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. " # Knowledge # Love # Imagination

" Frankly, and let me be blunt, Wikipedia as a readable product is not for us. It's for them. It's for that girl in Africa who can save the lives of hundreds of thousands of people around her, but only if she's empowered with the knowledge to do so. " # Knowledge # Fear # Life and Living

" We are Wikipedians. This means that 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. We are not vindictive, childish, and we don't stoop to the level of our worst critics, no matter how much we may find them to be annoying. " # Critics and Criticism # Love # Courage

" 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. " # Happiness # Arts and Artists # Poetry and Poets

" It turns out a lot of people don’t get it. Wikipedia is like rock’n’roll; it’s a cultural shift. " # Culture # Music # Rock and Roll

" I don't see any particular problem with that. " # Nations

" Simply having rules does not change the things that people want to do. You have to change incentives. " # Change # Love # Children

" EssJay was appointed at the request of and unanimous support of the ArbCom. " # Congress # Ask # Cooperation

" We are going to change the Free Documentation License in such a way that Wikipedia will be able to become licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License. And so this is not, as some people speculated on Facebook my 50th birthday party. This is a party to celebrate the liberation of Wikipedia. " # Politicians and Politics # Change # Creativity

" I don't really agree that most academics frown when they hear Wikipedia. Most academics I find quite passionate about the concept of Wikipedia and like it quite a bit. [...] The number of academics who really really don't like Wikipedia is really quite small and we find that they get reported on in the media far out of proportion to the amount they actually exist. " # Media # Academia # Love