Green’s defense of Wikipedia is not mainly that its leaders are trustworthy people. His defense is that Wikipedia makes its process inspectable: people can edit, changes can be reversed, citations are expected, arguments are visible, and sources can be checked.
That means trust is not grounded first in personality but in recoverable procedure. The user does not have to believe in the inner purity of editors in order to benefit from the system. The system earns trust by exposing how claims get made, challenged, and corrected.
This is a stronger kind of legitimacy than charisma because it scales beyond any one founder. A person can disappear, disappoint, or be misread; a transparent process can still be audited. Trust lasts longer when it is attached to visible mechanisms of correction rather than to personal prestige.
Verbatim: “It’s one of the only places on the internet where you can see how the sausage is made. You can read the real arguments. You can check the sources.”