'I was very nervous at first' - how the founder of Wikipedia learnt to embrace trust

Once spurned for being unreliable, the free, user-created encyclopedia Wikipedia is now a universally trusted source of factual information.

But when Jimmy Wales launched it more than two decades ago, he wasn't as trusting as he is today.

"I assumed we were going to have to lock things down or something like that. But actually, we found out trusting people does work… Trusting in human decency and the willingness of people to volunteer to do something that's useful really did pay off," he tells RNZ's Saturday Morning.

It was "pretty bold" to launch Wikipedia as a place where anyone could come and edit, and Wales admits he wasn't sure it would work.

"I thought, 'Oh, someone's going to come in the middle of the night and trash the work we've done in our little community."

Now, he's very proud that Wikipedia is a free service that promotes the "democratisation of knowledge" using only a very small amount of funding from major donors.

"The vast majority of money is just from individual people saying, 'Oh, you know what? I like Wikipedia. I use it all the time. I should chip in a little bit.

"That's important because it protects our intellectual independence. It keeps us accountable to those readers who are the ones funding the work. I think that does matter quite a lot."

When people ask Wales why Wikipedia is "always asking for money", rather than getting a big tech company like Google or Facebook to cover its costs, he invites them to think that through.

"Maybe that wouldn't be great for our intellectual independence. Maybe it's not a good idea to have a few billionaires funding it. That wouldn't raise trust. I would really be suspicious of it."

In his new book The Seven Rules of Trust, Wales makes a case for us counting on each other that is founded on authenticity, empathy and logic.

The divisive "rhetoric" of public figures like X founder Elon Musk doesn't reflect the fact that, in person, mostly, people find a way to get along.

"The people who disagree with us politically, probably, we can talk to them. Probably, we can come to understand their perspective. Probably we can see what they're facing and what that means to them."

Although some world leaders seem to go out of their way to try and undermine public trust in traditional information sources and our trust in each other, Wales believes "interpersonal trust" is still largely intact.

"A few people are jerks, of course, but person to person, I think we're still pretty solid.

"You meet a thousand people, and most of them are really, really nice and perfectly normal. There's a lot of pressures in life these days, but most people are still very decent and do care about other people for very good reasons."

The first rule of the seven rules of trust is the most important, Wales says, and that is 'be personal'.

"Trust is won and lost on a one-to-one basis."

All the time, all over the world, strangers trusting each other, he says.

"Every time you're you're driving on the street, you're trusting total strangers not to smash into you.