Jimmy Wales
The Guardian
What holds, and what fails, under pressure, standards and accountability.
Jimmy Wales reads as The Guardian because his leadership is organised around custodianship rather than conquest. He built Wikimedia's endowment precisely to insulate Wikipedia from commercial pressure, runs the foundation with deliberate fiscal conservatism, and measures success by community health and editorial integrity rather than traffic or influence. Where other founders chase scale as its own reward, Wales protects the underlying conditions that make public trust possible.
“We run the Wikimedia Foundation in a very cost conscious conservative way. We build our reserves. We've gotten an endowment fund that's a separate non profit that has sort of is about planning for the long term, about safety in the long term.”
“Trust is a deliberate vulnerability. If I trust you, I'm letting go of control. I'm saying I trust that you're going to do the thing. I'm not going to control what you're doing.”
“We don't obsess over traffic numbers. We don't obsess partly because we're not an advertising driven website. We're just like, oh OK, well great people like us, that's fun.”
Ways to Change the World with Krishnan Guru-Murthy: “Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales on the crisis of trust in the age of Trump”
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