Praise for Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Projects

Readers, users, and editors, as well as media and other stakeholders have made great public statements about Wikipedia and the other projects of the Wikimedia Foundation. Below are some of our favorites, collected from Wikipedia Testimonials and other sources. If you make an addition (beneath the line), please provide an accurate citation..

For press or media inquiries, please write to press@wikimedia.org or visit the Wikimedia Foundation press page.

Books

From The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age, Cathy N. Davidson (John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and Ruth F. Devarney Professor of English at Duke University) and David Theo Goldberg (Director of the University of California Humanities Research Institute), The MIT Press, 2009.

One of the best examples of a virtual learning institution in our era is Wikipedia, the largest encyclopedia compiled in human history and one "written collaboratively by volunteers from around the world."

From The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age, Cathy N. Davidson (John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and Ruth F. Devarney Professor of English at Duke University) and David Theo Goldberg (Director of the University of California Humanities Research Institute), The MIT Press, 2009.

In secondary schools and higher education, many administrators and individual teachers have been moved to limit use of collectively and collaboratively crafted knowledge sources, most notably Wikipedia, for course assignments or to issue quite stringent guidelines for their consultation and reference. This is a catastrophically anti-intellectual reaction to a knowledge-making, global phenomenon of epic proportions.

To ban sources such as Wikipedia is to miss the importance of a collaborative, knowledge-making impulse in humans who are willing to contribute, correct and collect information without remuneration: by definition, this is education.

From Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, Henry Jenkins (Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program and Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities at MIT) with Ravi Purushotma, Margaret Wiegel, Katie Clinton and Alice J. Robison, The MIT Press, 2009.

In one study, Nature magazine compared the accuracy of articles in Wikipedia, an enormous online encyclopedia constructed entirely through the efforts of volunteers using wiki technologies, with equivalent articles in Encyclopedia Britannica. The study determined the accuracy levels of the two to be roughly the same. Wikipedia is not flawless, but rather, even sources such as Encyclopedia Britannica are flawed. Students must be taught to read both sources from a critical perspective.

From Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge, Cass R. Sunstein (professor of Law at Harvard Law School), Oxford University Press, 2006.

If a person suddenly achieves public importance -through election, appointment, or sheer celebrity- it is almost certain that Wikipedia will have a relevant article almost immediately. The article is often detailed; it is nearly always highly informative.

If anyone in the world can make changes, isn't the text vulnerable to pranks and even destruction? Isn't some kind of security needed to protect against malevolent people? [Wiki inventor Ward] Cunningham and [his coauthor Bol] Leuf say that "experience shows that in fact little damage is done to wiki content even in the absence of security mechanisms." If this is so, it is not because of economic incentives, as in prediction markets. It is because most people really want the process to work.

To date, the most notable wiki, by far, is Wikipedia.

It is an understatement to say that Wikipedia generally works. In terms of sheer volume, it dwarfs the Encyclopedia Britannica. The number of articles is extraordinary. True, the quality does not always match the quantity; you can easily find articles that are thin or amateurish or that contain significant omissions and errors. But for the most part, the quality tends to be high as well. Specialists are regularly surprised to see a great deal of accuracy, as well as astounding currency, in Wikipedia entries.

Large numbers of knowledgeable people are willing to participate in creating Wikipedia, and whatever errors they make usually receive rapid correction, simply because so many minds are involved.The involvement of many people ensures that Wikipedians are able to produce a much more comprehensive resource than a small group could, even a small group of experts. Amazing but true: Wikipedia is revised hundreds of times every hour. At last count, more than seven hundred articles were being added every day.

Wikipedia works because those who know the truth, or something close to it, are usually more numerous and more committed than those who believe in a falsehood.

From Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Henry Jenkins (DeFlorz Professor of Humanities, and Founder and Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT), New York University Press, 2006.

You probably won't believe in the Wikipedia unless you try it, but the process works. The process works because more and more people are taking seriously their obligations as participants to the community as a whole: not everyone does so yet; we can see various flame wars as people with very different politics and ethics interact within the same knowledge communities. Such disputes often foreground those conflicting assumptions, forcing people to reflect more deeply on their choices. What once was taken for granted must now be articulated. What emerges might be called a moral economy of information: that is, a sense of mutual obligations and shared expectations about what constitutes good citizenship within a knowledge economy.

From Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, David Weinberger, Times Books, 2007.

One of the lessons of Wikipedia is that conversation improves expertise by exposing weaknesses, introducing new viewpoints, and pushing ideas into accessible form.

From Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, David Weinberger, Times Books, 2007.

What is the most important lesson that Wikipedia teaches us? That Wikipedia is possible. A miscellaneous collection of anonymous and pseudonymous authors can precipitate knowledge.

From Wikipatterns, Stewart Mader, Wiley Publishing Inc., 2008. Stewart Mader is Wiki Evangelist for Atlassian Software Systems, and a noted wiki/social software researcher.

When you pick up an article in Britannica and read the content, you get what's there at face value but you don't know what went into developing that article. There's no easy way for you to know the backgrounds, influences, and biases of the authors. Now think about reading that article on Wikipedia. You'd have not only the article itself, but the revision history that reveals the social forces behind the construction of that article. You can see, for instance, where authors may have disagreed about the content, where people have contributed new content, and who those people might be. ... The bottom line is, with a wiki you see not only the end product of the information, but you get to see the construction of that knowledge, and that's incredibly valuable in measuring the quality of that information.

From Wikipatterns, Stewart Mader, Wiley Publishing Inc., 2008

Wikipedia has achieved accuracy because the process is a self-checking one. The low barrier to entry of the wiki means that not only can articles be created quickly, but also the presence of an interested community results in accurate information and rapid error correction.

Published Articles

Nicholson Baker, The Charms of Wikipedia, New York Review of Books, Volume 55, Number 4, March 20, 2008

“Wikipedia is just an incredible thing. It's fact-encirclingly huge, and it's idiosyncratic, careful, messy, funny, shocking, and full of simmering controversies—and it's free, and it's fast. In a few seconds you can look up, for instance, "Diogenes of Sinope," or "turnip," or "Crazy Eddie," or "Bagoas," or "quadratic formula," or "Bristol Beaufighter," or "squeegee," or "Sanford B. Dole," and you'll have knowledge you didn't have before. It's like some vast aerial city with people walking briskly to and fro on catwalks, carrying picnic baskets full of nutritious snacks.”

Nicholson Baker, The Charms of Wikipedia, New York Review of Books, Volume 55, Number 4, March 20, 2008

“It worked and grew because it tapped into the heretofore unmarshaled energies of the uncredentialed.”

Nicholson Baker, The Charms of Wikipedia, New York Review of Books, Volume 55, Number 4, March 20, 2008

“Wikipedia was the point of convergence for the self-taught and the expensively educated. The cranks had to consort with the mainstreamers and hash it all out—and nobody knew who really knew what he or she was talking about, because everyone's identity was hidden behind a jokey username. All everyone knew was that the end product had to make legible sense and sound encyclopedic.”

Nicholson Baker, The Charms of Wikipedia, New York Review of Books, Volume 55, Number 4, March 20, 2008

“So there was this exhilarating sense of mission—of proving the greatness of the Internet through an unheard-of collaboration. Very smart people dropped other pursuits and spent days and weeks and sometimes years of their lives doing "stub dumps," writing ancillary software, categorizing and linking topics, making and remaking and smoothing out articles—without getting any recognition except for the occasional congratulatory barnstar on their user page and the satisfaction of secret fame. Wikipedia flourished partly because it was a shrine to altruism—a place for shy, learned people to deposit their trawls.”

Jonathan Dee, “All The News That's Fit to Print Out,” New York Times Sunday Magazine, July 1, 2007

“For centuries, an encyclopedia was synonymous with a fixed, archival idea about the retrievability of information from the past. But Wikipedia’s notion of the past has enlarged to include things that haven’t even stopped happening yet. Increasingly, it has become a go-to source not just for reference material but for real-time breaking news — to the point where, following the mass murder at Virginia Tech, one newspaper in Virginia praised Wikipedia as a crucial source of detailed information.”

Jonathan Dee, “All The News That's Fit to Print Out,” New York Times Sunday Magazine, July 1, 2007

“Nothing is easier than taking shots at Wikipedia, and its many mistakes (most often instances of deliberate vandalism) are schadenfreude’s most renewable resource. But given the chaotic way in which it works, the truly remarkable thing about Wikipedia as a news site is that it works as well as it does. And what makes it work is a relatively small group of hard-core devotees who will, the moment big news breaks, drop whatever they’re doing to take custody of the project and ensure its, for lack of a better term, quality control.”

