Jimmy Wales Quotes

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.

When I was growing up in Huntsville, Alabama, this is where the space and rocket center was. This is where all of the German rocket scientists came after war and started designing rockets for NASA, for the moon landing and all that.

Wikis and social networking are just tools.

I can't do anything quietly anymore.

We have to come together, worldwide, and "think". We have a tool - the internet - to let us do that. Let's use it wisely.

We don't need secrecy.

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.

The core community is passionate about quality and getting it right. If you want to read some good criticisms of Wikipedia, probably the best place to go is to the Wikipedia article called 'criticisms of Wikipedia'... It was either the dumbest thing or the smartest thing I ever did. The dumbest thing for the obvious reasons, but the smartest thing because I don't think it could have had nearly as much impact as it has. One of the key things that inspired people to put a lot into it (was the charity aspect).

I'm a very friendly person, and I think that's had a big impact on my work because I tend to be pretty good with not trying to always win every argument and things like that. I just sort of try to bring a lot of people together to talk.

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.

When I opened Wikipedia, it had three articles, yet it was called an encyclopedia.

I have always liked the idea of going to print because a big part of what we are about is to disseminate knowledge throughout the world and not just to people who have broadband.

My original concept was to provide a free encyclopedia for every single person in the world.

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.

I spent lots of time reading the encyclopedia and really kind of an eclectic approach to learning things - not very structured.

Dialing down is not an option for me.

When you consider the magnitude of how many people use Wikipedia globally, there is a potential here for really creating some noise and getting some attention in the U.S.

The Internet is allowing for us to really experience people in some of the most distant places in the world - as other people just like us. So get to know people, seek out bloggers from a country you're kind of curious about. It's about building empathy and breaking through to the point of recognizing people as people.

I'm a big advocate of freedom: freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom of thought.

What you don't get in the mainstream media is so much of the background material.

I don't come down on any simple place as a deletionist or a completionist.

A huge amount of what goes on in the Middle East has to do with people being fed really bad information.

I have zero interest in sports of any kind - professional, college or international.

It has become more important than ever that we teach students how to do research, and how to evaluate different sources of information. (Jimmy Wales, IB World, 68, Sept. 2013, p.10. )

Everybody tells jokes, but we still need comedians.

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

A lot of people who work on open-source software don't mind making money elsewhere. They aren't anticommercial.

I think people have to recognise that the traditional modes of authority weren't that great.

You shouldn't use anything as the sole source for anything, in my view.

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.

It just didn't occur to me, sitting at my computer, that I would end up travelling all over the world.

The core of Wikipedia is something people really believe in. That is too valuable for the world to screw it up.

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

It's kind of surprising that you could just open up a site and let people work.

The real struggle is not between the right and the left but between the party of the thoughtful and the party of the jerks.

I have no regular schedule. I get up whenever I can.

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.

People do fun and interesting things because they're fun and interesting.

My being some kind of celebrity - not a real celebrity, isn't a welcome part of the job.

We are still in the very beggining of the Internet. Let's use it wisely.

I'm very much an Enlightenment kind of guy.

I'm not real good at the administrative part of running a company.

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.

I don't worry. It's just not in my nature, really.

I think it's a mistake to treat different realms of knowledge as if they are some how fundamentally the same.

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.

There's kind of this real social pressure to not argue about things.

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.