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.

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.

The right to information and right to freedom of expression are fundamental human rights and we'll stand by and defend those values... Knowledge is so fundamental to allowing us to make decisions that empower and fulfil us as individuals... The internet is increasingly a highly commercialised place where privacy is illusory, where platforms and information tend to be highly concentrated, where information is algorithmically presented to you with tremendous bias based on what it is you looked at last. The internet is no longer a free and open space.... Wikipedia is one of the remaining free and open spaces on the internet... What we stand for is not just Wikipedia, but the open ecosystem of free information across the world. The need for us to create information. The need for inquiry. The need for sharing. The need for transparency and accountability. The need for presentation and celebration of languages and cultures... If governments try to get us to take information down, we don't...

Because Wikipedia is a process, not a product, it replaces guarantees offered by institutions with probabilities supported by process: if enough people care enough about an article to read it, then enough people will care enough to improve it, and over time this will lead to a large enough body of good enough work to begin to take both availability and quality of articles for granted, and to integrate Wikipedia into daily use by millions.

There are a few core principles of Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia, that I think are important starting points. It’s an online encyclopedia. It’s not trying to be anything else. It’s certainly not trying to be a traditional social media platform in any way. It has a structure that is led by volunteer editors. And as you may know, the foundation has no editorial control. This is very much a user-led community, which we support and enable.
The lessons to learn from, not just with what we’re doing but how we continue to iterate and improve, start with this idea of radical transparency. Everything on Wikipedia is cited. It’s debated on our talk pages. So even when people may have different points of view, those debates are public and transparent, and in some cases really allow for the right kind of back and forth. I think that’s the need in such a polarized society — you have to make space for the back and forth. But how do you do that in a way that’s transparent and ultimately leads to a better product and better information?

Wikipedia is essential infrastructure, almost like a utility that provides a trustworthy resource to the broader Internet.

We operate Wikipedia as a public trust. Our vision statement says: “Imagine a world in which every single human can freely share in the sum of all human knowledge. That’s our commitment.” At best, this is an aspiration; in reality it is a beautiful, if slightly mad, ambition. But even knowing the challenges, we forge onwards because we believe in people — the contribution every human can make, and the things humanity can do together.

The difference between Wikipedia and other editorially created products is that Wikipedians are not professionals, they are only asked to bring what they know. Everyone brings their crumb of information to the table. If they are not at the table, we don't benefit from their crumb.

The world's become so horrifying now. It's too easy to become cynical about things and that's not fair and it doesn't work. And in fact, there is hope for the world. And it is in the form of Wikipedia. Now, Wikipedia will save us all. I found this out when recently a friend of mine emailed me and he said that someone had created a Wikipedia entry about me. I didn't realize this was true, so I looked it up. And like most Wikipedia entries, it came with some flamboyant surprises, not least amongst them my name. Because in it it said my name was John Cornelius Oliver. Now my middle name is not Cornelius because I did not die in 1752. But obviously, I want it to be. Cornelius is an incredible name. And that's when it hit me — the way the world is now, fiction has become more attractive than fact. That is why Wikipedia is such a vital resource. It's a way of us completely rewriting our history to give our children and our children's children a much better history to grow up with. We seem to have no intention of providing them with a future. Let's at least give them a past. It is in a very real sense the least we can do.

I well understand how Wikipedia represents an Enlightenment dream of describing the world, which, however, clashes with the difficulties of accrediting itself as a credible compendium of knowledge, while maintaining anonymity, flexibility and continuous openness to new contributors. At the same time, this 'utopia' overturns the dream of the traditional encyclopaedia, understood as an authoritative, organic and integrated construction of knowledge. In fact, Wikipedia is like a living organism: it grows (at the rate of 7 per cent every month), it 'falls ill', it is subject to internal compositions and decompositions, to continuous growth and reduction. But above all, Wikipedia conceals another, in its own way, ambiguous utopia: the absolute democracy of knowledge and the collaboration of multiple intelligences that gives rise to a kind of collective intelligence. This utopia could hide a new form of 'tower of Babel', which has its Achilles' heel not only in unreliability, but also in relativism. [...] His 'utopias' arise, radicalising them, from the profound needs of human knowledge, which the wíki, in general, help transform into concrete projects: knowledge understood as a dynamic process, open to all, and the fruit not only of individual commitment, but also of profound collaboration and intense confrontation between minds willing to share skills and intelligence.

I know Wikipedia is very cool. A lot of people do not think so, but of course they are wrong.

(That incident) led Wikipedia to realize that we’d gone from being an experiment to really something that had an impact on the public discourse... That really set the stage for a close appreciation for Wikipedia editors for ‘What does it mean to hold the responsibility of not just being this public, free resource, but also perhaps the primary resources in many instances? We don’t always get it right, but by and large, as soon as something comes to the attention of the Wikipedia editing community or the public, editors are extremely responsive and are able to not only go in and lock that article down, but also to correct the record and make sure that it’s reverted to the most accurate and most recent form.

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

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