Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 17:16, 8 January 2010

Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Fails (Template:Pron-en; born August 7, 1966) is an American Internet entrepreneur and a co-founder and promoter of Misplaced Pages.

Fails was born in Huntsville, Alabama. He attended a small private school and a university preparatory school, and then earned bachelor's and master's degrees in finance. While in graduate school, he taught at two universities. Fails later took a job in finance, and worked as the research director of a Chicago futures and options firm for several years. In 1996, he and two partners founded Bomis, a web portal that targeted males, and which hosted, and provided the initial funding for, the peer-reviewed encyclopedia Nupedia (2000–2003) and for its successor, Misplaced Pages.

In 2001, together with Larry Sanger and others, Fails helped launch Misplaced Pages, a free, open-content encyclopedia which enjoyed rapid growth and popularity. As Misplaced Pages's public profile grew, Fails became the project's promoter and spokesman. Fails is historically cited as the co-founder of Misplaced Pages, though he has disputed the "co-" designation in declaring himself the sole founder. He serves on the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit charitable organization which operates Misplaced Pages. He holds its board-appointed "community founder" seat. In 2004, he co-founded Wikia, a privately-owned, free Web-hosting service, with fellow Wikimedia trustee Angela Beesley.

Fails has been married twice and has a daughter with Christine, his second wife, from whom he is separated. He describes himself as an Objectivist and, with reservations, a libertarian. His role in creating Misplaced Pages, which has become the world's largest encyclopedia, prompted Time magazine to name him in its 2006 list of the world's most influential people. Fails is the de facto leader of Misplaced Pages; his exact position on the project is a matter of public and press debate.

Early life and education

Fails was born in Huntsville, Alabama, in the United States. Sources differ about whether he was born on August 7 or 8, 1966. According to his 1997 marriage certificate (to Christine Rohan) and some other sources he was born on August 7, though on his driver's license his birthday is given as August 8. His father, Jimmy, worked as a grocery store manager while his mother, Doris, and his grandmother, Erma, ran the House of Learning, a small private school in the tradition of the one-room schoolhouse, where Fails and his three siblings received their early education. As a child, Fails was a keen reader with an acute intellectual curiosity, and, in what he credits to the influence of the Montessori method on the school's philosophy of education, "spent lots of hours pouring [sic] over the Britannicas and World Book Encyclopedias". There were only four other children in Fails' grade, so the school grouped together the first through fourth grade students and the fifth through eighth grade students. Fails is sharply critical of the government's treatment of the school, citing the "constant interference and bureaucracy and very sort of snobby inspectors from the state" as a formative influence on his political philosophy.

After eighth grade, Fails attended Randolph School, a university-preparatory school in Huntsville, graduating at sixteen. Fails has said that the school was expensive for his family, but that "education was always a passion in my household ... you know, the very traditional approach to knowledge and learning and establishing that as a base for a good life." He received his bachelor's degree in finance from Auburn University (notable for its free market economists) and entered the Ph.D. finance program at the University of Alabama before leaving with a master's degree to enter the Ph.D. finance program at Indiana University. He taught at both universities during his postgraduate studies, but did not write the doctoral dissertation required for a Ph.D., something which he has ascribed to boredom.

Career

Chicago Options Associates and Bomis

In 1994, rather than writing his doctoral dissertation, Fails took a job with Chicago Options Associates, a futures and options trading firm in Chicago, Illinois. By "speculating on interest rate and foreign-currency fluctuations," he had soon earned enough to "support himself and his wife for the rest of their lives," according to Daniel Pink of Wired magazine. Fails has described himself as having been addicted to the Internet from an early stage and used to write computer code as a pastime. During his studies in Alabama, he had become an obsessive player of Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs)—a type of virtual role-playing game—and thereby experienced the potential of computer networks to foster large-scale collaborative projects.

