Jimmy-wales-homeA couple of days before I interviewed Jimmy Wales about how he built Wikipedia, the New York Times ran an article that generated some controversy about how Wales might have saved a life.

David Rohde, a reporter, was captured by the Taliban, and because the story was kept off Wikipedia, it reduced the leverage that his kidnappers had in the negotiation. Even though it helped save a life, some called what Wikipedia did censorship and others worried that this meant Wales had too much power.

So I asked him about it. Here’s the audio and transcript of his response. (Get the full interview here!)

Andrew Warner: Was it a tough decision to say that you’ll keep information off of Wikipedia? The New York Times seems to say that a lot of that decision came from you.

Jimmy Wales: Yeah, it was a very, very easy decision. In this case, we were fortunate, because all we had to do was enforce the already existed policies of Wikipedia. The things that were being posted were not reliable sources, and it was basically random speculatio

In a biography of a living person, we have very strict sourcing requirements. That made it super easy to basically say, “hey, look, what we’re going to do is enforce policy here. We’re gonna be very diligent about it.” That made it very eas

If the story had been different and if the story had been published in lots of different newspapers and lots of sources and everybody was talking about it and the New York Times asked it to be removed from Wikipedia, we would have to say, “well, that’s impossible, the story’s out. There are reliable sources. There’s really nothing we can do about it.”

In this case, it just worked out very well that it was about a difficult matter.

Andrew Warner: I see here in the article that there was an Afghan news agency report on it. Was it that it just wasn’t online so the editors couldn’t link to that Afghan news story? Is why it couldn’t make it into Wikipedia?

Jimmy Wales: No, it was online, at least part of it. I think it was taken down at some point and put back.

I’m not clear on all the details. It was online, but it was a source that we didn’t know much about and it wasn’t being corroborated by anybody else. I knew, behind the scenes, but I’m not a news source and I’m not going to publish my personal knowledge as being something we should have on Wikipedi

Whenever we have that kind of situation where we have a report of something from a very difficult area where it’s really hard to get good news out and it’s not being corroborated by other sources, we tend to downplay it and say, “well, that doesn’t seem…you know, if that were true, then it would be repeated elsewhere.” That’s sort of the standar

This kind of issue comes up all the time, that there’s a report in some news service that may or may not be a real news service, or maybe it is, and it seem logical at first, but then nobody else is confirming it. What do you do with that? We have to make editorial judgment calls all the time about things like that.