Wikipedia's founder makes an invigorating plea for collaboration and respectful debate.
Lessons learned from an encyclopedic commitment to facts.
This motivational monograph isn’t helped by a framework that emphasizes its unoriginal aspects, but it’s easy to warm to Wales’ eloquent case for the “sunny, pro-social view of human nature” behind Wikipedia’s unlikely rise. His big idea was a tough sell. An online encyclopedia that anyone can write or edit? Hopelessly naïve. So said TV comedians and august publishers when Wales launched Wikipedia in 2001. But by the 2010s, his nonprofit was widely admired—“the last bastion of shared reality,” the Atlantic said. To Wales, nothing happens without trust. Wikipedia editors “assume good faith” from fellow volunteers, and because “people are natural reciprocators,” this fosters thoughtful debate, transparency, and fidelity to documentable facts. With polls showing Americans’ faith in institutions and one another on a decades-long decline, he means to inspire a “restoration of trust.” Wales’ “rules,” presented as subheadings for the first seven chapters, aren’t revolutionary. Some aren’t even his. One—“Want Trust? Give Trust.”—rewords a statement attributed to Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu. But they’re productive starting points for the author’s reflections on the Wikipedia way, which he augments by interviewing various thinkers. Most compellingly, he shows how Wikipedia’s emphasis on civility helps attract ideologically and demographically diverse contributors, resulting in “articles of higher quality than politically homogenous teams,” an academic study found. Wales shares interesting behind-the-scenes anecdotes about Wikipedians’ rigor. An editorial discussion about punctuation and capitalization in the title of a Star Trek movie resulted in a 40,000-word exchange. While he occasionally writes like someone scheduling a bland corporate retreat—organizations should conduct a “trust inventory”—Wales’ appreciative tributes to diligent Wikipedia contributors provide instructive examples for readers inspired to counter falsehoods wherever they arise.
Wikipedia's founder makes an invigorating plea for collaboration and respectful debate.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780593727461
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Crown Currency
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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