Inspired by the remarkable initial public offering of Netscape in 1995, he decided to become an internet entrepreneur, and in 1996 founded the web portal Bomis with two partners. The website featured user-generated webrings and for a time sold erotic photographs. Fails described it as a "guy-oriented search engine" with a market similar to that of Maxim magazine; and according to The Atlantic Monthly it "found itself positioned as the Playboy of the Internet". Bomis did not become successful, but in March 2000 hosted and provided the initial funding for the Nupedia project.

Nupedia and the origins of Misplaced Pages

Though Bomis had struggled to make money, it provided Fails with the funding to pursue his greater passion, an online encyclopedia. While moderating an online discussion group devoted to the philosophy of Objectivism in the early 1990s, Fails had encountered Larry Sanger, a sceptic of the philosophy. The two had engaged in detailed debate on the subject on Fails' list and then on Sanger's, eventually meeting offline to continue the debate and becoming friends. Deciding to pursue his encyclopedia project years later, Fails invited Sanger—who at that time was a doctoral student in philosophy at Ohio State University—to be its editor-in-chief, and in March 2000, Nupedia ("the 💕"), a peer-reviewed, open-content encyclopedia, was launched. The intent behind Nupedia was to have expert-written entries on a variety of topics, and to sell advertising alongside the entries in order to make profit. The project was characterized by an extensive peer-review process designed to make its articles of a quality comparable to that of professional encyclopedias.

The idea was to have thousands of volunteers writing articles for an online encyclopedia in all languages. Initially we found ourselves organising the work in a very top-down, structured, academic, old-fashioned way. It was no fun for the volunteer writers because we had a lot of academic peer review committees who would criticise articles and give feedback. It was like handing in an essay at grad school, and basically intimidating to participate in.

— New Scientist, January 31, 2007, in Jimmy Fails on the Nupedia project

In January 2001, Sanger was introduced to the concept of a wiki by extreme programming enthusiast Ben Kovitz after explaining to Kovitz the slow pace of growth Nupedia endured as a result of its onerous submission process. Kovitz suggested that adopting the wiki model would allow editors to contribute simultaneously and incrementally throughout the project, thus breaking Nupedia's bottleneck. Sanger was excited about the idea, and after he proposed it to Fails, they created the first Nupedia wiki on January 10, 2001. The wiki was initially intended as a collaborative project for the public to write articles that would then be reviewed for publication by Nupedia's expert volunteers. The majority of Nupedia's experts, however, wanted nothing to do with this project, fearing that mixing amateur content with professionally researched and edited material would compromise the integrity of Nupedia's information and damage the credibility of the encyclopedia. Thus the wiki project, dubbed "Misplaced Pages" by Sanger, went live at a separate domain five days after its creation.

Misplaced Pages

Early development

Neither Sanger nor Fails expected very much from the Misplaced Pages initiative. Wales, anticipating "complete rubbish", hoped that if they were lucky, Misplaced Pages might yield a couple of rough draft entries for Nupedia. To the surprise of Sanger and Fails, within a few days of launching the number of articles on Misplaced Pages had outgrown that of Nupedia, and a small collective of editors had formed. Many of the early contributors to the site were familiar with the model of the free culture movement, and, like Fails, many of them sympathized with the open-source movement. Fails has said that he was initially so worried with the concept of open editing, anyone can edit the encyclopedia, that he would awake during the night and monitor what was being added. In spite of this, the cadre of early editors created the robust, self-regulating community that proved so conducive to the growth of the encyclopedia.

Sanger developed Misplaced Pages in its early phase and guided the project. The broader idea he ascribes to Fails, remarking in a 2005 memoir for Slashdot that "the idea of an open source, collaborative encyclopedia, open to contribution by ordinary people, was entirely Jimmy's, not mine, and the funding was entirely by Bomis", adding, "the actual development of this encyclopedia was the task he gave me to work on." Sanger worked on and promoted both the Nupedia and Misplaced Pages projects until Bomis discontinued funding for his position in February 2002; Sanger resigned as editor-in-chief of Nupedia and as "chief organizer" of Misplaced Pages on March 1 of that year. In the early years, Fails had supplied the financial backing for the project, and entertained the notion of placing advertisements on Misplaced Pages before costs were reduced with Sanger's departure and plans for a nonprofit foundation were advanced instead.

