Jimmy Wales Quotations

The goal is to give people a free encyclopedia to every person in the world, in their own language. Not just in a 'free beer' kind of way, but also in the free speech kind of way.

We've seen how grassroots journalism by blogs has had an impact at various points politically, as ordinary people have amplified stories that were being ignored by the traditional press.

Things work well when a group of people know each other, and things break down when it's a bunch of random people interacting.

If it isn't on Google, it doesn't exist.

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

While I'm optimistic about the direction the world is headed, generally, I think there is a need for constant vigilance and pressure on repressive governments.

I don't worry. It's just not in my nature, really.

People do fun and interesting things because they're fun and interesting.

Free speech includes the right to not speak.

We are still in the very beginnings of the Internet.

The mainland Chinese tend to take a Chinese mainland point of view on controversial issues, and the Taiwanese take another the Taiwanese viewpoint.

I worry about censorship in many parts of the world.

My original concept was to provide a free encyclopedia for every single person in the world.

I have always viewed the mission of Wikipedia to be much bigger than just creating a killer website. We're doing that of course, and having a lot of fun doing it, but a big part of what motivates us is our larger mission to affect the world in a positive way

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 still believe there is a need to open up search and it will come eventually. It is very important to challenge the current models.

The core of Wikipedia is something people really believe in. That is too valuable for the world to screw it up.

My view is that good community management is like having good municipal government: You should be able to have dissenting opinions and so on, freedom of speech, but your grandmother should also be able to walk down the street at night without having to worry about getting mugged.

What can we put into the hands of people under oppressive regimes to help them? For me, a big part of it is information, knowledge - the ability to defeat propaganda by understanding it.

I tend to eat things in fours. I'll eat four nuts, four grapes, four chips at a time. I don't know why. It's not really a superstition. I don't think anything bad will happen if I don't, but three potato chips doesn't seem right.

I have no regular schedule. I get up whenever I can.

I'm very much an Enlightenment kind of guy.

If you see a blatant error or misconception about yourself, you really want to set it straight.

A huge amount of what goes on in the Middle East has to do with people being fed really bad information.

What we're hopeful to see is that by slowing that down to 1,500 a day from several thousand, the people who are monitoring this will have more ability to improve the quality. In many cases the types of things we see going on are impulse vandalism.

We are talking to several agents and publishers about what they would be interested in.

Somebody might contact you, but that doesn't mean they're administrators. They're just people who know how to use the search tool.

The purpose is really contained in the word 'freely licensed,' which is to make available to anyone in the world, in any language, a curriculum that they can copy, redistribute and modify, for whatever purpose they may have, for free,

I was very pleased, just to see that (the study) was reasonably favorable. I think it provides, for us, a great counterpoint to the press coverage we've gotten recently, because it puts the focus on the broader quality and not just one article.

Most of the prominent contributors are not anonymous. We are an actual community in the sense that we know each other and have fun working together.

You don't delete it. If they wanted to put in their side of things, that would seem ethically relevant, rather than just omitting it.

We're very pleased with the results and we're hoping it will focus people's attention on the overall level of our work, which is pretty good.

We delete things that are not good. They're taken down for good reasons.

Our growth rate continues to be staggering.

We have constant problems where we have people who are trying to repeatedly abuse our sites.

We've had a lot of interest from investors, and it was really a matter of sorting through the investors to be sure that people who are investing were people who were believers in our mission.

We have to continually evaluate whether our controls are enough.

We have to come together, worldwide, and 'think.' We have a tool - the internet - to let us do that. Let's use it wisely.

Communities can build amazing things, but you have to be part of that community and you can't abuse them. You have to be very respectful of what their needs are.

Especially with politics, it gets more and more borderline on what's in bad faith or good faith. Reasonable people can find a way to work together. Unreasonable people get blocked, of course.

People shouldn't do it, including me. I wish I hadn't done it. It's in poor taste...People have a lot of information about themselves but staying objective is difficult. That's the trade-off in editing entries about yourself...If you see a blatant error or misconception about yourself, you really want to set it straight.

