The inner workings of Wikipedia (Interview)
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
1hr 48min Nov 26, 2025
Let’s hear how Wikipedia actually works from long-time Wikipedian, Bill Beutler! Bill has been heavily involved with this “8th wonder of the modern world” for two decades and even built a career on it, founding Beutler Ink –a digital agency known for its pioneering work in Wikipedia public relations.
We discuss: the official (and not so official) rules, the editor cabal (which isn’t one), the business model (which really isn’t one), how an edit sticks (or not), how AI chatbots threaten the future of the site (or don’t), and a whole lot more.
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Featuring:
- Bill Beutler – Website, LinkedIn, X
- Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
- Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
Jerod Santo
Today, we have Bill Beutler with us, a Wikipedia expert. Is that fair to say, Bill? ...you are expert at Wikipedia.
Bill Beutler
I will not deny it.
Jerod Santo
\[laughs\]
Adam Stacoviak
So it's a yes?
Bill Beutler
It's a yes, but as I was saying before the show, the thing is, Wikipedia is so big that even the most veteran of veterans don't know everything that happens there. So I will do the best I can, and if I don't know, I'll just say "That requires more research."
Jerod Santo
Yeah. It really is kind of like the eighth wonder of the world at this point. The fact that it exists, it's so huge, it's editable by anybody, it's got all kinds of intrigue and politicking and interestingness around it... I mean, it really is a fascinating creation that exists in the digital world, isn't it?
Bill Beutler
There's nothing else like it. For many years -- I would say that even Google has competitors, even Amazon, I guess... Even Amazon has competitors, right? Walmart... But Wikipedia, until maybe, maybe very recently, if we want to go in this direction, there's really there's no other substitute. And so it's also the thing that all of the other big tech giants can agree on, that they use it to underpin information... It's the canonical source of information on the internet.
Adam Stacoviak
What does it mean, practically, if you could just flex a little potentially right here at the top, what does it mean to be an expert, or a self-professed expert in Wikipedia? What does that mean?
Bill Beutler
Well, gosh, probably everybody is self-professed if they say they are...
Jerod Santo
Right.
Bill Beutler
It's the same thing as being a Wikipedia editor in the first place. What does it mean to be a Wikipedian? Because to some extent, it is just you have an account, you make edits, you want to advance Wikipedia's mission, and you just kind of demonstrate it day by day. And when it comes to being an expert - I mean, I guess you could ask my friends who are Wikipedia editors if I'm a Wikipedia expert, and I think they would say yes. That said, though, it is not hard -- just like on Wikipedia, because it is so vast, it is diffuse, the community is very... The borders are porous. People come and go. You can just say you are, but then you have to back it up, and anyone can dispute anything. And I'm not an expert on certainly the technical side of how the squid servers work and all that, but... The community dynamics, the guidelines that underpin the content, that's where I'm strongest.
Adam Stacoviak
Does Wikipedia have things like RFCs, or specifications for how you -- is there protocols that you can just like flex on and say "You know what? I know RFC 525, and on line seven it says X."
Bill Beutler
I mean, RFC is very much a thing on Wikipedia. It's a request or comment. Is that what your RFC is?
Adam Stacoviak
I think there's a couple of different flavors of it, but pretty much. Yeah.
Bill Beutler
So an RFC would be a formal call -- semi-formal. Nothing is completely formal on Wikipedia. Call for editors to give comment on a difficult issue that editors are trying to resolve. And there certainly are policies that people will cite, and they'll do so in shorthand... Probably one of the more famous rules is neutrality; the policy that says you have to write with a neutral point of view. And so the shorthand for that is wp:npov. Or oftentimes it's just npov. And so if you're in a discussion with Wikipedia editors and you drop some of these terms, that's one way to demonstrate you are speaking the language.
Adam Stacoviak
You're in the know. You're in the circle.
Bill Beutler
Right.
Jerod Santo
What are some other things? Npov makes sense... What are the other shorthand principles that all the editors know about?
Bill Beutler
I'll tell you one that's even more obscure. Probably many people have learned about npov over time. I'll give you another one that is used by editors really in the know, and that is called NOTHERE. All caps, N-O-T-H-E-R-E. And this is when you're dealing with a problem editor. Wikipedia tries to give benefit of the doubt to new editors coming in; if they mess something up, you want to assume good faith. And there's actually a policy that says "Assume good faith." But at a certain point, that could be abused, and you have to no longer do that. And so NOTHERE is shorthand for "Not here to build an encyclopedia." So if two veteran editors are discussing a third editor, and one says the other is not here, that is a signal that someone's getting ready to break out the band hammer, or put someone on suspension.
Jerod Santo
\[00:08:03.00\] What are the official rules? I know there's something like no first-party sources, or like there's specific things where if I'm just going to become an editor, I assume I go read a document that tells me "Here's how it's going to work." Can you just lay the base foundation for how pages come to be, or edits come to be? Principally, not technically.
Bill Beutler
Yeah. Let me start with the superstructure of the rules, and we can get into some of the more specifics. So there's not one document you'd be reading; it's many, many documents. And when I got into Wikipedia, 20-some years ago, I was a much younger man then. I was single, and I had free time, and I would spend my hungover Sunday mornings just reading endless policy pages on Wikipedia.
Jerod Santo
Because the hangover wasn't bad enough for you? You had to submit yourself to more...?
Bill Beutler
It slowed me down enough that I could just like read... They're so long. These pages are so long.
Jerod Santo
Okay.
Bill Beutler
But there are policies that are absolutely mandatory. There are guidelines which are very strongly advisory. There's even a third level of rule, and that would be essays, community essays where they describe perspective points of view, but they don't necessarily carry the weight of a policy or a guideline. And so the policies tend to be focused on editor behavior, such as not creating multiple accounts, no sock puppetry, things like that neutral point of view... Some of the core policies are content-focused. But once you get outside those core policies into the guidelines, then you have things like "How do you write titles of nobility? Do you put spaces in between, say, the name J.R, like J.R. Ewing? Do you put spaces in between that?" Last time I checked on this - don't come after me if it's no longer the case, but yes, you always put spaces in between those two letters, even if the person themselves does not.
Jerod Santo
How about the Oxford comma? Are they pro or against?
Bill Beutler
I think more pro, but it's also not uniform.
Jerod Santo
Really?
Bill Beutler
Because the site is so vast. Again, I reserve the right to be wrong on this one, but...
Adam Stacoviak
That's interesting, because the Associated Press has a similar nature. Is there any overlap between the Associated Press's version of that and how it shows up in journalism, to Wikipedia's?
Bill Beutler
There may be, but it would be more incidental. They're not following Chicago style or anything like that. They've developed their own style over time. And by the way, another thing that they have to contend with is English comes in multiple flavors. There's American English. There is British English. And so, for example -- I'll tell you what, some of my very earliest edits to Wikipedia back in the late aughts was changing British spellings in the articles about the Sopranos TV show back to English... Because the show had a huge following in the UK. And British editors really punch above their weight in terms of contributing to Wikipedia. But if it is an American subject, it should be written in American English, and vice versa.
By the way, if there is not a clear country of origin... Yogurt is one topic that there was an endless edit war many years ago about whether there should be an H in yogurt.
Adam Stacoviak
There's no H in yogurt... Is there an H in yogurt?
Jerod Santo
Well, it depends on where you are. \[laughs\]
Bill Beutler
Like gas versus petrol. They say petrol over there. And I could be wrong, but the last I checked I thought it was still saying petrol. In that case, it's just whoever created the page first, and now that was so long ago that no one remembers.
Jerod Santo
Crazy. And you actually created a company around this, because anytime you have a website as massive, that becomes kind of the standard of record. When things are on Wikipedia it doesn't mean they're true, but it means they're at least vetted to a certain extent, and people accept it as true.
\[00:12:03.24\] And so PR is a huge aspect of that, because you are in control of your page, or a topic's page. If you're a public figure, you want to be painted in a good light. Maybe you want a scandal hidden etc. If you're a business, you may want to just maintain your reputation... I'm not saying you're doing scandalous PR stuff. I'm not sure what you're doing, but I assume you're helping businesses engage correctly with Wikipedia. How'd you get into that?
Bill Beutler
Yeah, I mean, the last part is definitely correct. We help our clients influence how Wikipedia writes about them, but also while following the rules of engagement for PR. So my career goes back to the early 2000s. I was a political journalist early in my career, working in Washington D.C. And around this time, the political blogosphere, which - I don't know if that even really still exists. It's all kind of like coalesced into -- Substack has kind of made a little bit of a comeback...
Jerod Santo
Yeah, true.
Bill Beutler
...but the political blogosphere was exerting influence, and so around 2004 I was writing a column about political blogging for this insider tips sheet, sort of like a forerunner of Politico. And - well, Wikipedia kept showing up in the blog posts... It was the one thing that editors of the left and right and center all seemed to agree on, that "This is an interesting resource that can help explain concepts, so I don't have to write them out." And I got out of journalism and went to go work at a public affairs firm, digital public affairs firm, and I was the person in the office who talked about Wikipedia the most, just because I thought it was fascinating... Although the truth of the matter is I'd never actually edited the site myself at this point in time. What I had done was I was going to try to stand up my own wiki site. And naturally, I was going to create Blogopedia. It was going to be a directory, an encyclopedia of all the blogs out there. This thing never got off the ground, and then one day the CEO of the company asked if I would make a change to his... He had a friend who's a member of Congress. Would I make a change to his page? And so I kind of looked into it, I was like "Alright, he's got a point here." And I'll tell you what I did first, that really did set the stage for the rest of it. And that was -- like, I didn't just go make the change... I kind of like read up on the policy, and then I went to the Talk page, the discussion section for that article, and explained what I was about to do. And then I did it, and it stuck. And I got a thank you from another editor for it.
