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Jimmy Wales

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Jimmy Wales
Wales in December 2008
BornJimmy Donal Wales
(1966-08-07) August 7, 1966 (age 58)
Huntsville, Alabama
United States
NationalityAmerican
Other namesJimbo (online alias)
Alma materAuburn University
University of Alabama
Indiana University Bloomington
Occupation(s)Investment banker
Internet entrepreneur
Known forCo-founding Misplaced Pages
TitlePresident of Wikia, Inc. (2004–present)
Chairman of Wikimedia Foundation (June 2003 – October 2006)
Chairman Emeritus, Wikimedia Foundation (October 2006–present)
SuccessorFlorence Devouard
Board member ofWikimedia Foundation
Creative Commons
Socialtext
MIT Center for Collective Intelligence (advisory board)
AwardsEFF Pioneer Award (2006)
The Economist's Business Process Award (2008)
The Global Brand Icon of the Year Award (2008)
Gottlieb Duttweiler Prize (2010)
WebsiteBlog.JimmyWales.com

Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales (/ˈdoʊnəl ˈweɪlz/; born August 7, 1966) is an American Internet entrepreneur and a volunteer and promoter of Misplaced Pages.

Wales was born in Huntsville, Alabama, United States. He attended The Randolph School, a university-preparatory school, then earned bachelor's and master's degrees in finance. While in graduate school, he taught at two universities. He 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 men's web portal featuring entertainment and adult content. This website provided the initial funding for the peer-reviewed encyclopedia Nupedia (2000–2003) and its successor, Misplaced Pages.

In 2001, together with Larry Sanger and others, Wales helped launch Misplaced Pages, a free, open content encyclopedia that enjoyed rapid growth and popularity, and as Misplaced Pages's public profile grew, he became the project's promoter and spokesman. He is historically cited as a co-founder of Misplaced Pages, though he has disputed the "co-" designation in declaring himself the sole founder. Wales 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.

Wales 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.

Early life and education

Wales was born in Huntsville, Alabama, in the U.S. on August 7, 1966. 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 Wales and his three siblings received their early education. As a child, Wales 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 Wales' grade, so the school grouped together the first through fourth grade students and the fifth through eighth grade students. As an adult, Wales was 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, Wales attended Randolph School, a university-preparatory school in Huntsville, graduating at sixteen. Wales 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. Wales then 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 he ascribed to boredom.

Later life

Wales with his second wife Christine

Wales has been married twice, and has one child. At the age of 20, Wales 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. Wales 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.

According to the Tampa Tribune, by 2006, Wales spent a good portion of his time traveling to promote Misplaced Pages and his other projects. He mentioned to the paper that he was studying German, having decided to become bilingual, as befitting someone "leading this global movement."

Wales had a brief relationship with Canadian conservative columnist Rachel Marsden in 2008 that began after Marsden contacted Wales about her Misplaced Pages biography. After accusations that Wales' relationship constituted a conflict of interest, Wales 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 Wales had made statements to the contrary via instant messenger, and further claimed that Wales ended the relationship "via an announcement on Misplaced Pages".

Career

Chicago Options Associates and Bomis

In 1994, Wales 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. Wales 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 became 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. Wales 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

Main article: Nupedia
Philosopher Larry Sanger, whom Wales hired as editor-in-chief of Nupedia

Though Bomis had struggled to make money, it provided Wales 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, Wales had encountered Larry Sanger, a sceptic of the philosophy. The two had engaged in detailed debate on the subject on Wales' list and then on Sanger's, eventually meeting offline to continue the debate and becoming friends. Deciding to pursue his encyclopedia project years later, Wales 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 Wales 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 Wales, 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

Main article: History of Misplaced Pages

Neither Sanger nor Wales expected very much from the Nupedia wiki 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 Wales, 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 Wales, many of them sympathized with the open-source movement. Wales has said that he was initially so worried with the concept of open editing, where anyone can edit the encyclopedia, that he would awake during the night and monitor what was being added. Nonetheless, the cadre of early editors helped create a robust, self-regulating community that has proven conducive to the growth of the project.

Sanger developed Misplaced Pages in its early phase and guided the project. The broader idea he ascribes to Wales, 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, Wales 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

Wales has asserted that he is the sole founder of Misplaced Pages, and has publicly disputed Sanger's designation as a co-founder. Sanger and Wales 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, Wales 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 Wales are historically cited or described in early news citations and press releases as co-founders. Wales was quoted by The Boston Globe as calling Sanger's claim "preposterous" in February 2006, and called "the whole debate silly" in an April 2009 interview.

Further information: History of Misplaced Pages § Early roles of Wales and Sanger

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, Wales 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." 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. Though Wales argued that his modifications were solely intended to improve the accuracy of the content, he apologized for editing his own biography, a practice generally discouraged on Misplaced Pages.

The January/February 2006 issue of Maximum PC reported that Wales refused to abide by a request of the People's Republic of China to censor "politically sensitive" articles in Misplaced Pages. Other big business Internet companies such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have already yielded to Chinese government pressure. Mr. Wales would rather see companies such as Google follow suit on Misplaced Pages's policy of freedom of information.