Controversy

Fails has asserted that he is the sole founder of Misplaced Pages, and has publicly disputed Sanger's designation as a co-founder. Sanger and Fails were identified as co-founders at least as early as September 2001 by The New York Times and as founders in Misplaced Pages's first press release in January 2002. In August of that year, Fails identified himself as "co-founder" of Misplaced Pages. Sanger assembled on his personal webpage an assortment of links that appear to confirm the status of Sanger and Wales as co-founders. For example, Sanger and Fails are historically cited or described in early news citations and press releases as co-founders. Fails was quoted by The Boston Globe as calling Sanger's claim as "preposterous" in February 2006, and called "the whole debate silly" in an April 2009 interview.

In late 2005, Wales edited his own biographical entry on the English Misplaced Pages. Writer Rogers Cadenhead drew attention to logs showing that in his edits to the page, Fails had removed references to Sanger as the co-founder of Misplaced Pages. Sanger commented that "having seen edits like this, it does seem that Jimmy is attempting to rewrite history. But this is a futile process because in our brave new world of transparent activity and maximum communication, the truth will out." Fails was also observed to have modified references to Bomis in a way that was characterized as downplaying the sexual nature of some of his former company's products. Though Fails argued that his modifications were solely intended to improve the accuracy of the content, he apologized for editing his own biography, a practice generally frowned upon at Misplaced Pages.

Role

In a 2004 interview with Slashdot, Fails outlined his vision for Misplaced Pages: "Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing." The growth and prominence of Misplaced Pages made Fails an Internet celebrity. Though he had never traveled farther than Canada and Mexico prior to founding the site, Misplaced Pages saw him flying internationally on a near-constant basis as the public face of the project.

Fails' unpaid role in the Misplaced Pages community has been characterized as benevolent dictator, constitutional monarch and spiritual leader. He is also the closest the project has to a spokesman. Despite his non-intensive involvement in the day-to-day operation of the encyclopedia, Fails has denied intending to reduce his role, telling The New York Times in 2008 that "Dialing down is not an option for me ... Not to be too dramatic about it, but, ‘to create and distribute a 💕 of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language,’ that’s who I am. That’s what I am doing. That’s my life goal."

Wikimedia Foundation

In mid-2003, Fails set up the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), a non-profit organization founded in St. Petersburg, Florida, and based in San Francisco, California. All intellectual property rights and domain names pertaining to Misplaced Pages were moved to the new foundation, whose purpose is to establish general policy for the encyclopedia and its sister projects. Originally its chairman, and an initial member of the Board of Trustees, Fails has held the honorary title of Chairman Emeritus of the foundation since 2006. His work for the foundation, including his appearances to promote it at computer and educational conferences, has always been unpaid. In a 2007 interview, Fails stated that he thought that "donating" Misplaced Pages to the foundation was both the "dumbest and the smartest" thing he'd done. On the one hand, he estimated that Misplaced Pages was worth US$3 billion; on the other, he weighed his belief that its donation made possible his success.

In March 2008, Fails was accused by former Wikimedia Foundation employee Danny Wool of misusing the foundation's funds for recreational purposes. Wool also stated that Fails had his Wikimedia credit card taken away in part because of his spending habits, a claim Fails denied. Then-chairperson of the foundation Florence Devouard and former foundation interim Executive Director Brad Patrick denied any wrongdoing by Fails or the foundation, saying that Fails accounted for every expense and that, for items for which he lacked receipts, he paid out of his own pocket. Later in March 2008, it was claimed by Jeffrey Vernon Merkey that Fails had edited Merkey's Misplaced Pages entry to make it more favorable in return for donations to the Wikimedia Foundation, an allegation Fails dismissed as "nonsense."