I probably wouldn't have done it exactly the same way today, but this was like showing some foresight, showing some kind of respect for the fact that other people had views about how things were done on Wikipedia... It put me in a good headspace to kind of diplomatically work through issues. And in particular, the company I worked for at the time, it had clients like -- you know, one they had back then was Domino's Pizza. And there's this teeny tiny - scandal's even the wrong word, but a negative news story from way back then, where someone at a Domino's somewhere, an employee, was doing disgusting things with the pizza, like blowing snot into it, or whatever. And it made the news. So someone had added it to Wikipedia, it was it was true, it had a source in theory... That's all you need for Wikipedia. But I was able to make the case that these were just some random, low-level employees. This was not something that had buy-in from the corporate structure. In fact, the company responded quickly. And I got editors to agree that, "You know what? This is trivial." It was not something that needed to be in the Domino's page.
\[00:15:56.14\] And so that was probably one of the big a-ha moments, was if I make a good enough case, I can persuade editors that the Wikipedia article should say something different, in part, as you said, because it has the power... And even more so now than then, it has the power to affect the reputations of the subject it covers.
Jerod Santo
Is there a maximum length, or there's a point where it's like -- because you could just put everything about Domino's you could possibly gather, and at a certain point it becomes too much information.
Adam Stacoviak
Not here.
Bill Beutler
Yeah. \[unintelligible 00:16:28.28\] adding too much. Not here.
Jerod Santo
How do you know when "not here" comes into play, and when just people have to make a call?
Bill Beutler
I'll tell you what, I don't think they come into play there, because if you're adding too much, you're like here to build too much of an encyclopedia. And that's --
Adam Stacoviak
Too much.
Bill Beutler
It's definitely such thing as too much. So there is answer to your question, and I believe it is around a hundred thousand bytes. There's rarely hard and fast rules... This one says as an article gets closer to a hundred thousand bytes, you should consider splitting it. And so this is why you have articles that have like -- there's a parent article, and there will be a child article. There'll be Microsoft is the article, then there is Criticism of Microsoft, which is - it could be nearly as long as the actual Microsoft article.
Jerod Santo
Well, they've been around so long... I mean, at a certain point there's just a lot. There's a lot of history for a lot of these - either whether it's an organization, or a topic, or... I mean, it's overwhelming sometimes to think about how you would even manage the information architecture of such a thing. And it sounds like it's somewhat organic, and has grown over time...
How many editors are there? So we had a friend of ours, Andrew Nesbitt, on the show a couple of weeks ago, talking about ecosystems in open source, and how he found that when it came to certain popular open source packages, there are about 15,000 people who are kind of underpinning the entire software world, so to speak.
There's the old trope from the XKCD comic, like it's one person in Nebraska who's like running all the dependencies... Well, it turns out 15,000 around the world is pretty close to that. And I think with Wikipedia, I assume there's a -- I don't want to call them a cabal, but there's got to be a core group of N editors who are kind of in charge. Do you know that number? Are you one of that group? Do you know that group?
Bill Beutler
I am not personally in that group, but I know plenty of people in that group. It's funny... Did you pull the word cabal out of thin air, or did you pull that from doing some reading?
Jerod Santo
I just thought of it because it seemed like appropriate at the time...
Bill Beutler
It is. Well, so there is even an essay on Wikipedia called "There is No Cabal."
Jerod Santo
Oh, really?
Bill Beutler
And the reason why that essay exists is because -- the cynical take on it is yeah, there's not one cabal. There's many cabals. And that meaning there are kind of groups of editors who will talk together offline. And offline coordination is frowned upon... But let's not pretend it doesn't happen. It can happen in good ways, it can happen in bad ways. I think it's kind of value neutral.
But to your question about like -- because it's similar to the open source communities, for sure... Which it is - it's an open to open knowledge community. Open source is certainly a component of it. I know it follows a power law, where there is a small number of highly active editors up at the very top, and a long tail of contributors who might contribute here and there.
So the numbers I'm going to give you are going to be very approximate, and they're just kind of offered for demonstrative purposes, not to be quoted as accurate... And these numbers are very findable. But let's say that there's 3000 editors who are editing every single day, often hours a day. And they are really like the core group that keeps Wikipedia going. And a lot of them are not always writing the articles that you read. They are kind of arguing over policy, banning problem editors, and kind of working out kind of the structure of the behind the scenes; all the behind the scenes stuff, janitorial stuff at best. I don't know about at best... But you know, Wikipedia has an arbitration committee that is sometimes considered to be Wikipedia's Supreme Court... They're in that 3000.
\[00:20:18.25\] And you've got maybe 30,000 editors who are editing in a given month. I'm in that group. I don't edit as often as I used to in the early years... And there's also definitely a lifespan. There's... I'm forgetting the term I'm looking for here, but like a course of events, where...
Jerod Santo
Yeah, like a lifecycle.
Bill Beutler
Lifecycle. That is what I'm looking for. A lifecycle to being an editor, where you kind of get in, you get real excited, and you add a lot of material... And then you kind of like drift away, as you've already --
Jerod Santo
Burn out.
Bill Beutler
Burn out is totally one thing. Shared all the knowledge you wanted to share is another... There's a lot of editors who really don't create content. They just kind of shuffle around categories, and poke around here and there... And then to finish out the down at the long tail end, there's about 100,000 editors who are - and this one I'm a little more certain about... There are 100,000 editors who make one edit, minimum one edit per month. And so that's great, that it is really the people at the very top who are doing the most of it.
Jerod Santo
It's kind of crazy. So going back to your work and how that works, how your work works, is like - when a company engages with you, do you then advise them how to engage with Wikipedia? Or is it like "Hey, we really want Bill's edits, and he has clout..."? Because there's like a clout system that's just part of humanity, that's built into this, as you edit, to a certain extent... Like "This guy's reliable because he's been not just doing this one company or this one topic... There's clearly people that just come with their agenda, and then there's people who are just there to edit and then they may also have it... There's so many different angles.
Bill Beutler
Oh, sure.
Jerod Santo
How do you tell brands to engage?
Bill Beutler
So we'll do both, by the way, myself or members of our strategy team. We have a six-person strategy team. Or seven, I suppose... But folks who are working on Wikipedia all day, every day. And we will, using our disclosed business accounts that say "I'm Bill and I work at Beutler Inc, and my client is such and such, and I'd like to propose a change on this page." We'll do that. We also will coach our clients through leading outreach themselves. For large companies, where they have a corporate comms division, and they have more resources, they more -- I don't know if they have time for it, but they... Like, if a big company shows interest in Wikipedia and cares enough to put an employee on it, and share information, and talk with editors - that can be a good look. And so that is certainly a thing we do for certain, especially like Fortune 50 clients. But also, we will represent clients ourselves.
If you're having us do it, then we're going to decide what we're going to be willing to ask for or not. If the company is the one who's out there with the disclosure, it's all on them. If they want to push a little harder on something that's in the gray area, we might be willing to do that... But the fact is - yes, there is an aspect of reputation where we're likely to get faster replies, myself or my colleagues, because editors will be more likely to recognize us. On the other hand though, there's thousands of editors out there, and they don't all know us. So there are projects where we work on the Talk page, communicating for a company, and we'll be talking to editors we've never run across before. So there's no -- Wikipedia is all shades of gray. There's never any one right way to do everything.
Jerod Santo
\[00:23:55.02\] So a lot of sites or a lot of tech companies, because of their location and their employee base and stuff, they tend to lean to the left side of the political spectrum here in the United States. And there's lots of claims that Wikipedia also is captive to that. And I'm curious your perspective from a "in the trenches" kind of guy who's getting changes done... Do you see overwhelming political leanings, generally speaking, in Wikipedia? Do you think that that's bonk? What are your thoughts on that?
Bill Beutler
So the point about companies and their lean - I mean, they certainly did, I would say, in the Obama administration, Obama era... But especially now, in Trump too, I think that they kind of blow which way the winds are going.
Jerod Santo
Sure.
Bill Beutler
They're very malleable. They'll go where the dollars tell them they need to.
Jerod Santo
Right. They have shareholder value to worry about.
Bill Beutler
A hundred percent. Wikipedia, I would say - and just for the record, I'm pretty centrist myself. I was a little more on the right when I was in my 20s, I'm a little centrist, not quite the left, in my 40s... But I've kind of seen the full gamut. And Wikipedia definitely has a center left, even maybe a little bit left bias. And I would say that that has something to do with the fact that a lot of the contributors, many have an academic background, and that obviously leans heavily left... They have journalistic values, which sometimes do have, often have at least, even if not, I would say, a left wing bias, they are at least parallel, there's a parallel perspective there... That said, right now there's probably more right wing criticism of Wikipedia than there has been in ever, really. And it's been kind of rising over the last few years... And it's not to say that there aren't some decent criticisms of the handling of certain topics... But I think a lot of them kind of willfully misunderstand how Wikipedia uses sources.
So one of the big complaints would be "Well, we can't use Breitbart, or The New York Post, or The Daily Mail to cite sources." And kind of blow right past the fact that these are all publications that are not known for their journalistic scrutiny, integrity... No one's going to flag you for using The Telegraph, or using the Wall Street Journal. But the fringier sources... And now there are more fringy sources on the right. I think there's a whole interesting thing to be written, or many things to be written about why that's the case. Why the right does not have kind of journalistic values as part of its animating values, and the left does more. That's a huge topic, and it could be the rest of the show, if you want it to be. And I've written about this...
Jerod Santo
I don't want it to be. I just wanted to tiptoe into it and then move on, but...
Bill Beutler
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jerod Santo
...this is an interesting perspective from you.
Adam Stacoviak
I think the way to maybe approach that without going left, right or center is to talk about how power is distributed. Because you mentioned there's no cabal, right? So if there's no cabal, how is power distributed? How do you acquire power? How do editors squash other editors? How are there clicks? ...things like that. I think that's kind of like maybe a version, Jerod, of what you're talking about... Because it's not quite that, but it's how do you leverage your own bias and your own power.
