatest challenge: getting strangers on the Internet to trust each other. They had to trust that others would not be abusive or uncivil. They had to trust that others would not unfairly change or erase their contributions. They had to trust that people had good intentions.

Trust, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales says, is a treasure. But it is not inanimate, like gold or gems. Trust is a living thing that can and must be cultivated. This book will show you how. And it will reveal how his organization, this one-time punchline, has become a global authority—in the same two decades when the public’s trust in everything else, from government to social media, has trended backwards.

Every community on earth depends on trust; it underpins our capacity to know things, and it is at an all-time low. Inspiring, approachable, and packed with candid lessons from the early days of Wikipedia, The Seven Rules of Trust is a guide to kickstarting a positive loop of accountability and creativity—and to building things that stand the test of time.

Leseprobe
Chapter one

Make It Personal

Rule #1

Trust is won and lost person-to-person. Always think of trust in these personal terms, no matter what scale you’re working at.

I want to begin by asking a simple question: How exactly do we decide to trust? Or to withhold trust? We’ve all made these decisions countless times. But for most of us, most of the time, they aren’t conscious, calculated decisions. They mostly just feel right. So we may go our whole lives without ever really thinking about how we decide to trust others, or not to.

Let’s do that now.

We’ve already seen an example of people making a decision about whether to trust others. It came in the introduction, when I talked about the birth of my daughter, Kira. And I assure you, that decision was not easy. Kira’s mother and I knew her life was in danger due to something called “meconium aspiration syndrome.” We knew that the traditional treatment was only to support the baby and hope for the best. And we knew that a local doctor in San Diego had invented a new treatment in which the baby’s blood was routed through a machine and oxygenated while a special protein fluid was used to flush out the baby’s tiny lungs. But beyond that? We knew almost nothing.

Most importantly, we didn’t know how likely it was that the treatment would work. Or what its risks were. No one did. The treatment option had not been validated by rigorous scientific testing. The doctor who had invented the treatment was in the midst of running a double-blind experiment, which meant that, to be precise, Kira wasn’t offered the treatment. She was offered the chance to be a test subject in the experiment. If we agreed, a random selection would determine whether Kira got the new treatment or the traditional treatment.

The doctor who invented this new treatment was named Graham Bernstein. We met and spoke. We had never met this man before, or even heard of him. Now we were being asked to almost literally place our baby daughter in his hands. For an experiment.

We said yes. The random selection assigned Kira the treatment. And the treatment worked.

But why did we say yes? How did we decide to trust Dr. Bernstein?

The triangle of trust: authenticity, empathy, logic

Trust is critical to everything we do. Academics hailing from various fields—sociology, psychology, economics, business—have spent their careers studying it, developing different theories and models for how it works.

One framework in particular for thinking about trust decisions really resonates with me and with my experience. And I find it useful and insightful. It’s also simple. Incredibly simple. Here it is:

This version of the framework comes from the work of Frances Frei, a professor at the Harvard Business School. “Every single time trust exists, these three things are there,” Frei told me when we spoke in 2024. “And every single time it’s broken, I can trace it back to one of these three.”

Academics being academics, there is debate about which labels are best to …