The goal is to give people a free encyclopedia to every person in the world, in their own language. Not just in a 'free beer' kind of way, but also in the free speech kind of way.

Things work well when a group of people know each other, and things break down when it's a bunch of random people interacting.

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.

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.

I'm very much an Enlightenment kind of guy.

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).

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