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Jimmy Wales

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Jimmy Wales (November 2004)
Jimmy Wales standing at the Hohlbeinsteg bridge in Frankfurt Main, Germany during a shooting break of a documentary film about Misplaced Pages by the French-German TV-station Arte.

Jimmy Donal Wales (born August 7, 1966) is the founder and President of the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit corporation which operates Misplaced Pages and several other wiki projects. Wales is also founder of the for-profit company Wikia (unrelated to Wikimedia), within which he co-founded the Wikicities project.

Life before Misplaced Pages

Wales was born in Huntsville, Alabama. His father, now retired, was a grocery store manager while Wales was growing up. Wales's mother Doris and grandmother Irma ran a small private school, "in the tradition of the one-room schoolhouse," where he also went to school. There were four children in his grade most of the time, so the school grouped together first through fourth grades and fifth through eighth grades. A May 2005 Time magazine article incorrectly reported that Wales was home schooled . Strictly speaking Wales was not, but he did note that his schooling experience was "in a sense similar" since his mother and grandmother were his primary teachers. Students had a fair amount of freedom to study whatever they liked; the school's philosophy of education was significantly influenced by Montessori. Wales spent many hours poring over the World Book Encyclopedia during this time. After eighth grade, Wales went to Randolph School, a college prep school, which was and is an early adopter of computer labs and other technology for direct student use. This prep school was expensive for the family, since they had few means, but Wales reports that his family believed education was very 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 undergraduate degree from Auburn University and his masters from the University of Alabama. Later, he took courses offered in the Ph.D. finance programs at the University of Alabama and Indiana University. He taught at both universities during his postgraduate studies, but he did not write the doctoral dissertation required to earn a postgraduate degree at these institutions. Wales went on to become a futures and options trader in Chicago, and within a few years had earned enough to "support himself and his wife for the rest of their lives." (March 2005, Wired article)

In 1996, Wales founded a search portal called Bomis, which also sold softcore pornography photography until mid-2005. Because of his past position with Bomis, Wales was asked in a September 2005 C-SPAN interview about his involvement with what the interviewer, Brian Lamb, called "dirty pictures." In response, Wales described Bomis as a "guy-oriented search engine." In an interview with Wired, he also explained that he disputed the categorization of Bomis content as "soft-core pornography": "If R-rated movies are porn, it was porn. In other words, no, it was not." Wales is no longer actively involved in the company.

In March 2000, he started a peer-reviewed, open-content encyclopedia, Nupedia.com ("the 💕"), and hired Larry Sanger to be its editor-in-chief. While Wales was CEO, Bomis donated over $100,000 (primarily through salaries and providing free Internet access) to Nupedia and Misplaced Pages, and continued supporting them into 2002.

Work on Misplaced Pages

Jimmy Wales speaking at Wikimania 2005
Main article: History of Misplaced Pages

Using a wiki to create encyclopedic content was publicly proposed by Larry Sanger on January 10, 2001. The wiki was set up by Wales and started on January 15, 2001. Misplaced Pages was at that point a wiki-based site intended for collaboration on early encyclopedic content before submitting it to Nupedia for peer review. Misplaced Pages's rapid growth soon made it the dominant project and Nupedia was mothballed.

Wales has sometimes been referred to in the press as the (implicitly) sole "founder" of Misplaced Pages, including in a 2004 Newsweek magazine article . Sanger has strongly contested this assertion, considering himself a co-founder along with Wales, and criticizing reports that have suggested otherwise. However, Sanger has also stated: "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."

Jeremy Rosenfeld has been credited by Wales as the originator of the idea for a wiki-model encyclopedia (), although the details of this are the subject of controversy between Sanger and Wales.

Sanger later dropped out of the project, posting a resignation on his user page. Sanger has since criticized Wales's approach to the project , describing Wales as being "decidedly anti-elitist." Wales took issue with this description in the above-mentioned C-SPAN interview, describing himself as not anti-elitist, but "perhaps anti-credentialist. To me the key thing is getting it right. And if a person's really smart and they're doing fantastic work, I don't care if they're a high school kid or a Harvard professor; it's the work that matters.... You can't coast on your credentials on Misplaced Pages.... You have to enter the marketplace of ideas and engage with people."

In mid-2003, Wales set up the Wikimedia Foundation, a St. Petersburg, Florida-based non-profit organization, to support Misplaced Pages and its younger sibling projects. He appointed himself and two business partners who are not Wikipedians to the five-member board; the remaining two members are elected community representatives.

Wales has since become increasingly involved with promoting and speaking about the foundation's projects. To this end, he travels the world, both to conferences and Wikimedia functions (like "Wikimeets" and Wikimania). He has frequently been engaged as a speaker.

In 2004, Wales was quoted as saying that he spent around US$500,000 on the establishment and operations of his Wiki projects. By the end of the foundation's February 2005 fund drive, the Wikimedia Foundation was being supported entirely by grants and donations.

Perhaps inspired by the success of Misplaced Pages, Wales has founded the for-profit company Wikia (unrelated to Wikimedia), which hosts various wikis and manages the Wikicities project.

Wales was appointed a fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School in 2005. Later that year, on October 3, according to a press release , Wales joined the Board of Directors of Socialtext, a provider of wiki technology to businesses.

In late 2005, a controversy arose regarding Wales and the related Misplaced Pages entry on himself. After Wired Magazine picked up on work from Rogers Cadenhead, Wales confirmed that he had (visibly and under his own name) edited his own biography on Misplaced Pages, a practice generally frowned upon within the Misplaced Pages community and even by Wales himself . Wales's edits (, and ) were in line with his view that former editor Larry Sanger should not be considered a co-founder of Misplaced Pages. When some other editors undid his edits, Wales repeated them twice. His edits changed specific references to Misplaced Pages's origins as well as the description of Bomis. Wales said in the interview, "People shouldn't do it, including me. I wish I hadn't done it."

Other activities

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Wales in May 2005

Wales has been a passionate adherent of Objectivism, a philosophical system developed by author Ayn Rand. From 1992 to 1996 he ran the electronic mailing list "Moderated Discussion of Objectivist Philosophy" , and in 2002, he began moderating Atlantis, an Objectivism-related mailing list on the Objectivist community site We the Living.

Wales lives in St. Petersburg, Florida, with his wife Christine and daughter Kira. He has traveled to many countries, including the United Kingdom, Belgium, and France. He is protective about his personal life, and his interests and hobbies outside of Misplaced Pages and the Wikimedia Foundation are mostly unknown to the general public.

Published works

  • 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. Abstract available online from the Social Science Research Network . See also Log-normal distribution.

Footnotes

  1. "Misplaced Pages Founder Looks Out for Number 1". 19 December. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= and |year= / |date= mismatch (help)
  2. "The History of Bomis". 3 October. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= and |year= / |date= mismatch (help)
  3. Template:News reference
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