Jimmy Wales

speaker

6,110 appearances 12 recordings 11 series first heard Jun 2023 last heard 21 Jun

Jimmy Wales’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 11 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.

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The Action Catalyst · The Seven Rules of Trust, with Jimmy Wales | (Leadership, Internet, Entrepreneurship, Media) · 3 Feb 2026 podcast

The way they edited it was very clever, actually.

So the world book was an encyclopedia for children, but children is a wide range.

And so they would make sure like an article about Tiger would have a reading level that was much lower, like a first grade, second grade reading level, because they knew kids at that age are interested in tigers and they're going to look that up.

But they would also have an article on physics or quantum physics that would be more suited for a 13 year old.

I've always thought that's very clever.

Obviously, Wikipedia doesn't do that.

We can't do that.

But I always thought that was pretty cool.

You know, I only tied these two things together as an adult, right?

I didn't think, oh, I always loved encyclopedias when I was a kid.

It is true.

I would say the original inspiration for Wikipedia came from watching the growth of free software, open source software, and seeing programmers coming together to collaborate in new ways, and realizing that that kind of collaboration on the internet where people could work together and

share their work.

I realized that could be extended beyond just software to all kinds of products.

And so, you know, it makes sense that it would start with software because programmers could create the tools they needed to share code and so forth.

But the rest of us needed sort of to have the tools built in order to be able to share.

So that was my initial thinking.

And realize that the encyclopedia would be something that people could collaborate on simply because everybody understands what an encyclopedia article should be like.

Like if I say encyclopedia article about the Eiffel Tower, everybody instantly knows more or less what that's going to be.

So it makes it possible to collaborate.

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