Jimmy Wales Quotes

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

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

The primary issue is how seriously we take our chosen obligations to people in the developing world who do not have Internet connections. … 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..

I joke that I started as a kid revising the encyclopedia by stickering the one my mother bought.

Freely licensed textbooks are the next big thing in education.

When is the last time you saw a politician talking about Aristotle's Virtues? This is what I love seeing -@RoryStewartUKpost on WT: https://wt.social/post/vg6w2a75311699787861

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.

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.

You cannot write a good Wikipedia article about a small town if there is no longer news about this small town. This [trend] will impact the quality of Wikipedia long-term.

What if we could get everyone in the world together to record what they know in one place?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.