Bill Beutler
Yeah. I mean, you can definitely discuss it in terms that are not explicitly left/right political. There's kind of a truism that if there is no visible hierarchy in an organization or a community, then it becomes an invisible hierarchy. And so that is 100 percent true at Wikipedia. And to my knowledge, nobody has ever, say, mapped out exactly what that looks like...
\[00:27:54.27\] If you were to look at Wikipedia's own maintained list of the most active editors in Wikipedia, within that top 50 or so, you're going to find some of those editors who are, just by virtue of being there all the time, the ones who they know the most policy, they have the most connections... And in certain topic areas - there are topic areas that do get captured by the contributors. Most of those are not necessarily the most active pages. A lot of times that's in a little out of the way places where most editors don't care to spend any time there... And so - you know what? When I talked about the rules of Wikipedia, I mentioned the policies and the guidelines. I didn't mention that there are five pillars of Wikipedia, which are like Wikipedia's encyclopedia, Wikipedia has no firm rules, etc. etc, things like that. There's a sixth pillar that people sometimes refer to, and that is "The person who cares the most ends up getting their way." \[laughs\]
Jerod Santo
Wow...
Bill Beutler
Yeah, it's not perfect.
Jerod Santo
That can be life sometimes, too. Yeah. Just like "Well, you care more than the rest of us, so go ahead, man... Just go ahead." \[laughs\] That can be shaky when it comes to what's true or not. Like, the person that cares the most gets their edit... It's like "Well, how about the most truthful thing?" But when we all disagree about what's true - I mean, those are really hard problems, aren't they?
Bill Beutler
It is. I mean, you remember Stephen Colbert back in the early days of his Comedy Central Show coined a word... It was wikiality. And wikiality was -- it's the truth that we all agree on, because we just agreed with the case. And so it was couched as a criticism of Wikipedia, but also was more broadly intended to comment on shared delusions... In his case, he was definitely criticizing the American right... But certainly, shared delusions have no political home. They could be all over the place. And so there's a bad version of that, and there's a good version of that.
And one of the things about Wikipedia that I find really to be fascinating, probably one of the reasons why I got drawn to the project in the first place, was life does not have a black and white answers for many, many things. One plus one equals two, yes... But the right form of government is something that can change over time, even. As democracy works in the United States, it has had a harder time in other countries... It's not because democracy itself is bad or wrong in some other place, it can be about what the culture around it is. And so there's just no way that you can set it and forget it with Wikipedia, or with all the topics it covers. There's no substitute for the daily task of rolling up your sleeves, getting in there, and making sure that things stay correct. And that's why Wikipedia's job will never be done. It's an ideological informational battle that rages on around us, and never will go away. If it goes away, then there's a problem. If Wikipedia calms down, that is when I get worried. As long as people are arguing about it, you know it's healthy.
Jerod Santo
So one of the things I've been telling people who don't understand how all these new AI chatbots are doing what they do - just as a mental model, I know it's not actually true. I just say "Just imagine that they're kind of reading Wikipedia to you." Like, they basically read the page so you don't have to, and then they summarize it. I mean, obviously that's a simplification and not always true, but certainly, these things have all read Wikipedia and continue to, right?
Bill Beutler
That is probably the most succinct way of putting it, that they have read it, and continue to.
Jerod Santo
Well, I'm trying to think of like why it might go away, is because maybe there's a demand for the information, but not for the website, so to speak.
Bill Beutler
Oh, yeah.
Jerod Santo
And then there becomes either a perverse or inverse incentive to even edit, if there's no demand for the website. I mean, I feel like a lot of our internet underpinnings are kind of up in the air right now, of like "Where will they be in 10 years?" And I'm not so sure about Wikipedia. Because it's certainly -- it's tantamount to these things right now, and new things they need. But why edit it if there's no there there?
Bill Beutler
It's a really fascinating question, because it's the conversation that Wikipedia editors are having themselves. And the foundation that runs Wikipedia also is very much focused on this issue. I am a little more bullish. I've been around for Wikipedia about 20 years, and I've seen many predictions of its demise.
Jerod Santo
Okay.
Bill Beutler
I remember I was even interviewed for an Economist story back in, I want to say like 2012... It was called WikiPeaks... You know, a play on WikiLeaks, but WikiPeaks. It was like a "Has it reached its zenith?" thing.
Jerod Santo
Oh, that's like a Twin Peaks thing. Okay. They peak of Wiki. Gotcha.
Bill Beutler
Right. Or like Peak Oil, you know? That concept.
Jerod Santo
Yeah, exactly.
Bill Beutler
And so I've seen -- rumors of its death have been greatly exaggerated in the past. And I will say that I do think that the core community doesn't do it for the clicks. They do it because it's a hobby. It is something that -- I oftentimes will liken editing Wikipedia, especially the people who are just recategorizing things, and kind of going about their way, just working through multiple articles and making the same kind of change over and over... It's like knitting. It's a repetitive, soothing...
Jerod Santo
It's a way to relax.
Bill Beutler
A hundred percent. I have friends who will sit down after a hard day's work and just kind of click through the edit lists and make the same change, over, over, over. And there's a weirdly satisfying thing in doing that. And that's one mode of motivation for Wikipedia editors. Of course, there are many. And as long as Wikipedia itself continues to underpin what Google, what ChatGPT is putting out there, its influence is going to be continued.
I would say that because of the rise of AI search and the widespread awareness that AI has read, and continues to read - I love that formulation. I'm going to steal that.
Jerod Santo
Please do.
Bill Beutler
\[00:36:00.19\] Yeah. That it's more important than it was two years ago. Or people have realized that, and so it's more front of mind. So not to get too much into my business specifics, but this has been a really interesting year. It was kind of a rocky first half of the year, and I think that had something to do with the election, and brands kind of sitting on budgets, waiting to see... But then by the middle of the year, the AI -- like, this is really the year, in multiple ways, where AI became part of business workflows. People had to figure out how to make use of it, even outside of technical circles. And so the second half of the year has been crazy for us. We really have not seen this kind of interest in a long time... Because all of a sudden there's now -- it's not just Google as a driver. But that was historically the driver of clients to us, because Google relies on Wikipedia, it shows up at the top of some of these search results... Now there's a whole second driver, and that's ChatGPT.
Adam Stacoviak
It's interesting to think about that though, because you've got these non-interfaces interfaces to Wikipedia... Like you said, the website not being there, Jerod. I think we still need -- I think what you're saying is we need this source of truth. I think so long as we have that centralized and societally elected source of truth, then Wikipedia still has a pretty good underpinning in terms of its foothold to being just that. I can't imagine that the LLMs extracting that, and being trained on that supplants that, because you still need -- those are distributed. You've got various frontier models. They're not all controlled by one... And so they're disparate sources of truth, if you want to call them that. And they're really just copies of the truth, not the actual source.
Jerod Santo
Right.
Adam Stacoviak
I still value, personally - this is where I'm personally at... I still value the original database, which is Wikipedia. So I'm bullish as well.
Jerod Santo
What if you're extracted from that for 5 or 10 years? Are you still going to value that? Or are your kids going to value that?
Adam Stacoviak
How do you mean?
Jerod Santo
Well, your kids might not even know Wikipedia is back there, behind the scenes, doing its thing. Now, to your point - and I agree with you guys, that doesn't mean that getting your information in there isn't still important, because eventually it makes its way out of the GPTs, maybe. But they can also opt to not use your -- so you're kind of a degree of separation away from your edit actually being useful, because they may or may not use it in the final output. Whereas anybody who goes to the webpage, they're going to read your sentence, as long as your sentence stays. Right?
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah.
Jerod Santo
So there is like a decreased value of an editor for those who are not editing because it relaxes them, but they're editing because they want some sort of --
Adam Stacoviak
For truth, yeah.
Jerod Santo
I have no problem with people editing for self interest. The only edits I've ever made on Wikipedia was adding links to our podcast...
Adam Stacoviak
For self-interest... \[laughs\]
Jerod Santo
No, it's fine. Because we are a source of information. There's a public figure on our show, they said something interesting, you go put it in the page, you get a link back to your podcast... Like, that's self interest, but it also is adding value to the wiki. And so it's totally fine. I've got no problem with that.
Bill Beutler
Did those edits stay? Have they remained?
Jerod Santo
I don't know. Well, the problem was... I think I realized -- I thought maybe they were going to be... They're all no follow links, aren't they? Like, every link is a no follow...
Bill Beutler
They are no follow, but it's still value being there.
Jerod Santo
Yeah. I think there's still value being there. It was kind of like an ROI question of like how worth it is it for me to go be doing this, and the answer was "Well, maybe I should call Bill Beutler Inc. and have them do it for me... Because okay, my personal use - I never look at the sources very often. And when I do, I even less often click through to a source. So if it was a follow link, I would at least be getting Wikipedia juice, and I think that was worth it... But without that, I was kind of like "Meh..." And then I think I got one denied, and I was like "Well, this sucks."
Bill Beutler
I mean, this is why they no-follow it. Exactly.
Jerod Santo
\[00:39:53.25\] Yeah. I understand why they no-follow it. It would be so many more edits if they didn't. But yeah, I just kind of gave up. I think I did two or three, and I was like "This is not worth the squeeze."
Bill Beutler
Yeah. And this is why we work with SEO firms a lot less than we work with PR firms.
Jerod Santo
That makes sense.
Bill Beutler
PR firms trying to tell a story about a client, and SEO trying to push a website up. I will say, though, that's starting to change just a little bit in this AEO, GEO era. The links between -- actually, less adding links, and I'm thinking more of like creating links between pages to strengthen the relationship between, say, a client's page and a concept they want to be associated with. I'm not saying we're seeing a lot of that, but it's just a conversation that comes up more often than it did for a long time, which is it almost never came up.
Jerod Santo
Well, here's a sustainability question, because we're in the current time of year when Wikipedia grants us the awesome "Please donate" button with a picture...
Bill Beutler
They sure do.
Jerod Santo
...and the sob story... Which, for my money, I'd rather you just charge for the website and not do that, but I understand. People have their opinions on it. I like the fact that it's free for everybody, so I understand why they go the route they go... But you know, what Reddit does is they let everybody contribute to Reddit, and then they take all the information and they sell it to Open AI, to be trained on.
