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Jimmy Wales Quotes
born 1966 United Kingdom
Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales (born August 8, 1966) is a British-American Internet entrepreneur and wiki pioneer who is most famous as one of the founders of Wikipedia, an international collaborative free content encyclopedia on the Internet, and the Wikimedia Foundation.
United Kingdom Activists Bloggers Businesspeople Critics Also known as: Jimbo Wales, Jimmy Donal Wales, Wales, Jimbo, Wales, Jimmy, Jimbo
Random Jimmy Wales quote
49 quotes
Wikipedia is a non-profit. It was either the dumbest thing I ever did or the smartest thing I ever did.
IAR is policy, always has been.
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.
I don't think it will affect it. It's just news, there's always some news. If anything, I am hopeful that donations will increase just because more people are learning of us.
Real people are involved, and they can be hurt by your words. We are not tabloid journalism, we are an encyclopedia.
I think that reality exists and that it's knowable
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?
You cannot write a good Wikipedia article about a small town if there is no longer news about this small town. This [trend] will impact the quality of Wikipedia long-term.
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.
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..
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.
When someone just writes 'f**k, f**k, f**k', we just fix it, laugh and move on. But the difficult social issues are the borderline cases — people who do some good work, but who are also a pain in the neck.
There’s plenty of rude stuff online. People say things online that they would be ashamed to say face to face. If people could treat others as though they were speaking face to face, that would be huge.
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, because whatever they are here for, it is not to help build an encyclopedia.
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 predict that https://gov.uk/home-education is going to be dramatically more popular this coming year.
I joke that I started as a kid revising the encyclopedia by stickering the one my mother bought.
[Wikipedia is] like a sausage: you might like the taste of it, but you don't necessarily want to see how it's made.
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.
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