Misplaced Pages

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Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales
Photo credit: Andrew Lih
Born	August 1966 Huntsville, Alabama, USA
Occupation(s)	President of Wikia, Inc.; Board member and Chair Emeritus of the Wikimedia Foundation
Spouse	Christine
Children	Kira
Website	Jimmy Wales - Free knowledge for free minds

Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales (born August 1966 in Huntsville, Alabama) is an American Internet entrepreneur best known for co-founding, running, and promoting Misplaced Pages. He is also involved in other wiki-related projects, including the charitable organization Wikimedia Foundation, and the for-profit company Wikia, Inc.

Personal life

Wales' father worked as a grocery store manager while his mother, Doris, and his grandmother, Erma, ran a small private school, in the tradition of the one-room schoolhouse, where Wales received his education. Most of the time there were four children in his grade so the school grouped the first through fourth grade students together and the fifth through eighth grade students together. In his adult life, Wales enjoys sailing and is an outdoor enthusiast.

Education

After eighth grade, Wales attended Randolph School, a university-preparatory school in Huntsville, Alabama. Wales has said that the school was expensive for his family, but that education was regarded as important. "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 and started with the Ph.D. finance program at the University of Alabama, where he left with a Master's in finance. After that, he took courses offered in 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 to earn a Ph.D.

Career

From 1994–2000, Wales served as research director at Chicago Options Associates, a futures and options trader in Chicago. 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. During this time one of the projects Wales undertook was the creation of a dot-com erotic search engine, Bomis, that later helped in the initial funding for Misplaced Pages. The nature of Bomis is disputed—Wales describes Bomis as a "guy-oriented search engine" that often sold erotic materials similar in nature to "Maxim" magazine's scantily clad women. Wales disputes the statement that Bomis dealt in "soft-core pornography," preferring the term "adult content."

In a 2007 interview Wales said that in 1999 he had a student design software for a top-down design multilingual encyclopedia website; however, it was too slow to be usable.

In March 2000, he started a peer-reviewed, open-content encyclopedia, Nupedia ("the 💕"), and hired Larry Sanger to be its editor-in-chief.

Misplaced Pages and Wikimedia Foundation

After Larry Sanger publicly proposed on January 10, 2001 the idea of using a wiki to create an encyclopedia, Wales installed wiki software on a server and authorized Sanger to pursue the project under his supervision. Sanger dubbed the project "Misplaced Pages" and, with Wales, laid down the founding principles, content and established an Internet-based community of contributors during that year. Misplaced Pages was initially intended to be a wiki-based site for collaboration on early encyclopedic content for submission to Nupedia, but Misplaced Pages's rapid growth quickly overshadowed Nupedia's development. 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. Wales has said that he initially was so worried with the concept that he would wake up in the middle of the night, wanting to check the site for vandalism. In mid-2003, Wales set up the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization based in St. Petersburg, Florida, to support Misplaced Pages and its younger sibling projects. The Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation consists of seven directors as of May 2007. In 2004 in interview with Slashdot Wales has explained his motivations about 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."

Wikia

Wales also later went on to co-found, with Angela Beesley, the for-profit company Wikia, Inc. in 2004. Wikia is a wiki farm, in that it is a collection of different individual wikis on different subjects, all hosted on the same website. One of the proposed services of Wikia is Wikia Search, with which Wales means to upset Google, a service he says produces excessive "spam and useless crap." Wales emphasizes the inner workings of the search engine will be "transparent." He went on to say, "This is fundamental, basic information about the world. It needs to be neutral, and there needs to be an accountable, transparent, public dialogue about how it's created." He further stated, "I trust Google reasonably well, but that's like saying you have a favorite politician. I trust this politician, but I still want the city council to meet publicly. I still want a certain transparency in how government is run, even if you trust the person who's in charge now."

Media appearances and honors

Wales was appointed a fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School in 2005. On October 3 2005, according to a press release, Wales joined the Board of Directors of Socialtext, a provider of wiki technology to businesses. In 2006, he joined the Board of Directors of the non-profit organization Creative Commons.

Wales was the first person listed in the "Scientists & Thinkers" section of the May 8 2006 special edition of Time ("The lives and ideas of the world's most influential people"), listing 100 influential people.

Wales received an honorary degree from Knox College on June 3 2006. The Electronic Frontier Foundation awarded him a Pioneer Award on May 3, 2006.

Wales appeared on PBS' Charlie Rose on October 6 2006 and was nominated for Beard of the Year 2006.

