Archive:Founder letter: Difference between revisions
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''By Jimbo Wales - september 2004'' |
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<center><font face="Palatino,Verdana,Arial" size=4>Letter from the Founder</font></center> |
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[[Image:Jimbo_Wales_in_France.jpg|right|150px]] |
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<div align=right>'''In Focus & In Love'''</div> |
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<font size=6 color="#7E0000">O</font>ur mission is to give freely the sum of the world's knowledge to |
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every single person on the planet in the language of their choice, |
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under a free license, so that they can modify, adapt, reuse, or |
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redistribute it, at will. And, by "every single person on the planet," I |
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mean exactly that, so we have to remember that much of our target |
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audience is not yet able to access the Internet reliably, if |
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at all. |
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We are an astounding global project that continues to grow at a |
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staggering pace. Some statistics already widely known in the |
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community are worth repeating: we see 2,000 new wikipedians each month; |
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2,000 new articles and 40,000 article edits every day -- almost twice |
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as many pages and page-edits if you include discussion and meta-pages -- |
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and this is only counting Wikipedia. |
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As we continue to grow at this rate, we will face some challenges of |
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scaling. Old ways of doing things sometimes begin to break down as |
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we become a community with ever larger numbers of people. We want to |
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maintain and improve our quality standards, while at the same |
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time remaining open, friendly, and welcoming as a community. This is |
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a challenge. |
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To meet that challenge will require a lot of analysis and thoughtfulness. |
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I also always like to talk about another ingredient that is absolutely |
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essential: love. It's not so common in technological, academic, and |
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scientific circles to talk about love within a community, but for us it |
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is, and has to be, common and explicit. |
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Our community already comes from a huge variety of backgrounds, and over |
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time the variety will only increase. The only way we can coordinate our |
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efforts in an efficient manner to achieve the goals we have set for |
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ourselves, is to love our work and to love each other, even when we |
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disagree. Mutual respect and a reasonable approach to disagreement are |
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essential, and both of those are helped along enormously when we feel |
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favorably towards each other just as a natural result of being |
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volunteers together on this incredible ridiculous crazy fun project to |
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change the world. |
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None of us is perfect in these matters; such is the human condition. |
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But each of us can try each day, in our editing, in our mailing list |
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posts, in our irc chats, and in our private emails, to reach for a higher |
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standard than the Internet usually encourages, a standard of rational |
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benevolence and love. |
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We've come a long way already, and to really achieve our goals, we |
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have to remain in focus and in love. |
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==Archives== |
==Archives== |
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*[[/Founder letter Sept 2004]] |
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*[[/2005]] |
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*[[/2004]] |
*[[/2004]] |