Jimmy Wales on Wikipedia

“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 am astonished at the ethical blindness of Bell Pottinger's reaction. That their strongest true response is they didn't break the law tells a lot about their view of the world, I'm afraid.”

“Hayek's work on price theory is central to my own thinking about how to manage the Wikipedia project.  ...  [O]ne can't understand my ideas about Wikipedia without understanding Hayek.”

“Deeply inappropriate for the European Commission to be lobbying publicly *and* misleading the public in this way. ... the Wikipedia community is not so narrow minded as to let the rest of the Internet suffer just because we are big enough that they try to throw us a bone. Justice matters.”

“In this era where we've seen the rise of these fake news websites and so forth, Wikipedia has had almost no problems with this at all. Simply because our community is quite – you know, it's their hobby to debate about the quality of sources, and it's very difficult to fool the Wikipedia community with this.”

“It is partly a product of history, where we came from in the early days. We were really a child of the dot-com crash. There was no investment money. We were just a group of people on the internet trying to do something cool. A lot of the volunteers wanted to put it into the non-profit [Wikimedia Foundation] – made sense to me.”

“Two years before Wikipedia, I had the dream, the vision, of a free encyclopedia written by volunteers in all the languages of the world. This inspiration came to me from watching the growth of free software, open-source software, as most people know it. And watching programmers coming together and giving away their work for free online.”

“After a year or so of working on Nupedia, Larry had the idea to use Wiki software for a separate project specifically for people like you (and me!) who are intimidated and bored (sorry, Nupedia!) with the tedium of the process. As it turns out, Wikipedia is dramatically more successful on some measures, ... The main thing about Wikipedia is that it is fun and addictive.”

“Every single person who signed this petition needs to go back to check their premises and think harder about what it means to be honest, factual, truthful. Wikipedia's policies around this kind of thing are exactly spot-on and correct. If you can get your work published in respectable scientific journals - that is to say, if you can produce evidence through replicable scientific experiments, then Wikipedia will cover it appropriately. What we won't do is pretend that the work of lunatic charlatans is the equivalent of "true scientific discourse".”

“[I have not seen a single practical use-case to convince me to integrate cryptocurrencies or blockchain into the platform. To reward content creators and editors with digital assets] is a really bad idea. ... By integrating cryptocurrencies, Wikipedia would be taking a step back by making it easier for people and companies to pay for the content they want on the platform. Creating a mechanism where you effectively authenticate that type of behavior ... isn't going to help with the quality of Wikipedia at all. ... To say to them, you're going to have to pay or put money at risk in order to edit Wikipedia is completely insane.”

“Even racists have the right to freedom of expression. But, not on wikipedia. ... The policies of wikipedia, even the French Wikipedia, aren't constrained by French law. Yahoo caved in to French censorship efforts because they are a large company with many business interests in France. We do not have that problem. ... Anyhow, no article in Wikipedia should ever directly contradict or directly support any controversial statement of moral principle such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That's not NPOV, and it's not our mission. ... You are right not to tolerate this kind of sentence. ... But, not becau[s]e of French law! Because of NPOV.”