"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..."

"We don't want Wikipedia to be just as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica: We want it to have 55 times as many entries, present contentious debates fairly, and reflect brand new scholarly research, all while being edited and overseen primarily by volunteers."

"Despite being staffed entirely by an army of volunteers, Wikipedia – which is not, strictly speaking, a news site – is keeping pace with conventional media outlets. Official results make their way to athletes' Wikipedia pages within hours, and sometimes minutes, of their finish. With dedicated editors working 24/7, Wikipedia pages are proving to be faster, leaner and more popular alternatives to traditional reporting."

"Wikipedia, as you well know, is a fraudulent encyclopedia. It's sort of invented. And we all go to it. The entry under Michael Savage – I have one person who keeps trying to correct the truth. But the soviets, that is the communists, that is the liberals, that is the democrats, have at least ninety-nine people who attack my site, every time he makes a correction. For example, when he reenters that Michael Savage single-handedly stopped the Dubai Ports Deal? They take it out of there. They don't want anyone to know it. In other words, they revise my history, the way the soviets did to individuals that they wanted to destroy in their country. Now you understand why I'm not allowed on any television station. Why Michael Savage is an unknown individual in America, except to its millions of listeners. And why this show is number two on the Internet and radio. And why I have six best sellers in a row. Because somehow the truth is getting out. But I'm warning you about Wikipedia. If Wikipedia doesn't stop these ninety-nine democrat liberal soviets from modifying things that are true, then how could you rely upon a website that's so fraudulent? You can't. You can't! But I can't fight every battle every day, you understand that?"

"Wikipedians [...] act as de facto topic moderators, they often end up being biased and frequently quirky. ... Articles are often edited with the sensibility of adolescent too-clever-by-half males[, which] describes a lot of Wikipedians."

"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."

"The site I avoid at all cost is Wikipedia, which for many subjects I've found to be a trove of misinformation. I don't even have any desire to read my own Wikipedia article."

"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."

"It all started one night when writer Amanda Filipacchi was browsing through Wikipedia and noticed an absence of women under the category "American novelists." At first, she thought the female writers being moved off the page were not important enough to be on it. But then she discovered some obscure male novelists were still listed, while some well-known women were not."

"As they say, history is written by the victorious Wikipedia editors."

"Of the approximately 7,000 languages spoken today, some 2,500 are generally considered endangered. ...less than 5% of all languages can still ascend to the digital realm. We present evidence of a massive die-off caused by the digital divide. ... To summarize a key result of this study...: No wikipedia, no ascent."

"It rarely tries new things in the hope of luring visitors; in fact, it has changed little in a decade."

"Dealing with the Wikipedians is like walking into a mental hospital: the floors are carpeted, the walls are nicely padded, but you know there's a pretty good chance at any given moment one of the inmates will pick up a knife."

"Every single person who signed this petition needs to go back to check their premises and think harder about what it means to be honest, factual, truthful. Wikipedia's policies around this kind of thing are exactly spot-on and correct. If you can get your work published in respectable scientific journals - that is to say, if you can produce evidence through replicable scientific experiments, then Wikipedia will cover it appropriately. What we won't do is pretend that the work of lunatic charlatans is the equivalent of "true scientific discourse"."

"Today, this democratic federation [Wikimedia] controls a large proportion of the sum of human knowledge, largely displacing the former Britannica Empire which had once stretched from A to ."

"...when I used to teach kids, there was a fierce debate between teachers on the pro versus the anti Wikipedia side, and I always came down very strongly on the pro side, and I told my students if they were researching something for me – like Wikipedia is totally OK. Copy and pasting from Wikipedia is not, but there is no place to get a better overview from things. ... it all depends on what do you need, and if you just want to check some quick fact about something, Wikipedia is totally reliable. Now there's reasons why you can't cite it as a source, but ignoring that for the time being, Wikipedia for a huge number of people's needs is totally fine. ... the thing that is disturbing is the number times that that source link does not go anywhere, or, I have found some times where the context of the source link says something that is completely contrary to the feeling that you got from the Wikipedia page itself ..."

"You'd be amazed at the number of times I've been with top professors in the field and I've asked them a question and they've said, 'I'm not too sure about that, let me check', and gone straight to Wikipedia."

"With such a massive amount of rules and regulations to adhere to, how is it not absolutely deterring for newcomers to join Wikipedia? Most likely, because they do not even know these rules exist. Counter-intuitive as it may sound, in spite of all the regulations, it is perfectly fine and acceptable to just use common sense when editing Wikipedia, relying on one's best judgment on how to make it a better encyclopedia. In fact, one of the Wikipedia policies goes even further and states that “If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it,” and one of the five pillars of Wikipedia claims that “Wikipedia has policies and guidelines, but they are not carved in stone; their content and interpretation can evolve over time. Their principles and spirit matter more than their literal wording, and sometimes improving Wikipedia requires making an exception.” In a similar spirit, there is a rule stating that instruction creep should be avoided and that pettifogging is not welcome. One policy, which describes what Wikipedia is not, insists that Wikipedia is not a bureaucracy."

"Whether or not Wikipedia has managed to attain the authority level of traditional encyclopaedias, it has undoubtedly become a model of what the collaborative Internet community can and cannot do."

"Most have simply washed their hands of the problem, claiming that the bigotry or bias on Wikipedia is just an unfortunate side-effect that we have to accept. But this is not a trivial unintended consequence of an open source system; bias goes against the very principle of Wikipedia and must be addressed. I have to deal with this bias and misinformation every time a journalist interviews me and references my Wikipedia article. I need to spend the first 30 minutes of interviews to correct all the misleading information from my Wikipedia article... Most of the skeptic editors on my article believe me to be a very dangerous man — and believe that it is Wikipedia's responsibility to warn the world of how dangerous my ideas are."

