Jimmy Wales
👤 PersonAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
And I've always thought that the term notability, I think, is a little problematic.
I mean, we struggle about how to talk about it.
The problem with notability is...
It can feel insulting to say, oh no, you're not noteworthy.
Well, my mother's noteworthy.
She's a really important person in my life, right?
But it's more like verifiability.
Is there a way to get information that actually makes an encyclopedia entry?
So there's a few things to unpack in all that.
So first, one of the things I find really, always find very interesting is your status with MIT.
Okay, that's upsetting and it's an argument and can be sorted out.
But then what's interesting is you gave as much time to that, which is actually important and relevant to your career and so on, to also where your father was born, which most people would hardly notice but is really meaningful to you.
And I find that a lot when I talk to people who have a biography in Wikipedia is they're often as annoyed by a tiny error that no one's going to notice.
Like this town in Tajikistan has got a new name and so on.
Like nobody even knows what that means or whatever, but it can be super important.
And so that's one of the reasons, you know, for biographies, we say like human dignity really matters.