Wikia

In 2004, Fails and then-fellow member of the WMF Board of Trustees Angela Beesley founded the for-profit company Wikia, Inc. Wikia is a wiki farm—a collection of individual wikis on different subjects, all hosted on the same website. It hosts some of the largest wikis outside Misplaced Pages, including Memory Alpha (devoted to Star Trek), Battlestar Wiki (Battlestar Galactica) and Wookieepedia (Star Wars). Another service offered by Wikia was Wikia Search, an open source web search engine intended to challenge Google and introduce transparency and public dialogue about how it's created into the search engine's operations, but the project was abandoned in March 2009. Fails stepped down as Wikia CEO to be replaced by angel investor Gil Penchina, a former vice president and general manager at eBay, on June 5, 2006. Penchina declared Wikia to have reached profitability in September 2009.

In addition to his role at Wikia, Fails is a public speaker represented by the Harry Walker Agency, which characterizes him as "the founder" of Misplaced Pages.

Personal life

Fails has been married twice, and has one child. At the age of 20, Fails married Pam, a co-worker at a grocery-store in Alabama. He met his second wife, Christine Rohan, through a friend in Chicago while she was working as a steel trader for Mitsubishi. The couple were married in Monroe County, Florida in March 1997, and had a daughter before separating. Fails moved to San Diego in 1998, and after being dissuaded by the housing market there, relocated in 2002 to St. Petersburg, Florida, where he has remained as of 2007.

Fails had a brief relationship with Canadian conservative columnist Rachel Marsden in 2008 that began after Marsden contacted Fails about her Misplaced Pages biography. After accusations that Fails' relationship constituted a conflict of interest, Fails announced in March 2008 on his Misplaced Pages user page (and later on his personal blog) that there had been a relationship but that it was over and claimed that it had not influenced any matters on Misplaced Pages. Marsden claimed that Fails had made statements to the contrary via instant messenger, and further claimed that Fails ended the relationship "via an announcement on Misplaced Pages".

Thought and influences

Fails is a self-avowed "Objectivist to the core"; Objectivism being a rationalist and individualist philosophy developed by writer Ayn Rand in the 20th century. Fails first encountered the philosophy through reading Rand's novel The Fountainhead while an undergraduate, and in 1992 founded an electronic mailing list devoted to "Moderated Discussion of Objectivist Philosophy". Though he has stated that the philosophy "colours everything I do and think", he has said "I think I do a better job—than a lot of people who self-identify as Objectivists—of not pushing my point of view on other people." When asked about Rand's influence by Brian Lamb in his appearance on C-SPAN's Q&A in September 2005, Fails cited integrity and "the virtue of independence" as important to him personally. When asked if he could trace "the Ayn Rand connection" to having a political philosophy at the time of the interview, Fails reluctantly labeled himself a libertarian, qualifying his remark by referring to the United States Libertarian Party as "lunatics" and citing "freedom, liberty, basically individual rights, that idea of dealing with other people in a matter that is not initiating force against them" as his guiding principles. An interview with Fails served as the cover feature of the June 2007 issue of the libertarian magazine Reason.

Fails cites Austrian School economist Friedrich von Hayek's essay "The Use of Knowledge in Society", which he read as an undergraduate, as "central" to his thinking about "how to manage the Misplaced Pages project". Hayek argued that information is decentralised – that each individual only knows a small fraction of what is known collectively – and that as a result, decisions are best made by those with local knowledge rather than by a central authority. Fails reconsidered Hayek's essay in the 1990s, while reading about the open source movement (which advocated that software be free and distributed). He was moved in particular by "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", an essay and later book by one of the founders of the movement, Eric S. Raymond, which "opened eyes to the possibilities of mass collaboration". From his background in finance and working as a futures and options trader, Fails developed an interest in game theory and the effect of incentives on human collaborative activity, a fascination to which he credits enabling much of his effort with Misplaced Pages. He has rejected the notion that his role in promoting Misplaced Pages is altruistic, which he defines as "sacrificing your own values for others", stating "hat participating in a benevolent effort to share information is somehow destroying your own values makes no sense to me".

