People From Alabama

"Most people understand the need for neutrality. The real struggle is not between the right and the left — that's where most people assume — but it's between the party of the thoughtful and the party of the jerks. And no side of the political spectrum has a monopoly on either of those qualities."

"Ideally, our rules should be formed in such a fashion that an ordinary helpful kind thoughtful person doesn't really even need to know the rules. You just get to work, do something fun, and nobody hassles you as long as you are being thoughtful and kind."

"Wikipedia is first and foremost an effort to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language. Asking whether the community comes before or after this goal is really asking the wrong question: the entire purpose of the community is precisely this goal."

"When someone just writes 'f**k, f**k, f**k', we just fix it, laugh and move on. But the difficult social issues are the borderline cases — people who do some good work, but who are also a pain in the neck."

"[Wikipedia is] like a sausage: you might like the taste of it, but you don't necessarily want to see how it's made."

"I have no plans at all to be running an asylum. This is a serious encyclopedia project. We *do* have to make our changes conservatively and slowly, so as to make sure that we preserve our open spirit to the maximal degree possible. But some people are just not suitable for editing here, and that's just a simple brute fact."

"I frequently counsel people who are getting frustrated about an edit war to think about someone who lives without clean drinking water, without any proper means of education, and how our work might someday help that person. It puts flamewars into some perspective, I think."

"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing."

"Dude, you rock."

"What if we could get everyone in the world together to record what they know in one place?"

"...Please consider joining http://wt.social - healthy dialogue rather than soundbite vitriol"

"I've reason to believe"

"I support freedom of expression. A lot of people I disagree with also support freedom of expression. If that's controversial, then someone will have to explain to me why."

"On Sunday July 5th at 5pm we’re all saying #ThankYouTogether! Whether you’re thanking the NHS, key workers, delivery drivers or a friend, neighbour or colleague who has helped you during this time - join us on your doorstep and help spread the word. together.org.uk"

"Take a look at this: http://vaccinecommongood.org"

"When is the last time you saw a politician talking about Aristotle's Virtues? This is what I love seeing -@RoryStewartUKpost on WT: https://wt.social/post/vg6w2a75311699787861"

"I predict that https://gov.uk/home-education is going to be dramatically more popular this coming year."

"Education and innovation are two things that we can fall back on in the most uncertain times! Join me July 1, 4 PM IST on @unacademy, I will speak about education and my early life that propelled me to create Wikipedia.... unacademy.onelink..."

"The next billion people who'll get online access will enter the Internet with mobile devices. It's difficult to write Wikipedia articles on smart phones. So we're investing more and more resources to improve access for these people."

"You cannot write a good Wikipedia article about a small town if there is no longer news about this small town. This [trend] will impact the quality of Wikipedia long-term."

"President's power does not extend to threatening or shutting down social media platforms. But we should fear this in every country. Worst case scenario is that platforms don't have courage to tell Trump to go away, that they begin to adapt policies to his whims because he is a lunatic,"

"I think that's right. [replying to comment: "it should go to health care workers first"]. I'm not an expert. I just know that I'm healthy and safe at home, so it will be more helpful for others to go first. But I'm eager to take it!"

"In case anyone is wondering I strongly support the development and widespread adoption of a covid-19 vaccine and will take it as soon as it is widely available... I don't think I should be in the first wave to take it as that should be people more vulnerable or more likely to be spreaders..."

"Wikipedia is something special. It is like a library or a public park. It is like a temple for the mind. It is a place we can all go to think, to learn, to share our knowledge with others. When I founded Wikipedia, I could have made it into a for-profit company with advertising banners, but I decided to do something different. We’ve worked hard over the years to keep it lean and tight. We fulfill our mission efficiently."

"A lot of them, they really cost more than they're worth, and they should be encouraged to leave, and not in a bad way. I mean one of the things that I've always believed is letting people walk away with dignity. We don't have to shame them and scream at them and make them leave and then they're sad and annoyed and then they make sock puppets and then they come back and harass us for years."

"One of the classic problems we have is -- and we have this a lot in English Wikipedia -- is the annoying user, who at least allegedly produces good content. There are users in the community who have a reputation for creating good content, and for being incredibly toxic personalities. This is a tough issue because [fixes slide problem] but my idea is very simple. Actually, on this issue, I have a very simple view is that most of these editors actually cost us more than they're actually worth, and we're making a big mistake by tolerating people who are causing us enormous..."

