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.
We've always had a love/hate relationship with numbers.
IAR is policy, always has been.
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.
The more time I spent on the site the more I came to think of Wales as some kind of Queen Ant, letting the vast colony go about its work, at the centre of a system where the knowledge of the community is infinitely larger than the sum of experience of all its individuals.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Given enough time humans will screw up Wikipedia just as they have screwed up everything else, but so far it's not too bad.
[Wikipedia is] like a sausage: you might like the taste of it, but you don't necessarily want to see how it's made.
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?
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.
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.
Wikipedia is a non-profit. It was either the dumbest thing I ever did or the smartest thing I ever did.
Freely licensed textbooks are the next big thing in education.
The real struggle is not between the right and the left but between the party of the thoughtful and the party of the jerks.