Jimmy Wales: evaluation

Transcript context

…There are Wikipedia pages on all of these terms, by the way. It’s amazing, it’s amazing. I’m a moderate on that. In fact, there was an interesting discussion today that I was involved with, about — forgotten her name, but she’s running for the Senate in Iowa. She’s the Democratic candidate [Theresa Greenfield], and Wikipedia doesn’t have a page about her. Somebody said this to me on Twitter: “Why doesn’t Wikipedia have a page on this politician who’s the front runner, at the moment, to be elected to the Senate in Iowa?” I said, “Gee, I don’t know. Let me go check. ” What I found was this enormously convoluted, very, very Wikipedia discussion about the rules and the process, and there was a deletion a while back because she was not notable when she first announced her candidacy because she was not someone who we could find any information about. However, she has become notable in the last several months, including national media coverage. But the whole thing got caught in this web of complicated Wikipedia-ness. I cited one of our oldest rules, the ignore-all-rules rule, to say if some rule is preventing you from making Wikipedia better, then ignore that rule. Does that rule apply to itself?…

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