John Green Quotes

If you think of the ideas of open source applied to information in an encyclopedia, you get to Wikipedia - lots and lots of small contributions that bubble up to something that's meaningful.

It would be really great if someone would invent a new Internet with the specific purpose of not making money off of it, but making it what it originally was, a free marketplace of ideas, and there are still aspects of the Internet that are that. Wikipedia, essentially, is still the bastion of the original ideals of the Internet.

For all its shortcomings, Wikipedia does have strong governance and deliberative mechanisms; anyone who has ever followed discussions on Wikipedia's mailing lists will confirm that its moderators and administrators openly discuss controversial issues on a regular basis.

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 positive way.

I don't think Silicon Valley understands the power of Wikipedia, how it works, or the opportunities it represents.

Wikipedia was a big help for science, especially science communication, and it shows no sign of diminishing in importance.

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

Wikipedia is just an incredible thing. It is fact-encirclingly huge, and it is idiosyncratic, careful, messy, funny, shocking and full of simmering controversies - and it is free, and it is fast.

To continue down the path of comprehensiveness, Wikipedia will need to sustain the astonishing mass fervor of its birth years. Will that be possible? No one knows.

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.

My original concept was to provide a free encyclopedia for every single person in the world.

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

Wikipedia's funny. Some of the stuff on there - I go there occasionally - it's unbelievable the amount of stuff that people will write on there.

I've consciously avoided actually reading anything about Wikipedia.

...Writings can be stolen, or changed, or used for evil purposes. But isn't the risk worth taking? The more people who share knowledge, the greater safeguard for it. Isn't there more danger in ignorance than knowledge?

When I learn something, when I know something, when I find something. I always want to share it. Because life is better when you share it.

Wikipedia [...] is the product not of collectivism but of unending argumentation.

Knowledge was meant to be shared.

Knowledge-like the sky- is never private property. No teacher has a right to withhold it from anyone who asks for it. Teaching is the art of sharing.

Wikipedia is the #5 site on the Web and serves 450 million different people every month - with billions of page views.

Wikipedia took the idea of peer review and applied it to volunteers on a global scale, becoming the most important English reference work in less than 10 years. Yet the cumulative time devoted to creating Wikipedia, something like 100 million hours of human thought, is expended by Americans every weekend, just watching ads.

Wikipedia celebrates its 12th birthday today. Of course, I have no idea if it's true. I read it on Wikipedia.

A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product.

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.

It turns out a lot of people don't get it. Wikipedia is like rock'n'roll; it's a cultural shift.