Bill Beutler
And Reddit has advertising. It's a for profit company, right?
Jerod Santo
Yeah, true.
Bill Beutler
Whereas Wikipedia is not. Yeah.
Jerod Santo
Yeah, exactly. But they're sustainable in that way. Like, they're not just sustainable, they're actually like profit-generating. Do you think that Wikipedia could potentially just -- I mean, they are the world's source of truth on many topics... Couldn't they just charge the model trainers for that, and not have to -- like, wouldn't humanity better off if Open AI and Microsoft and Google were paying Wikipedia, and then they wouldn't have to take donations?
Bill Beutler
Well, they would have to change their license, their creative commons license, that - you can use it. Anybody is free to use anything on Wikipedia, remix it, even use it for commercial purposes... And all you have to do is say you got it from Wikipedia, and you're covered. And that's a very kind of liberal license that they have chosen. Copyleft, as opposed to copyright.
Jerod Santo
Permissive.
Bill Beutler
Very permissive. It's kind of like Jimmy Wales. Jimmy Wales was profiled in the New York Times magazine about a decade ago with the unfortunate kind of demeaning headline "Jimmy Wales is not an internet billionaire." Among the people who've founded top 10 global websites, those guys are all billionaires many times over, with the exception of Jimmy Wales. And the problem is - and it's not a problem, honestly. Jimmy Wales' wisdom - his smart decision at the time was that if he had tried to add advertising and make it a for profit site and then limit it that way, it would not have become, not have grown to be what it is. You know, contributors really were drawn to the altruistic nature of it, in the sense that they were all kind of collecting all the world's knowledge. If they were trying to if they were trying to monetize it, then the whole thing would collapse like a house of cards.
So this is still true today... If they were to start charging for it, they could -- and then you know what? I should be careful. There is a one part of the Wikimedia Foundation that is charging for some parts of it. So the Wikimedia Enterprise is a for profits company inside the Wikimedia Foundation. And I guess I should say they were a one-time client of ours a few years ago. Not now. But I still have friends there. And they do offer up a professional version of the Wikimedia API, which is much more reliable, it has guaranteed uptimes, and an SLA... Which the regular Wikipedia API, which my firm does use for monitoring software that we built and maintain - it's an unwieldy API.
\[00:44:00.16\] As Wikipedia's knowledge is useful, but untamed, so too is their free API... And so they're never, however, going to charge, say, the AI companies for the main unvarnished product. But what they did do a few months ago was they did -- like, the Wikimedia Foundation was annoyed with the big AI companies for putting strain on their servers by crawling the pages, using up a lot of their server time. And so what they did is they put out a couple of different cleaned up versions of it that they were like "Hi, Open AI. Hi, Anthropic. Please, please, please crawl this one. Don't crawl our main site. We'll give this one away for free. You can crawl it." But they can't, due to their licensing, force them to use it. They're not charging for it. Does anybody use it? I don't know the answer to that, and I'm not even sure the foundation knows the answer.
So there's a lot of interesting questions like this that we won't know the answer to, I suppose, for a long time. And to your question earlier about "Will people contribute if they don't see the page show up in search results?", so there's not the same glory in their work being in the limelight of the top of Google search results. I will say that for the current generation of editors, for the people who built Wikipedia, that does not matter. They do it because they love it.
The real question - and this has been a conversation I've heard at a few Wikipedia conferences in the last few years, as Wikipedia approaches its 25th birthday anniversary in January... It'll be celebrating 25. You know, the people who started Wikipedia - they are all 25 years older now. And obituaries for Wikipedia editors have been -- I don't know if it feels like it's been getting more common. It would make sense, as they all get older...
Jerod Santo
Sure.
Bill Beutler
I know a handful of people who've been editors, who passed away, from even old age... And so the real question is, will there be the next generation of editors? Will they come on and continue the work? That is a source of anxiety, for sure.
Jerod Santo
Yeah, I don't know the answer to that. I don't think any of us do. I certainly know that Adam and I, and perhaps you are as well, Bill - we're kind of raising up the next generation currently... And sometimes the ignorance of the way things work strikes me. And then I realize "Well, you're their dad, Jerod. You've got to teach him about this stuff."
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah.
Jerod Santo
But I think a lot of people don't realize Wikipedia is user-generated content. They just think it's like this encyclopedia that lives on their phone...
Adam Stacoviak
Magically there...
Jerod Santo
It's just magically there. I mean --
Adam Stacoviak
It's like the Internet not being run by Linux, Jerod. It's like the same question. I couldn't believe that people don't understand that the internet doesn't run on Linux. Like, who doesn't know that? Well, I guess a lot of people.
Jerod Santo
Oh, yeah.
Adam Stacoviak
A lot of people. So it doesn't surprise me that this fact about Wikipedia is largely unknown by the general population. I mean, you've got harder issues in your life. Affording your mortgage, being able to actually even buy a house, affording the college degree you just got, or even being able to put your kids through college, or afford the grocery bill you just have to pay for. We were just shopping for groceries, and I was like, everything is up dramatically. Wow. Thanksgiving this year has gotta be like "Okay, all we can do is turkey and potato. That's it. Okay?" I'm being facetious, but... My grocery bill this time, I was like "Wow, that's dramatically more than I'm remembering." So...
Bill Beutler
Yeah. Well, my son is four and a half years old... Adam, I heard you mentioned on a recent episode that your kiddo is doing one of those ninja classes...
Adam Stacoviak
Oh, yeah. He's an up and coming ninja. He's competing in everything. He's loving it.
Bill Beutler
Little Billy Beutler is also now a ninja in training, as of just a few weeks ago.
Jerod Santo
\[laughs\] Nice.
Adam Stacoviak
\[00:48:10.02\] Wow, good. Amazing.
Bill Beutler
Yeah. It's super-fun.
Adam Stacoviak
Especially at the age of four. I mean, if he keeps up with it... One, my son's back is what I call swole, if that translates. I think it does.
Bill Beutler
Yeah, it does.
Adam Stacoviak
And I'm like, "I've hugged this child for my whole entire life, and now when I hug him, I'm envious." I'm like "Dang, man. I want my back to be swole like that." You know?
Jerod Santo
It's never too late to become a ninja, Adam.
Adam Stacoviak
I know. I know. \[laughter\]
Bill Beutler
But yeah, will he edit Wikipedia? I mean, someone of his generation will, even if my son does not, exactly...
Jerod Santo
Yeah.
Adam Stacoviak
You know, Jerod, you mentioned the point that it's your job. I think that's exactly why this kind of podcast exists, and also why we bleep all the curse words... Because we truly want to - and I guess for a while it's been the hacker generation, but I guess it's now becoming beyond just simply hacker, with shows like this... But I feel like that's the job of content creators like us, and guests like you, to come on and share this truth, and this depth of our world, and the things that are important, and the reasons to show up and how to do them. Because if not, then who else is going to do it, besides the folks like us, who are in their 40s and nerds? That's our job, righ?
Bill Beutler
Yeah.
Jerod Santo
That's right.
Bill Beutler
I mean, it's more than a job for me. I got interested in Wikipedia before I realized that there was going to be a career in it for me. Certainly, at Beutler Inc, for the clients that we take on, the work that we do, one of our core values is just "Will our work make the encyclopedia better for its readers?" And one, I think that's a good moral position to have... It also happens to have the advantage of like that's what makes for successful projects. Editors will agree with us to make changes if what we bring to the table makes it better for the readers. That's the thing. It's like "Can Wikipedia service readers well?" And sometimes there are challenges where the rules themselves get in the way of making Wikipedia better. And I'll give an example of a current one, with a client who's a semi-retired venture capitalist who was divorced some years ago, but his Wikipedia page says he's still married. And he's like semi-retired. He's not out there making news anymore... So what's he going to do? Go do an interview just where he can say he's divorced? He won't do that. But there's a novelist, the woman who wrote the novels the "Station Eleven" TV show is based on... She gave an interview to Slate back in 2012 to say "I'm not married anymore", just so Wikipedia would change it.
Jerod Santo
Oh, wow.
Bill Beutler
So the fact that it'd be so hard to change things like that because of Wikipedia's standard of sourcing... We couldn't use the court documents to verify his marital status, for reasons that I could explain, but I don't want to bore your audience. It's like, Wikipedia runs into these limitations where trying to do the right thing can sometimes produce a worse encyclopedia.
Jerod Santo
Yeah. See, that I think is kind of weird. So at the risk of boring everybody, if there's a court document that says that this thing is true, and Wikipedia's desires to be a source of truth - or I'm not sure what the desires are; it seems like that would be what it is... It's like "Well, you have evidence that this is true. Why is it invalid evidence? Like, what is the rule?"
Bill Beutler
Alright, so I'll cite some more policy at you... Let's see. So there's going to be the primary sources, there's going to be the biography of living persons... And then there's going to be another one that's actually an essay, but it's very influential. I'll start with the essay. And this one really throws people for a loop oftentimes, that Wikipedia's goal is verifiability, not truth. And this owes something to the fact that truth is a really difficult subject. Again, one plus one equals two - true. Matters of perspective - much harder to say what the truth is. So that's one thing - Wikipedia is not a place to write down things that you know are true.
Jerod Santo
\[00:52:24.28\] Verifiability is the most important thing.
Bill Beutler
Verifiability.
Jerod Santo
But isn't a court document verifiability? Like, it's a court document that says they got divorced.
Bill Beutler
Here's where we get to the primary sources part of it... Which is - there are primary sources, which would be court documents, government reports... Then there are secondary sources, which would be like news articles. The coverage of those primary sources. There's also tertiary sources, of which Wikipedia is one, or a textbook would be, like compilations of compilations...
Jerod Santo
Sure.
Bill Beutler
Anyway, back to primary and secondary sources.
Adam Stacoviak
That's why he said it would bore us, Jerod. It's like, he warned us.
Jerod Santo
I'm not bored. Let's go. I want to I want the answer. I want the answer.
