If I had some information, the last thing I would ever do with it is send it to Wikileaks.
— Jimmy Wales
My view is that good community management is like having good municipal government: You should be able to have dissenting opinions and so on, freedom of speech, but your grandmother should also be able to walk down the street at night without having to worry about getting mugged.
While I'm optimistic about the direction the world is headed, generally, I think there is a need for constant vigilance and pressure on repressive governments.
We've seen how grassroots journalism by blogs has had an impact at various points politically, as ordinary people have amplified stories that were being ignored by the traditional press.
We have to come together, worldwide, and 'think.' We have a tool - the internet - to let us do that. Let's use it wisely.
The Supreme Court has held that code is speech. And it doesn't matter that it's done on a computer or done face to face or done in a newspaper, reporting the facts of the world is protected speech.
I think people have to recognise that the traditional modes of authority weren't that great.
Mostly, I try to take a rational approach to life.
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.
The mainland Chinese tend to take a Chinese mainland point of view on controversial issues, and the Taiwanese take another the Taiwanese viewpoint.
I just get up every day and do what seems like the most interesting, fun thing to do.
People who have achieved a public voice find it a mixed bag.
Dialing down is not an option for me.
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.
Things work well when a group of people know each other, and things break down when it's a bunch of random people interacting.
A lot of people who work on open-source software don't mind making money elsewhere. They aren't anticommercial.
We don't need secrecy.
Massive numbers of people are going to come online from cultures we don't normally interact with.
One of the ways that Microsoft beat Apple way back in the day was that they were a lot more open; today, in the world I come from, the free software and open-source world, Microsoft is not generally viewed as open; they're viewed as proprietary.
I worry about censorship in many parts of the world.
Wikis and social networking are just tools.
I still believe there is a need to open up search and it will come eventually. It is very important to challenge the current models.
I think it's a mistake to treat different realms of knowledge as if they are some how fundamentally the same.
You shouldn't use anything as the sole source for anything, in my view.
I have zero interest in sports of any kind - professional, college or international.
It just didn't occur to me, sitting at my computer, that I would end up travelling all over the world.
What you don't get in the mainstream media is so much of the background material.
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.
My being some kind of celebrity - not a real celebrity, isn't a welcome part of the job.
There's kind of this real social pressure to not argue about things.
If you see a blatant error or misconception about yourself, you really want to set it straight.
I'm very much an Enlightenment kind of guy.
I can't do anything quietly anymore.
I think that reality exists and that it's knowable.
A huge amount of what goes on in the Middle East has to do with people being fed really bad information.
There's a big tendency to gravitate toward a closed and proprietary approach too easily.
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.
People do fun and interesting things because they're fun and interesting.
Free speech includes the right to not speak.
I don't come down on any simple place as a deletionist or a completionist.
I don't worry. It's just not in my nature, really.
I have no regular schedule. I get up whenever I can.
I am really accessible.
We are still in the very beginnings of the Internet.
I'm a big advocate of freedom: freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom of thought.
The core of Wikipedia is something people really believe in. That is too valuable for the world to screw it up.
It's kind of surprising that you could just open up a site and let people work.
If it isn't on Google, it doesn't exist.
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.
I'm not real good at the administrative part of running a company.
