Once the butt of jokes for being the site where visitors could find anything, true or not, Wikipedia in recent years has become a more trusted source of information — certainly for settling bar bets, but even for weighty topics like Ebola.

Wikipedia, eh? Must be accurate then!

I love Wikipedia. I donated thousands of dollars to the Wikimedia Foundation.

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

Wikipedia is the first place I go when I'm looking for knowledge... or when I want to create some.

In my experience, it is perfectly possible to have opinions and also produce valuable, fact-based information for the world.

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.

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.

As time has shifted, The Times and all the other media outlets recognize how important Wikipedia is. It's not the same hurdle anymore. I don't have to sort of say: 'Wow look at this strange thing going on, can I write some weird story about it?' Instead it's like: 'This is hugely important, and of course, write, we want to know every change.'

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.

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?

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...

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..