Jonathan Dee, “All The News That's Fit to Print Out,” New York Times Sunday Magazine, July 1, 2007

“But even when Wikipedia’s function is journalistic, its aim is not; rather than report the news, the goal is to act as a kind of phenomenally fast, bias-free digest of what others have already reported elsewhere. On a big news day, Wikipedia functions like a massive, cooperative blog — except that where most blogs’ function is to sieve news accounts through the filter of strong opinion, Wikipedia’s goal is the opposite: it strives to filter all the opinion out of it.”

John Seely Brown (Visiting Scholar and Advisor to the Provost at the University of Southern California) and Richard P. Adler (Research Affiliate at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto) “Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0,” EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 43, no. 1 (January/February 2008): 16-32.

“In [Wikipedia's] open environment, both the content and the process by which it is created are equally visible, thereby enabling a new kind of critical reading—almost a new form of literacy—that invites the reader to join in the consideration of what information is reliable and/or important.”

Roy Rosenzweig (Mark and Barbara Fried Professor of History and New Media at George Mason University and director of the Center for History and New Media), Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past, The Journal of American History, Volume 93, Number 1 (June 2006) 117-46

“A historical work without owners and with multiple, anonymous authors is thus almost unimaginable in our professional culture. Yet, quite remarkably, that describes the online encyclopedia known as Wikipedia, which contains 3 million articles (1 million of them in English). History is probably the category encompassing the largest number of articles. Wikipedia is entirely free. And that freedom includes not just the ability of anyone to read it (a freedom denied by the scholarly journals in, say, jstor, which requires an expensive institutional subscription) but also—more remarkably—their freedom to use it. You can take Wikipedia’s entry on Franklin D. Roosevelt and put it on your own Web site, you can hand out copies to your students, and you can publish it in a book—all with only one restriction: You may not impose any more restrictions on subsequent readers and users than have been imposed on you. And it has no authors in any conventional sense. Tens of thousands of people—who have not gotten even the glory of affixing their names to it—have written it collaboratively. The Roosevelt entry, for example, emerged over four years as five hundred authors made about one thousand edits. This extraordinary freedom and cooperation make Wikipedia the most important application of the principles of the free and open-source software movement to the world of cultural, rather than software, production.”

Roy Rosenzweig (Mark and Barbara Fried Professor of History and New Media at George Mason University and director of the Center for History and New Media), Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past, The Journal of American History, Volume 93, Number 1 (June 2006) 117-46

“Thus, those who create Wikipedia’s articles and debate their contents are involved in an astonishingly intense and widespread process of democratic self-education. Wikipedia, observes one Wikipedia activist, “teaches both contributors and the readers. By empowering contributors to inform others, it gives them incentive to learn how to do so effectively, and how to write well and neutrally.” The classicist James O’Donnell has argued that the benefit of Wikipedia may be greater for its active participants than for its readers: “A community that finds a way to talk in this way is creating education and online discourse at a higher level.””

Roy Rosenzweig (Mark and Barbara Fried Professor of History and New Media at George Mason University and director of the Center for History and New Media), Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past, The Journal of American History, Volume 93, Number 1 (June 2006) 117-46

“If Wikipedia is becoming the family encyclopedia for the twenty-first century, historians probably have a professional obligation to make it as good as possible. And if every member of the Organization of American Historians devoted just one day to improving the entries in her or his areas of expertise, it would not only significantly raise the quality of Wikipedia, it would also enhance popular historical literacy.”

Daniel J. Cohen, “From Babel to Knowledge: Data Mining Large Digital Collections,” D-Lib Magazine, March 2006

“Resources that are free to use in any way, even if they are imperfect, are more valuable than those that are gated or use-restricted, even if those resources are qualitatively better.”

Daniel H. Pink, The Book Stops Here, Wired magazine 13.03, March 2005

“Instead of clearly delineated lines of authority, Wikipedia depends on radical decentralization and self-organization - open source in its purest form. Most encyclopedias start to fossilize the moment they're printed on a page. But add Wiki software and some helping hands and you get something self-repairing and almost alive. A different production model creates a product that's fluid, fast, fixable, and free.”

