Jimmy Wales Quotes

37 Sourced Quotes

We are going to change the [GNU] Free Documentation License in such a way that Wikipedia will be able to become licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License. And so this is not, as some people speculated on Facebook my 50th birthday party. This is a party to celebrate the liberation of Wikipedia.

Jimmy Wales
EssJay was appointed at the request of and unanimous support of the ArbCom.

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

Jimmy Wales
Random speculative pseudo information should be removed, unless it can be sourced.

Jimmy Wales
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?

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

Jimmy Wales
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.

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.

Jimmy Wales
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.

Jimmy Wales
[Wikipedia is] like a sausage: you might like the taste of it, but you don't necessarily want to see how it's made.

Jimmy Wales
It turns out a lot of people don't get it. Wikipedia is like rock'n'roll; it's a cultural shift.

Jimmy Wales
I have my team focused on the front end, working on the user experience, and making sure we have all the wiki-like tools people need to work on the site. We're just cranking away.

Jimmy Wales
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.

Jimmy Wales
Real people are involved, and they can be hurt by your words. We are not tabloid journalism, we are an encyclopedia.

Jimmy Wales
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.

Jimmy Wales
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.

Jimmy Wales
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.

Jimmy Wales
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.

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

Jimmy Wales
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.

Jimmy Wales
Wikipedia is a non-profit. It was either the dumbest thing I ever did or the smartest thing I ever did.

Jimmy Wales
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.

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

Jimmy Wales
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.

Jimmy Wales
Zero information is preferred to misleading or false information

Jimmy Wales
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.

Jimmy Wales
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.

Jimmy Wales
Freely licensed textbooks are the next big thing in education.

Jimmy Wales
We are a passionate community of volunteers who are trying to create a free encyclopedia for every single person on the planet. So we don't often think in terms of competition. We are going to do what we do and we hope Google does wonderful things as well. … If we were approaching this as a business we would think always: Oh, how can we position ourselves on the market... We just don't do any of that stuff.

Jimmy Wales
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.

Jimmy Wales