Jimmy Wales

Wales publicly criticized the Wikipedia article on the Gaza genocide, calling it 'one of the worst Wikipedia entries I've seen in a very long time' for stating 'in Wikipedia's voice, that Israel is committing genocide, although that claim is highly contested.' He called it a violation of NPOV (Neutral Point of View) policy requiring immediate correction.

At the CNBC Technology Executive Council Summit, Wales issued a stark warning about AI hallucination problems, stating 'The hallucination problem is still very bad.' He also criticized Elon Musk's Grokipedia project, saying 'The LLMs he is using to write it are going to make massive errors.'

Wales stated Wikipedia would not comply with UK Online Safety Act age verification requirements, saying 'We will not be identifying users under any circumstances. We will not be age-gating Wikipedia under any circumstances. So, if it comes to that, it's going to be an interesting showdown, because we're going to just refuse to do it.'

In a Times Radio interview, Wales criticized President Trump's repeated 'fake news' claims, saying they mirror tactics used by strongmen around the world. He noted it was 'an astonishing situation' when a President 'clearly contradicts himself, or denies that he said things that we can all play tapes of him saying.'

Wales criticized Musk for Twitter censoring posts at Turkey's request during elections, contrasting it with Wikipedia's successful legal battle in Turkey. He stated 'We do not bend to the will of governments, anywhere' and questioned whether Musk was saying 'we don't care about freedom of expression if it interferes with making money.'

In April 2023, Wales publicly questioned a former Arbitration Committee member (Bradv) on-wiki about a possible connection to WikiExperts, an undeclared paid-editing firm, saying he did not think 'keeping these matters hushed benefits anyone other than the ultimate scammers.' Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee subsequently investigated and concluded the evidence was flawed, determining the episode was an 'obvious Joe job' (impersonation scam) and that Bradv was a victim rather than complicit. Wales apologized for his tone and voluntarily relinquished his administrative and technical tools on the site.

Wales publicly called Trump a 'lunatic' in response to his threats to regulate social media companies, stating 'Worst case scenario is that platforms don't have courage to tell Trump to go away, that they begin to adapt policies to his whims because he is a lunatic.'

Jimmy Wales joined eleven other business leaders in signing an open letter to American voters urging them not to vote for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election.

Jimmy Wales served as committee chair for Democrat Lawrence Lessig's 2016 presidential campaign, supporting Lessig's platform focused on campaign finance reform and fighting corruption in politics.

Wales was a vocal supporter of changing Wikipedia's article from 'Bradley Manning' to 'Chelsea Manning' following her coming out as transgender, writing 'We ought to very strongly defer to how people identify themselves.'

In February-March 2008, leaked instant-message transcripts showed Jimmy Wales communicating with Fox News commentator Rachel Marsden about edits to her Wikipedia biography while the two were developing a romantic relationship, which he did not fully disclose to Wikimedia's OTRS volunteer team. In one leaked message Wales wrote, 'The truth is of course a much worse conflict of interest than that :) but that will do,' acknowledging the conflict while misrepresenting it internally. Wales maintained he acted consistently with Wikipedia policy and had disclosed a conflict, but the episode was widely reported as a breach of the neutral-point-of-view and conflict-of-interest norms Wales himself championed as Wikipedia's founder.