Daniel H. Pink, The Book Stops Here, Wired magazine 13.03, March 2005

“What makes the model work is not only the collective knowledge and effort of a far-flung labor force, but also the willingness to abide by two core principles. The first: neutrality. All articles should be written without bias. Wikipedians are directed not to take a stand on controversial subjects like abortion or global warming but to fairly represent all sides. The second principle is good faith. All work should be approached with the assumption that the author is trying to help the project, not harm it.”

Daniel H. Pink, The Book Stops Here, Wired magazine 13.03, March 2005

“Wikipedia represents a belief in the supremacy of reason and the goodness of others. In the Wikipedia ideal, people of goodwill sometimes disagree. But from the respectful clash of opposing viewpoints and the combined wisdom of the many, something resembling the truth will emerge. Most of the time.”

Daniel H. Pink, The Book Stops Here, Wired magazine 13.03, March 2005

“Wikipedia's article on Islam has been a persistent target of vandalism, but Wikipedia's defenders of Islam have always proved nimbler than the vandals. Take one fairly typical instance. At 11:20 one morning not too long ago, an anonymous user replaced the entire Islam entry with a single scatological word. At 11:22, a user named Solitude reverted the entry. At 11:25, the anonymous user struck again, this time replacing the article with the phrase "u stink!" By 11:26, another user, Ahoerstemeir, reverted that change - and the vandal disappeared. When MIT's Fernanda Viegas and IBM's Martin Wattenberg and Kushal Dave studied Wikipedia, they found that cases of mass deletions, a common form of vandalism, were corrected in a median time of 2.8 minutes. When an obscenity accompanied the mass deletion, the median time dropped to 1.7 minutes.”

Daniel H. Pink, The Book Stops Here, Wired magazine 13.03, March 2005

“It turns out that Wikipedia has an innate capacity to heal itself. As a result, woefully outnumbered vandals often give up and leave.”

Dan Tynan. "Winners and Losers of 2005". Tech Tuesday - Yahoo! News. (December 16 2005). Rated as both the "Winner" and "Loser of the Year".

You can't do a Web search on any major topic without this wiki popping up near the top of the results page. Heavily linked, authoritative, and constantly updated, the world's largest interactive encyclopedia came into its own this year[...] Popular, yes. Accurate? Not necessarily. Because its entries can be edited by anyone, the Wikipedia can be the source of dubious or biased information. [...(citing the Swiftboat controversy and Seigenthaler Incident)...] [W]ith more than 800,000 articles in English and well over 1 million in 15 other languages, foolproof policing is well nigh impossible.

Crispin Sartwell, "See 'Information,' 'Amazing,' 'Anarchy'", Los Angeles Times p. B15 (4 May 2005).

So is it to be trusted? Does it have the credibility of Britannica? Well, I have monitored over a decent period a number of entries on matters about which I know something and have found them almost invariably accurate. And I have watched some of them grow, becoming ever more elaborate and interlinked.

Wynn Quon, "The new know-it-all", National Post, p. FP19 (26 Feb. 2005).

Are traditional encyclopedia publishers aware of Wikipedia's threat? Here's a clue: Try looking for the "Wikipedia" article in the online version of Britannica. You won't find it. Nor will you find it in any of the half a dozen or so mainstream encyclopedias currently on the market. These folks should be busy brainstorming a survival strategy. Instead, the range of reaction has run in a comically limited range from denial to derision. Even Britannica, with its prestigious reputation, needs to figure out how it will thrive in what will increasingly be a Wikipedia world. In the final analysis, Wikipedia is more than just the raising of a new barn. It's the tearing down of the old ones.

Simon Waldman, "Who knows?" "The Guardian" (Oct. 26, 2004):

It has no editors, no fact checkers and anyone can contribute an entry - or delete one. It should have been a recipe for disaster, but instead Wikipedia became one of the internet's most inspiring success stories.

Bill Thompson, "A question of trust online", BBC News Online, (Apr. 23, 2004)

And there is the Wikipedia, a community-written encyclopedia that has evolved over the years [...] into one of the most reliably useful sources of information around, on or off-line.

Bill Bailey, "Big Night In" [1], The Times, (Feb. 21, 2004)

If I’m writing a show I spend a lot of time researching it on the net. I use Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) a lot. It’s a brilliant online encyclopaedia, invaluable for historical stuff, and probably the most accurate of all those sites.

