Jimmy Wales Quotes

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

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

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.

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.

The real struggle is not between the right and the left but between the party of the thoughtful and the party of the jerks.

I think MySpace is doomed, I give them about two more years.... I think Facebook is the next Microsoft in both the bad and the good senses. That's an amazing company that is going to do a lot of good and bad things.

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.

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?

Most people assume the fights are going to be the left versus the right, but it always is the reasonable versus the jerks.

People are not fundamentally bad. It only takes the smallest of correctives to take care of that tiny minority that wants to disrupt the community.

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.

Everybody tells jokes, but we still need comedians.

When I was growing up in Huntsville, Alabama, this is where the space and rocket center was. This is where all of the German rocket scientists came after war and started designing rockets for NASA, for the moon landing and all that.

A lot of people who work on open-source software don't mind making money elsewhere. They aren't anticommercial.

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.

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

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.

We are still in the very beggining of the Internet. Let's use it wisely.

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

I think that reality exists and that it's knowable.

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

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.

You know when I think about what I'm doing - what I'm doing and the way I'm doing it is more important to me than any amount of money or anything like that because it's my artistic work.

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.

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 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.

If I had some information, the last thing I would ever do with it is send it to Wikileaks.

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.

Freedom, liberty, individual rights, that idea of dealing with other people in a matter that is not initiating force against them, is critical to me.

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.

We've always had a love/hate relationship with numbers.

It just didn't occur to me, sitting at my computer, that I would end up travelling all over the world.

Free speech includes the right to not speak.

I'm a very friendly person, and I think that's had a big impact on my work because I tend to be pretty good with not trying to always win every argument and things like that. I just sort of try to bring a lot of people together to talk.

Dialing down is not an option for me.

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 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.

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

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

People take issue with individual aspects of Wikipedia all the time. But it's kind of hard to hate the general idea of a free encyclopedia. It's like hating kittens.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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