After watching this I kind of disagree. Wales said he didn’t care multiple times. Calling it the “dumbest question” is childish, yes. Walking out of an interview that was going nowhere is not childish.

I personally think writing Sanger out of Wikipedia history (as in this 25 year celebration montage thing) is quite lame. But I also think pressing Wales on this when he says “you can say whatever you want” is also quite lame. No one is obligated to sit with an interviewer while the interviewer tries to pick a fight.

Wales actually covers this at length in his book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Rules_of_Trust

He himself admits it's a complicated situation, and argues both his own and Sanger's position.

Combined with the context provided by all the parent comments here, it's quite difficult to argue good faith given the interview was also specifically on the book tour. There are many different and actually productive ways the interview could have talked about the conflict between Wales and Sanger.

> Not surprising! Are we setting aside how deceitful his answer his? Claiming all credit for a collaborative accomplishment -- which he does by adopting the "founder" title -- would rightfully provoke "poking" by interviewers.

I went down the rabbit hole on this a while back and came away with the impression that it's complicated. And whether or not Wales is being deceitful hinges on pedantic arguments and mincing of words. Should Wales be referred to as "a founder", "co-founder", or "one of the founders"? It's not as if he's titling himself "sole founder". And Sanger is still list on his Wiki page and the Wikipedia pages as a Founder.

It should also be noted that Sanger was hired by Wales to manage Nupedia, and that Wikipedia was created as a side-project of Nupedia for the purpose to generating content for Nupedia. Does the fact that Sanger was an employee of Wales, and that Wikipedia only exists because Sanger was tasked with generating content for Nupedia impact his status as a founder? Would Sanger or Wales have gone on to create a wiki without the other?

Can Steve Jobs claim to be the creator of the iPhone since he was CEO at the time it was created at Apple?

At the end of the day Sanger was present at the ground breaking of Wikipedia but was laid off and stopped participating in the project entirely after a year. He didn't spend 25 years fostering and growing the foundation. He did however try to sabotage or subvert the project 5 years later when it was clear that it was a success. Interestingly he tried to fork it to a project that had strong editorial oversight from experts like Nupedia which flies in the face of the ethos of Wikipedia.

yes, but question can be done in different ways. and tilo jung always at least, not cared, if his questions are offensive... or trying to up the interviewed person

a group of people seems to think, that journalists should trip up people, like in interrogations, instead of being hard in the topic but nice in the tone.

For the last part I agree with you, the LLMs tend to say what you like to hear. The echo chamber problem also exists, pushing them to say pros and cons is not perfect, but helps to make an opinion (and also "unaligned" models).

Facts are very skewed by the environment: in the case you push too much in one direction that is too controversial or because the politicians disagree too much with you; there can be plenty of negative consequences:

- your website gets blocked, or you get publicly under pressure, or you lose donations, you lose grants, your payment providers blocks you, you lose audience, you can get a fine, you can go to jail, etc.

Many different options.

There is asymmetry here:

    We disagree, you have one opinion, what happens if both of us fight for 10 months, 24/7 debating "what is the truth ?" on that topic.

    - You have that energy and time (because it's your own page, or your mission where you are paid by your company, or because this topic is personally important to you, etc)

    - I don't have time or that topic is not *that* important for me.

    - Consequence: Your truth is going to win.

The tricky part: there are also truths that cannot be sourced properly, but are still facts (ex: famous SV men still offering founders today investment against sex). Add on top of that, legal concerns, and it becomes a very difficult environment to navigate. Even further, it's always doable to find or fabricate facts, and the truth wins based on the amount of energy, power and money that the person has.

> It is tedious because you must edit with facts, not ideology.

Not just because you must edit with facts. If your opposition outnumbers you and/or they have more energy to spend than you, they can grind you down with bad-faith arguments and questions for clarification.

The way this goes is that they edit an article to insert their POV. You edit/revert it. They open a talk page discussion about the subject. Suppose their edit is "marine animals are generally considered cute throughout the world" with a reference to a paper by an organization in favor of seals. You revert it by saying this is NPOV. They open a talk page question asking where the organization has been declared to be partisan. Suppose you do research and find some such third-party statement that "the Foundation for Animal Aesthetics is organized by proponents of marine animals". Then they ask how this third party is accurate, or whether "organized by proponents" necessarily implies that they're biased.

This can go on more or less forever until someone gives up. The attack even has a name on Wikipedia itself: "civil POV pushing". It works because few Wikipedia admins are subject matter experts, so they police behavior (conduct) more than they police subject accuracy.

Civil POV pushers can thus keep their surface conduct unobjectionable while waiting for the one they are actioning against to either give up or to get angry enough to make a heated moment's conduct violation. It's essentially the wiki version of sealioning.

In short, a thousand "but is really two plus two equal to four?" will overcome a single "You bastard, it is four and you're deliberately trolling me", because the latter is a personal insult.

The LLMs I use all supply references.

LLMs have their issues too.

In everyday life, you cannot read 20 books about a topic about everything you are curious about, but you can ask 5 subject-experts (“the LLMs”) in 20 seconds

some of them who are going to check on some news websites (most are also biased)

Then you can ask for summaries of pros and cons, and make your own opinions.

Are they hallucinating ? Could be. Are they lying ? Could be. Have they been trained on what their masters said to say ? Could be.

But multiplying the amount of LLMs reduce the risk.

For example, if you ask DeepSeek, Gemini, Grok, Claude, GLM-4.7 or some models that have no guardrails, what they think about XXX, then perhaps there are interesting insights.

LLMs disclose sources now.