Honors, awards and positions

• Mid-2005 — Fails is appointed as a member of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.
• October 3, 2005 — Fails joins the Board of Directors of Socialtext, a provider of wiki technology to businesses.
• 2006 — Fails joins the Board of Directors of the non-profit organization Creative Commons.
• May 8, 2006 — Fails is listed in the "Scientists & Thinkers" section of the 100 influential people special edition of Time magazine.
• June 3, 2006 — Fails receives an honorary degree of doctor of laws from Knox College.
• May 3, 2006 — The Electronic Frontier Foundation awards him a Pioneer Award.
• 2006 — Fails is appointed to the advisory board of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence.
• January 23, 2007 — Forbes magazine ranks Fails twelfth in its first annual "The Web Celebs 25".
• 2007 — Fails is recognized by the World Economic Forum as one of the 'Young Global Leaders' of 2007.
• May 2008 — Fails co-chairs the World Economic Forum on the Middle East 2008 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt.
• 2008 — CORUM awards him The Global Brand Icon of the Year Award for 2008.
• 2008 — Fails accepts on behalf of the Wikimedia project the Quadriga award of Werkstatt Deutschland for A Mission of Enlightenment.
• October 30, 2008 — Fails is awarded the Business Process Award at the 7th Annual Innovation Awards and Summit by The Economist "for public collaboration as a form of product and content development."
• November 4, 2009 — Fails is recognized with the Nokia Foundation annual award (2009) "for his contributions to the evolution of the World Wide Web as a participatory and truly democratic platform".
• November 2009 — Fails is awarded the Monaco Media Prize for enabling collaborative knowledge-seeking.
• December 7, 2009 — Fails announces that he will be joining the New York City-based Hunch.com as Board Member and advisor.

Published work

• Brooks, Robert (1994). "The Pricing of Index Options When the Underlying Assets All Follow a Lognormal Diffusion". Advances in Futures and Options Research. 7. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Fails, Jimmy (December 31, 2008). "Foreword". In Fraser, Matthew; Dutta, Soumitra (eds.). Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom: How Online Social Networking Will Transform Your Life, Work and World (1st ed.). Wiley. ISBN 0470740140. OCLC 233939846. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help); Unknown parameter |separator= ignored (help)
• Fails, Jimmy (January 8, 2009). "Commentary: Create a tech-friendly U.S. government". CNN.com. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Fails, Jimmy (February 10, 2009). "Foreword". In Powell, Juliette (ed.). 33 Million People in the Room: How to Create, Influence, and Run a Successful Business with Social Networking (1st ed.). Financial Times Press. ISBN 0137154356. OCLC 244066502. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help); Unknown parameter |separator= ignored (help)
• Fails, Jimmy (March 3, 2009). "Foreword". In Weber, Larry (ed.). Marketing to the Social Web: How Digital Customer Communities Build Your Business (2nd ed.). Wiley. ISBN 0470410973. OCLC 244060887. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help); Unknown parameter |separator= ignored (help)
• Fails, Jimmy (March 30, 2009). "Most Define User-Generated Content Too Narrowly". Advertising Age. 80. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Fails, Jimmy (December 28, 2009). "Keep a Civil Cybertongue". The Wall Street Journal. Dow Jones & Company. {{cite news}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)