On November 4, 2006, Wales appeared in the "Not My Job" segment of Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!, a humorous news-quiz show on National Public Radio. The topic was "It must be True, I read it on Misplaced Pages". The three questions posed, drawn from obscure content on Misplaced Pages, were answered incorrectly.

Forbes magazine ranked him twelfth in its first annual "The Web Celebs 25."

Wales was featured in the April 2 2007 issue of Time magazine in the article "10 Questions: Jimmy Wales." He answered ten questions culled from Time's readership. He was the second to be interviewed in this fashion, after Chris Rock, as previously the questions were composed by a Time staff member. In his replies, he acknowledged the limitations of Misplaced Pages, while defending its usefulness.

On April 10, 2007 the Annual Meeting of the Friends of the Spartanburg County Public Libraries (in South Carolina and hosted by Converse College) had Jimmy Wales as a special guest speaker. A humorous event occurred when an introductory speaker (Dr. Mark Monson) misspoke while presenting an award and said “gynecological” rather than “genealogical.” Later, during a question-and-answer period, Wales was asked by a school-aged child what Wales’s favorite article was that a third grader could read. Wales (after some consideration) said that Inherently funny word would probably be the case. He later cautioned that a parent may want to check on this before sending their child to the site. However, perhaps a new word will be added to this article because the questioner after a few attempts at pronunciation asked if “genie-whatever that was” was one of those words, and if it was the study of genies. Wales said that this question should be answered by his parents and continued with the forum.

On April 26 2007 Wales had a run-in with The Chaser, an Australian satire group. He was used in the first occurrence of the "Mr. Ten Questions" segment in Season 2 of The Chaser's War on Everything, in which a "reporter" asks the victim ten questions of variable relevance without pausing for a response until all questions are asked. Wales managed to score a 4 out of 10, however some of the answers did not seem to match the questions being asked.

Controversy

Bomis

In 1996, Wales founded a search portal called Bomis, which also sold erotic materials until mid-2005. He was asked in a September 2005 C-SPAN interview about his previous involvement with what the interviewer, Brian Lamb, called "dirty pictures." In response, Wales described Bomis as a "guy-oriented search engine", with a market similar to that of Maxim magazine. In an interview with Wired News, he also explained that he disputed the categorization of Bomis content as "soft-core pornography" saying, "If R-rated movies are soft porn, it was porn. In other words, no, it was not. That description is inaccurate" (as Wales told Wired News in the phone interview that Monday).

Misplaced Pages biography

In late 2005, Wales was criticized for editing his own biography page on Misplaced Pages. In particular, Rogers Cadenhead drew attention to logs showing that Wales had removed references to Sanger as the co-founder of Misplaced Pages. Larry 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." Wales 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. An article in the July 31 2006 issue of The New Yorker magazine expanded on this topic:

Even Wales 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, Wales agreed to a compromise: "erotic photography.")

In both cases, Wales argued that his modifications were solely intended to improve the accuracy of the content. He apologized for editing his own biography, which is a practice generally frowned upon at Misplaced Pages. Wales said in the Wired interview, "People should not do it, including me. I wish I had not done it."

Wales continues to assert that he is the sole founder of Misplaced Pages, which he bases on a specific fact that Sanger had been his employee. In 2006, Wales told The Boston Globe that "it's preposterous" to call Sanger the co-founder; however, Sanger was identified as a co-founder of Misplaced Pages at least as early as September 2001 and referred to himself that way as early as January 2002. In addition to developing Misplaced Pages in its early phase and guiding the project, Sanger is also responsible for the idea of applying the wiki concept to the building of a 💕. It is undisputed that he also coined the name of the project. He nevertheless ascribed the broader idea to Wales: "To be clear, 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. (…) The actual development of this encyclopedia was the task he gave me to work on." In response to Wales' revisionism, Sanger posted on his personal webpage a collection of evidence about his role in founding Misplaced Pages by referencing earlier versions of Misplaced Pages pages, citing Misplaced Pages press releases, and linking to early media coverage, all of which described Wales and Sanger as the co-founders. In a discussion with Brian Bergstein of the Associated Press, Wales said: "When you write this up please do not uncritically repeat Sanger's absurd claim to be the co-founder of Misplaced Pages." He added: "I am not bent out of shape about it. The facts are on my side, which is why I bother so little about it."

