"Hayek's work on price theory is central to my own thinking about how to manage the Wikipedia project. ... [O]ne can't understand my ideas about Wikipedia without understanding Hayek."

"You just can't put something with commercial motive into Wikipedia. Admitting it is hardly better; it is still a crime. The Wikipedians and bloggers will attack hard and they will deserve what they get."

"You set up this fantastic site, with people sending information all around the world, and you don't make any money of it! It's practically an un-American activity!"

"There are a lot of bad things said about Wikipedia, the ninth most-visited destination on the internet. An encyclopedia that anyone can edit, critics argue, is one that is vulnerable to endless mistakes. Such criticisms have been raised by skeptics since Wikipedia's creation in 2001. ... While that ultimate goal imagined by Wales for Wikipedia has not yet come to fruition, there is no questioning the breadth and usefulness of Wikipedia. Those who refused to believe that a user-generated encyclopedia could compete with the monolithic, traditional encyclopedia written by experts and organized by professional editors, were no doubt shocked when Nature magazine published a 2006 article comparing Wikipedia to the well-known Encyclopedia Britannica. The article concluded that Wikipedia articles were comparable in accuracy and thoroughness to those of the older, paper encyclopedia."

"The man credited with founding Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales...was a finance major at Auburn University when the Mises Institute's Mark Thornton suggested he read "The Use of Knowledge in Society," a now-famous essay written by Austro-libertarian economist and Nobel laureate Friedrich von Hayek. The essay argues that prices in the market represent a spontaneous order that results from the interaction of individuals with diverse wants, allowing them to cooperate to achieve complex goals. According to a June 2007 Reason magazine interview, this insight of Hayek's is what led Wales to found Wikipedia. The rather lofty vision that inspired Wales? "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.""

"But how does such a polycentric – even anarchic – system, composed of editors acting independently and for their own reasons, result in such an utterly useful resource? The answer goes back to the Hayekian inspiration for the project. Because editors receive both psychological satisfaction and material usefulness from their contributions, the project has grown to include safeguards that help guarantee that the development of the project will move in a positive direction – towards broad, accurate articles that depend on reliable, verifiable sources."

"One could very aptly describe the Wikipedia system for directing the development of the project as being a common law system of sorts. The encyclopedia has basic policies – the constitutional law of Wikipedia – which require that articles be written from a neutral point of view, make use of verifiable sources, and include no original research. ... Whenever a content dispute does arise between editors on the "talk" pages that accompany each article, there are a host of dispute resolution options available."

"Wikipedia's reflection of market dynamics is most easily observed in what many people view as the project's weakest areas: obscure articles that draw little traffic. In articles about third-rate garage bands and other topics of limited interest, one will often find factual and typographical errors at a much higher rate than in high-traffic articles such as those on "England" or "Barry Bonds." The much higher demand for information about the latter topics means that many more eyes will be combing those much-demanded articles for mistakes. Since Wikipedia is open to correction by anyone, it stands to reason that the articles attracting more potential editors will be of a higher quality. Rather than a failure, this is a great demonstration of Wikipedia's efficient allocation of resources."

"The Tsunami article is well researched and extensive, only at two places a little inaccurate. The scientific Wikipedia articles are, according to my judgement, almost always good."

"The article [Martin Luther] is ample and solidly written. Someone was really occupied with Luther and read some church histories. I give extra points for quoting from sources and the pictures."

"There is nothing to add to that entry [Marinade]. In my view it contains all important information. I use Wikipedia often for food chemistry. Sometimes you find something you didn't even think about."

"I think there's more information about culture in Wikipedia than anywhere else in the world, ever."

"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."

"This may sound like a recipe for disaster, but the results are impressive. While many of the site's 130,000-plus articles are definitely works in progress, many are rich, concise, and polished. ... Surprisingly, our time spent on Wikipedia turned up no junk entries and no defacements. ... A few of the articles seemed a bit dated, and we came across many red links or blue links that led to single-sentence placeholders. But for the most part, the items were useful and thoughtful."

