Top 80 Jimmy Wales Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “If it isn’t on Google, it doesn’t exist.”

— Jimmy Wales

2. “We are still in the very beggining of the Internet. Let’s use it wisely.”

— Jimmy Wales

3. “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

4. “We have to come together, worldwide, and ‘think.’ We have a tool – the internet – to let us do that. Let’s use it wisely.”

— Jimmy Wales

5. “I can’t do anything quietly anymore.”

— Jimmy Wales

6. “Free speech includes the right to not speak.”

— Jimmy Wales

7. “Everybody tells jokes, but we still need comedians.”

— Jimmy Wales

8. “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

9. “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

10. “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.”

— Jimmy Wales

11. “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...”

— Jimmy Wales

12. “We don’t stoop to the level of our worst critics, no matter how much we may find them to be annoying.”

— Jimmy Wales

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

— Jimmy Wales

14. “Wikis and social networking are just tools.”

— Jimmy Wales

15. “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.”

— Jimmy Wales

16. “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

17. “It just didn’t occur to me, sitting at my computer, that I would end up travelling all over the world.”

— Jimmy Wales

18. “Freely licensed textbooks are the next big thing in education.”

— Jimmy Wales

19. “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.”

— Jimmy Wales

20. “Given enough time humans will screw up Wikipedia just as they have screwed up everything else, but so far it’s not too bad.”

— Jimmy Wales

21. “IAR is policy, always has been.”

— Jimmy Wales

22. “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

23. “I don’t worry. It’s just not in my nature, really.”

— Jimmy Wales

24. “We’ve seen how grassroots journalism by blogs has had an impact at various points politically, as ordinary people have amplified stories that were being ignored by the traditional press.”

— Jimmy Wales

25. “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

26. “Wikipedia is a non-profit. It was either the dumbest thing I ever did or the smartest thing I ever did.”

— Jimmy Wales

27. “When I opened Wikipedia, it had three articles, yet it was called an encyclopedia.”

— Jimmy Wales

28. “I am really accessible.”

— Jimmy Wales

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

— Jimmy Wales

30. “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.”

— Jimmy Wales

31. “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.”

— Jimmy Wales

32. “I’m a big advocate of freedom: freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom of thought.”

— Jimmy Wales

33. “When I was growing up in Huntsville, Alabama, this is where the space and rocket center was. This is where all of the German rocket scientists came after war and started designing rockets for NASA, for the moon landing and all that.”

— Jimmy Wales

34. “The goal is to give people a free encyclopedia to every person in the world, in their own language. Not just in a ‘free beer’ kind of way, but also in the free speech kind of way.”

— Jimmy Wales

35. “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.”

— Jimmy Wales

36. “If you see a blatant error or misconception about yourself, you really want to set it straight.”

— Jimmy Wales

37. “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

38. “Wikipedia is a non-profit. It was either the dumbest thing I ever did or the smartest thing I ever did. Communities can build amazing things, but you have to be part of that community and you can’t abuse them. You have to be very respectful of what their needs are.”

— Jimmy Wales

39. “Massive numbers of people are going to come online from cultures we don’t normally interact with.”

— Jimmy Wales

40. “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.”

— Jimmy Wales

41. “I think people have to recognise that the traditional modes of authority weren’t that great.”

— Jimmy Wales

42. “The real struggle is not between the right and the left but between the party of the thoughtful and the party of the jerks.”

— Jimmy Wales

43. “Greatest misconception about 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.”

— Jimmy Wales

44. “The Supreme Court has held that code is speech. And it doesn’t matter that it’s done on a computer or done face to face or done in a newspaper, reporting the facts of the world is protected speech.”

— Jimmy Wales

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

— Jimmy Wales

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

— Jimmy Wales

47. “I think that reality exists and that it’s knowable.”

— Jimmy Wales

48. “We don’t need secrecy.”

— Jimmy Wales

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

— Jimmy Wales

50. “People who have achieved a public voice find it a mixed bag.”

— Jimmy Wales