Transcript
Dean Russell MP: Thank you, Mr Wales, for allowing me to ask you some questions. You mentioned briefly politicians and a very high-profile one. I am interested in your views on reputational harm. One of the things that has been interesting when chatting to colleagues in the past few days and talking about Wikipedia is how many MPs have said, “Oh yeah, on Wikipedia there was this entry about me that wasn’t true”, or, “There’s that entry”. I had quite an interesting one where one of my colleagues had been reached out to by a university to invite him to its alumni event, and it turned out it was because on Wikipedia it said he went to that university, and he had never attended. The weight and importance of Wikipedia in people’s minds is that accuracy is paramount. What is your take on how that impacts people’s views when they assume it is going to be correct and it is incorrect? I appreciate there are moderators, but I must admit in my own instance I have not touched my Wikipedia page because I am scared stiff that as soon as I edit it myself, even though I should be the expert on me, and even though I would put accurate information on it, it is instantly going to attract loads of people to put fake stuff on that I will not know is there unless I check it. I am interested in your take on that. How do you ensure accuracy, and how do you ensure that people can correct misinformation?
Jimmy Wales: First, I applaud you for your wisdom. Getting involved in your own Wikipedia page is seldom a fun thing to have done. We have several different mechanisms whereby people can raise issues. The most straightforward is the talk page of the entry. People can come and say, “You’ve missed this source. You’ve missed this or that”. This is one of the areas where we think anonymity is quite important. If you come to Wikipedia and go to the talk page and sign Dean Russell MP, “You’ve left out this bit about me”, that will be kind of awkward when—I do not want to keep picking on the Mail—a tabloid newspaper notices it and rakes you over the coals for harassing Wikipedia, which of course you would not have been doing. You can just say, “I’m an interested citizen. Here’s a source. You might have missed this fact”, or “I don’t think this person went to that university”, and so forth. In other cases, the right thing to do is to email. If you email us, it is handled by a group of selected editors, all volunteers still, who are trusted members of the community. They look into issues for people to say, “Oh yes, there’s this problem or that problem”. They will, hopefully, direct and help you in some way. I am not sure that process always works to everyone’s satisfaction, because sometimes the problem is that there is a scandal in your past, and it is part of history; you do not like it, and that is tough. I do not know anything about you, so I am not talking about you.
Dean Russell MP: There genuinely is not.
Jimmy Wales: You get the perspective.
Dean Russell MP: Yes.
Jimmy Wales: It is a complex matter, but as a matter of moral principle it is really important that Wikipedia be responsive to concerns by subjects. Many years ago, in 2006, at a conference at Harvard, one of my last royal proclamations before I became a figurehead, when I could make rules directly, was that we have a biography of living person policy. It says that, if anything negative about a person in Wikipedia is unsourced or poorly sourced, it should be removed immediately, and then have a discussion on the talk page. The idea is, whether it is right or wrong, if it is negative and does not have a source, it should be pulled out immediately. There are clear exceptions in our rules, so that even the subject of the entry has the right to do that. We should not expect random people who have a Wikipedia entry to understand the intricacies of the Wikipedia discourse process.
Dean Russell MP: May I broaden it out a bit? It is fascinating that you say that. What is interesting is something we have talked about before, and that is immediacy. One aspect that has come up repeatedly is the risk in the Bill that the initial harm done by not taking content down immediately is not solved by the Bill because it is going to take a few weeks or months for Ofcom to look at it, but actually the damage is already done. I was interested in whether you think that your approach is against the grain of other platforms. I have not heard of that particular approach from others.
Jimmy Wales: It is interesting because we can think about this, and we should think about it, not as one-size-fits-all problems of harm. If Wikipedia says you went to that university and you did not, it is not a major, major harm. It is an error that should be fixed, and if it takes a little while that is probably not a great big deal to anyone. In other cases, if we are talking about non-consensual pornography and someone sees something about themselves on a major porn site— typically, a video that a boyfriend posted without permission—they need a really fast response. A process whereby they can report it to Ofcom that can then launch an investigation sounds quite slow to me. I would propose an alternative in that particular case, because the harm is so extreme and so clear. First, as I think one of your witnesses said, if there are enhanced penalties for lying about having permission, that is a piece of it, but it does not solve it immediately. It could be a notice and takedown type of procedure, to say, “Look, if you receive a notification you must take it down within a short period”. There is a possibility then that someone could say, “No, actually we’re a major porn company and we have signed releases with whatever”. That is a whole other story. That is the way the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the US treats copyright notifications. That process works reasonably well. It allows the balance between copyright holders to be able to complain to say, “Look, this is pirated content. Take it down”, and the platforms either have a duty to take it down or to stand behind it, in which case they may become liable. Those kinds of processes can make a lot of sense if we are talking about specific harms.
Dean Russell MP: I would be really interested to get some sort of outline of the process that you use for that immediacy of content. I imagine you have literally millions of pages of content, and I wonder whether you would be open to providing that. The other question I have, which connects very deeply to this, is about who owns one’s identity online. Even in the relatively light situation of an incorrect university profile, is there a burden of responsibility on platforms, Wikipedia being one, but definitely social media platforms, that, if somebody posts something about you online, you should then be notified that that content is there? I know it is very complicated, but, ultimately, in the instance of, say, a Wikipedia profile, should not the person whose profile has been edited be notified, rather than that person having to go to Wikipedia to see what has changed, or is that already there? More broadly within platforms, for example, if somebody has something put online that has their name and details on, should they not be aware that has happened?
Jimmy Wales: Let me take that in smaller pieces.
Dean Russell: Sorry, I know it was a long question.
Jimmy Wales: At Wikipedia, if you log in and sign up for an account, you have a watch list. You can watch list any article, and you can subscribe to changes so you would be emailed every time it is changed. That exists for everyone for anything that you are interested in. A lot of our active editors use that functionality to keep an eye on their particular pet topic, Elizabethan poetry or something like that. On the broader question, I think it is very difficult because the number of platforms and places where people might be discussing you is near infinite. Dean Russell is not a particularly unusual name, so if you said to Facebook, “I would like to know any time anyone mentions me, ever”, it is going to have a really hard time complying with that without just burying you in a lot of “Dean Russell from Alabama has gone to the park”.
Dean Russell MP: There is a Dean Russell in Alabama.
Jimmy Wales: I am sure there is. It seems quite difficult for them to do that. In my case, I occasionally, slightly embarrassedly, search my name in Twitter. It is usually fine—people like Wikipedia and so on—but sometimes I find things that are disgusting and alarming. I do not think it would be very easy to mandate that, even for major platforms.
Dean Russell: Thank you.
