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.
My being some kind of celebrity - not a real celebrity, isn't a welcome part of the job.
There's kind of this real social pressure to not argue about things.
Wikipedia is the #5 site on the Web and serves 450 million different people every month - with billions of page views.
While I'm optimistic about the direction the world is headed, generally, I think there is a need for constant vigilance and pressure on repressive governments.
The core of Wikipedia is something people really believe in. That is too valuable for the world to screw it up.
Most people are good. They may not be saints, but they are good.
I'm very much an Enlightenment kind of guy.
I worry about censorship in many parts of the world.
Mostly, I try to take a rational approach to life.
Wikis and social networking are just tools.
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.
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. )
You know when I think about what I'm doing - what I'm doing and the way I'm doing it is more important to me than any amount of money or anything like that because it's my artistic work.
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.
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.
EssJay was appointed at the request of and unanimous support of the ArbCom.
What you don't get in the mainstream media is so much of the background material.
When I opened Wikipedia, it had three articles, yet it was called an encyclopedia.
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.
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 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.
Freely licensed textbooks are the next big thing in education.
I spent lots of time reading the encyclopedia and really kind of an eclectic approach to learning things - not very structured.
