The creation of dialogue drives Jimmy Wales.

Question: What inspires you?

Jimmy Wales: What inspires me? Well what inspires me is that we have this amazing tool now that’s very quickly penetrating every place in the world where you can have point-to-point communication between individuals all over.

It’s possible in limited ways to censor the Internet, but I’m very much an optimist about that. I don’t think the censorship can very much succeed in the long run.

So the idea that we can have a real dialogue between people – not between governments or just between sort of important pundits, but ordinary people can talk about things in many different parts of the world – I think that’s really fascinating. It’s going to have some major and positive implications for peace in the long run.

It’s no simple and easy process. It’s not like you just sort of turn on the Internet and all of a sudden everybody just has a reasonable conversation instead of going to war. It’s more subtle and complex than that; but I think it does begin to make it possible to see people as human beings rather than “the other”, and I think that’s going to be huge in the long run.

Recorded On: Aug 10, 2007