Bill Beutler
These are the core. Like, we're really like seeing the matrix here in terms of how the wiki sausage gets made.
Jerod Santo
There's a show title for you...
Bill Beutler
Yeah, yeah. \[laughter\] Perfect. Wikipedia really, really, really wants to be based on secondary sources. Wikipedia editors don't want to be in the position of arguing about interpretations of primary sources... Because there may be like a government transcript, like a Senate hearing. How do you decide which sentences of like a three-hour Senate hearing do you quote in a relevant article? So Wikipedia editors avoid arguing all of that by outsourcing those judgments to professional journalists who are covering that material, who have context for it, and who apply editorial judgment. So no one has applied an editorial judgment in this case to even say that the divorce was noteworthy in itself. I mean, it kind of like -- here's where it's perverse. It does kind of defy logic that "If the article says he's married now, and we have a court case that says that he is no longer married - we should be able to use that." Right? So Wikipedia editors are thinking about "Well, if we apply this rule broadly, can that get us into trouble if you cite--"
So back to the third item, it's the biography of a living persons policy. And that says for information about living persons, if the information is contentious or poorly sourced, it should be left out. So this would be -- I don't know if you would say this is contentious, but it is poorly sourced according to Wikipedia's guidelines. And so you don't want to be using primary sources to make claims about living people, that could affect their reputation... In most cases, it is used to keep from adding information to -- like, let's say the person got pulled over for a DUI, and it was not in the news, but you could find a court record of it... Does that need to be in there? Wikipedia editors would say "If it wasn't in the press, then it wasn't that important, so we don't need to cover it." Of course, if it was in the press, then it's going to be added, and that could be hard to get out. But in this way -- because this is kind of a perverse outcome, that it's keeping Wikipedia from being fully accurate, because it is following rules that are well intentioned, and work out right most of the time... But then there are these edge cases.
And I will say, there is actually a very unpopular and a very little followed policy... It's basically a dead letter today, that's called "Ignore All Rules." It says if the rules of Wikipedia are making it harder to improve the encyclopedia, then ignore the rules.
Jerod Santo
I like that one.
Bill Beutler
\[00:55:55.27\] It seems great. It seems like a good, helpful thing. But then you get back into applying editorial judgment calls, and I think here we are, Wikipedia being a quarter century old, everybody knows how important it is... There's a lot of like caution around sticking your neck out. And so there are so many arguments about all kinds of issues, large and small in Wikipedia, that sometimes editors can be just cautious, and you know, if I don't have to get involved in this thing, I don't really care about it, I'm going to excuse myself from the conversation, or just never show up. I've been kind of working on this guy's Talk page for a couple of years, and not constantly, but trying different angles every now and then, and still hasn't got there.
Jerod Santo
Is that to remove or to add?
Bill Beutler
So I think that either one could be an acceptable outcome.
Jerod Santo
Gotcha.
Bill Beutler
If we can, use the court record, which is publicly available, to say that he's divorced, that would be fine. Also, the reason why he is notable has nothing to do with his family life. So you could remove that, and I think it would not affect the public's understanding of this person's accomplishments. Gotta get a Wikipedia editor who cares enough about it to see it my way. It hasn't happened yet.
**Break**: \[00:57:17.29\]
Adam Stacoviak
That's interesting, how your edits, given your depth and length there, still get pushed back by the non-cabal, that you said it's not there...
Jerod Santo
\[laughs\] That's right.
Adam Stacoviak
Because you've tried. You're making attempts. You know the protocols, you know the RFCs, you know the rulings etc. The one piece of advice you could go back to is the one you gave before, which was go do some media coverage and just say it in media, and then you've got your golden ticket.
Bill Beutler
Yeah. I mean, I have yet to press the ignore all rules case. That's sort of like the break glass in case of emergencies; it's kind of the last ditch. And I might do that at some point, and almost more to kind of - I don't want to say prove a point, because there is also a rule on Wikipedia that says "Don't break the rules just to make a point." That would be wp:point.
Adam Stacoviak
I'm not a fan of people who say double click necessarily. I like those people, so I'm not going to say double click, I'm going to say zoom in, which is my other take on it... Can you zoom into the practicality of the edit? So you write it up, you submit the edit... How does that work? What is the interface you see? Is there a discussion possibility? Do you know the name of the editor who's denying your request? Help me get into the double click version of that, if you don't mind. I had to... I love those people, by the way. They're the coolest double clickers.
Jerod Santo
Wait, are you saying you love people who say double click \[unintelligible 01:03:24.10\]
Adam Stacoviak
Let's double click in on that. Let's close that tab.
Jerod Santo
It's all you had to say, Adam, was double click on that \[unintelligible 01:03:29.18\] Alright, Bill...
Adam Stacoviak
Anyways...
Jerod Santo
...what's it feel like? What does it look like?
Bill Beutler
We're zooming in now, and double clicking... You know, every Wikipedia article that you read, every page that's part of the encyclopedia has right behind it, metaphorically speaking, a Talk page. This is the place where Wikipedia editors hash out their disagreements, and this is where as a paid editor, as a conflict of interest contributor, this is where I am invited to come participate. They don't really want me making direct changes, and that's fine. As long as I can get a fair hearing, no problem with that. That can be a bit of an issue sometimes.
\[01:04:11.03\] You go to the Talk page, and you get the top of the page, you can click Add Topic, or Edit This Page. In terms of what you see, Wikipedia has a markup editor, Wikitext. It's kind of like HTML, it has certain code that's similar... It's very simple coding language, markup language, which I'm pretty proficient in, my team is proficient in. But there is also a visual editor that they rolled out many years ago, where you can do a WYSIWYG version. It's not as powerful, but for most purposes it's suitable.
We'll use the markup editor, and we will write a message, \[unintelligible 01:04:53.10\] write an explanation of "Here's what I want to change. Here's why. Here's what I think it should change to." I will cite policies and guidelines that are relevant, but I also don't want to overdo it. I trust that editors can see through the way that I am writing, that they know that I'm not some rando off the street, but I know what Wikipedia's rules are all about... And I try to make a -- start off like a simple request that is kind of undeniable, fact-based edit requests, much easier to make than... Again, matters of perspective are more challenging. And I embed links to the relevant section of the page I want to change, and all that.
I will even put into like block quotes with formatting to make it as legible as possible. So people can go look me up and find my user account and see me doing this. It's all public. Obscure, but public. And then I add four squiggly -- four tildes at the end, and that applies my signature. I hit Preview, check it... I hit Preview several times, just to get it just right.
Adam Stacoviak
Oh, yeah.
Bill Beutler
You guys wanted to double click... We're like triple clicking now.
Adam Stacoviak
Triple click. Is it now a thing?
Jerod Santo
A triple tilde, at this point.
Adam Stacoviak
Triple tilde clicks, and all.
Bill Beutler
Quadruple tilde. If you do a triple tilde, it's going to leave off the date. But you want to have the timestamp there.
Jerod Santo
And they'll know you're a \[unintelligible 01:06:22.16\]
Adam Stacoviak
It's better...
Bill Beutler
Bro, do you even wiki?
Jerod Santo
\[laughs\]
Bill Beutler
And I hit Publish. And then -- do you know what else I do, actually? This is a tip for anybody who themselves is representing a brand and wants to actually get someone to reply to their request eventually... It's to add a template to the top of the message, below the heading, above the body of the message... It's the Edit COI template. It opens up -- do you know those squiggly brackets? You open with two squiggly brackets, you write Edit COI, and then you close up two squiggly brackets... And it creates a template that says "The user writing below has asked someone to review this change, because they have a conflict of interest." And this puts your request into a queue on another part of the site, where volunteer editors who are interested in reviewing paid editor requests, which is too few editors from my perspective, of course... It's just not what editors got into Wikipedia to do in the first place. Some people do find it fun, but not enough. And it can be a pain in the ass. My team takes pride in getting right to the point, not wasting anybody's time, not asking for things that you can't have. I almost cut myself there. And not everybody does. A lot of people will show up and try to do it, and they don't really know how to ask, or they'll write like a big wall of text that makes it -- if it's TL;DR, your request will sit there for a long time. As it is, your request will probably sit there for anywhere from a few days to a few weeks anyway, just because of the backlog, and because it does not work in chronological or reverse chronological order. There's no first in/last out. It's like, people just grab the edits, like "Oh, that's interesting."
Adam Stacoviak
\[01:08:23.02\] So it could sit there for a long time if it's not of interest to somebody.
Bill Beutler
You know what? I actually happen to have the page -- okay, here we go. There are currently 243 requests as of 4:07 PM Eastern on November 19th, 2025. That's higher than I've seen it in a while. Probably not the highest it's ever been...
Adam Stacoviak
407?
Bill Beutler
243 open edit requests. Yeah.
Adam Stacoviak
243.
Bill Beutler
For paid edit requests. Yeah. Where somebody asking about their brand, their boss, their employer, their client.
Adam Stacoviak
I see.
Jerod Santo
Is that worldwide, or is that coming from your firm specifically?
Bill Beutler
Worldwide for the --
Jerod Santo
For the paid.
Bill Beutler
Yeah, so it is the edit request queue for the Edit COI template, COI being conflicts of interest.
Jerod Santo
Gotcha.
Bill Beutler
So it's worldwide for the English language. Wikipedia has many different language editions. English is by far the largest and the one that gets the most attention. This is where the significant majority of our work is done. We do some work in other languages, but Wikipedia is the one that people in other countries care about. The business language of India is English. So that's the Wikipedia that Indians care about.
Jerod Santo
So if you had to get the editor's interest, is there the equivalent of edit bait? Like, something you can put in there where it's like "Hey, this is going to be a fun one for you to review" or anything like that?
Bill Beutler
That's a really good question. I don't think I have a good answer for it, because we're not choosing, for the most part... We will take on clients that we think have a good point to make, and that we are willing to work for... And the things they want to change are the things that they ask for, that we agree are feasible. So probably the closest thing would be if we have a client with a page that needs a lot of work, we will start off -- I said a version of this earlier. We'll start off with something real simple. We don't want to barge in and ask "Can you change the most controversial element of this page?" We want to start off with something that everybody could agree on. Let's let's build some trust. Let's show that we're here, that we are here to build the encyclopedia, even though we're doing so from a paid perspective. That's about the best I could say.