No, we don't pay for publicity, never have and most likely never will; it hasn't been necessary, and I don't see that it will be necessary.

Your user ID is the basis for your reputation. If you are doing good work, you will gain trust. If you do bad work it will get reverted. We don't care about your personal name or what your previous credentials are.

That's a big error to assume that there's any tension between the two, that it's experts vs. community. There are experts in the community.

The bigger it gets and the more people stumble across it, the more people are interested in volunteering.

The beauty of a forum like this is free speech. But we also promote a neutral point of view.

It's a mass collaboration to build all kinds of things. It's becoming a new model for doing things on the Internet.

I joke a lot that (choosing to be a nonprofit) was either the best thing or the worst thing I've ever done. But I think that the site wouldn't have been successful with ads. People might not be so quick to contribute.

I'm learning German, ... You couldn't learn German just from a textbook...So I'm learning from audio CDs and games.

The idea that we are going to tighten our editorial 'rules' is completely not correct (and) the articles would not be frozen in perpetuity.

You shouldn't use anything as the sole source for anything, in my view.

Mostly, I try to take a rational approach to life.

Wikis and social networking are just tools.

The Supreme Court has held that code is speech. And it doesn't matter that it's done on a computer or done face to face or done in a newspaper, reporting the facts of the world is protected speech.

People who have achieved a public voice find it a mixed bag.

What you don't get in the mainstream media is so much of the background material.

One of the ways that Microsoft beat Apple way back in the day was that they were a lot more open; today, in the world I come from, the free software and open-source world, Microsoft is not generally viewed as open; they're viewed as proprietary.

The Internet is allowing for us to really experience people in some of the most distant places in the world - as other people just like us. So get to know people, seek out bloggers from a country you're kind of curious about. It's about building empathy and breaking through to the point of recognizing people as people.

We don't stoop to the level of our worst critics, no matter how much we may find them to be annoying.

When you consider the magnitude of how many people use Wikipedia globally, there is a potential here for really creating some noise and getting some attention in the U.S.

I think people have to recognise that the traditional modes of authority weren't that great.

Wikipedia is the #5 site on the Web and serves 450 million different people every month - with billions of page views.

When I opened Wikipedia, it had three articles, yet it was called an encyclopedia.

Love. It isn't very popular in technical circles to say a lot of mushy stuff about love, but frankly it's a very very important part of what holds our project together.

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

To create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language - That's who I am. That's what I am doing. That's my life goal.

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.

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.

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

It has become more important than ever that we teach students how to do research, and how to evaluate different sources of information. (Jimmy Wales, IB World, 68, Sept. 2013, p.10. )

Almost anything is better than three network TV outlets completely controlling the national discourse with their nightly broadcasts. We've moved a long way from that, and that's important.

I don't come down on any simple place as a deletionist or a completionist.

I can't do anything quietly anymore.

I am really accessible.

I have always liked the idea of going to print because a big part of what we are about is to disseminate knowledge throughout the world and not just to people who have broadband.

I have zero interest in sports of any kind - professional, college or international.

I just get up every day and do what seems like the most interesting, fun thing to do.

There's a big tendency to gravitate toward a closed and proprietary approach too easily.

Massive numbers of people are going to come online from cultures we don't normally interact with.

It's kind of surprising that you could just open up a site and let people work.

Dialing down is not an option for me.

I'm not real good at the administrative part of running a company.

I think it's a mistake to treat different realms of knowledge as if they are some how fundamentally the same.

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.

In general, the best advice I can give people is to take criticism seriously, apologize for anything you have done wrong, and pull back from conflict. Of course, if you are right on a content matter, you should press forward in the interest of quality, but conflict often has a way of taking on a life of its own, unfortunately.

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.

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?

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 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.

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.

Myspace hurts my eyes.

Greatest misconception about 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.

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.

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.

Freely licensed textbooks are the next big thing in education.

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.

The more time I spent on the site the more I came to think of Wales as some kind of Queen Ant, letting the vast colony go about its work, at the centre of a system where the knowledge of the community is infinitely larger than the sum of experience of all its individuals.