Jimmy Wales Quotes

#1. 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. )

Jimmy Wales

#2. 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.

Jimmy Wales

#3. 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.

Jimmy Wales

#4. Most people assume the fights are going to be the left versus the right, but it always is the reasonable versus the jerks.

Jimmy Wales

#5. Free speech includes the right to not speak.

Jimmy Wales

#6. 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

#7. I think that reality exists and that it's knowable.

Jimmy Wales

#8. I just get up every day and do what seems like the most interesting, fun thing to do.

Jimmy Wales

#9. 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.

Jimmy Wales

#10. 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

#11. Love. It isn't very popular in technical circles to say a lot of mushy stuff about love, but frankly it's a very very important part of what holds our project together.

Jimmy Wales

#12. 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.

Jimmy Wales

#13. 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.

Jimmy Wales

#14. We are still in the very beginnings of the Internet.

Jimmy Wales

#15. 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.

Jimmy Wales

#16. I am really accessible.

Jimmy Wales

#17. 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.

Jimmy Wales

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

Jimmy Wales

#19. 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

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

Jimmy Wales

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

Jimmy Wales

#22. To create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language - That's who I am. That's what I am doing. That's my life goal.

Jimmy Wales

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

Jimmy Wales

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

Jimmy Wales

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

Jimmy Wales

#26. 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.

Jimmy Wales

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

Jimmy Wales

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

Jimmy Wales

#29. We've seen how grassroots journalism by blogs has had an impact at various points politically, as ordinary people have amplified stories that were being ignored by the traditional press.

Jimmy Wales

#30. Greatest misconception about 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

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

Jimmy Wales

#32. 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.

Jimmy Wales

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

Jimmy Wales

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

Jimmy Wales

#35. I have said this many times in the past and will say it many times in the future I am sure: some people need to find a different hobby ...

Jimmy Wales

#36. Everybody tells jokes, but we still need comedians.

Jimmy Wales

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

Jimmy Wales

#38. If I had some information, the last thing I would ever do with it is send it to Wikileaks.

Jimmy Wales

#39. Wikipedia is a non-profit. It was either the dumbest thing I ever did or the smartest thing I ever did. Communities can build amazing things, but you have to be part of that community and you can't abuse them. You have to be very respectful of what their needs are.

Jimmy Wales

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

Jimmy Wales

#41. People take issue with individual aspects of Wikipedia all the time. But it's kind of hard to hate the general idea of a free encyclopedia. It's like hating kittens.

Jimmy Wales

#42. 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

#43. I worry about censorship in many parts of the world.

Jimmy Wales

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

Jimmy Wales

#45. Wikipedia is the #5 site on the Web and serves 450 million different people every month - with billions of page views.

Jimmy Wales

#46. Our growth rate continues to be staggering.

Jimmy Wales

#47. Freely licensed textbooks are the next big thing in education.

Jimmy Wales

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

Jimmy Wales

#49. 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.

Jimmy Wales

#50. We don't need secrecy.

Jimmy Wales

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

Jimmy Wales

#52. Dialing down is not an option for me.

Jimmy Wales

#53. Freedom, liberty, individual rights, that idea of dealing with other people in a matter that is not initiating force against them, is critical to me.

Jimmy Wales

#54. 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

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

Jimmy Wales

#56. The Supreme Court has held that code is speech. And it doesn't matter that it's done on a computer or done face to face or done in a newspaper, reporting the facts of the world is protected speech.

Jimmy Wales

#57. I still believe there is a need to open up search and it will come eventually. It is very important to challenge the current models.

Jimmy Wales

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

Jimmy Wales

#59. 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

#60. People who have achieved a public voice find it a mixed bag.

Jimmy Wales

#61. Massive numbers of people are going to come online from cultures we don't normally interact with.

Jimmy Wales

#62. 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

#63. Mostly, I try to take a rational approach to life.

Jimmy Wales

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

Jimmy Wales

#65. The mainland Chinese tend to take a Chinese mainland point of view on controversial issues, and the Taiwanese take another the Taiwanese viewpoint.

Jimmy Wales

#66. 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

#67. While I'm optimistic about the direction the world is headed, generally, I think there is a need for constant vigilance and pressure on repressive governments.

Jimmy Wales

#68. We don't stoop to the level of our worst critics, no matter how much we may find them to be annoying.

Jimmy Wales

#69. I'm very much an Enlightenment kind of guy.

Jimmy Wales

#70. If you see a blatant error or misconception about yourself, you really want to set it straight.

Jimmy Wales

#71. You know, when I think about what I'm doing, what I'm doing and the way I'm doing it is more important to me than any amount of money or anything like that because it's my artistic work.

Jimmy Wales

#72. 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

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

Jimmy Wales

#74. 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.

Jimmy Wales

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

Jimmy Wales

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

Jimmy Wales

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

Jimmy Wales

#78. It turns out a lot of people don't get it. Wikipedia is like rock'n'roll; it's a cultural shift.

Jimmy Wales

#79. There's a big tendency to gravitate toward a closed and proprietary approach too easily.

Jimmy Wales

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

Jimmy Wales

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

Jimmy Wales

#82. 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.

Jimmy Wales

#83. IAR is policy, always has been.

Jimmy Wales

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

Jimmy Wales

#85. Myspace hurts my eyes.

Jimmy Wales

#86. I can't do anything quietly anymore.

Jimmy Wales

#87. Wikis and social networking are just tools.

Jimmy Wales

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

Jimmy Wales

#89. 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.

Jimmy Wales

#90. 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

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

Jimmy Wales

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

Jimmy Wales