Jerod Santo
What about bad actors? I'm sure as a contributor you're not necessarily the one who's charged with this, but certainly, there are people that aren't like yourselves. Even if you have conflicts of interest, you're trying to make the encyclopedia better. There's people that are trying to destroy it, there's people that are trying to defame it, there's people that are trying to just completely take over certain pages, certain topics, spam...
Bill Beutler
Right. Promote themselves, win an argument... Those are the --
Jerod Santo
Yeah, there's tons of interests that are against the betterment of the encyclopedia. How does that usually play out?
Bill Beutler
So there is another group of editors - it sometimes overlaps with the editors who answer edit requests from the disclosed rule following paid editors like my team... But there is another group that runs a page which is worth a look. It could be fascinating. It's called "The conflict of interest notice board". This is where editors will go to report what they see as suspicious activity. Like "I've seen the pattern of edits on this editor. They've made 30 edits and they're all to this one businessman. That's a crystal clear pattern that this is someone working for that businessman."
And so editors will go in and investigate, and they may roll back edits... They usually will not just block someone for conflict of interest editing... And some of this has to do with that fear that we won't have editors in the future. Anybody who chooses to open up the browser window and make an edit, even if it is not immediately constructive, is a better bet to become a Wikipedia editor down the line than someone who's never edited in the first place. It's kind of the same principle why you buy a pair of shoes on the internet, on Amazon, and then the ads follow you around for the next couple of days, asking you to buy shoes again. If you've already shown interest in this topic, you're more likely to buy that thing, even if "I just did that. Don't show me shoe ads."
\[01:12:35.28\] Well, I have a friend who is a longtime Wikipedia editor, and her very first edit to Wikipedia was vandalizing it, because she thought it was funny. She was also a teenager at the time, and a lot of people don't realize, "Wow, I actually was able to edit this, and it went live." That little a-ha moment... Sometimes people show up and they don't know what they're doing... They might write a page about their best friend to impress their best friend. And then the page gets taken down, but they're like "Oh. Well, what else could I do?" At least that's what they're hoping for.
Jerod Santo
How does a page become a page, and how does a page not become a page? I assume it's similar to an edit, but it's like a much bigger thing, because now it's like, this deserves a page. I think that's probably a bigger decision than "This sentence should be modified." Or maybe it's the same exact rules. How does that work?
Bill Beutler
Yeah. If we're talking about regular Wikipedians who are contributing without any kind of conflict of interest, they can just like click on -- like, if you see a red link on Wikipedia... You see fewer of them today than you did years ago, but a red link on Wikipedia means there's no page behind that. You could click on that and just start creating the page. Or you could figure out how to create the new space and post it up. If you don't really understand how all that works, or if you have a financial interest in the topic, there's a project you can go to called Articles for Creation. This too has quite the backlog, but this is where you could write a draft entry and submit it for volunteer editors to review. And if you hit all the right points, if the subject is notable - and that's the term of art on Wikipedia, because there's a guideline called Notability. That's a whole kettle of fish. If you want to get into it, we can. And if it's approved, it goes on the live encyclopedia... Where it stays presumably forever, as long as it continues to be deemed notable.
But yes, articles are deleted too, either because they were never notable in the first place, or... That's usually the main reason. The idea is once notable, always notable. But also, standards shift, opinions shift, and so there's a process also called "Articles for deletion", funny enough. And that's also a really fascinating one to follow, because boy, that can get emotional. And people can come in and like try to desperately beg "Please, please leave my Wikipedia article." And "Look here, I got mentioned in all these news articles." And a lot of those mentions, they might not be the kind of sources or the kind of mentions -- like, Wikipedia wants to have articles about, say, businesses that have really received true public attention, and not just within the industry vertical, a niche, but has been covered by major press more than once. Profile pieces, not passing mentions, and not like showing up in a listicle, or certainly not a paid placement.
The Forbes Contributor Network and all those blogs - a lot of them really are well-written and they look professional, but Wikipedia will not accept Forbes contributor pieces. If it's from the magazine, now we're talking. But if it's from the Forbes Contributor - it's an unpaid blog, really. Not truly professional, it has not been fact-checked or edited...
\[01:16:08.13\] And so yeah, deletion of pages -- at my company, we do sell a service that is creating pages. We're very selective about whom we sell it to, because we don't want to sell something we can't deliver on. And that's a real challenge. We don't really sell a service that's saving your page from deletion. We'll be like "This will run its course in two weeks. If it survives, we can help you improve it. But if it's not, then you probably need more sources."
Adam Stacoviak
I think it's kind of wild that -- I'm assuming that there's a lot of PR companies like yours... How many would you say there are in the world, that are like you?
Bill Beutler
You mean the focus on Wikipedia?
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah.
Bill Beutler
So there is a very limited universe of what I would call guideline-compliant, rule-following... It's like, on one hand I can count the number of agencies that do what we do. And we were the first. I started the company back in 2010. There are a handful of big PR firms that have someone on staff who does this work credibly... But then here's one of the challenges of operating in this space - if you were just to go do a Google search for "Wikipedia help", or "Wikipedia editor for hire", "how to create a Wikipedia page", you're going to find these really hard sell, aggressive, fly by night companies that many of them are the same person, or small network, operating overseas... They will offer "100 percent guaranteed results", and they will claim to have all kinds of testimonials, but they're never from real people. And they will take your money and run. And at best, they will do -- at best, they'll take your money and run. At worst, they might create a page you hate, and then create an issue.
And I guess there's a middle category. There's a handful of agencies that will do this work, and they'll either claim to be following the rules, but I've seen their work. I know they're not. Or they just hope their clients don't know any better. Because Wikipedia is still an esoteric thing. But clients don't know what the rules of engagement are... So that's sort of three categories, and we're in the smallest one.
Adam Stacoviak
I guess -- I don't really have a question, but more like an area where I'm hovering here, because I'm thinking... I'm back to like Jimmy Wales is not a billionaire... Maybe you've got a large swath of PR folks like you all, some that are credible, some that are less credible... But certainly a cottage industry of economics around editing and contributing to Wikipedia. And I'm just thinking like how that plays out in terms of maybe - do you all even give back to Wikipedia as part of your revenue model to maintain the source of truth being there? And I guess just the -- again, not really a question, but just more around the economics of it... Because you guys are making money. Jimmy's not making billions \[unintelligible 01:19:18.14\] I don't know.
Jerod Santo
Yeah. The money doesn't go to him anyway, would it?
Bill Beutler
Yeah, don't cry for Jimmy. He's doing well.
Adam Stacoviak
I'm getting asked right now to donate two bucks, or something like that, to Wikipedia. I don't know, I'm just looking at the economics around Wikipedia; I'm like zooming into that, I suppose.
Jerod Santo
Double-clicking.
Adam Stacoviak
No double clicks.
Bill Beutler
\[01:19:40.11\] The topic of fundraising came up earlier, and I didn't really go at it. Wikipedia - it's about to be donation season again, fundraising season... And that hard sell, their own hard sell that you mentioned is contentious among Wikipedia editors. And not just because the money doesn't go to them. It does not go to them, of course... But because Wikipedia -- those fundraisers are extremely successful. Wikipedia's budget is like 100 million dollars every year. And they raise what they spend, and it goes in and out, and there are over 100 employees, not counting contractors at the foundation... And it's not clear that a lot of the work they do actually makes the encyclopedia better. It's almost kind of its own thing. It's this NGO that is -- I don't know, conservatives would say that it supports woke causes. And that's an interesting thing to unpack. But a lot of it is just trying to improve the ecosystem of editors, but the money -- it's difficult to spend the money well, because they can't directly pay for content. That's in their charter as well.
So editors in the past have -- a couple of years ago there was an editor revolt of sorts, where they pressured the foundation to tone down some of that alarmist rhetoric about how Wikipedia will go away. And guess what? The fundraising tanked that year, and they had to lay off a bunch of people. And I mentioned that Wikimedia Enterprise was a client of ours... That was really the reason why they had to let us go, because they didn't \[unintelligible 01:21:22.03\] I hope they don't get mad about me saying that if they hear this. No hard feelings, truly, but... I mean, that is what happened.
Adam Stacoviak
\[laughs\] Now it's clear.
Bill Beutler
Yeah, now it's clear. The truth comes out, an hour and 15 in...
Jerod Santo
Ha-hah! Get the transcript, put it on Wikipedia.
Bill Beutler
Right. The economics, though. I wanna get to the economics, or the ecosystem. So I have wished in the past that Wikipedia had developed an ecosystem like, say, Linux. And I've tried making this argument in the past, that there's no such thing as the Red Hat of Wikipedia. If there was, I think we would be it. But there is this -- and this also gets to Wikipedia having kind of like a left-leaning disposition... I've mentioned the academics, but there is also kind of an anti-corporate atmosphere around Wikipedia, which is a principle challenge to the work that we do, but it's also a reason why our service is viable to begin with... Because it is difficult to work on company topics. Like, if you're a regular old Wikipedia editor, editing in your own spare time, and you just happen to be really interested in writing corporate biographies, other Wikipedia editors are going to look at you and be very skeptical, because few editors get into Wikipedia because they want to work on corporate profiles. Unless it's like Nintendo, or...
Jerod Santo
Some beloved...
Bill Beutler
Yeah, things that are beloved. So I'm still working at this... Speaking of PR firms in Wikipedia and firms that I've founded... You know, Beutler Inc's been around now for 15 years, but just this fall I launched a new proper PR firm focused on Wikipedia. It's called The Notability Company. My firm is not a traditional PR firm, so we are partnering with an agency principal who is a seasoned PR leader. And so we came together and we started this -- it's just really the two of us right now who are running it, but the whole idea is to generate earned media that Wikipedia cares about. And so it's a marathon, not a sprint. It is not easy to do. But the thing is, traditional PR firms are not focused on the type of results that produce the kind of stories that Wikipedia likes. The Notability Company aims to settle that.