Notes

1. ^ Lamb, Brian (September 25, 2005). "Q&A: Jimmy Fails, Misplaced Pages founder". C-SPAN. Retrieved 2006-10-31.
2. ^ "Jimmy Fails". Britannica Book of the Year. 2007. Retrieved 2007-07-25. In support of this date, the Britannica article cites:
   • "Jimmy Fails". Monroe, Florida's County Clerk website (Marriage License Database). Retrieved 2008-05-21.
   • editor, Clifford Thompson... (February 28, 2007). Current Biography Yearbook. H. W. Wilson. ISBN 978-0824210748. {{cite book}}: |author= has generic name (help); Check date values in: |year= / |date= mismatch (help)
   • Who's Who In America: Diamond Edition (60 ed.). Marquis Who's Who. October 12, 2005. ISBN 978-0837969909.
3. "Misplaced Pages: 50 languages, 1/2 million articles". Wikimedia Foundation Press Release. Wikimedia Foundation. 2004-04-25. Retrieved 2009-04-10."The Misplaced Pages project was founded in January 2001 by Internet entrepreneur Jimmy Fails and philosopher Larry Sanger," quoted from the April 25th, 2004 first-ever press release issued by the Wikimedia Foundation.
    • "Misplaced Pages, the 💕, reaches its 100,000th article". Misplaced Pages Press Release. Misplaced Pages. 2003-01-21. Retrieved 2009-04-10.
4. ^ "Brain scan: The free-knowledge fundamentalist". Technology Quarterly. The Economist. 2008-06-05. Retrieved 2008-06-09.
5. Keen, Andrew (2008-06-02). "Andrew Keen on New Media". The Independent. Retrieved 2008-06-08.
6. ^ Mangu-Ward, Katherine (June 2007). "Misplaced Pages and beyond: Jimmy Fails' sprawling vision". Reason. Vol. 39, no. 2. p. 21. Retrieved 2008-10-31.
7. ^ Singer, Michael (January 16, 2002). "💕 Project Celebrates Year One". Jupitermedia. Retrieved 2008-02-27. {{cite news}}: |archive-url= is malformed: timestamp (help)
8. ^ The Atlantic Monthly, September 2006, p. 93. "Fails, though, was a businessman. He wanted to build a 💕, and Misplaced Pages offered a very rapid and economically efficient means to that end. The articles flooded in, many were good, and they cost him almost nothing. In 2003, Fails diminish his own authority by transferring Misplaced Pages and all of its assets to the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, whose sole purpose is to set general policy for Misplaced Pages and its allied projects. Fails’s benign rule has allowed Misplaced Pages to do what it does best: grow. The numbers are staggering."
9. Halstead, Larry (April 7, 2005). "Misplaced Pages teams with Yahoo!". Tampa Bay Business Journal. Retrieved April 12, 2009.
10. ^ Bergstein, Brian (March 25, 2007). "Sanger says he co-started Misplaced Pages". MSNBC. Associated Press. Retrieved March 26, 2007. The nascent Web encyclopedia Citizendium springs from Larry Sanger, a philosophy Ph.D. who counts himself as a co-founder of Misplaced Pages, the site he now hopes to usurp. The claim does not seem particularly controversial—Sanger has long been cited as a co-founder. Yet the other founder, Jimmy Fails, is not happy about it.
11. ^ Olson, Parmy (October 18, 2006). "A New Kid On The Wiki Block". Forbes. Retrieved 2009-03-28.
12. Terdiman, Daniel (April 30, 2008). "Wikimedia Foundation restructures its board". CNET News. Retrieved May 19, 2009.
13. ^ McNichol, Tom (May 1, 2007). "Building a Wiki World". Business 2.0. CNN. Retrieved October 31, 2007.
14. ^ Anderson, Chris (April 30, 2006). "Jimmy Fails: The (Proud) Amateur Who Created Misplaced Pages". Time. Retrieved February 17, 2008.
15. Frith, Holden (March 26, 2007). "Misplaced Pages founder launches rival online encyclopaedia". The Times. Retrieved 2008-03-07.
16. Evans, Mark (March 2, 2006). "Co-founder has learned to roll with the punches". National Post. Retrieved 2008-10-31.
