About Jimmy Wales: Jimmy Donal is an American Internet entrepreneur best known as the co-founder and promoter of the online non-profit encyclopedia Wikipedia and the for-profit Wikia web hosting company.
I'm not real good at the administrative part of running a company.
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.
What can we put into the hands of people under oppressive regimes to help them? For me, a big part of it is information, knowledge - the ability to defeat propaganda by understanding it.
I have always liked the idea of going to print because a big part of what we are about is to disseminate knowledge throughout the world and not just to people who have broadband.
I think it's a mistake to treat different realms of knowledge as if they are some how fundamentally the same.
To create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language - That's who I am. That's what I am doing. That's my life goal.
Mostly, I try to take a rational approach to life.
Love. It isn't very popular in technical circles to say a lot of mushy stuff about love, but frankly it's a very very important part of what holds our project together.
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.
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.
A lot of people who work on open-source software don't mind making money elsewhere. They aren't anticommercial.
I don't worry. It's just not in my nature, really.
I have zero interest in sports of any kind - professional, college or international.
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 posi...
Things work well when a group of people know each other, and things break down when it's a bunch of random people interacting.
It's kind of surprising that you could just open up a site and let people work.