Birthdate

Wales had previously edited his entries on Misplaced Pages and on the Wikimedia Foundation's website in 2004 to indicate his date of birth is August 7, 1966. He also made a statement in 2006 in which he wrote in part: "My date of birth is not August 8, 1966." The Encyclopædia Britannica, Current Biography, and Who’s Who in America support this statement. However, according to a researcher’s note on the Britannica’s website in June 2007, Wales contacted Britannica claiming that the date of August 7, 1966 was incorrect but was unwilling to provide them with a documented alternative. On July 27, 2007, when asked by Oregonian reporter Mike Rogoway when his birthday was Wales is reported to have mysteriously stated, "Nobody knows." Moreover, on his blog Rogoway claims that a Florida public records search shows that Wales’ drivers license lists his date of birth as August 8, 1966. In August 2007, Wales expanded on this in his Misplaced Pages talk page by stating, in part: "In any event, the quotes in the Oregonian are correct."

Personal philosophy

Wales is a self-avowed "Objectivist to the core", to the extent of having named his daughter Kira after the heroine in Ayn Rand's We the Living, although he says, "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 by Brian Lamb in his appearance on C-SPAN's Q&A about Rand, Wales cited "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, Wales reluctantly labeled himself a libertarian, qualifying his remark by referring to the 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. From 1992 to 1996, he ran the electronic mailing list "Moderated Discussion of Objectivist Philosophy." A photo of Wales is featured on the cover of the June 2007 issue of the libertarian magazine Reason.

Published works by Wales

• Robert Brooks, Jon Corson, and J. Donal Wales. "The Pricing of Index Options When the Underlying Assets All Follow a Lognormal Diffusion", in Advances in Futures and Options Research, volume 7, 1994. See also log-normal distribution.

