Best 80 quotes of Jimmy Wales on MyQuotes

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

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.

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

Freely licensed textbooks are the next big thing in education.

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.

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.

Free speech includes the right to not speak.

Greatest misconception about Wikipedia: We aren’t democratic. Our readers edit the entries, but we’re actually quite snobby. The core community appreciates when someone is knowledgeable, and thinks some people are idiots and shouldn’t be writing.

Ideally, our rules should be formed in such a fashion that an ordinary helpful kind thoughtful person doesn't really even need to know the rules. You just get to work, do something fun, and nobody hassles you as long as you are being thoughtful and kind.

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

I frequently counsel people who are getting frustrated about an edit war to think about someone who lives without clean drinking water, without any proper means of education, and how our work might someday help that person. It puts flamewars into some perspective, I think.

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.

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

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.

I have no regular schedule. I get up whenever I can.

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.

I have zero interest in sports of any kind - professional, college or international.

I just get up every day and do what seems like the most interesting, fun thing to do.

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

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 very friendly person, and I think that's had a big impact on my work because I tend to be pretty good with not trying to always win every argument and things like that. I just sort of try to bring a lot of people together to talk.

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

I'm on it pretty much all the time. I edit Wikipedia every day, I'm on Facebook, I'm on Twitter, I'm reading the news. During one of the US elections, I actually went through my computer and I blocked myself from looking at the major newspaper sites and Google News because I wasn't getting any work done.

I'm very much an Enlightenment kind of guy.

In general, the best advice I can give people is to take criticism seriously, apologize for anything you have done wrong, and pull back from conflict. Of course, if you are right on a content matter, you should press forward in the interest of quality, but conflict often has a way of taking on a life of its own, unfortunately.

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

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.

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.

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. )

I think it's a mistake to treat different realms of knowledge as if they are some how fundamentally the same.

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.

I think people have to recognise that the traditional modes of authority weren't that great.

I think that argument is completely morally bankrupt, and I think people know that when they make it. There's a very big difference between having a sincere, passionate interest in a topic and being a paid shill. Particularly for PR firms, it's something they should really very strongly avoid: ever touching an article.

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

It's kind of surprising that you could just open up a site and let people work.

It turns out a lot of people don't get it. Wikipedia is like rock'n'roll; it's a cultural shift.

I worry about censorship in many parts of the world.

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.

Massive numbers of people are going to come online from cultures we don't normally interact with.

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

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

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

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

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

My view is that good community management is like having good municipal government: You should be able to have dissenting opinions and so on, freedom of speech, but your grandmother should also be able to walk down the street at night without having to worry about getting mugged.

One of the ways that Microsoft beat Apple way back in the day was that they were a lot more open; today, in the world I come from, the free software and open-source world, Microsoft is not generally viewed as open; they're viewed as proprietary.

Our growth rate continues to be staggering.

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.

People do fun and interesting things because they're fun and interesting.

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.