Quote

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

Jimmy Wales

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Jimmy Wales
Age: 58
Born: 1966
Born: August 8
Blogger
Businessperson
Computer Scientist
Entrepreneur
Internet Entrepreneur
Researcher
Wikimedian
Huntsville
Alabama
Jimbo Wales
Jimmy Donal Wales
Jimbo
Jimmy Donal Jimbo Wales
Like
People
Shift
Cultural
Roll
Rock
Rocks
Turns

More quotes by Jimmy Wales

Image
There's kind of this real social pressure to not argue about things.
Jimmy Wales
Image
When you consider the magnitude of how many people use Wikipedia globally, there is a potential here for really creating some noise and getting some attention in the U.S.
Jimmy Wales
Image
I spent lots of time reading the encyclopedia and really kind of an eclectic approach to learning things - not very structured.
Jimmy Wales
Image
I'm not real good at the administrative part of running a company.
Jimmy Wales
Image
We are growing from a cheerful small town where everyone waves off their front porch to the subway of New York City where everyone rushes by. How do you preserve the culture that has worked so well?
Jimmy Wales
Image
It's kind of surprising that you could just open up a site and let people work.
Jimmy Wales
Image
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.
Jimmy Wales
Image
I think it's a mistake to treat different realms of knowledge as if they are some how fundamentally the same.
Jimmy Wales
Image
The core of Wikipedia is something people really believe in. That is too valuable for the world to screw it up.
Jimmy Wales
Image
What we won't do is pretend that the work of lunatic charlatans is the equivalent of true scientific discourse. It isn't.
Jimmy Wales
Image
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.
Jimmy Wales
Image
I don't worry. It's just not in my nature, really.
Jimmy Wales
Image
I'm very much an Enlightenment kind of guy.
Jimmy Wales
Image
Things work well when a group of people know each other, and things break down when it's a bunch of random people interacting.
Jimmy Wales
Image
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
Jimmy Wales
Image
Simply having rules does not change the things that people want to do. You have to change incentive.
Jimmy Wales
Image
What you don't get in the mainstream media is so much of the background material.
Jimmy Wales
Image
Wikipedia is first and foremost an effort to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language. Asking whether the community comes before or after this goal is really asking the wrong question: the entire purpose of the community is precisely this goal.
Jimmy Wales
Image
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.
Jimmy Wales
Image
Wikipedia is the #5 site on the Web and serves 450 million different people every month - with billions of page views.
Jimmy Wales