And so this is very much a startup. We really launched it about five weeks ago... But I'm optimistic for it. I do think there should be more of an ecosystem around Wikipedia, because it's so important. It's too important to be entirely left to the volunteers.
\[01:24:09.04\] There are organizations and nonprofits besides the foundation that are focused on different aspects of Wikipedia... There's a Wikiproject Med Foundation, that is focused on medical, health-related articles. There is the Wiki Education Foundation, which partners with universities... If our children a few years from now don't hear their teachers telling them to not use Wikipedia, it'll probably be because the Wiki Education Foundation did its job of helping teachers understand how it can be a pedagogical tool, and not something to be totally avoided. So... Good question. Great topic.
Adam Stacoviak
One of the things you say - I'm on your LinkedIn right now, The Notability Company. You say "We help brands and nonprofits." Forgive me for promoting you here for a second. "We help brands and nonprofits earn the coverage that makes Wikipedia possible." I know you may have buried some of that in terms of what you do and what you can do to get the edits right out there... But in practical terms, what exactly does that mean?
Bill Beutler
In practical terms, it means generating news coverage, professional media coverage, profiles... Here's the thing we've not talked about too much - reliable sources. Wikipedia wants to be built out of sources that are independent of the subject, that have a track record of putting out factual information. Again, here's where journalism heavily figures into what Wikipedia does. And so it really wants coverage that explains why the subject is significant. Not every prospective client of The Notability Company is going to be a good fit for our service... But for a company that is growing, that is doing something interesting, or for a nonprofit that is doing good work, but their publicity that they've done before and their earned media... Knowing the PR industry, performance PR, the guaranteed results, but it's like the publicist writes it and places it on a website that looks journalistic, but isn't really... Wikipedia editors are not fooled by that. It also doesn't mean you have to be in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal to get that. But your hometown daily paper, if it even still is daily anymore - you want to get articles about your accomplishments and why you're interesting. If it's a biography of a person, you want that kind of profile that starts off in media res, and talks about the thing you're doing, and then in paragraph seven it jumps to "Born and raised in small town, Ohio." That coverage is hard to get. Wikipedia editors know that. The thing is, though, PR firms are not really focused on that.
So that is a great question, and in fact, probably the next step of kind of developing the service is providing examples of -- what I want to do is go grab some articles that have been recently created, either by my firm, or just new company articles, and then back-engineer. Go to those references and kind of look for the commonalities between those stories... And in a few weeks' time I'll be able to give you more of a generic, broad descriptor. Right now I'm just sort of describing the kind of in-depth profile pieces that tend to go for the more famous types of people and companies.
Adam Stacoviak
\[01:28:05.02\] Yeah.
Bill Beutler
That's it.
Adam Stacoviak
That's all predicated on the value of Wikipedia being Wikipedia, right? Because there's a paid service... It sounds like you're going through a lot of work to reverse-engineer or engineer your way into it by examining previously accepted articles, or whatever may have been facts or information to a lot of editors to hit the Accept button. Is that a big business that you're going to build? I mean, will it be bigger than your current? Is it going to be big and -- I mean, can you quantify some version of big?
Bill Beutler
Well, we'll find out. The reason why I wanted to start it was because for many years people come to us and say "Can you create a page about us?" And most of the time the answer is no. I would say probably, I don't know, 80% of the inbound inquiries we get are about creating a Wikipedia article for them. But probably 80% of the actual work that Beutler Inc. does is improving existing pages, especially for large, well-established companies. So there's really like an imbalance. There's a symmetry to it, but I've been thinking about is there a way to monetize or address that interest? And even though Beutler Inc. definitely is in the PR space, we're not a traditional PR agency, or in media. For many years we'd say "You should go to your publicist, you should go to your PR firm and get more in media." But we've found that those firms were not focused on the right kinds of coverage, and so The Notability Company is going to be focused only that kind of coverage. And so we think that we could be either their sole PR firm, or we could be an add-on to their PR firm.
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah
Bill Beutler
And you know, Butler Inc. is a company - we have many direct clients, but we also get a lot of referrals from PR firms where they don't do Wikipedia work; it just sounds like a headache. "Oh, I know a guy... We've got just the people, let me send you over to them." That's how I built my book of business in the first place, way back in 2010.
Jerod Santo
Carving out a niche.
Bill Beutler
And it's still a source. Absolutely.
Adam Stacoviak
What about the notability, I guess, to use your brand term, of the places you want to get earned media? Are those becoming fewer and far between because of I would imagine there's a lot of ad-supported creators out there? And I'm not even sure, is a creator a notable source? How do you define, what is the test to say "Okay, notable/not notable"? Or "Credible/not credible?"
Bill Beutler
Right. So the term of art in this case is reliable. Reliable sources.
Adam Stacoviak
Oh, reliable. Sorry about that. My bad.
Bill Beutler
No, no, no. I mean like --
Adam Stacoviak
Erase what I said. Put reliable in there.
Bill Beutler
Nobody can remember these. I mean...
Adam Stacoviak
I'm trying my best. I was trying to use your brand term. I figured it was on point. Slightly off...
Jerod Santo
Well, notability is on point, because they're trying to make people notable by getting them into reliable sources.
Bill Beutler
There you go.
Jerod Santo
Bam!
Bill Beutler
Very well done. Nailed it.
Adam Stacoviak
Nailed it, Jerod. Congratulations.
Jerod Santo
I'm just... I'm tracking. I'm tracking.
Bill Beutler
But your question is totally on point here. And it's not even a new thing, right? The general decline of ad-supported media, of - I mean, any media. You know, I'm old enough, we're old enough to remember that in the 2000s the magazine apocalypse happened 15-20 years ago. It's been in decline pretty much the entire time that we've been adults. And I have friends who used to work for -- I have a friend who used to work for Newsweek magazine, worked in DC, and New York, and she could call cars to the office to take her home at night. And she had like an expense report. Those things used to just print money. Newsweek, which by the way, still exists as a website, but it is now kind of like a right wing shadow of itself. Like, the brand lives on, but it's not the same publication at all. And that era is super-gone, never coming back...
\[01:32:12.14\] And now we are potentially on the precipice of another collapse as the publisher sites and internet are losing out traffic to ChatGPT, as it's answering the questions that people will search for them. Here's where Wikipedia is in a better space. It doesn't need, it doesn't have advertising, but the sources that it depends on are in peril.
Jerod Santo
It needs reliable sources, and the sources are going away. Or they're completely losing their credibility in the public's eye. I mean, at least in the United States, the powers that be press-wise, which are all kind of like owned by corporate interests and stuff like that, they've never been less relied upon. So many people don't even trust them anymore. But if Wikipedia does - I mean, maybe that will be... If anything may be leading towards its trend down and influence over time, it might be that.
Bill Beutler
Yeah. It's a long-term risk. It's absolutely a risk. And I would say it definitely has a negative impact on the growth potential of my business.
Jerod Santo
Right.
Bill Beutler
Because if there was more journalism about more companies, then that would be more sources that we could cite, that'd be more profile pieces establishing notability... So we are swimming against the currents a little bit there. Let me also answer this in a different way, again, back to the ecosystem, where I would like to build up an ecosystem... Here's a project that I cannot own, so I'm giving this away to anybody who wants to start this, and you can reach out to me to get my guidance on it... But like, there should be a publication which is basically like a factcheck.org for Wikipedia. It would be a place where, for example, my clients could get just a simple fact check of his marital status, and you would build the news organization around what the Reliable Sources Guideline says. If you are to reverse-engineer that guideline, you could start up a publication that is a reliable source, for sure... And so creators - creators don't follow any of this, most YouTubers, certainly no TikTokkers... I mean, YouTube definitely has more credible reporting than, again, TikTok, let alone Instagram. But yeah, someone should create a publication that exists to help Wikipedia verify sources. And to be clear, I do not mean citation laundering. I don't mean trying to skirt around the rules. I mean like hire some journalists, do some actual reporting and fact checking. And how you fund that, and why anybody would want to do so other than that...
Jerod Santo
Right...
Bill Beutler
...yeah, that's a great question. I have some ideas on how it would be funded by PR, AI, and philanthropy. I have these ideas; please come talk to me about it. But I couldn't -- I'm a former news guy, as I said at the top, and I would love that thing to exist. But Beutler Inc. can't run it. That would kind of defeat the whole purpose.
Jerod Santo
Absolutely.
Adam Stacoviak
Arms length, and stuff like that.
Jerod Santo
Yeah.
Bill Beutler
At the very least arms length. Yeah.
Adam Stacoviak
That's interesting. "Here's a free idea. I can't do it, but it's really good, so you should come and do it if you're capable.
Jerod Santo
There you go. So let's end on this, if you're willing, Bill... I just posted a Wikipedia page into the chat. I'm not sure if you have access to the chat there.
Bill Beutler
Yeah. Got it here.
Jerod Santo
I did not have a Wikipedia page, nor do I deserve one... However, my name does appear a few times...
Bill Beutler
Oh, yeah.
Jerod Santo
...through this podcast. This is Eugen Rochko's page. He's the creator of Mastodon.
Bill Beutler
Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Jerod Santo
Noteworthily, he just recently announced he's resigning as CEO, or something like that... But at the bottom of that page we have a section called Media Coverage.
Bill Beutler
Yup, there it is.
Jerod Santo
\[01:36:05.15\] In which case it says in a 2018 podcast with Jerod Santo and Adam Stacoviak from Twitter and GitHub, Rochko described in depth the origin of Mastodon. Now, I am not from Twitter, and Adam is not from GitHub, so this is incorrect... And how, in your expertise ways, would I go about correcting the record here? Because that's wrong.
Yeah. This... This is a pickle. And for more than one reason.
Adam Stacoviak
"This is a pickle..." \[laughs\]
Bill Beutler
Yeah... I can't solve all problems, you know...?
