"My original concept was to provide a free encyclopedia for every single person in the world"
About this Quote
There is a quiet audacity in the phrase "my original concept": it frames Wikipedia not as an accident of the early web, but as a deliberately universal project, closer to public infrastructure than a startup. Jimmy Wales isn’t pitching a product feature. He’s sketching a moral baseline. “Free” is doing double duty here: free as in no paywall, but also free as in unowned, unclosed, culturally nonexclusive. The line makes a claim about who gets to access legitimacy itself.
The subtext is that knowledge has historically been rationed - by tuition, by geography, by gatekeepers, by language, by the simple fact that reference books used to be heavy and expensive. Wales’s sentence compresses a whole anti-scarcity worldview into something that sounds almost naive, which is exactly why it lands. The simplicity reads as sincerity, and sincerity is a powerful weapon in tech culture: it turns an engineering challenge into a social mission and invites volunteers to feel like citizens, not users.
The context matters: early-2000s internet optimism, when “information wants to be free” still sounded like liberation rather than a business model. Wikipedia emerged as a rebuke to proprietary knowledge (think Britannica) and, unintentionally, as a prototype for mass collaboration. The ambition “for every single person” is also a pressure point: it dares you to notice who’s missing, whose histories aren’t cited, whose languages lag behind. The sentence sells a dream and quietly admits the work is never finished.
The subtext is that knowledge has historically been rationed - by tuition, by geography, by gatekeepers, by language, by the simple fact that reference books used to be heavy and expensive. Wales’s sentence compresses a whole anti-scarcity worldview into something that sounds almost naive, which is exactly why it lands. The simplicity reads as sincerity, and sincerity is a powerful weapon in tech culture: it turns an engineering challenge into a social mission and invites volunteers to feel like citizens, not users.
The context matters: early-2000s internet optimism, when “information wants to be free” still sounded like liberation rather than a business model. Wikipedia emerged as a rebuke to proprietary knowledge (think Britannica) and, unintentionally, as a prototype for mass collaboration. The ambition “for every single person” is also a pressure point: it dares you to notice who’s missing, whose histories aren’t cited, whose languages lag behind. The sentence sells a dream and quietly admits the work is never finished.
Quote Details
| Topic | Knowledge |
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