Jimmy Wales
I have zero interest in sports of any kind - professional, college or international.Collection: Sports
I'm a big advocate of freedom: freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom of thought.Collection: Freedom
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.Collection: Knowledge
I think that reality exists and that it's knowable.
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.
If it isn't on Google, it doesn't exist.
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.
There's kind of this real social pressure to not argue about things.
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.
I'm very much an Enlightenment kind of guy.
Our growth rate continues to be staggering.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We don't need secrecy.
I'm not real good at the administrative part of running a company.
I can't do anything quietly anymore.
A lot of people who work on open-source software don't mind making money elsewhere. They aren't anticommercial.
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.
Things work well when a group of people know each other, and things break down when it's a bunch of random people interacting.
If you see a blatant error or misconception about yourself, you really want to set it straight.
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's kind of surprising that you could just open up a site and let people work.
Dialing down is not an option for me.
The core of Wikipedia is something people really believe in. That is too valuable for the world to screw it up.
My being some kind of celebrity - not a real celebrity, isn't a welcome part of the job.
People who have achieved a public voice find it a mixed bag.
I just get up every day and do what seems like the most interesting, fun thing to do.
We are still in the very beginnings of the Internet.
What you don't get in the mainstream media is so much of the background material.
The mainland Chinese tend to take a Chinese mainland point of view on controversial issues, and the Taiwanese take another the Taiwanese viewpoint.
I am really accessible.
It just didn't occur to me, sitting at my computer, that I would end up travelling all over the world.
I have no regular schedule. I get up whenever I can.
Mostly, I try to take a rational approach to life.
I don't worry. It's just not in my nature, really.
You shouldn't use anything as the sole source for anything, in my view.
I think people have to recognise that the traditional modes of authority weren't that great.
I don't come down on any simple place as a deletionist or a completionist.
I think it's a mistake to treat different realms of knowledge as if they are some how fundamentally the same.
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.
Free speech includes the right to not speak.
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.
We have to come together, worldwide, and 'think.' We have a tool - the internet - to let us do that. Let's use it wisely.
People do fun and interesting things because they're fun and interesting.
Wikis and social networking are just tools.
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.