Jimmy Wales

“Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing.”

“I frequently counsel people who are getting frustrated about an edit war to think about someone who lives without clean drinking water, without any proper means of education, and how our work might someday help that person. It puts flamewars into some perspective, I think.”

“[Wikipedia is] like a sausage: you might like the taste of it, but you don't necessarily want to see how it's made.”

“When someone just writes 'f**k, f**k, f**k', we just fix it, laugh and move on. But the difficult social issues are the borderline cases — people who do some good work, but who are also a pain in the neck.”

“Wikipedia is first and foremost an effort to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language. Asking whether the community comes before or after this goal is really asking the wrong question: the entire purpose of the community is precisely this goal.”

“Ideally, our rules should be formed in such a fashion that an ordinary helpful kind thoughtful person doesn't really even need to know the rules. You just get to work, do something fun, and nobody hassles you as long as you are being thoughtful and kind.”

“Most people understand the need for neutrality. The real struggle is not between the right and the left — that's where most people assume — but it's between the party of the thoughtful and the party of the jerks. And no side of the political spectrum has a monopoly on either of those qualities.”

“Freely licensed textbooks are the next big thing in education.”

“We are growing from a cheerful small town where everyone waves off their front porch to the subway of New York City where everyone rushes by. How do you preserve the culture that has worked so well?”

“Frankly, and let me be blunt, Wikipedia as a readable product is not for us. It's for them. It's for that girl in Africa who can save the lives of hundreds of thousands of people around her, but only if she's empowered with the knowledge to do so.”

“We are Wikipedians. This means that we should be: kind, thoughtful, passionate about getting it right, open, tolerant of different viewpoints, open to criticism, bold about changing our policies and also cautious about changing our policies. We are not vindictive, childish, and we don't stoop to the level of our worst critics, no matter how much we may find them to be annoying.”

“It is pretty weird. A few years ago, I was just some guy sitting in front of the internet. Now I send an e-mail or edit an article and it makes headlines around the world … I used to be just a guy — now I'm Jimmy Wales.”

“We come from geek culture, we come from the free software movement, we have a lot of technologists involved. If we had done the same sort of comparison on poets or artists, I think that we would not have fared nearly as well.”

“It turns out a lot of people don’t get it. Wikipedia is like rock’n’roll; it’s a cultural shift.”

“We've always had a love/hate relationship with numbers.”

“IAR is policy, always has been.”

“Quite frankly, several of the people who contributed to the article should be banned from coming near a keyboard until they have learned to engage in proper encyclopedia writing.”

“I think that argument is completely morally bankrupt, and I think people know that when they make it. There's a very big difference between having a sincere, passionate interest in a topic and being a paid shill … Particularly for PR firms, it's something they should really very strongly avoid: ever touching an article.”

“I regard it as a pseudonym and I don’t really have a problem with it.”

“I don't see any particular problem with that.”

“Myspace hurts my eyes.”

“Wikipedia is a non-profit. It was either the dumbest thing I ever did or the smartest thing I ever did.”

“Simply having rules does not change the things that people want to do. You have to change incentives.”

“EssJay was appointed at the request of and unanimous support of the ArbCom.”

“I think MySpace is doomed, I give them about two more years.... I think Facebook is the next Microsoft in both the bad and the good senses. That's an amazing company that is going to do a lot of good and bad things.”

“Greatest misconception about Wikipedia: We aren’t democratic. Our readers edit the entries, but we’re actually quite snobby. The core community appreciates when someone is knowledgeable, and thinks some people are idiots and shouldn’t be writing.”

“There’s plenty of rude stuff online. People say things online that they would be ashamed to say face to face. If people could treat others as though they were speaking face to face, that would be huge.”

“I have said this many times in the past and will say it many times in the future I am sure: some people need to find a different hobby, because whatever they are here for, it is not to help build an encyclopedia.”

“We are going to change the [GNU] Free Documentation License in such a way that Wikipedia will be able to become licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License. And so this is not, as some people speculated on Facebook my 50th birthday party. This is a party to celebrate the liberation of Wikipedia.”

“Given enough time humans will screw up Wikipedia just as they have screwed up everything else, but so far it's not too bad.”

“I don't really agree that most academics frown when they hear Wikipedia. Most academics I find quite passionate about the concept of Wikipedia and like it quite a bit. [...] The number of academics who really really don't like Wikipedia is really quite small and we find that they get reported on in the media far out of proportion to the amount they actually exist.”

“We are a passionate community of volunteers who are trying to create a free encyclopedia for every single person on the planet. So we don't often think in terms of competition. We are going to do what we do and we hope Google does wonderful things as well. … If we were approaching this as a business we would think always: Oh, how can we position ourselves on the market... We just don't do any of that stuff.”

“I have my team focused on the front end, working on the user experience, and making sure we have all the wiki-like tools people need to work on the site. We're just cranking away.”

“To me the key thing is getting it right. And if a person's really smart and they're doing fantastic work, I don't care if they're a high school kid or a Harvard professor; it's the work that matters.”

“I'm on it pretty much all the time. I edit Wikipedia every day, I'm on Facebook, I'm on Twitter, I'm reading the news. During one of the US elections, I actually went through my computer and I blocked myself from looking at the major newspaper sites and Google News because I wasn't getting any work done.”

“What we won't do is pretend that the work of lunatic charlatans is the equivalent of "true scientific discourse." It isn't.”

“Real people are involved, and they can be hurt by your words. We are not tabloid journalism, we are an encyclopedia.”

“Wikipedia is something special. It is like a library or a public park. It is like a temple for the mind. It is a place we can all go to think, to learn, to share our knowledge with others. When I founded Wikipedia, I could have made it into a for-profit company with advertising banners, but I decided to do something different. We’ve worked hard over the years to keep it lean and tight. We fulfill our mission efficiently.”

“Random speculative pseudo information should be removed, unless it can be sourced.”

“Zero information is preferred to misleading or false information”

“Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing.”

“I'm a big advocate of freedom: freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom of thought.”