Jimmy Wales Quotes (1966-)

“If R-rated movies are soft porn, it was porn. In other words, no, it was not. That description is inaccurate.”

“I think that Twitter and YouTube could work with the streaming app to create something more developed and make it have more 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.”

“Should there be competing articles, so that you would have the Catholic article on abortion, the evangelical Christian version, and the Planned Parenthood version”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“[L]ike Larry, I'm interested that we think it over to see what we can add to Project Gutenberg. It seems unlikely that primary sources should in general be editable by anyone -- I mean, Shakespeare is Shakespeare, unlike our commentary on his work, which is whatever we want it to be.”

“Most people understand the need for neutrality. The real struggle is not between the right and the left — that's where most people assume — but it's between the party of the thoughtful and the party of the jerks. And no side of the political spectrum has a monopoly on either of those qualities.”

“...a lot of people say they've lost trust in the media, and they think everything is propaganda. And then it becomes very hard to come to any kind of a consensus in society where we say, well, look; you and I disagree on a certain policy, but here are some facts underlying it, and we can at least agree on those facts, whereas now I feel like a lot of people are just adrift. They don't know what to believe.”

“Sue came in when we were very tiny. We were based in Florida, still a handful of employees. She deserves credit for building the Wikimedia Foundation from, I’m going to venture to say, probably five or six employees, into quite a large organization after several years of time.”

“It is tough problem for platforms like Twitter and Facebook. They exist to allow people to share their thoughts and ideas … One of the things that I would like to see more of is, not to stop people from sharing things … but to warn them… So, when I am about to share something, and a reputable fact checking organization has shown it is a hoax, I would like Facebook to warn me “Hey … you might want to check, if this is true or not, before you share it”. I think that would be very helpful.”

“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.”

“Local press die-offs worldwide are robbing Wikipedia of sources to cite, warns co-founder Jimmy Wales. He told the German outlet Spiegel his team's next aim is to reach 'billions' of potential users in poor countries... Jimmy Wales, who co-founded Wikipedia in 2001, told a German news magazine on Wednesday that declines in centuries-old local press sectors around the world worried him more than even fake news in the "Trump" era... Asked by Spiegel magazine if giants such as Google, Amazon and Facebook should do more to support Wikipedia, Wales replied: "yes perhaps, but we lay great value on our independence." ...Wales was also asked about the greatest problem he would like solved. He said Wikipedia's "greatest challenge" was a growth in the languages of poorer developing countries.”

“At 18:54 EST on December 12 John Seigenthaler's wife, who was infuriated at Wikipedia regarding the recent scandal regarding his role in the Kennedy Assassination, came into the house, where Jim was having dinner. Wearing a mask, he [sic] shot him three times in the head and ran,"”

“Why do Wikipedians perform these millions of hours of labor, some expended on a giant straw goat, without pay? Because they don't experience them as labor. “It's a misconception people work for free,” Wales told the site Hacker Noon in 2018. “They have fun for free.” A 2011 survey of more than 5,000 Wikipedia contributors listed “It's fun” as one of the primary reasons they edited the site.”