Jimmy Wales

“ Causes of uncivil behavior
Okay, so that's just one problem. Another thing to think about is general causes of uncivil behavior. And this is one that I wanted to mention in order simply to dismiss it. Sometimes people are uncivil because they care so much about the content -- and that can be in a positive sense -- that they just love Wikipedia so much that they get upset when people are doing the wrong thing. It can be people who are passionate and have a point of view on the issue, and that's more problematic. ”

“ It is my belief that the government of the United States should be using wiki technology for both internal and public facing projects. As with any large enterprise, internal communications problems are the cause of many inefficiencies and failures. Just as top corporations are finding wiki usage exploding because the tool brings about new efficiencies, government agencies should be exploring these tools, as well.
The U.S. Government has always been premised on responsiveness to citizens, and I think we all believe good government comes from broad, open public dialogue. ”

“ I'm just going to forgive them and move on, because it's just not worth having this fight.' That's an incredibly powerful value in the community where we all have to live together, we all have to get along over time, and there's a real opportunity if we do this and if we do it consistently in our community to raise the level of discourse, to make it harder for someone to be hard-hearted for a very long period of time. If they've been genuinely forgiven, and people treat them well, it's a lot easier to come around and to be a nicer person themselves. ”

“ As you can see, just as the dot-com crash forced private industry to think about more efficient and effective ways to use digital technology, the attacks on the United States forced our intelligence community to explore innovate ways to share intelligence among agencies. ”

“ Apparently I'm fulfilling my role as the symbolic monarch of just speaking the thoughts that have bubbled up through the community.
A lot of them, they really cost more than they're worth, and they should be encouraged to leave, and not in a bad way. I mean one of the things that I've always believed is letting people walk away with dignity. We don't have to shame them and scream at them and make them leave and then they're sad and annoyed and then they make sock puppets and then they come back and harass us for years. ”

“ In order to hold the project together, and in order to keep the largest possible group of people working together on the central project, I must listen carefully to all elements of the community, and make decisions that are satisfactory to the best interests of the encyclopedia as a whole.
5. Wikipedia is not to be viewed as an adversarial endeavor, nor as a marketplace, but as a co-operative endeavor. Edit wars are to be avoided in favor of efforts to create mutually acceptable articles -- this is where the guidance of the NPOV is most important. ”

“ So the point is, when I hear about a case involving freedom of expression, it will be really helpful to me to know some people who are interested. Just, you know, get in touch with us and register your interest, so when we hear about a case, we can come and ask you. You know, because sometimes you hear, you know, it’s terrible, this blogger has been arrested in such-and-such a country. Then when you really start to dig into the case, you realize they were actually making violent death threats. ”

“ But we actually find even in the Wikipedia context, which is written by human beings, that there are some websites that even when you type in the right thing and you submit and you get the information you want, you cannot link directly to that. And so someone who is writing something, trying to explain something, and they want to link to a particular statute or a particular regulation or a particular piece of information that has been published by the government, if they are not able to cut and paste that URL and put it into Wikipedia, then even with a human involved it is very frustrating. ”

“ We can't do that much about anything yet, we're not in enough languages, we're not quite there yet, but we're building an infrastructure, so that people can quickly turn and say: 'Oh right, something horrible's going on in my village, ebola, I'm going to learn about it.' So there's love for that, in conflict areas, I think there's really value to be had in neutral summaries of what's happened, calm, that Wikipedia style. It doesn't solve problems necessarily, but it prevents problems from being exacerbated by misinformation and hype, propaganda and things like that. ”

“ The thing that I really am happy about this award is that we won in the category of international cooperation, and people often think of Wikipedia as a technology story. Sometimes they get the idea it’s a story about knowledge, but very seldom are we recognized for being a group that really promotes international cooperation which is obviously very, very visible here at Wikimania. ”

“ Now, the UK is home to a very diverse newspaper community, a vibrant newspaper culture. We've got papers like The Sun, The Mirror, The Mail. ”

“ And the point being made here is that not every citizen realizes when they are looking into their health, their business, education, or housing, that government provides a service that is relevant. And that is why it is critical that all of the information of the Federal Government that is public be in all search engines possible and not simply through USA.gov, where a user is consciously looking for information from its government. ”

“ Anyone who disagrees with these governance policies has very little reason to complain. If you want to set up a wikipedia that is an experiment in anarchy, or an encyclopedia for the purpose of pushing your own political vision without the need for NPOV compromises, then you may do so, and I will help you if I can. ”

“ One of the big issues that faces Wikipedians, something that we all take very seriously, is the issue of freedom of expression. And I want to talk a little bit about freedom of expression and some of the things that the Wikimedia foundation is doing, some of the things we in the community are doing and facing. So one of the first things that I encourage everyone to do is to go and take a look at transparency.wikimedia.org. This is the number of requests from governments to modify or remove content from Wikipedia. As you can see, our legal department is not someone you want to tangle with. ”

“ But then it's up to us as a community -- we have to realize we have to build an environment that's conducive to producing the greatest encyclopedia in history.
And one of the things we always talk about is civility. But this has long been a contentious issue in the community and I have, I hope, a new approach to thinking about this that I'm hoping to popularize today, because I think that in many ways our conversations about civility in the community have gone down a bad path that is causing us to miss an enormous opportunity. ”

“ This brings us back to what might be called the lesson of Wikipedia, that an open flat forum allowing many stakeholders to participate can facilitate information sharing in an extremely cost-efficient manner and it can take advantage of a wider range of knowledgeable people than traditional information sharing processes do.
Good democratic governments strive to be responsive to citizen's needs. In order to do so, it is important that governments use technology wisely to communicate with the public and also to allow the public to communicate with the government. ”

“ People outside the movement who who hear this might think Wikipedia never takes anything down. People post horrible things and they refuse. That’s not it at all. One of the reasons this number is so low is that we as a community are so responsible for making sure that we have reliable sources, that crazy stuff doesn’t get put into Wikipedia. So, the best way if somebody’s got a genuine complaint is to come to the community and say, here’s a problem, and we always try really hard to fix it. ”

“ But, so I'm not arguing against the minimum standard, don't get me wrong, I think that civility piece, that minimum standard, is incredibly important, what I want us to do is to raise the level in the entire community, to raise the spirit of what we're doing, and I think that thinking about love, is the right way to do that. ”

“ If you view the NPOV as hopelessly human-centric or not sufficient to overcome implicit biases, there's no need to argue with me about it -- you should consider me totally bullheaded and beyond the possibility of change on this point. But take comfort in the knowledge that you can set up your own project and do things your own way. ”

“ So within Wikipedia, the software, the Mediawiki software that we use puts several tools into the hands of the community so that they can manage the quality of the content. Within the community, there are administrators who are elected from the community and they are generally chosen after they have proven their worth over a period of time in terms of being good writers, thoughtful editors, kind and helpful to others, the kinds of values that we look for in an administrator. ”

“ And this is the values that I think we should hold in order to be morally ambitious, and to build our community up into a more fabulous fun loving environment, so that we can really get our work done, we can really build this great encyclopedia, and we don't remain focused on that lowest standard of behavior. ”