Jimmy Wales - Wikipedia Quotes

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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.

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
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
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.

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
[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
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
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
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