Thinkers & Ideas The Seven Rules of Trust with Jimmy Wales
Dec 16, 2025
Join Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and author of The Seven Rules of Trust, as he shares insights from two decades of building one of the world’s most trusted platforms. He discusses how scaling interpersonal trust is essential for collaboration and addresses whether Wikipedia could thrive today amid online toxicity. Wales emphasizes the importance of assuming good faith and how organizations can reclaim lost trust. He also examines AI's impact on trust, advocating for transparency and human oversight while remaining optimistic about society's ability to rebuild trust.
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Trust Is Personal First
- Trust is a personal judgment that lives in each individual's mind and must be treated as such when building institutions.
- Translating interpersonal trust into organizational systems requires focusing on individual stories and emotions, not only statistics.
Airbnb's Trust Wake-Up Call
- Airbnb learned that rare catastrophic events destroy trust more than statistics suggest when a host's apartment was wrecked and the company responded poorly.
- The emotional story forced Airbnb to rethink trust rather than rely on low-probability math.
Assume Good Faith — With Guardrails
- Favor environments that assume good faith to let collaborative decisions and goodwill propagate across the organization.
- Pair that cultural stance with transparency and accountability to reduce vulnerability to bad actors.