Jimmy Wales Quotes

I've consciously avoided actually reading anything about Wikipedia.

I get so sick and tired of Wikipedia. People write their own crap on there.

A lot of stuff in Wikipedia is not true, and that goes for a lot of people. I sometimes think, "How can that happen?" But Wikipedia is maintained by people, and everybody can add stuff to it.

With YouTube - with the Internet in general - you have information overload. The people who don't necessarily get credit are the curators.

What Google did in Web 1.0 was take a feature, which was search, and built an entire business around that utility. In Web 2.0, Twitter took a feature, which is sharing, and built a utility that allowed people to do that on a massive scale.

Encyclopedias are finished. All encyclopedias combined, including the redoubtable Britannica, have already been surpassed by the exercise in groupthink known as Wikipedia.

When you look at Yahoo Answers, there can be a lot of garbage. But if you're careful about the rules and supporting good contributions, over time you can get better and better, like Wikipedia.

When you look at things like Flickr and Youtube, they are specialised blogging systems, so why hasn't blogging encompassed that ease of functionality?

Wikipedia gets a lot of things wrong.

I first met Jimbo Wales, the face of Wikipedia, when he came to speak at Stanford.

Think of how Wikipedia works, how Amazon harnesses user annotation on its site, the way photo-sharing sites like Flickr are bleeding out into other applications. We're entering an era in which software learns from its users and all of the users are connected.

The strange thing with Wikipedia is that the first article that ever gets written about you will define your Wikipedia page forever.

One of mankind's problems is we keep committing the same errors.

The cause and root of nearly all evils in the sciences is this-that while we falsely admire and extol the powers of the human mind we neglect to seek for its true helps.

A fallible being will fail somewhere.

The eternal mistake of mankind is to set up an attainable ideal.

You should be allowed to rub out and start again, it means that you are human. The purists are tedious, they tell you a mistake is like an enduring black mark. Nonsense -- better to be human than some infernal machine never going wrong.

There's no perfect coach in the world. Coaches are human, too. Mistakes are made. But, fundamentally, if you're sound, you eliminate as many mistakes as possible.

Oh, the shortcomings and inconsistency of the average human being, especially when this human being is a man trying to manage women's affairs!

Human beings, like plans, prove fallible in the presence of those ingredients that are missing in maneuvers - danger, death, and live ammunition.

I think there's confusion around what the point of social networks is. A lot of different companies characterized as social networks have different goals - some serve the function of business networking, some are media portals. What we're trying to do is just make it really efficient for people to communicate, get information and share information.

Theoretically, I grant you, there is no possibility of error in necessary reasoning. But to speak thus "theoretically," is to uselanguage in a Pickwickian sense. In practice, and in fact, mathematics is not exempt from that liability to error that affects everything that man does.

We must accept human error as inevitable - and design around that fact.

Nobody is smart enough to be wrong all the time.

I make mistakes like the next man. In fact, being--forgive me--rather cleverer than most men, my mistakes tend to be correspondingly huger.