"It is partly a product of history, where we came from in the early days. We were really a child of the dot-com crash. There was no investment money. We were just a group of people on the internet trying to do something cool. A lot of the volunteers wanted to put it into the non-profit [Wikimedia Foundation] – made sense to me."

"For any information, it is necessary to trace it back to the primary source, and unfortunately this is not always the case for online publications. This is also true for Wikipedia, which considers newspapers and magazines to be reliable sources. In my case, it was first published in a magazine and then on Wikipedia that my father was a driver, but, while I have absolutely nothing against drivers, my father was a Russian interpreter."

"Even the founders of Wikipedia had no clue when they started the project of what it would accomplish. They dug a hole to find water, and struck oil instead."

"It's said that aeronautical theory says bumblebees ought not to be able to fly. Likewise, the idea that a useful, serious reference work could emerge from the contributions of thousands of "ordinary" internet users, many without scholarly qualifications, would until comparatively recently have been dismissed as absurd."

"Even racists have the right to freedom of expression. But, not on wikipedia. ... The policies of wikipedia, even the French Wikipedia, aren't constrained by French law. Yahoo caved in to French censorship efforts because they are a large company with many business interests in France. We do not have that problem. ... Anyhow, no article in Wikipedia should ever directly contradict or directly support any controversial statement of moral principle such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That's not NPOV, and it's not our mission. ... You are right not to tolerate this kind of sentence. ... But, not becau[s]e of French law! Because of NPOV."

"The project's advocates imagine that the problem, if they recognise one at all, lies in the variable quality of Wikipedia's individual entries. The solution is obvious: a process in which editors work on the less successful entries and remove the obviously unmerited ones. In reality, the problem is much more fundamental to Wikipedia than that much of its content is a pile of dross. Whereas science and learning pursue truth, Wikipedia prizes consensus. Wikipedia has no means of arbitrating between different claims, other than how many people side with one position rather than another. That ethos is fatal to the advancement of learning. Ideas are refined by being tested; scientific method presupposes scrutiny, experiment and conflict."

"A lot of articles will be locked down. The history of Wikipedia has been one of increasing barriers to changing articles"

"The early days were a gold rush,They attracted lots and lots of people, because a new person could write about anything."

"We now see the strong emergence of the Social Web instead of the Semantic Web, and a proposal has been made to use Wikipedia, the largest hierarchical collection of information in the world, as bottom-up input for the ontologies required to give shape to the Semantic Web."

"The only solution is to shut [Wikipedia] down and scatter it to the four winds. The idea that experts don't matter but 12 year old Canadians in their basements do is beyond untenable. ... What gives any anonymous douchebag the qualifications to write about ME and then call it encyclopedic? The project has failed from the top down. There is no fixing."

"Wikipedia is effectively one-of-a-kind. No other mass-market or topically broad wikis have had meaningful success to date. Even Wikimedia's other wiki projects are not nearly as active as Wikipedia. If successful wikis are rare, Wikipedia might be a one-in-a-million lightning strike — some unique combination of factors succeeded in this case, but those circumstances are unlikely to replicate. If so, Wikipedia's rarity might also highlight its fragility."

"There are a number of trolls, stalkers, and psychopaths who wander around Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects looking for people to harass, stalk, and otherwise ruin the lives of (several have been arrested over their activities here) ... You will eventually say something that will lead back to you, and the stalkers will find it ... I decided to be myself, to never hide my personality, to always be who I am, but to utilize disinformation with regard to what I consider unimportant details: age, location, occupation, etc."

"1. Wikipedia has no governance to speak of. It's a land of jungle law. 2. Wikipedia has no respect for people and their works. People are treated on Wikipedia like s--t. 3. Wikipedia cannot be trusted for accurate information, considering the agenda-pushing street gangs of wiki. 4. Wikipedia pollutes the internet as well as diminishes scholarship. It floods and pollutes the search engines on the internet and pushes out good scholarship and honest debate in favor of bad scholarship, defamation, and bold face intimidation and thuggery. 5. Wikipedia needs to be brought under the rules of slander, liable [sic], defamation, and copyright laws. 6. Wikipedia should be stripped of its 501c3 status."

