Jimmy Wales Quotes

co-founder of Wikipedia (born 1966)

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Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales (born August 7, 1966) is a British-American Internet entrepreneur and wiki pioneer who is most famous as one of the founders of Wikipedia, an international collaborative free content encyclopedia on the Internet, and the Wikimedia Foundation.

From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Pen Names: Jimbo

Birth Name: Jimmy Donal Wales

Alternative Names: Jimbo Wales • Jimmy D. Wales

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IAR is policy, always has been.

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

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.

In case anyone is wondering I strongly support the development and widespread adoption of a covid-19 vaccine and will take it as soon as it is widely available... I don't think I should be in the first wave to take it as that should be people more vulnerable or more likely to be spreaders...

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

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.

Zero information is preferred to misleading or false information.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

...Please consider joining http://wt.social - healthy dialogue rather than soundbite vitriol

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. )