Education Quote by Jimmy Wales

“Imagine a world” is the tell: Wales isn’t pitching a website, he’s selling a moral horizon. The line borrows the cadence of utopian tech rhetoric, but it works because it tethers grand idealism to a deceptively concrete object: “the sum of all human knowledge.” That phrase is knowingly impossible, and that’s the point. It frames Wikipedia not as a scrappy, error-prone encyclopedia, but as an asymptote - a collective project that can be approached forever, improved by anyone, owned by no one.

The subtext is equal parts philanthropy and insurgency. “Free access” is a shot across the bow of legacy gatekeepers: paywalled publishers, credentialed experts, national curricula, even governments that treat information as leverage. Wales smuggles in a radical claim under a friendly premise: knowledge should be infrastructure, not a luxury good. By universalizing the beneficiary (“every single person”), he also preemptively answers the suspicion that tech projects mainly serve the already connected and already privileged, even as Wikipedia’s actual reach depends on literacy, bandwidth, language coverage, and local politics.

Context matters: early-2000s internet optimism, open-source culture, and the post-dot-com craving for platforms that felt public-spirited rather than purely extractive. The final sentence - “That’s what we’re doing” - collapses aspiration into certainty. It’s a founder move: turn a messy, volunteer-driven process into a clear mission, and make participation feel like joining history rather than editing a page. The brilliance is that it’s both true enough to inspire and vague enough to forgive imperfection.