Sean Carroll, "Site of the Week", PC Magazine (Jun. 6, 2003):

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. And the typos and awkward constructions we found? As editors, we plan to return to those pages, on the subjects we care about, and tweak them a bit.

Ben Hammersley, "Common Knowledge", Guardian (Jan. 30, 2003):

The Wikipedia [is] perhaps one of the greatest testaments to the generosity on the web [...] What makes the Wikipedia so compelling—and this article so hard to finish—is the way everything is so massively linked. You read one entry, and before you know it, you're reading up on Anne Boleyn or Italian greyhounds.

John Jerney, "The Wikipedia: The encyclopedia for the rest of us", The Daily Yomiuri (Oct. 22, 2002):

In particular, the goal of the Wikipedia is to produce the best encyclopedia encapsulating the sum total of human knowledge. And a quick run through some of the articles shows that this community based approach can indeed work. [...] The Wikipedia, and hopefully other services similar to it, offers the possibility of everything being written into history, with all of mankind sharing knowledge and information in a way that enables everyone to profit from it.

Mary Ellen Quinn, "Wikipedia", Booklist Magazine (Sep. 15, 2002):

What about authority and reliability and all the other things we've been taught to look for in an encyclopedia? We were prepared to hate Wikipedia, but were disarmed when we got to the section Wikipedia:Our Replies to Our Critics, which answered all these questions and more. [...] [Wikipedians] believe that their process of continuous editing means that articles can only improve. Bad content will be edited out, and good content will rise to the top, like cream: As further edits accumulate, the quality of the article moves asymptomatically towards perfection, and likewise the quality of the encyclopedia as a whole. Maybe. We'll keep an open mind.

Steven Johnson, "Populist Editing", New York Times (Dec. 9, 2001):

But an intriguing new subgenre of sites, called WikiWikiWebs, really are interactive: users can both read and write. [...] The most ambitious Wiki project to date applies this governing principle to the encyclopedia, that Enlightenment-era icon of human intelligence. [...] With a total of 16,000 articles in the database, the Wikipedia is already large enough to be a source of generally reliable information, though stronger in some areas ("Star Trek" spinoffs) than others (the novels of Charles Dickens).

"Open source". Jun 10th 2004. From The Economist print edition

Wikipedia... [is a] ...force for good.

Ulrich Johannes Schneider interviewed by Hubert Spiegel, "Aus für den gedruckten Brockhaus – Unser Wissen lebt nur in den Köpfen, nicht im Regal", FAZ (Feb. 15, 2008):

Es gibt bei Wikipedia sogenannte Exzellenz-Artikel, die von absoluten Kennern der Materie verfasst werden. Außerdem betreibt Wikipedia ein ausgezeichnetes System der Qualitätssicherung, das vor allem in der deutschen Version von Wikipedia sehr gut funktioniert. […] Die Kultur der wechselseitigen Kritik führt zu besseren Ergebnissen und auch dazu, dass Fehler leichter akzeptiert werden als in gedruckten Lexika. Außerdem erlaubt Wikipedia, die Genese eines Artikels nachzuvollziehen. Wenn Sie sich die verschiedenen Versionen ansehen, haben Sie einen Prozess der Arbeit am Wissen vor Augen.

Notable Blog Mentions

Tim Bray of Sun Microsystems, "Wikipedia", Ongoing weblog (Aug. 31, 2004):

Maybe the Wikipedia is a short-lived fad, maybe it’ll get better, maybe it’ll get worse, but I was surprised that nobody pointed this out: The Wikipedia is beautiful. It’s an unexpected and unexplainable triumph of collective creativity and of order over entropy. I hope it lasts a long time, and those who criticize it Just Don’t Get It.

"Time For Change," Wikipedia as a Source of Information, Democratic Underground, http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x5625029, May 09th 2009

"I often find Wikipedia to be a very valuable resource, and I believe that the condescending attitude that some people show towards it is misplaced. It is meticulous about documenting its sources, it sticks to the facts and strives to clearly label opinions as opinions, and it has processes in place to achieve objectivity and avoid bias. I look at the fact that numerous editors are used for individual articles as a strength rather than as a weakness. So-called reputable sources of information use much fewer editors, who are often highly paid and professional. But consider who pays them and what biases might be involved in that fact. I would take numerous unpaid, non-professional editors any day over a single professional editor who is paid by a corporation whose financial interests may interfere with its ability (or motivation) to evaluate and present information in an unbiased manner."

