Jimmy Wales
48 quotes
Biography
Jimmy Donal Wales is an American and British internet entrepreneur and former financial trader. He is best known for co-founding Wikipedia, a nonprofit free encyclopedia, and Fandom, a for-profit wiki hosting service.
"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 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."
"I have no plans at all to be running an asylum. This is a serious encyclopedia project. We *do* have to make our changes conservatively and slowly, so as to make sure that we preserve our open spirit to the maximal degree possible. But some people are just not suitable for editing here, and that's just a simple brute fact."
"[Wikipedia is] like a sausage: you might like the taste of it, but you don't necessarily want to see how it's made."
"When someone just writes 'f**k, f**k, f**k', we just fix it, laugh and move on. But the difficult social issues are the borderline cases — people who do some good work, but who are also a pain in the neck."
"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."
"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."
"Freely licensed textbooks are the next big thing in education."
"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?"
"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.."
"Wiki editing thrives on local knowledge, but 'local' in an epistemological sense, not necessarily in a geographical sense. For example, I personally know a lot more about world news on topics that interest me and could synthesize much better in those areas, than I know about local politicians where I live"
"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."
"It is pretty weird. A few years ago, I was just some guy sitting in front of the internet. Now I send an e-mail or edit an article and it makes headlines around the world … I used to be just a guy — now I'm Jimmy Wales."
"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."
"It turns out a lot of people don’t get it. Wikipedia is like rock’n’roll; it’s a cultural shift."
"We've always had a love/hate relationship with numbers."
"IAR is policy, always has been."
"Quite frankly, several of the people who contributed to the article should be banned from coming near a keyboard until they have learned to engage in proper encyclopedia writing."
"I regard it as a pseudonym and I don’t really have a problem with it."
"I don't see any particular problem with that."
"Myspace hurts my eyes."
"Wikipedia is a non-profit. It was either the dumbest thing I ever did or the smartest thing I ever did."
"pedophilic sexualization of a community mascot? No. - email me if you have questions"
"Simply having rules does not change the things that people want to do. You have to change incentives."
"EssJay was appointed at the request of and unanimous support of the ArbCom."