Jimmy Wales

1966– · co-founder of Wikipedia (born 1966)

Topics: open source, learning, web development, engineering leadership

• 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

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

  — Jimmy Wales

• 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.

  — Jimmy Wales

• To me the key thing is getting it right. And if a person's really smart and they're doing fantastic work, I don't care if they're a high school kid or a Harvard professor; it's the work that matters.

  — Jimmy Wales

• 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.

  — Jimmy Wales

• The next billion people who'll get online access will enter the Internet with mobile devices. It's difficult to write Wikipedia articles on smart phones. So we're investing more and more resources to improve access for these people.

  — Jimmy Wales

• Simply having rules does not change the things that people want to do. You have to change incentives.

  — Jimmy Wales

• 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

• What if we could get everyone in the world together to record what they know in one place?

  — Jimmy Wales