"The prime agent of this change is a development that nobody (save perhaps Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) would have predicted. It is called Wikipedia—an online encyclopedia collectively produced and edited by 'amateurs' who have created what is effectively the greatest reference work the world has yet produced."

"Beneath its reasonably serene surface, the website can be as ugly and bitter as 4chan and as mind-numbingly bureaucratic as a Kafka story. And it can be particularly unwelcoming to women."

"The problem instead stems from the fact that administrators and longtime editors have developed a fortress mentality in which they see new editors as dangerous intruders who will wreck their beautiful encyclopedia, and thus antagonize and even persecute them."

"We can learn a lot from Wikipedia about Internet governance and collective knowledge-building. It’s ultimately up to the site’s editors to choose to learn to temper their fortress mentality, get more outside eyes and ears, listen to the most moderate and reflective among them, and perhaps even entertain the idea that they might sometimes be wrong. Wikipedia’s future may depend on it."

"Wikipedia is amazing. But it’s become a rancorous, sexist, elitist, stupidly bureaucratic mess."

"Last week, Wikipedia’s highest court, the Arbitration Committee, composed of 12 elected volunteers who serve one- or two-year terms, handed down a decision in a controversial case having to do with the site’s self-formed Gender Gap Task Force, the goal of which is to increase female participation on Wikipedia from its current 10 percent to 25 percent by the end of next year. The dispute, which involved ongoing hostility from a handful of prickly longtime editors, had simmered for at least 18 months. In the end, the only woman in the argument, pro-GGTF libertarian feminist Carol Moore, was indefinitely banned from all of Wikipedia over her uncivil comments toward a group of male editors, whom she at one point dubbed “the Manchester Gangbangers and their cronies/minions.”"

"And then there's Wikipedia – astroturf's dream come true. Billed as the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit, the reality can't be more different. Anonymous Wikipedia editors control and co-opt pages on behalf of special interests. They forbid and reverse edits that go against their agenda. They skew and delete information, in blatant violation of Wikipedia's own established policies, with impunity – always superior to the poor schleps who actually believe anyone can edit Wikipedia, only to discover they're barred from correcting even the simplest factual inaccuracies. Try adding a footnoted fact, or correcting a factual error on one of these monitored Wikipedia pages, then poof! Sometimes within a matter of seconds you'll find your edit is reversed."

"Could the pressure from mobile, and the internal tensions, tear Wikipedia apart? A world without it seems unimaginable, but consider the fate of other online communities. ... The real challenges for Wikipedia are to resolve the governance disputes – the tensions among foundation employees, longtime editors trying to protect their prerogatives, and new volunteers trying to break in – and to design a mobile-oriented editing environment. ... The worst scenario is an end to Wikipedia, not with a bang but with a whimper: a long, slow decline in participation, accuracy and usefulness that is not quite dramatic enough to jolt the community into making meaningful reforms. No effort in history has gotten so much information at so little cost into the hands of so many – a feat made all the more remarkable by the absence of profit and owners. In an age of Internet giants, this most selfless of websites is worth saving."

"When Wikipedia launched, it raised immediate concerns about the sanctity of accreditation – could knowledge be created by amateurs? But its steady rise in utility meant that, in time, nearly everyone made their peace with it – some more happily than others."

"The Wikimedia Foundation has gotten far off track. Every year, it builds its campaign around a budget many millions larger than the year before."

"If you're selling to customers that you're familiar and competent with new media, and you can't manage something like Wikipedia, that's a failure."

"It is clear that our deep state is obsessed with controlling information and moulding it to fit its narrative. On Wikipedia, a number of 'users' and 'editors' have been planted to ensure that only Pakistan's official stance or the Nazaria-e-Pakistan [ideology of Pakistan] is reflected in the pages on Pakistan. Consequently, the pages on Pakistan's history read like a secondary school Pakistan Studies textbook... All alternative views on Pakistan's constitution, role of religion and federalism are stifled by this group...If one were to venture a guess it would be that these manipulators of the Pakistani narrative on sites like Wikipedia and others are operating out of some nondescript building in Islamabad's G sectors [where Pakistani intelligence agencies are located]."

"A lot of students write a paper for a class, and eventually it winds up in the dustbin. When students write an article for Wikipedia, they have to learn to collaborate, to research and to write for a popular audience, and their work will benefit the millions of people using the site."

"Linux and Wikipedia (as well as other, less known achievements) show unambiguously that the idea of requiring any kind of payment for great tools, culture, or knowledge to come into being is an utter falsehood."

"For a website with no paid writing staff that is still overcoming an out-of-date reputation for inaccuracy, Wikipedia punches above its weight. ...it is especially powerful in an election season: On the day of the 2012 election, Barack Obama's and Mitt Romney's entries alone were read 1.6 million times. [...] you can see a virtual version of the presidential race playing out every day."

"It turns out there are people, typically they're probably unemployed kids with student debt you know that are stuck in their parents' basement with Cheetos stains on their t-shirts that haven't been able to get their first job so what they do is they play games to see how long they can edit Wikipedia pages in order to have games with their friends all around the world. So my advice to you is, if you do have a Wikipedia page, check it once in a while..."

"... what Wikipedia and Facebook teach us is that social models of content curation and collaboration do scale. ...organisations will increasingly need to crowd-source a lot of their meta-data. ... In other words, [organisations] will need to build a Corporate Data Catalogue that looks and feels a lot like Wikipedia, but which borrows the “like” and “share” concepts from Facebook."