"When I write, I consult Wikipedia 30–40 times a day, because it is really helpful. When I write, I don't remember if someone was born in the 6th century or the 7th; or maybe how many n's are in "Goldmann"... Just a few years ago, for this kind of thing you could waste a lot of time."

"At our roundtable, an audience member commented that the web was supposed to offer a democratic space in which no voices or experiences would be marginalized or ignored. Yet the coverage on Wikipedia has huge gaps, partly because of the interests and knowledge of those who have hitherto been most drawn to contributing: "more than 80 percent male, more than 65 percent single, more than 85 percent without children, around 70 percent under the age of 30." Although Wikipedia boasts thousands of detailed, well-researched, well-referenced articles on scholarly subjects, such as its Featured Articles, entries on fictional locations such as Middle-earth may be much more detailed than entries on real locations, such as countries in Africa."

"Two Israeli groups set up training courses in Wikipedia editing with aims to 'show the other side' over borders and culture done by Yesha Council, representing the Jewish settler movement, and the rightwing Israel Sheli (My Israel) movement. "We don't want to change Wikipedia or turn it into a propaganda arm," says Naftali Bennett, director of the Yesha Council. The problem, according to Ayelet Shaked of Israel Sheli, is that online, pro-Israeli activists are vastly outnumbered by pro-Palestinian voices. In 2008, members of the hawkish pro-Israel watchdog Camera who secretly planned to edit Wikipedia were banned from the site by administrators. Meanwhile, Yesha is building an information taskforce to engage with new media, by posting to sites such as Facebook and YouTube, and claims to have 12,000 active members, with up to 100 more signing up each month. "It turns out there is quite a thirst for this activity," says Bennett. "The Israeli public is frustrated with the way it is portrayed abroad.""

"So I finally gave in and coughed up a donation for Wikipedia. It was no trouble at all, and felt good. Now I have a sense that I'm a partial owner – a stakeholder of sorts – in this apparatus that I use every day. ... Giving like this can be habit forming. ... It's true that giving this way doesn't make rational sense according to a neoclassical idea of what constitutes economic rationality. Wikipedia is free and it will be there whether I give or not. The same might be said of the Mises Institute. If all we cared about were commercial exchange, I have every incentive to use the free good and never pay. There is no harm done in free riding, right?Mises himself had a broader view of rationality. He said that all actions are rational from the point of view of the actor. I'm glad to embrace that idea. Giving in this way is not strictly a capitalist act if you define capitalism as only commercial exchange based on contract. But if we see capitalism as the voluntary sector of society characterized by private property relationships, this kind of micro-giving is part of that."

"Wikipedia is, for many users, the primary site for information on the Web ... At present, Wikipedia hosts more than 2.9 million English-language articles, with a total of 13 million articles available in more than 250 different languages ... Wikipedia is the second-most searched site on the Internet, behind only Google."

"As Wikipedia founder Jim Wales revealed, back in 2005, 50 percent of all Wikipedia edits were made by just 0.7 percent of users; 75 percent of all articles were written by less than 2 percent of the user base. These numbers reveal that the active Wikipedia community is a lot smaller than you might think. It's understandable, then, for this active group to be somewhat self-centered, and not always accommodating to new or casual users."

"Concerns among the academic community about the reliability of information from Wikipedia are unlikely to ever be fully alleviated, but this has never been Wikipedia's fundamental goal. Much greater speed in adding and updating information, and involvement of the many rather than the few, have always been seen as ample compensation for any inaccuracies that emerge in the initial posting of entries. Wikipedia, like Castalia, is a flawed ideal but it is, as far as can reasonably be predicted, here to stay."

"Intuitively [students] are using Wikipedia as one of those [new] tools, creating a new layer of information-filtering to help orient them in the early stages of serious research. As a result, Wikipedia's role as a bridge to the next layer of academic resources is growing stronger."

"America's daily political vitriol is an undeniable fact. Against that depressing background, it is good to be able to celebrate an American invention which, for all its faults, tries to spread around the world a combination of unpaid idealism, knowledge and stubborn civility."

