Jimmy Wales quotes

Jimmy Wales is an American Internet entrepreneur, best known as the co-founder of Wikipedia. His work helped make free access to knowledge available to people worldwide. He continues to advocate for open information and digital rights. Here are 117 of his quotes:

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.

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

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 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

I think MySpace is doomed, I give them about two more years.... I think Facebook is the next Microsoft in both the bad and the good senses. That's an amazing company that is going to do a lot of good and bad things.

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

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.

Jimmy Wales

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

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

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

Jimmy Wales

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

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

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

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

Jimmy Wales

IAR is policy, always has been.

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

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

Freely licensed textbooks are the next big thing in education.

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

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

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

Jimmy Wales