If you’ve read Living in Information, you’ll know I think highly of Wikipedia. It’s a very valuable artifact; a convenient agglomera

Jimmy Wales on Constraints for Bad Behavior

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2021-09-13 13:00:15

If you’ve read Living in Information, you’ll know I think highly of Wikipedia. It’s a very valuable artifact; a convenient agglomeration of the world’s key knowledge. But it’s more than that: Wikipedia is also where that artifact is created — a place, a culture, a system that produces ongoing value for everyone, for free.

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales is one of the people most responsible for establishing and stewarding that place. In a lengthy interview (audio, transcript) with Tim Ferriss, Wales discusses Wikipedia’s history, the values that make it work, and how it’s different from other social networks.

The entire conversation is worth your attention, but I was particularly taken by the discussion of how to regulate bad behavior. What should users be allowed/forbidden to do? What guardrails should the system have to prevent bad things from happening?

I have this analogy, I call it the Steak Knives Analogy, which is, imagine you’re designing a restaurant and you think, “Okay, in my restaurant, I’m going to serve steak because I like steak and I’m going to give everybody steak knives. And one thing we know about people with knives is they might stab each other. So therefore, I’m going to build a cage around every table so that no one can stab each other. And yeah, when you hear this, you laugh because you’re like, “Oh, that’s hilarious.”

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