Jerod Santo
Okay... Well, tell us how bad this is here.
Bill Beutler
Look, for ninety eight point seven percent of all Wikipedia articles, this is no big deal. This is Wikipedia having information -- I mean, the fact that it's wrong is the issue, right?
Jerod Santo
Right. We don't really care one way or the other, but it is just wrong. Like, it should be right, you know?
Bill Beutler
Yeah. This is a case where I would say if you went in and changed it, you would not be -- I'm willing to say this at an hour and a half in... I don't think it'd be the worst thing in the world, right? Because actually, your intentions would be to correct the thing already there.
Jerod Santo
Yeah.
Bill Beutler
And it'd better for it to be corrected than incorrect. That said though, if you were to go post an edit request like our clients do, you might find an editor pointing out that the source goes back to your own website, does it not?
Jerod Santo
It does.
Bill Beutler
Right.
Adam Stacoviak
Is there a link back to our site? I didn't notice if there was or not.
Bill Beutler
Let me see here. Hold on a second. The citation... This is interesting, because it's using a citation format...
Jerod Santo
Number 26.
Bill Beutler
Number 26. Hold on. Well, yeah. Okay, so here you are... But then when you click on it -- no, I've found it now. Okay, join the Federation. Mastodon awaits. And so it goes to - yeah, the Changelog page. Look, I think it's at least an open question whether Changelog would be considered a reliable source... I think the short version would be "No, especially if he is the person who said it." I would say that you guys, if you guys are doing research, and you are offering commentary, you are well established as podcast experts in a field, if either of you have written on these subjects for, I don't know --
Jerod Santo
I write Changelog News every week. So I'm not a journalist, but we are documentators of the news...
Bill Beutler
Yeah, right. See, not just because I'm on your show right now... I'd be willing to give you --
Jerod Santo
You're gonna get this changed? Is that what you're trying to say?
Bill Beutler
...the benefit of the doubt because of the additional... Like, you don't just do the interviews. You also do news reporting as well, and covering the coverage. And I think that counts for something. Totally. You are more professional news...
Jerod Santo
Thank you.
Bill Beutler
...a more professional media outlet than most podcasts are.
Jerod Santo
I'm just here for the compliments, Bill.
Bill Beutler
Hah! Yeah.
Jerod Santo
So if I wanted to change this -- basically, all I would like to say is "We're not from Twitter and GitHub. We're from the Changelog." Then do I just click Edit, and then I just change the text and say "Look, I'm Jerod. This is wrong."
Bill Beutler
Do you want me to do it?
Jerod Santo
I mean, I don't have any money, but yes...
Bill Beutler
I'm not going to use my business account. I'm going to use my personal account. \[laughter\]
Adam Stacoviak
This is Bill personal.
Jerod Santo
This is Bill's personal --
Bill Beutler
This is what you came for.
Jerod Santo
You're really scratching my back, Bill... Yeah, I would like you to submit that. That would be amazing. I mean, that saves me from having to even remember my password, because I haven't \[unintelligible 01:39:39.19\] for years.
Adam Stacoviak
I tried to actually log in, Jerod, while we're on this pod, and I guess the email that I use for Wikipedia and for my account - maybe I don't have access to it, it won't tell what it is, so I've got to go through the process of proving I'm me, basically, at this point, to get my true account back. I think I might have one edit out there.
Bill Beutler
Did you not use an email account when you set it up?
Adam Stacoviak
\[01:40:06.02\] I think so, because whenever I'm trying to log in, it is telling me to verify with a code to an email that is blocked from my visibility. And I checked the ones I think it would be, and the code is not there. So at this point I'm thinking... I don't know. I don't know which email account it's using. There's only two that I would have used, and it's not in either of those accounts.
Bill Beutler
I'll tell you what, I'm going to make this change, because at least I'm going to make it correct... I will add this -- the sentence, it's not like it adds massively critical information. "In the podcast he described the company he built." But I'm just going to write "Not from --"
Jerod Santo
Yeah, I'm not even sure... Maybe I'm the one that created this edit back in 2018, back when I was trying to get my website on the -- but I wouldn't have put "from Twitter and GitHub" unless I was trying to make them think I was important.
Bill Beutler
Well, I'm going to do the favor of not looking into that right now. I'm going to just correct the thing in front of me, which most Wikipedia editors do. It's better to make a small edit that makes it a little better, than on the hook for going back and determining the absolute best possible version of the page. Honestly, that's the reason why my company exists, because we will do that deep research and try to write the best version of the page. Most Wikipedia editors are just kind of like moseying along, and they might see something in the news... "Oh, that's not on the page. Let me add it." This is one reason why Wikipedia biographies sometimes are so scattershot, because that's literally what happens. Like, 13 people added 13 different sentences over 13 years, and no one's ever applied any editorial hand to it. Anyway, if you reload the page now, you will see that...
Jerod Santo
Yes...! It's fixed.
Bill Beutler
...you are from the Changelog, and not from...
Jerod Santo
Yes...! We'll see if it sticks.
Adam Stacoviak
Wow...
Jerod Santo
This is amazing.
Bill Beutler
I think it will. I think it will.
Jerod Santo
Speaking to the power and the coolness of Wikipedia for a moment, I just mentioned that Eugen just announced his retirement yesterday... It's there. It's the last one on --
Bill Beutler
Oh yeah, \[unintelligible 01:42:06.25\]
Jerod Santo
Rochko stepped down. Now, the weird thing about this is the citation for that particular sentence, which is the second to last sentence prior to the media coverage section. Links to his Mastodon post...? Isn't that a primary source?
Bill Beutler
It is, and it is not the ideal source, because - I've been working on this issue with my client. One potential option that's been floated to me would be to have him post something on his, Twitter or X account... Which I think he doesn't want to do either, frankly. So there is a deep -- so I happen to be familiar with this area of policy right now... It is the -- "blp primary" is the shortcut. And it says that it can be occasionally alright to use self-published sources for biographies if it comes from the person, and if it updates something that was already wrong, for example. So it's not the most ideal source... Here's the thing. Again, for 99% of Wikipedia articles, this is fine. It's useful. And if it's not useful, most pages are not controversial.
Jerod Santo
\[01:43:21.03\] Yeah. Like, they're going to accept this until maybe somebody comes by and is like "Hey, that's wrong", and then it's like "Well, the source is bad." And then maybe it would go away. Gotcha.
Bill Beutler
More likely it stays for a long time, because it's right.
Jerod Santo
Yeah.
Bill Beutler
You know, a lot of Wikipedia is doing the best possible job in the moment... And it isn't until you get to those really hard pages that are either in politics, or in matters of lawsuits, and other things that -- big businesses are kind of inherently a contested subject. It's not outwardly controversial... They are at least closely scrutinized. Eugen Rochko - you know, first I've heard of him, obviously... I created a Mastodon account and posted on it once, a long time ago...
Jerod Santo
There you go.
Bill Beutler
And I love the photo. Wikipedia photos are -- I know we're late into this, but speaking of the ecosystem, one thing that does exist is there's a project called Wiki Portraits, run by some friends of mine. And they go to Sundance, and South by Southwest, and the Cannes Film Festival, and they set up a pop-up studio, and they take headshots of people so they can put quality photos on Wikipedia. They're not a for-profit company, they have a grant to do it... But that's kind of a cool thing, because yeah, Wikipedia photos of the living persons - they can't use copyrighted photos. That's just also part of the guidelines, or part of the site licensing. And so you get some hilarious photos where it's like a basketball player from behind, that somebody snapped the photo from the sidelines... You'll still see that.
Jerod Santo
Yeah, I think that kind of maybe lends to the community feel, kind of the...
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah.
Bill Beutler
It's authentic.
Jerod Santo
Yeah.
Bill Beutler
Yeah. Still built by volunteers.
Jerod Santo
Well, Bill, I'm glad that I waited until 90 minutes in to get my edit request submitted, because you happily obliged... And there it is. I mean, a correction. Just like when the true stuff is out there, Adam. I mean, Adam, you never worked at GitHub, did you?
Adam Stacoviak
No. No, I have not.
Jerod Santo
You don't want that to be public record, right? Like, that's just not true.
Adam Stacoviak
No. I mean, it's not true. It's not valid information.
Jerod Santo
\[laughs\]
Bill Beutler
It's just a weird thing. Yeah, and trivial... It was definitely no big deal to remove... And look, perhaps in this way I have a little bit of veteran privilege, where... Highly unlikely someone comes along to undo that. And besides, I'm right. It's on that other person to prove that you -- so that's really the thing. Can they prove that you worked --
Jerod Santo
They're never going to prove that, because we're not even public figures. They're going to be like "Well, how would you even know?"
Bill Beutler
Can't prove a negative.
Adam Stacoviak
Well, you do one search and you don't find GitHub, you find the Changelog. So it's like, one search... I mean, are search results part of the second party, third party validation systems? I don't know.
Jerod Santo
Well, it depends on where you land. If you land on a reputable source, or a reliable source...
Adam Stacoviak
If a link to say that you work for GitHub or Twitter is barely on page four, because of misinformation, but the truth is on page one... I mean, you've got to add one and one together, and not get 11. You've got to get one -- or you've got to get two. Sorry about that. \[laughter\]
Jerod Santo
Alright, that's where we end the show. One plus one equals one... I mean, come on. What is truth?
Adam Stacoviak
What is truth around here..? That's cool. Super-geek, real quick... I mean, a cool thing on their cache busting. You push Submit, it busted the cache on this global website, and immediately it was updated for Omaha and Austin, Texas. So that's cool.
Jerod Santo
Oh, yeah. Well, in 25 years they've ironed out the kinks, man.
Bill Beutler
It's a marvel. It is the eighth wonder of the world, absolutely.
Jerod Santo
Absolutely. Bill, thanks so much for telling us all about it, man. This has been awesome.
Bill Beutler
Thanks, guys. This was a lot of fun.
Adam Stacoviak
So cool. Thanks, Bill.
Bill Beutler
Definitely.
