Jimmy Wales

Well, I was watching the growth of free software, open source software, and thought that idea of people coming together to collaborate in new ways could be a big thing on the internet.

And I've always loved encyclopedias and just looking up facts and things like that.

And so I thought, oh, let's try and do this and see what happens.

You know, I remember even as a very small kid looking at tigers and reading about tigers and things like that.

Yeah, yeah.

We've got, you know, thousands of volunteers all around the world in many, many, many languages.

You know, people are always curious, who are these people?

What are they like?

Well, we're a bunch of nerds and we like information and we like digging into things and having debates and trying to get it right and so on and so forth.

So it's a really sweet bunch of people.

Yeah, in many ways, yes.

But of course, having been doing this for 25 years, I always remind people there's always stuff to argue about.

That's always been true.

And so, yeah, although there's a lot of contention and mistrust in the world today,

You know, at the heart, people are the same, and most people just want to get it right.

Yeah, so Wikimedia, of course, is very trusting.

You know, we let anybody come and help us and participate and join.

And also Wikipedia has gone from being kind of a joke in the early days, like people didn't really take us seriously, to being one of the few things that people more or less trust.

I mean, it's not perfect, of course, but people do realize it's pretty good.

So I thought, what are the lessons learned?