Jimmy Wales on steak knives

Jimmy Wales is the founder of Wikipedia, and apparently he has done versions of this rant multiple times in multiple venues. Here he is, verbatim, from ConvergeSouth in Greensboro, N.C., on Oct. 8:

Imagine if you’re designing a restaurant. And in this restaurant we’re going to be serving steak. And because we’re going to be serving steak we’re going to be using steak knives. And since we have steak knives, people might be stabbing each other. And therefore we need to put fences around all the tables. We need to have cages so that people are protected from each other, because who knows what godawful thing they might do, sitting there with knives.

That isn’t a good idea. It isn’t a good way to design a restaurant, it isn’t a good way for us to live our lives in society. A society that is based on a lack of trust ends up being a distrustful and violent society. We normally don’t think twice about sitting next to someone with a steak knife because we trust them. And yes, occasionally people go berserk in restaurants and stab each other with steak knives. We put up with this, though, because we like the human community and it’s kind of nice that I can go and sit in a room and not worry about people stabbing me, not because there are cages but because they’re basically good people.

So at Wikipedia we consistently had a design philosophy to use the softest possible security. We try not to lock anything down unless it absolutely needs to be locked down.

That's not just a software design issue he's talking about, ladies and gentlemen. That's a revolution.