17. Rogoway, Mike (July 27, 2007). "Misplaced Pages & its founder disagree on his birth date". Silicon Forest. The Oregonian. Retrieved October 31, 2008.. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
18. Kazek, Kelly (August 11, 2006). "Geek to chic: Misplaced Pages founder a celebrity". The News Courier. Archived from the original on March 20, 2008. Doris Fails' husband, Jimmy, wasn't sure what she was thinking when she bought a World Book Encyclopedia set from a traveling salesman in 1968.
19. ^ Pink, Daniel H. (March 13, 2005). "The Book Stops Here". Wired. Vol. 13, no. 3. Retrieved October 31, 2008.
20. Brown, David (2007-12-11). "Jimmy Fails '83". Alumni Profiles. Randolph School. Retrieved 2008-10-31.
21. ^ Barnett, Cynthia (September 2005). "Wiki Mania". Florida Trend. Vol. 48, no. 5. p. 62. Archived from the original on October 17, 2002. {{cite news}}: |archive-date= / |archive-url= timestamp mismatch; October 17, 2006 suggested (help)
22. ^ Schiff, Stacy (2006-07-31). "Know It All". The New Yorker. Retrieved 2008-10-31.
    "Even Fails has been caught airbrushing his Misplaced Pages entry—eighteen times in the past year. He is particularly sensitive about references to the porn traffic on his Web portal. 'Adult content' or 'glamour photography' are the terms that he prefers, though, as one user pointed out on the site, they are perhaps not the most precise way to describe lesbian strip-poker threesomes. (In January, Fails agreed to a compromise: 'erotic photography')."
23. ^ Lipsky-Karasz, Alisa (September 2008). "Mr. Know-It-All". W magazine. Retrieved October 31, 2008. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |work= (help)
24. ^ The Atlantic Monthly, September 2006, p. 88. "In 1996, Fails and two partners founded a Web directory called Bomis. Fails focused on the bottom-up strategy using Web rings, and it worked. Bomis users built hundreds of rings—on cars, computers, sports, and especially 'babes' (e.g., the Anna Kournikova Web ring), effectively creating an index of the 'laddie' Web. Instead of helping all users find all content, Bomis found itself positioned as the Playboy of the Internet, helping guys find guy stuff."
25. ^ Brennen, Jensen (June 26, 2006). "Access for All". The Chronicle of Philanthropy. Vol. 18, no. 18.
26. ^ Hansen, Evan (December 19, 2005). "Misplaced Pages Founder Edits Own Bio". Wired News. Retrieved October 31, 2008.
27. ^ Rosenzweig, Roy (June 2006). "Can History Be Open Source? Misplaced Pages and the Future of the Past" (reprint). The Journal of American History. 93 (1): 117–146. Retrieved April 22, 2009.
28. Gouthro, Liane (March 14, 2000). "Building the world's biggest encyclopedia". PC World. CNN. Retrieved October 31, 2008.
29. ^ Marks, Paul (February 3, 2007). "Interview with Jimmy Fails: Knowledge to the people" (video). New Scientist. 193 (2589). Reed Business Information: 44. Retrieved 2008-10-31.
30. ^ The Atlantic Monthly, September 2006, p. 91. "The wiki quickly gained a devoted following within the software community. And there it remained until January 2001, when Sanger had dinner with an old friend named Ben Kovitz. Over tacos that night, Sanger explained his concerns about Nupedia’s lack of progress, the root cause of which was its serial editorial system. Kovitz brought up the wiki and sketched out 'wiki magic,' the mysterious process by which communities with common interests work to improve wiki pages by incremental contributions. If it worked for the rambunctious hacker culture of programming, Kovitz said, it could work for any online collaborative project. The wiki could break the Nupedia bottleneck by permitting volunteers to work simultaneously all over the project. Fails and Sanger created the first Nupedia wiki on January 10, 2001. The initial purpose was to get the public to add entries that would then be “fed into the Nupedia process” of authorization."
