Jimmy Wales
👤 PersonAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
I can give an example that I haven't looked at in a long time, but I was really pleased with what I saw at the time.
So the discussion was that they're building something in Israel.
And for their own political reasons, one side calls it a wall, hearkening back to Berlin Wall, apartheid.
The other calls it a security fence.
So we can understand quite quickly, if we give it a moment's thought, like, okay, I understand why people would have...
this grappling over the language.
Like, okay, you want to highlight the negative aspects of this, and you want to highlight the positive aspects, so you're going to try and choose a different name.
And so there was this really fantastic Wikipedia discussion on the talk page.
How do we word that paragraph to talk about the different naming?
It's called this by Israelis, it's called this by Palestinians.
And how you explain that to people could be quite charged, right?
Explain, oh, there's this difference, and it's because this side's good and this side's bad, and that's why there's a difference.
Or you could say, actually, let's try and really stay as neutral as we can and try to explain the reason.
So you may come away from it with a concept.
Oh, okay, I understand what this debate is about now.