Jimmy Wales Quotes
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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.
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What you don't get in the mainstream media is so much of the background material.
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Zero information is preferred to misleading or false information
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The core of Wikipedia is something people really believe in. That is too valuable for the world to screw it up.
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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.
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EssJay was appointed at the request of and unanimous support of the ArbCom.
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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.
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What we won't do is pretend that the work of lunatic charlatans is the equivalent of 'true scientific discourse.' It isn't.
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Hayek's work on price theory is central to my own thinking about how to manage the Wikipedia project. … One can't understand my ideas about Wikipedia without understanding Hayek.
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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.
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There's a big tendency to gravitate toward a closed and proprietary approach too easily.
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I don't worry. It's just not in my nature, really.
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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.
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I just get up every day and do what seems like the most interesting, fun thing to do.
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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.
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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, because whatever they are here for, it is not to help build an encyclopedia.
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People do fun and interesting things because they're fun and interesting.
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There's kind of this real social pressure to not argue about things.
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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.
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There’s plenty of rude stuff online. People say things online that they would be ashamed to say face to face. If people could treat others as though they were speaking face to face, that would be huge.
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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.
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Wikipedia is like a sausage: you might like the taste of it, but you don't necessarily want to see how it's made.
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If you see a blatant error or misconception about yourself, you really want to set it straight.
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I worry about censorship in many parts of the world.