Wikipedia User Comments

Two16, from User talk:Ed Poor (spelling corrected):

"I've never posted to a usenet group because nothing I wanted to say was worth the overhead of learning the interface. It is a big commitment for me to learn any new interface. This killer app called, email, everyone around me has been chattering about for 17 years, doesn't provide me incentive to learn a very simple interface, how the hell could a usenet group? The killer app called wiki wiki has caused me to learn a mark up language , learn to keyboard, learn to compose text while touch typing and learn NPOV cold. I came here because a project under development needed a back end content manager and I was asked to take a quick look so I could provide an expert opinion on its suitability as the project's interface. Boy does it ever work. I've declared wiki wiki to be the killer app of the world wide web."

AngelikaDagmar, from an anonymous talk page:

"I am amazed not to have discovered Wikipedia until now. I am so moved by its richness and intellectual value that I actually shed tears. What a wonderful endeavor!"

From the Talk:Israeli-Palestinian conflict page:

Editor,

I have studied the issues of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for decades. I also lived in the middle east for 10 years. I must tell you that yours is one of the most non-biased, fact-based articles I've every seen on the topic. I appreciate your objectivity; I wish more people were like that.

Sincerely,

E. Davidson

Atlanta

Stan Shebs's personal page:

Dumping my life's accumulated factoids into Wikipedia seems like a fun thing to do, we'll see how it goes. Two weeks later, it seems more like being an ADD-afflicted magpie in a bottle cap factory!

Kingturtle's personal page:

The discovery [of Wikipedia] matched love-at-first-sight. For years, I've been collecting old almanacs and encyclopedia. I bandied about different ideas regarding sharing and documenting the information revealed in these discarded sources. To stumble on a thriving community devoted to sharing information gave me a tremendous thrill and a curious sense of relief. Thank heavens you're all out there!

User:Aarchiba on User talk:Aarchiba:

I must say, Wikipedia has made tremendous progress since I last fiddled with it; it's astonishingly compendious, and the quality is just amazing.

Musichastherighttochildren on Wikipedia:Village pump:

I am a newcomer to wikipedia; although I have been aware of it and used it on occasion for quite a while, I have only recently realised the depth of this resource, and discovered the mechanics behind it.

this project is fantastic! the number of articles and the amount of information in them is truly amazing, even articles on topics so obscure I thought there would be no chance they would exist. the band biographies, for example, seem to have more detailed information and useful links than any official band website I have seen.

also, the articles are articulately written and unbiased, and the links between articles are very well done (though perhaps I have whiled away too many hours in school reading article after article as a consequence of this). wikipedia has become the primary internet resource for me (with the possible exception of news websites), and I really think that it is a credit to everyone who works on it, and indeed to human nature itself! this may seem like a sweeping statement, but it is hard to believe that something so incredible could be produced entirely voluntarily by people in their spare time. and, at the same time, would-be spoilers are repelled; I have never seen an incorrect piece of information or any 'graffiti'. good show!

anyway, I'm sure plenty of people have said this before, but just thought I would congratulate everyone who works on here, and say hi. I'm jack by the way, and I live in north wales. I shall try to contibute as much as possible (so far all I have done is added a sentence about john peel going to school in colwyn bay)!

Anonymous, from Wikipedia:Village pump:

Wow. Just wow. As I cruised around the Pump, I noticed talks about how old people were. As a 16 year old, I'm supposed to be jaded on the world, but the fact that there are kids younger than myself gives me an unexplicable [sic] hope. Wikipedia has the greatest minds on the internet, and I look forward to working with them. I haven't even written my first article yet, but when I do, expect me to look to younger users for advice.

Anonymous, from Talk:Main Page [2]:

Thank you Wikipedia. This is one of the best things to ever happen to me. An infinite amount of knowledge all integrated into one website. I love this thing! You need to know about something? Just type it in. You need to know about something relating to it, just click on one of the links in its explanation. I could go on for hours on this thing just learning! I love it! Thanks a lot!