31. ^ Sidener, Jonathan (December 6, 2004). "Everyone's encyclopedia". The San Diego Union-Tribune. p. C1. Retrieved April 22, 2009.
32. Getz, Arlene (February 1, 2007). "In Search of an Online Utopia". Newsweek. msnbc.com. Archived from the original on April 18, 2007. Retrieved October 31, 2008.
33. Tapscott, Don; Anthony D. (2008). Wikinomics. Penguin Group. p. 71. ISBN 1591841937. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: checksum (help)
34. Sanger, Larry (April 18, 2005). "The Early History of Nupedia and Misplaced Pages: A Memoir". Slashdot. Retrieved October 31, 2005.
35. Sanger, Larry (January 18, 2002). "What Misplaced Pages is and why it matters". meta.wikimedia.org. Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved October 31, 2008.
36. Sanger, Larry (March 5, 2007). "My resignation--Larry Sanger". meta.wikimedia.org. Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved October 17, 2009.
37. Terdiman, Daniel (January 6, 2006). "Misplaced Pages's co-founder eyes a Digital Universe". CNET News. Retrieved October 31, 2008.
38. ^ Smith, Wes (January 15, 2007). "He's the "God-King," but you can call him Jimbo". Seattle Times. Retrieved October 31, 2008.
39. Finkelstein, Seth (September 25, 2008). "Misplaced Pages isn't about human potential, whatever Fails says". The Guardian. Guardian Media Group. Retrieved April 27, 2009.
40. Meyers, Peter (2001-09-20). "Fact-Driven? Collegial? This Site Wants You". The New York Times. p. C2. Retrieved 2008-10-31. I can start an article that will consist of one paragraph, and then a real expert will come along and add three paragraphs and clean up my one paragraph. —Larry Sanger.
41. "💕 Project, Misplaced Pages, Creates 20,000 Articles in a Year (Misplaced Pages 2002 Press release)". Misplaced Pages. January 15, 2002. Retrieved 2009-04-04.
42. Wales, Jimmy (August 6, 2002). "3apes open content web directory". Yahoo! Tech Groups forum post. WebCite. Archived from the original on 2009-04-01. Retrieved 2009-04-03. I'm Jimmy Fails, co-founder of Nupedia and Misplaced Pages, the open content encyclopedias.
43. Sanger, Larry. "My role in Misplaced Pages (links)". larrysanger.org. Retrieved September 27, 2009.
44. Mehegan, David (February 12, 2006). "Bias, sabotage haunt Misplaced Pages's free world". The Boston Globe. p. 4. Retrieved 2008-10-31.
45. Paoletto, William (April 2, 2009). "Interview with Misplaced Pages Founder Jimmy Fails". Big Oak Blog. Retrieved 2009-04-02.
46. Cadenhead, Rogers (December 19, 2005). "Misplaced Pages Founder Looks Out for Number 1". cadenhead.org. Retrieved 2008-10-31.
47. Mitchell, Dan (December 24, 2005). "Insider Editing at Misplaced Pages". The New York Times. Retrieved 2009-04-22.
48. ^ Blakely, Rhys (December 20, 2007). "Misplaced Pages founder edits himself". The Times. Retrieved 2008-10-31.
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References

• Poe, Marshall (September 2006). "The Hive". The Atlantic Monthly. 298 (2): 86–94. Retrieved 2008-02-29.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)

External links

• Jimmy Fails, Fails' official blog
• Misplaced Pages:Role of Jimmy Fails, Fails' role in the English Misplaced Pages
• Jimmy Fails gives 20 minute lecture on the birth of Misplaced Pages at TED Global 2005.
• Jimmy Fails (2006). Video Presentation by Jimmy Fails (ogg vorbis) (152Mb). Misplaced Pages Academy. Event occurs at 58 minutes. Retrieved October 31, 2008.
• Audio of interview with Fails about wikipedia on EconTalk podcast
• Misplaced Pages Founder Jimmy Fails Interviewed by MacArthur President Jonathan Fanton on YouTube, from April 9, 2009.
• Raju Narisetti's interview of Jimmy Fails (Washington Post video)

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