"It can be stunningly good on obscure corners of popular culture, and strikingly weak on mainstream matters."

"The kind of social production that Wikipedia represents has turned from a laughable utopia to a practical reality. That's the biggest gift that Wikipedia has given to us – a vision of practical utopia that allows us to harness the more sociable, human aspects of who we are to effective collective action."

"Wikipedia underscores an evolutionary lesson: We've always gotten farther as a species collaborating than going it alone. ... In the past, the groups that cooperated best lived longer and had more kids – and we inherited those tendencies. Groups would correct cheaters (people who didn't share info or goods) through social pressure. So Wikipedia is like humanity's social nature writ large electronically, complete with ongoing disputes and corrections."

"The generation of an infinite number of bogusly 'objective' sentences in an English of agonizing patchwork mediocrity is no cause for celebration, even if it eventually amounts to a Borgesian paraphrase of our entire universe. ... I liked the internet better before. The mistakes had flavor, passion, transparent purpose."

"The fundamental flaw in the way Wikipedians think about what they do is that they are entirely absorbed in rules and procedures and arguing fine points with one another and earning merit points; it has all the flavour, as has been suggested before, of a great online game. Users – the ostensible audience – are hardly considered."

"An authority isn't a person or institution who is always right – ain't no such animal. An authority is a person or institution who has a process for lowering the likelihood that they are wrong to acceptably low levels. ... And this is what I think is really worth celebrating as Wikipedia begins its second decade. It took one of the best ideas of the last 500 years – peer review – and expanded its field of operation so dramatically that it changed the way authority is configured."

"Warm, kindly, humane Wikipedia didn't grow up in today's Internet. Now it's like a hothouse orchid the size of a barn."

"The difference between Wikipedia and other editorially created products is that Wikipedians are not professionals, they are only asked to bring what they know. Everyone brings their crumb of information to the table. If they are not at the table, we don't benefit from their crumb."

"Every single day for the last 10 years Wikipedia has got better because someone – several million someones in all – decided to make it better. ... Wikipedia is best understood not as a product with an organisation behind it, but as an activity that happens to leave an encyclopedia in its wake."

"Watching pornography [...] is like going to a Wikipedia page. You search for a specific thing, a specific feeling, a specific result, and that's exactly what you find."

"Wikipedia was an idea whose time had come on an information-driven net whose consumers couldn't wait for the slow workings of expertise or the cost of proprietary content: a free encyclopedia written by anonymous users supposedly striving for an “unbiased” perspective. ... Wikipedia in practice has strayed from these utopian ideas because of the ease with which political and social bias trumps altruism. ... Finding examples of Wikipedia's bias is not difficult. One need only compare the entries of figures who do the same thing but from opposite sides of the political spectrum."

"I am astonished at the ethical blindness of Bell Pottinger's reaction. That their strongest true response is they didn't break the law tells a lot about their view of the world, I'm afraid."

"But the blot on the encyclopedia's fair name is not just in the wrongness of the statement, but in its partisan and non-encyclopedic nature.... If Wikipedia wants to live up to its promise of being a reliable encyclopedic source, it will strike this and all sentences resembling it from its article on me. At most, it can use me as an example of how it was fooled by some of its all-too-partisan collaborators. Speaking of whom: the history page accompanying my page proves forever that some Wikipedia collaborators wanted to inflict on me the maximum harm possible, an attitude incompatible with work for an encyclopedia. Shouldn't Wikipedia fire them and wipe out everything they wrote? Of course they can still contribute blogs and columns, by preference under their own full names, but they have proven themselves not to be encyclopedic authorities..."

"This term "democratic" gets tossed around a lot, usually in a positive, "power to the people rather than some arbitrary ruler" sense. By that meaning, Wikipedia is indeed democratic. Yet, unlike a state democracy, 51% at the polls will not necessarily trump a Wikipedia adversary. So in the sense that the word "democracy" comes loaded with a "one man, one vote" ideology, Wikipedia is not democratic at all. And it is a good thing that Wikipedia isn't a democracy."