Hank Green argues that one of Wikipedia’s great strengths is that it is “boring.” In a media environment engineered to maximize drama, outrage, speed, and view counts, boringness becomes evidence that a system is not primarily trying to manipulate attention.
That matters because excitement and trust often pull in opposite directions. A platform optimized to keep people emotionally activated has strong incentives to oversimplify, polarize, and escalate. A platform that feels slow, procedural, citation-heavy, and unglamorous may be protecting the very conditions that make reliable knowledge possible.
The larger claim is that trustworthiness is often easier to recognize by what a system refuses to optimize for. When a knowledge system does not seem especially good at manufacturing excitement, that may be one reason it is still capable of telling the truth.
Sermon angle. The same diagnostic applies to churches. A congregation evaluated for emotional intensity, attendance spikes, or stage production is being judged by exciting metrics; a congregation evaluated for quiet faithfulness, recoverable teaching, and patient pastoral work is being judged by boring ones. Excitement attracts; boringness is what stays trustworthy when the lights are off.
Verbatim: “the fact that Wikipedia is kind of boring is one of the most beautiful things about it.”