Jimmy Wales
Jimmy Wales
Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Walesis an American Internet entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and promoter of the online non-profit encyclopedia, Wikipedia, and the for-profit Wikia web hosting company...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionBusinessman
Date of Birth7 August 1966
CountryUnited States of America
giving people advice
In general, the best advice I can give people is to take criticism seriously, apologize for anything you have done wrong, and pull back from conflict. Of course, if you are right on a content matter, you should press forward in the interest of quality, but conflict often has a way of taking on a life of its own, unfortunately.
people east goes-on
A huge amount of what goes on in the Middle East has to do with people being fed really bad information.
writing thinking people
Greatest misconception about We aren't democratic. Our readers edit the entries, but we're actually quite snobby. The core community appreciates when someone is knowledgeable, and thinks some people are idiots and shouldn't be writing.
screw-ups enough-time wikipedia
Given enough time humans will screw up Wikipedia just as they have screwed up everything else, but so far it's not too bad.
media numbers wikipedia
I don't really agree that most academics frown when they hear Wikipedia. Most academics I find quite passionate about the concept of Wikipedia and like it quite a bit. [...] The number of academics who really really don't like Wikipedia is really quite small and we find that they get reported on in the media far out of proportion to the amount they actually exist.
war drinking mean
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.
policy has-beens
IAR is policy, always has been.
jobs real welcome
My being some kind of celebrity - not a real celebrity, isn't a welcome part of the job.
real pressure arguing
There's kind of this real social pressure to not argue about things.
hate ideas issues
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.
long important three
Almost anything is better than three network TV outlets completely controlling the national discourse with their nightly broadcasts. We've moved a long way from that, and that's important.
numbers people culture
Massive numbers of people are going to come online from cultures we don't normally interact with.
fun interesting people
People do fun and interesting things because they're fun and interesting.
bigs tendencies approach
There's a big tendency to gravitate toward a closed and proprietary approach too easily.