Collaborative Knowledge Quotes

Nobody is as smart as everybody.

Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject. So you know you are getting the best possible information.

We can be more clever than one, but not more clever than all.

Groups are only smart when there is a balance between the information that everyone in the group shares and the information that each of the members of the group holds privately. It's the combination of all those pieces of independent information, some of them right, some of the wrong, that keeps the group wise.

Wikipedia represents a belief in the supremacy of reason and goodness of others.

The sciences are of a sociable disposition, and flourish best in the neighborhood of each other; nor is there any branch of learning but may be helped and improved by assistance drawn from other arts.

A doctor may know more than a peasant, but a peasant and a doctor know more together.

Consider this: alms aside, Wikipedia is fueled by competitive pedantry and emo-ness. How great is that?

To continue down the path of comprehensiveness, Wikipedia will need to sustain the astonishing mass fervor of its birth years. Will that be possible? No one knows.

The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information.

Think of how Wikipedia works, how Amazon harnesses user annotation on its site, the way photo-sharing sites like Flickr are bleeding out into other applications. We're entering an era in which software learns from its users and all of the users are connected.

Wikipedia is a victory of process over substance.

Wikipedia is an amazing construct. It's a commons that works. I don't know how Jimmy Wales came up with it. I'm sure all of us would have said, "This is the stupidest thing we've ever heard of. That'll never work in a million years."

A lot of stuff in Wikipedia is not true, and that goes for a lot of people. I sometimes think, "How can that happen?" But Wikipedia is maintained by people, and everybody can add stuff to it.

The core of Wikipedia is something people really believe in. That is too valuable for the world to screw it up.

If we're able to identify our own ignorance, we can identify someone else's expertise. We learn how to listen to each other. And that is the foundation of human understanding.

Wikipedia, every day, is tens of thousands of people inputting information, and every day millions of people withdrawing that information. It's a perfect image for the fundamental point that no one of us is as smart as all of us thinking together.