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.

cite news, 2007

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.

As quoted in "The Encyclopedist’s Lair" in The New York Times (19 November 2007), 2007

I regard it as a pseudonym and I don’t really have a problem with it.

On controversy regarding fraudulent claims of credentials by the Wikipedian Essjay, in an e-mail to editors of The New Yorker, as quoted in The New York Times (5 March 2007), 2007

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

Wikipedia-l mailing list (17 October 2007), 2007

Quite frankly, several of the people who contributed to the article should be banned from coming near a keyboard until they have learned to engage in proper encyclopedia writing.

In a discussion about Wikipedia article (07 September 2006), 2006

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

Wales to Computerworld, "Wikipedia founder gazes into site's future" (18 August 2006), based on an earlier interview at Wikimania, 2006

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

Wales to Computerworld, "Wikipedia founder gazes into site's future" (18 August 2006), based on an earlier interview at Wikimania, 2006

It is pretty weird. A few years ago, I was just some guy sitting in front of the internet. Now I send an e-mail or edit an article and it makes headlines around the world … I used to be just a guy — now I'm Jimmy Wales.

"Identity question for world's encyclopaedia", The Times (30 December 2005), 2005

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.

User talk statement (7 April 2005), 2005

We come from geek culture, we come from the free software movement, we have a lot of technologists involved. If we had done the same sort of comparison on poets or artists, I think that we would not have fared nearly as well.

Wales to the Miami Herald, "Will Wikipedia change history?", 2005

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?

As quoted in ExpressIndia (7 September 2005), 2005

Freely licensed textbooks are the next big thing in education.

While talking about Wikibooks project; TED - Jimmy Wales: How a ragtag band created Wikipedia, July 2005, 2005

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.

As quoted in "Wikimedia Founder Jimmy Wales Responds," by Robin "Roblimo" Miller, Slashdot (28 July 2004), 2004

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.

As quoted in "Who knows?", The Guardian (26 October 2004), 2004

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.

As quoted in "Wikimedia Founder Jimmy Wales Responds," by Robin "Roblimo" Miller, Slashdot (28 July 2004), 2004