Jimmy Wales Quotes
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While I'm optimistic about the direction the world is headed, generally, I think there is a need for constant vigilance and pressure on repressive governments.
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I'm a big advocate of freedom: freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom of thought.
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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.
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I think that reality exists and that it's knowable.
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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.
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Wikis and social networking are just tools.
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You shouldn't use anything as the sole source for anything, in my view.
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It's kind of surprising that you could just open up a site and let people work.
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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.
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Things work well when a group of people know each other, and things break down when it's a bunch of random people interacting.
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What can we put into the hands of people under oppressive regimes to help them? For me, a big part of it is information, knowledge - the ability to defeat propaganda by understanding it.
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A huge amount of what goes on in the Middle East has to do with people being fed really bad information.
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I'm on it pretty much all the time. I edit Wikipedia every day, I'm on Facebook, I'm on Twitter, I'm reading the news. During one of the US elections, I actually went through my computer and I blocked myself from looking at the major newspaper sites and Google News because I wasn't getting any work done.
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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.
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Dialing down is not an option for me.
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One of the ways that Microsoft beat Apple way back in the day was that they were a lot more open; today, in the world I come from, the free software and open-source world, Microsoft is not generally viewed as open; they're viewed as proprietary.
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I can't do anything quietly anymore.
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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.
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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.
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Wikipedia is a non-profit. It was either the dumbest thing I ever did or the smartest thing I ever did.
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Freely licensed textbooks are the next big thing in education.
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I have zero interest in sports of any kind - professional, college or international.
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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.
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The mainland Chinese tend to take a Chinese mainland point of view on controversial issues, and the Taiwanese take another the Taiwanese viewpoint.