The Seven Rules of Trust was released on October 28, 2025. Not many books have the claim to fame that this one does: Jimmy Wales is featured prominently on the cover (with co-author Dan Gardner in much smaller lettering). But does this book actually have something fundamentally important to say about Wikipedia? I would argue that it depends on the audience reading it. I read this book with my Wikipedian hat proudly on and that affects my perspective quite strongly. Therefore, I think a more casual reader may find the book to be more insightful than I did.

For the sake of transparency, I am declaring the conflict-of-interest that I have with Jimmy Wales that is already on my userpage. I'd also like to mention that I received a free copy of the book from him about a week before the book was officially released. Despite this connection, I don't think I have let this cloud my review. Feel free to take my opinion with a grain of salt regardless. I won't be offended if you don't trust my review to be purely objective.

So what is this book actually about? As the title implies, it's about trust. While the book lists both Jimmy Wales and Dan Gardner on the front cover, I perceived the book to be written in "Jimmy's voice". I say that because there is a lot of first-person language like "I". There are plenty of personal insights about Wales' life and there are none about Gardner's. The back cover only includes a photograph of Jimmy Wales.

Wales opens the book by talking about a very personal experience. His daughter had meconium aspiration syndrome and he had to make a decision as a parent on whether to accept an experimental treatment for the condition. I can only imagine the stress of that situation. He couldn't really find anything other than scientific papers that were unintelligable to laymen like him. Wales had this experience about a month before launching Wikipedia. He describes it as fortifying his belief in this website's importance. It's a touching story and I wholeheartedly believe its veracity. I'd personally advise more caution in the strength of our medical content than Wales does when he says "Worried parents will never go through a similar experience today because Wikipedia has excellent articles" on page 16 because our disclaimer about such content exists for a reason. I also admit to being a bit wary that Wales does not mention Larry Sanger until page 152.

I would argue that this is not strictly a book about Wikipedia even if there are Wikipedia-related anecdotes scattered throughout it. I think that The Editors by Stephen Harrison actually features Wikipedia more prominently despite technically only being "inspired" by it. In contrast, the Seven Rules of Trust reads like your standard business-related book with Wikipedia laying the foundation. There's numerous pages that have absolutely nothing to do with Wikipedia: Uber, AirBNB, Quaker Oats, and the subreddit r/ChangeMyView, to name a few examples. What all of these subjects have in common is something Wales perceives as being relevant to the matter of trust. I'm not saying these reflections aren't meaningful. I was simply expecting to see more about Wikipedia. The limited content about the hopes and dreams people had with Web 2.0 made me long to read more. Wikipedia really is something magical when compared to the toxicity that runs rampant across most of the Internet and the book is at its best when it focuses on that.

I enjoyed the mini-biographies of Wikipedians Annie Rauwerda, Emily Temple-Wood, and James Heilman. I also enjoyed the much briefer quotes of other Wikipedians. There happens to be an unattributed quote on page 131 that says "Reasonable people can disagree", quotation marks and all. I think there's a very real chance that quote came from me as it's something I've said verbatim in several contexts (if I recall correctly, this also includes a conversation with Gardner). That said, the idea itself isn't entirely original and could have plausibly come from elsewhere. I think there's a touching memorial to Jo Cox's memory as well.

I'm genuinely shocked that page 47 made it through the publication process. I understand the argument that Wales was trying to make. There's a dark side to the Internet and not everyone comes together to do something great. The Gamergate analogy made sense. But then Wales started writing about some dark history from his hometown of Huntsville, Alabama. He describes a literal lynching as an example of volunteers that came together, made plans, and got to work on something they thought was important to the community. At a fundamental level, you could argue that the lynching was our pro-social human nature in action. I'll emphasize that Wales sees this incident as evil. But the framing felt off, made me wonder if anyone at Penguin involved a sensitivity reader at any point, and felt like it cheapened the horror that this history contains. In case anyone is worried I am cherry-picking this quote, you can read the full page here. I'd argue that it's actually worse in context than without it.

Chapter 4 gets across the principle of assume good faith decently well. However, I do think the example written in the book takes the practice farther than how it is actually applied. Wales describes a situation in which a new editor erases a paragraph in an article about American politics and replaces it with slanted content cited to an obscure blog. He believes that the way Wikipedians would react to this situation would be to revert the edit (correct) and then open a discussion on the talk page explaining why they disagree with it (this generally wouldn't happen from the editor doing the reverting). I think there's a sincere value to writing edit summaries like this when dealing with good faith edits. But I also recognize that most editors will simply offer a quick link to the relevant policy and see that as sufficent. Whether that's how things should be is a different conversation, but I'm worried this example will give casual readers unrealistic expectations. I do agree with the message that it's difficult to have constructive conversations if people are making personal attacks. Civility is important.

I admit that I'm also not a big fan of the AI tool that Wales describes working on in the conclusion of the book. I think the answer to people not understanding our radical transparency is to get better at teaching the public how to engage with Wikipedia and how we work, not to have an LLM summarize and name the editors that participated in the discussions that led to the current consensus. I get why someone would think it's a good idea to make our processes more understandable this way but it'd only do so on a surface level. I worry that the results would cause more harm than good.

Overall, I'd say the book is a decent lighthearted read, even if I can't ignore its very noticeable flaws. The critiques always stand out more strongly in one's mind. I'd suggest people borrow it from a library because I don't think this book would be good value for money unless you were rich. $42 CAD works out to 20 cents a page.