Trust is not an immovable mountain. It is an edifice, built brick by brick. Pull out enough bricks and it will start to wobble. The world is currently in a crisis of trust, which helps to explain why “affective polarisation” — hating the people on the other side of the fence — has become extreme. In countries where this is an issue, people now have few or no news sources which they share in common.
One of the last information sources that transcends those divides and is used by all in common is Wikipedia. If Wikipedia becomes yet another casualty in the culture war — trusted as “one of us” by some, scorned by others as “one of them” — people will lose one of their last sources of shared facts. And what happens when people can no longer agree even on basic facts? Christiane Amanpour, the CNN International host who has been everywhere and seen everything, from war zones to refugee camps and palaces, is (which is rare) respected across the political spectrum. She is terrified by the thought of what happens to a society that can no longer agree what the facts are. “Our democracies will fall unless we accept that there is a basic set of facts that are indisputable,” she told me. “Afterwards, people can think and do whatever they want with that basic set of facts.”
