Top 50 Wikipedia Quotes

I first met Jimbo Wales, the face of Wikipedia, when he came to speak at Stanford.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been writing and then found myself seven clicks deep into a Wikipedia entry that I don’t even care about. Self-distraction appears to be my version of sleepwalking.

I’m loath to use my personal life to promote what I do, but at the same time, I don’t like a journalist going away with no more than you could get off Wikipedia, where most of it’s invented anyway.

I have often lost whole days jumping from one Wikipedia article after another in an attempt to understand the full scope of marriage as an institution.

Too often we just look at these glistening successes. Behind them in many, many cases is failure along the way, and that doesn’t get put into the Wikipedia story or the bio. Yet those failures teach you every bit as much as the successes.

A lot of biopics to me feel very much like someone is standing in front of the camera and is reading a Wikipedia page to you, like someone is reciting event. Did you know this happened? Did you know that happened? But Alan Turing’s life deserved a sort of passionate film, and an exciting film.

We always talk about how the first several seasons were faithful to the books, and anybody who wanted to could go onto Wikipedia and learn Ned Stark gets beheaded or about The Red Wedding, and most people don’t want to know – because why ruin a story?

Wikipedia is so dangerous.

On my Wikipedia page, it used to say I was born in Belfast, Ireland, then it said Belfast, Northern Ireland, and then it said Belfast, U.K. So there was a little war going on about where Belfast is located.

If you’re reading IMDB, half of it’s made up. You can’t trust it or Wikipedia, which is just lies, lies!

It would mean a lot, but it’s weird, because what’s the title? It’s an extra line on your Wikipedia page and a medal that says you won on that particular night. It obviously symbolizes more than that, but those are the things people think about.

If I don’t get a TV show next year because someone looks up my Wikipedia and it says ‘openly gay,’ then it’s worth the risk because I’ve had so many years being openly gay and proud of myself as a role model.

I have to say that talk of me living as a tramp at one point is completely false and I think that’s been added to my entry in Wikipedia, but I have been asked about that quite a few times.

I’ve consciously avoided actually reading anything about Wikipedia.

For all its shortcomings, Wikipedia does have strong governance and deliberative mechanisms; anyone who has ever followed discussions on Wikipedia’s mailing lists will confirm that its moderators and administrators openly discuss controversial issues on a regular basis.

When you look at Yahoo Answers, there can be a lot of garbage. But if you’re careful about the rules and supporting good contributions, over time you can get better and better, like Wikipedia.

You know it’s Oscar season when you see a slew of new movies based on true stories whose resolutions you can find in three seconds on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia gets a lot of things wrong.

Machines and people are both necessary for Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Google, and neither is sufficient on its own.

I do not go on my Wikipedia page. There’s just too much weird information on there for me to pick apart.

I have heard that my Wikipedia entry is completely incorrect, but then again, so is everyone else’s. I haven’t bothered about that.

Wikipedia is wrong! I was born in Los Angeles, not New York, but my parents and I would come here a lot, so I feel like a New Yorker.

Wikipedia is just an incredible thing. It is fact-encirclingly huge, and it is idiosyncratic, careful, messy, funny, shocking and full of simmering controversies – and it is free, and it is fast.

Wikipedia, every day, is tens of thousands of people inputting information, and every day millions of people withdrawing that information. It’s a perfect image for the fundamental point that no one of us is as smart as all of us thinking together.

Think about it. If it’s taking pictures, it’s not a cellphone. If it has a McDonald’s app to tell you where McDonald’s is based on your GPS location, that’s not a cellphone. If you can get Wikipedia or go to Google, that’s not a cellphone.

It’s fair to say that Wikipedia has spent far more time considering the philosophical ramifications of categorization than Aristotle and Kant ever did.

I’d rather play golf than go on to Wikipedia!

I don’t think Silicon Valley understands the power of Wikipedia, how it works, or the opportunities it represents.

Real history is far more complex and interesting than the simplistic summaries presented in Wikipedia articles. Knowing this allows you to question received wisdom, to challenge ‘facts’ ‘everybody’ knows to be true, and to imagine worlds and characters worthy of our rich historical heritage and our complex selves.

In the world of the Internet, there are many falsehoods. Anyone can write stuff on Wikipedia, and it doesn’t have to be true.

Wikipedia is a victory of process over substance.

It is seldom right to say that anything is true ‘according to Google.’ Google is the oracle of redirection. Go there for ‘hamadryad,’ and it points you to Wikipedia. Or the Free Online Dictionary. Or the Official Hamadryad Web Site (it’s a rock band, too, wouldn’t you know).

I think open source is an evolutionary idea for humanity, this idea of transparency. It played out for us in the technology world, but it also played out with the idea of a truth and reconciliation commission and Wikipedia.

Because everyone in the world has the power to edit, Wikipedia has long been plagued by the so-called edit war. This is like a house where the husband wants it warm and the wife wants it cool and they sneak back and forth adjusting the thermostat at cross purposes.

I think it’s important never to look yourself up on Wikipedia. I think the temptation to correct any interesting factual errors would be too much.

Wikipedia is a strange thing. Whoever gets there first, you know, they decide. Like the picture: You can’t choose it! You can’t be like, ‘You know, I hate that picture of me doing stand-up from 2005 – that doesn’t exemplify who I am.’ You take it down, and someone puts it back up.

The definition of marriage cannot be disputed. It’s right there in black and white and it’s been the same since the start of Wikipedia.

To continue down the path of comprehensiveness, Wikipedia will need to sustain the astonishing mass fervor of its birth years. Will that be possible? No one knows.

I use Wikipedia and eBay; I look for singles for my 1950s jukebox.

We talked about the Internet and Wikipedia and how facts and history are being collectively created online.

There’s actually a thing called Wikifeet that’s the Wikipedia of celebrity girls’ feet.

I’ve been reading a lot of books on history, and watching a lot of educational TV. Wikipedia too, even though it is not reliable.

Open-source encyclopedias such as Wikipedia and search engines such as Google and Bing, which people can tap into anytime and anywhere via computers and smart phones, put a world of knowledge at our fingertips at a lower cost than ever before.

Wikipedia’s a collaborative experiment akin to Simon Winchester’s account of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary in ‘The Professor and the Madman,’ which outlines James Murray’s mission to produce the tome in the 19th century.

Don’t believe anything you read on Wikipedia!

In the media age, everybody was famous for 15 minutes. In the Wikipedia age, everybody can be an expert in five minutes. Special bonus: You can edit your own entry to make yourself seem even smarter.

Anytime someone basically commissions a piece, I write a song based on something personal to them. I go online and I do research on that person – Wikipedia, YouTube interviews, anywhere I can find a piece of information that kind of tugs at your heart a little bit.

I go on Wikipedia and alter pages of animals with fake facts that I’ve made up about those animals.

People go to the movies to have an emotional experience, not to learn information they could look up on Wikipedia.

I think I am done with Wikipedia for the time being. But I have a secret hope. Someone recently proposed a Wikimorgue – a bin of broken dreams where all rejects could still be read, as long as they weren’t libelous or otherwise illegal.