Jimmy Wales 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.

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

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

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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

Everybody tells jokes, but we still need comedians.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Free speech includes the right to not speak.

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

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.

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

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

We don't need secrecy.

Most people are good. They may not be saints, but they are good.

Freely licensed textbooks are the next big thing in education.

I am really accessible.

Our growth rate continues to be staggering.

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.

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

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

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

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

I'm very much an Enlightenment kind of guy.

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

I worry about censorship in many parts of the world.

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

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

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.

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. )

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

Wikis and social networking are just tools.

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.

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.