Success Quote by Jimmy Wales

There is a soothing managerial optimism baked into Jimmy Wales's line, the kind that makes an online commons sound like a neighborhood potluck that just needs better sign-in sheets. Coming from the co-founder of Wikipedia, this is less a statement about human nature than a design philosophy: assume most people will collaborate in good faith, then build light-touch systems to handle the outliers. The “tiny minority” frames disruption as an edge case, not a governing reality, which is exactly the wager that makes open platforms possible at scale.

The subtext is bluntly institutional. Wales isn’t arguing that people are saints; he’s saying communities function when they normalize decent behavior and treat bad behavior as a solvable operational problem. “Correctives” is intentionally bloodless language - not punishment, not policing, but calibration. It’s the diction of a founder who wants legitimacy without authoritarian vibes: the rules are there, but they’re supposedly minimal, procedural, and in service of the group.

That choice matters because Wikipedia’s history is a long experiment in whether “assume good faith” can survive anonymity, ideology, and status games. The line sells a myth the project needs to keep telling itself: the crowd is basically workable; the trolls are manageable. It’s persuasive because it converts a moral question into an engineering one. If disruption is marginal and corrections are small, then governance can be framed as maintenance, not power. Of course, anyone who’s watched edit wars or harassment campaigns knows the “tiny minority” can be loud enough to set the agenda. Wales’s optimism is aspirational - and also a recruitment pitch for trust.