Jimmy Wales: Work

“Hayek's work on price theory is central to my own thinking about how to manage the Wikipedia project. … [O]ne can't understand my ideas about Wikipedia without understanding Hayek.”

Jimmy Wales

Jimmy Wales, cited by Katherine Mangu-Ward, " Wikipedia and Beyond: Jimmy Wales' sprawling vision http://reason.com/archives/2007/05/30/wikipedia-and-beyond," Reason (June 2007).
Also cited by Morton Winston and Ralph Edelbach, Society, Ethics, and Technology 4th ed. (Boston, MA: Wadsworth, 2012), p. 200.

Idea , Understanding , Thinking

“Wikipedia is something special. It is like a library or a public park. It is like a temple for the mind. It is a place we can all go to think, to learn, to share our knowledge with others. When I founded Wikipedia, I could have made it into a for-profit company with advertising banners, but I decided to do something different. We’ve worked hard over the years to keep it lean and tight. We fulfill our mission efficiently.”

Jimmy Wales

Wikimedia donation page https://donate.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:LandingPage&country=US&uselang=en&utm_medium=spontaneous&utm_source=fr-redir&utm_campaign=spontaneous&rdfrom=%2F%2Fwikimediafoundation.org%2Fw%2Findex.php%3Ftitle%3DFundraising%26redirect%3Dno.

Knowledge , Thinking , Learning

“What we won't do is pretend that the work of lunatic charlatans is the equivalent of "true scientific discourse."”

Jimmy Wales

It isn't.
Boingboing.net, Jimmy Wales tells "energy workers" that Wikipedia won't publish woo, "the work of lunatic charlatans isn't the equivalent of 'true scientific discourse'" http://boingboing.net/2014/03/26/jimmy-wales-tells-energy-wor.html

“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.”

Jimmy Wales

The Independent, October 23rd 2011 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/jimmy-wales-the-internets-shy-evangelist-2374679.html

Time , Reading

“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

About Wikia Search, in an interview with Susan Kuchinskas in iMediaConnection, March 26, 2009 http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/22475.asp (only days before Wales would shut down Wikia Search and lay off two developers)

People

“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

Long displayed quote on his User page at Wikipedia, and many other Wikimedia projects

School , Personality

“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

As quoted in ExpressIndia (7 September 2005) http://www.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?newsid=54191

“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

As quoted in "Wikimedia Founder Jimmy Wales Responds," by Robin "Roblimo" Miller, Slashdot (28 July 2004)

War , People , Education , Drink

“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

User talk statement (7 April 2005) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Ignore_all_rules/Archive_1#from_User_talk:Jimbo_Wales

Fashion , Help , Personality

“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.”

Jimmy Wales

Source: As quoted in "Who knows?", The Guardian (26 October 2004)

Pain , People