I am really accessible.
Things work well when a group of people know each other, and things break down when it's a bunch of random people interacting.
What you don't get in the mainstream media is so much of the background material.
I think it's a mistake to treat different realms of knowledge as if they are some how fundamentally the same.
The core of Wikipedia is something people really believe in. That is too valuable for the world to screw it up.
I think people have to recognise that the traditional modes of authority weren't that great.
I don't worry. It's just not in my nature, really.
My original concept was to provide a free encyclopedia for every single person in the world.
I worry about censorship in many parts of the world.
When I opened Wikipedia, it had three articles, yet it was called an encyclopedia.
Wikipedia is first and foremost an effort to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language. Asking whether the community comes before or after this goal is really asking the wrong question: the entire purpose of the community is precisely this goal.
It's kind of surprising that you could just open up a site and let people work.
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.
EssJay was appointed at the request of and unanimous support of the ArbCom.
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.
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.
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?
Dialing down is not an option for me.
People who have achieved a public voice find it a mixed bag.
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 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
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.
There's a big tendency to gravitate toward a closed and proprietary approach too easily.
We have to come together, worldwide, and "think". We have a tool - the internet - to let us do that. Let's use it wisely.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you see a blatant error or misconception about yourself, you really want to set it straight.
If it isn't on Google, it doesn't exist.
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.
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.
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.
Most people assume the fights are going to be the left versus the right, but it always is the reasonable versus the jerks.
Mostly, I try to take a rational approach to life.
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 spent lots of time reading the encyclopedia and really kind of an eclectic approach to learning things - not very structured.
Most people are good. They may not be saints, but they are good.
I don't come down on any simple place as a deletionist or a completionist.
The real struggle is not between the right and the left but between the party of the thoughtful and the party of the jerks.
You shouldn't use anything as the sole source for anything, in my view.
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.
A huge amount of what goes on in the Middle East has to do with people being fed really bad information.
We are still in the very beggining of the Internet. Let's use it wisely.
It turns out a lot of people don't get it. Wikipedia is like rock'n'roll; it's a cultural shift.
Wikipedia is a non-profit. It was either the dumbest thing I ever did or the smartest thing I ever did.
I'm not real good at the administrative part of running a company.
If I had some information, the last thing I would ever do with it is send it to Wikileaks.
I just get up every day and do what seems like the most interesting, fun thing to do.
There's kind of this real social pressure to not argue about things.
I'm a big advocate of freedom: freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom of thought.
My being some kind of celebrity - not a real celebrity, isn't a welcome part of the job.
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.
Freely licensed textbooks are the next big thing in education.
People do fun and interesting things because they're fun and interesting.
Massive numbers of people are going to come online from cultures we don't normally interact with.
I think that reality exists and that it's knowable.
We don't need secrecy.
In general, the best advice I can give people is to take criticism seriously, apologize for anything you have done wrong, and pull back from conflict. Of course, if you are right on a content matter, you should press forward in the interest of quality, but conflict often has a way of taking on a life of its own, unfortunately.
We've always had a love/hate relationship with numbers.
I have no regular schedule. I get up whenever I can.
I have zero interest in sports of any kind - professional, college or international.
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.
Our growth rate continues to be staggering.
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.
It just didn't occur to me, sitting at my computer, that I would end up travelling all over the world.
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.
I'm very much an Enlightenment kind of guy.
Given enough time humans will screw up Wikipedia just as they have screwed up everything else, but so far it's not too bad.
I can't do anything quietly anymore.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Simply having rules does not change the things that people want to do. You have to change incentive.
Wikipedia is the #5 site on the Web and serves 450 million different people every month - with billions of page views.
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 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.
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.
IAR is policy, always has been.
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.
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).
What we won't do is pretend that the work of lunatic charlatans is the equivalent of "true scientific discourse." It isn't.
A lot of people who work on open-source software don't mind making money elsewhere. They aren't anticommercial.
Myspace hurts my eyes.
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.
Free speech includes the right to not speak.
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.
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 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.
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.
Wikis and social networking are just tools.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