References

1. ^ Doran, James (2006-12-23). "Curiousity filled the biggest textbook in the world". Times Online. Times Newspapers Ltd. Retrieved 2007-08-24. Cite error: The named reference "timesonline" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
2. ^ Rogoway, M. (July 27, 2007) "Misplaced Pages & its founder disagree on his birth date," Silicon Forest (The Oregonian) accessed August 8, 2007 Cite error: The named reference "dob" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
3. ^ Wales, J. (August 8, 2007) "More birthdate nonsense" User talk:Jimbo Wales accessed August 8, 2007
4. ^ Mitchell, Dan (2005-12-24). "Insider Editing at Misplaced Pages". New York Times. Retrieved 2007-03-26. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
5. 💕 Project, Misplaced Pages, Creates 20,000 Articles in a Year Misplaced Pages press release January 15, 2002
6. ^ Bergstein, Brian (2007-03-25). "Sanger says he co-started Misplaced Pages". ABC News. Associated Press. Retrieved 2007-03-26. 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 Wales, isn't happy about it. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)—Brian Bergstein.
7. ^ McNichol, Tom (2007-03-01). "Misplaced Pages founder hunts for gold". Business 2.0. CNN. Retrieved 2007-03-10. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
8. ^ Lamb, Brian (2005-09-25). "Q&A: Jimmy Wales, Misplaced Pages founder". C-SPAN. Retrieved 2006-07-11. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
9. ^ ""Why Is This Man Smiling?"". Fast Company. March 2007. Retrieved 2007-05-02."Wales revealed that Wikia, his for-profit Silicon Valley startup, was working on Search Wikia, which he touted as "the search engine that changes everything … Just as Misplaced Pages revolutionized how we think about knowledge and the encyclopedia, we have a chance now to revolutionize how we think about search."
10. Pink, Daniel H. (2005-03-13). "The Book Stops Here". Wired. Retrieved 2006-10-09. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
11. ^ Hansen, Evan. "Misplaced Pages Founder Edits Own Bio". Wired News. Wired. Retrieved 2006-02-14. Cite error: The named reference "wirednews" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
12. ^ In Search of an Online Utopia 2007-02-01.
13. My resignation—Larry Sanger 2002-03-01. Retrieved on 2006-10-19.
14. Misplaced Pages's co-founder eyes a Digital Universe 2006-01-06.
15. Wikimedia foundation bylaws.
16. BBC.co.uk. Technology. Open media to connect communities. 20 November 2005
17. Wikimedia Foundation. Board of Trustees.
18. Wales, Jimmy (2004-07-28). ""Misplaced Pages Founder Jimmy Wales Replies"". Slashdot. Retrieved 2006-06-07. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
19. Wikia. Main Page. 12 May 2007.
20. "Misplaced Pages Founder Joins Socialtext Board". Socialtext. 2005-10-03. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
21. "Creative Commons Adds Two New Board Members". Creative Commons. 2006-03-30. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
22. Anderson, Chris (2006-05-08). "Jimmy Wales: The (Proud) Amateur Who Created Misplaced Pages". Time. Retrieved 2006-04-30. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
23. "EFF Honors Craigslist, Gigi Sohn, and Jimmy Wales with Pioneer Awards". Kansas City infoZine News. 2006-04-28. Retrieved 2006-06-05. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
24. Video of Jimmy Wales on Charlie Rose October 4, 2006
25. "Beard of the Year". Retrieved 2007-07-25.
26. ""This Week's Show 4 November 2006"". 2006-11-04. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Unknown parameter |Accessdate= ignored (|accessdate= suggested) (help)
27. Ewalt, David M. (2007-01-23). "The Web Celeb 25". Retrieved 2007-04-23.
28. "10 Questions: Jimmy Wales". Time Magazine. March 21, 2007. Retrieved 2007-03-24. The key is to look at the quality of articles. The quality of Misplaced Pages today compared with three years ago is a dramatic improvement. But people do need to be aware of how it is created and edited so they can treat it with the appropriate caution.—Jimmy Wales.
29. ^ Wales, Jimmy (April 10, 2007). (Speech). Converse College, Spartanburg, South Carolina. {{cite speech}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Missing or empty |title= (help)
30. Moses, Asher (April 26, 2007). "Chaser's war on Misplaced Pages founder". Brisbanetimes.com.au. Retrieved 2007-04-29. Given Wales's widely publicised goal of giving "every single person on the planet free access to the sum of all human knowledge", Hansen evidently thought Wales would be a prime candidate for The Chaser's "Mr Ten Questions" segment.
31. ^ Rogers Cadenhead. "Misplaced Pages Founder Looks Out for Number 1". Retrieved 2006-10-15.
32. "Misplaced Pages diff showing modification by Mr. Wales". Retrieved 2006-10-15.
33. "Misplaced Pages diff showing modification by Mr. Wales". Retrieved 2006-10-15.
34. "Wales' edit count for various articles on Misplaced Pages". Retrieved 2007-07-25.
35. ^ Knott, Janet (2006-02-12). "Bias, sabotage haunt Misplaced Pages's free world". The Boston Globe. Retrieved 2006-04-12. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
36. Jonathan Sidener. "Everyone's Encyclopedia". San Diego Union Tribune. Retrieved 2006-10-15.
37. Peter Meyers (2001-09-20). "Fact-Driven? Collegial? This Site Wants You". New York Times. Retrieved 2006-10-15. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)"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," said Larry Sanger of Las Vegas, who founded Misplaced Pages with Mr. Wales.
38. Sanger, Larry. "What Misplaced Pages is and why it matters". Retrieved 2006-04-12.
39. Sanger, Larry (2005-04-18). "The Early History of Nupedia and Misplaced Pages: A Memoir". Slashdot. Retrieved 2005-04-18. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
40. Larry Sanger. "My role in Misplaced Pages (links)". larrysanger.org. Retrieved 2007-04-21.
41. Wales, Jimbo (September 18, 2004). "Edit by Jimbo Wales at Misplaced Pages". Misplaced Pages. Retrieved 2007-08-08.
42. Wales, Jimbo (September 18, 2004). "Edit by Jimbo Wales at Wikimedia Foundation". Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved 2007-08-08.
43. "Wales claim birthdate is not August 8, 1966". Misplaced Pages. July 11, 2006. Retrieved 2007-08-12.
44. Current Biography Yearbook 2006 - Publisher: H. W. Wilson (February 28, 2007) ISBN 978-0824210748.
45. Who's Who In America: Diamond Edition - Publisher: Marquis Who's Who; 60th edition (October 12, 2005) ISBN 978-0837969909.
46. "Jimmy Wales's date of birth". Researcher's Note. Encyclopædia Britannica. September 18, 2004. Retrieved 2007-08-08.
47. "Jimmy Wales Will Destroy Google". Retrieved 2007-05-11.
48. Wales, Jimmy (1992-09-23). "Re: Objectivism of Ayn Rand". Newsgroup: talk.philosophy.misc. Bv1u8x.Bnv@usenet.ucs.indiana.edu. {{cite newsgroup}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)

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• 1966 births
• American entrepreneurs
• Auburn University alumni
• Berkman Fellows
• EFF Pioneer Award recipients
• History of Misplaced Pages
• Indiana University alumni
• Internet personalities
• Living people
• Objectivists
• People from Florida
• People from Huntsville, Alabama
• University of Alabama alumni
• Wikimedia Foundation
• Misplaced Pages people