Jimmy Wales Quotes
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Zero information is preferred to misleading or false information
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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.
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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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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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There's a big tendency to gravitate toward a closed and proprietary approach too easily.
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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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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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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 don't worry. It's just not in my nature, really.
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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 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?
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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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Myspace hurts my eyes.
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There's kind of this real social pressure to not argue about things.
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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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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.
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EssJay was appointed at the request of and unanimous support of the ArbCom.
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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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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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People do fun and interesting things because they're fun and interesting.
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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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If you see a blatant error or misconception about yourself, you really want to set it straight.
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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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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.