The Seven Rules of Trust
2025 book by Jimmy Wales with Dan Gardner
The Seven Rules of Trust is a book by Jimmy Wales written with Dan Gardner and published by Crown Currency and Bloomsbury on October 28, 2025. The book presents Wikipedia co-founder Wales's view on how to mend division in society through the building of trust in seven rules, which serve as subheadings in the book.
Background
Jimmy Wales is an American Internet entrepreneur who co-founded the online encyclopedia Wikipedia in 2001. Dan Gardner is a Canadian academic who previously wrote the 2008 book Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear and co-authored the 2015 book Superforecasting with Philip E. Tetlock.
Premise
In The Seven Rules of Trust, Wales presents his view on how the trust-based model of Wikipedia can be applied to address the problem of polarization in the United States or the world. For Wales, the solution to division in society lies in trust, for which he provides seven rules on how to build:
Make It Personal
Be Positive About People
Create a Clear Purpose
Be Trusting
Be Civil
Be Independent
Be Transparent
These rules serve as subheadings for each of the first seven chapters of the book.
Publication
By April 2025, translation rights had been sold in 15 other territories, and the book was scheduled for release on October 28, 2025 by Crown Currency in the US and Bloomsbury in Commonwealth countries (excluding Canada). Two days prior to publication, an excerpt was published in The Times, and on the publication day October 28, excerpts of the book were published as essays in the magazines Time and Fortune. A German translation by Ursula Held, Oliver Lingner, and Hans Freundl was published by Piper Verlag at the end of the month.
Media tour
Wales embarked on a media tour to promote The Seven Rules of Trust.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “The Seven Rules of Trust” as 2025 book by Jimmy Wales with Dan Gardner. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the arts & letters register because the source frames it as 2025 book by Jimmy Wales with Dan Gardner. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q133840503. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2025, 2001, 2008 and 2015.
Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
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The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “The Seven Rules of Trust”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow The Seven Rules of Trust primary sources, The Seven Rules of Trust archive and Seven research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “The Seven Rules of Trust” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.