"Now, the UK is home to a very diverse newspaper community, a vibrant newspaper culture. We've got papers like The Sun, The Mirror, The Mail. [laughter]...we're trusted slightly more than the BBC. Now, that's a little scary -- [laughter]"

"I hope someone will create lots of articles about famous dresses. Our systemic bias caused by being a predominantly male geek community is worth some reflection in this contest. We have nearly 90 articles about Linux distributions… I think we can have an article about this dress. We should have articles about 100 famous dresses."

"Greetings everyone!"

"I think that reality exists and that it's knowable"

"Real people are involved, and they can be hurt by your words. We are not tabloid journalism, we are an encyclopedia."

"What we won't do is pretend that the work of lunatic charlatans is the equivalent of "true scientific discourse." It isn't."

"I'm on it pretty much all the time. I edit Wikipedia every day, I'm on Facebook, I'm on Twitter, I'm reading the news. During one of the US elections, I actually went through my computer and I blocked myself from looking at the major newspaper sites and Google News because I wasn't getting any work done."

"He can run, but he can't hide."

"We helped plow the fields, build the dams, write the poems and sing the music of America. Are not all Americans proud, of Doree Miller, of Frederick Douglass, of Paul Robeson, of Joe Louis, of Marian Anderson."

"The fellow who turned off the light and jumped into bed before the room got dark may think he's fast ... but just wait until is poured into the same ring with Joe Louis."

"I did the best I could with what I had."

"Christ should leave us. He is too much with us and I don't like his friends. We have no hope of recovering Christ until Christ leaves us. There is after all something worse than being God-forsaken. It is when God overstays his welcome and take up with the wrong people."

"Once again he began to feel bad in the best of environments. And he noticed that other people did too. So bad did they feel, in fact, that it took the worst of news to cheer them up. On the finest mornings he noticed that people in the subway looked awful until they opened their newspapers and read of some airliner crashing and killing all hundred and seven passengers. Where there had been misery in their happiness, now as they shook their heads dolefully at the tragedy they became happy in their misery."

"He was a young man of pleasant appearance. Of medium height and exceedingly pale, he was nevertheless strongly built and quick and easy in his ways. Save for his deafness in one ear, his physical health was perfect. Handsome as he was, he was given to long silences. So girls didn't know what to make of him. But men liked him. After a while they saw that he was easy and meant no harm. He was the sort whom classmates remember fondly; they liked to grab him around the neck with an elbow and cuff him around. Good-looking and amiable as he was, however, he did not strike one as remarkable. People usually told him the same joke two or three times."

"I had discovered that a person does not have to be this or be that or be anything, not even oneself. One is free. (2.12)."

"She refers to a phenomenon of moviegoing which I have called certification. Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him. More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. But if he sees a movie which shows his very neighborhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere. (1.7)."

"I have discovered that most people have no one to talk to, no one, that is, who really wants to listen. When it does at last dawn on a man that you really want to hear about his business, the look that comes over his face is something to see."

"A repetition is the re-enactment of past experience toward the end of isolating the time segment which has lapsed in order that it, the lapsed time, can be savored of itself and without the usual adulteration of events that clog time like peanuts in brittle."

"The enduring is something which must be accounted for. One cannot simply shrug it off."

"She can only believe I am serious in her own fashion of being serious: as an antic sort of seriousness, which is not seriousness at all but despair masquerading as seriousness."

"As for hobbies, people with stimulating hobbies suffer from the most noxious of despairs since they are tranquilized in their despair."

"Oh the crap that lies lurking in the English soul. Somewhere it, the English soul, received an injection of romanticism which nearly killed it."

"A good rotation. A rotation I define as the experiencing of the new beyond the expectation of the experiencing of the new."

"Christians talk about the horror of sin, but they have overlooked something. They keep talking as if everyone were a great sinner, when the truth is that nowadays one is hardly up to it. There is very little sin in the depths of the malaise. The highest moment of a malaisian's life can be the moment when he manages to sin like a proper human (Look at us, Binx — my vagabond friends as good as cried out to me — we're sinning! We're succeeding! We're human after all!)."