Role

Wales delivering the keynote speech ("The State of the Wiki") at Wikimania, the conference for Wikimedia projects, in Buenos Aires in 2009

In a 2004 interview with Slashdot, Wales 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 Wales an Internet celebrity. Though he had never traveled farther than Canada and Mexico prior to founding the site, his participation in the Misplaced Pages project saw him flying internationally on a near-constant basis as its public face.

Although his formal designation is that of mere board member and chairman emeritus of the Wikimedia Foundation, Wales' social capital within the Misplaced Pages community has accorded him a status that has been characterized as benevolent dictator, constitutional monarch and spiritual leader. He is also the closest the project has to a spokesperson. Despite involvement in other projects, Wales has denied intending to reduce his role within Misplaced Pages, 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."

Wales continues to edit Misplaced Pages articles and identifies an "Anglophile streak" as responsible for his particular interest in the House of Lords, a "subject area he spends most time studying on Misplaced Pages, sometimes editing the articles himself."

Wikimedia Foundation

Main article: Wikimedia Foundation
Wales appearing as a member of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees on a panel at Wikimania 2007.

In mid-2003, Wales set up the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), a non-profit organization founded in St. Petersburg, Florida and headquartered on the West Coast of the United States, 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. Wales has been a member of the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees since it was formed and was its official Chairman from 2003 through 2006. From 2006 to date he serves under the honorary title of Chairman Emeritus and holds the board-appointed "community founder" seat. His work for the foundation, including his appearances to promote it at computer and educational conferences, has always been unpaid. Wales has often joked that donating Misplaced Pages to the foundation was both the "dumbest and the smartest" thing he had done. On the one hand, he estimated that Misplaced Pages was worth US$3 billion; on the other, he weighed his belief that the donation made possible its success.

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

Wikia and later pursuits

In 2004, Wales and then-fellow member of the WMF Board of Trustees Angela Beesley founded the for-profit company Wikia. 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) 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 is created into the search engine's operations, but the project was abandoned in March 2009. Wales 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, Wales is a public speaker represented by the Harry Walker Agency, which characterizes him as "the founder" of Misplaced Pages.

He has also participated in a celebrity endorsement campaign for the Swiss watch maker Maurice Lacroix.

Thought and influences

Wales in June 2008

Wales is a self-avowed "Objectivist to the core"; Objectivism being an individualist philosophy developed by writer Ayn Rand in the 20th century. Wales 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, Wales 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, Wales 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 Wales served as the cover feature of the June 2007 issue of the libertarian magazine Reason.

Wales 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. Wales 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, Wales 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". In 2010, he criticized whistleblower website Wikileaks and its editor in chief Julian Assange, saying that their publication of Afghan war documents "could be enough to get someone killed," and he expressed irritation at their use of the name "wiki": "What they're doing is not really a wiki. The essence of wiki is a collaborative editing...".

Honors, awards and positions

Wales receiving the Quadriga award on October 3, 2008
Wales on a billboard in Belgrade.
  • Mid-2005 — Wales was appointed as a member of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.
  • October 3, 2005 — Wales joined the Board of Directors of Socialtext, a provider of wiki technology to businesses.
  • 2006 — Wales joined the Board of Directors of the non-profit organization Creative Commons.
  • May 8, 2006 — Wales was listed in the "Scientists & Thinkers" section of the 100 influential people special edition of Time magazine.
  • June 3, 2006 — Wales received an honorary degree of doctor of laws from Knox College.
  • May 3, 2006 — The Electronic Frontier Foundation awarded him a Pioneer Award.
  • 2006 — Wales was appointed to the advisory board of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence.
  • January 23, 2007 — Forbes magazine ranked Wales twelfth in its first annual "The Web Celebs 25".
  • 2007 — Wales was recognized by the World Economic Forum as one of the 'Young Global Leaders' of 2007.
  • May 2008 — Wales co-chaired the World Economic Forum on the Middle East 2008 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt.
  • 2008 — CORUM awarded him The Global Brand Icon of the Year Award for 2008.
  • 2008 — Wales accepted on behalf of the Wikimedia project the Quadriga award of Werkstatt Deutschland for A Mission of Enlightenment.
  • October 30, 2008 — Wales was 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 — Wales was 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 — Wales was awarded the Monaco Media Prize for enabling collaborative knowledge-seeking.
  • December 7, 2009 — Wales announced that he will be joining the New York City-based Hunch.com as Board Member and advisor.
  • April 8, 2010 — Wales was honored as a Stuart Regen Visionary at New Museum in New York City.
  • May 21, 2010 — Wales received an honorary degree of doctor of laws from Stevenson University. Wales said that this was the very first college commencement speech that he had delivered.
  • May 23, 2010 — Wales received an honorary degree of doctor of humane letters from Amherst College.
  • January 26, 2011 — Wales was slated to be awarded on the foregoing date the Gottlieb Duttweiler Prize according to an announcement made on October 8, 2010.

Published work

References

  1. ^ Lamb, Brian (September 25, 2005). "Q&A: Jimmy Wales, Misplaced Pages founder". C-SPAN. Retrieved 2006-10-31.
  2. "Swiss award for Misplaced Pages founder Jimmy Wales". Boston Herald. Associated Press. October 8, 2010. Retrieved October 8, 2010.
  3. ^ "Jimmy Wales". Britannica Book of the Year. 2007."Researcher's note". Britannica. 2007. Retrieved 2007-07-25.
    • "Jimmy Wales". 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.
  4. "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 Wales 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.
  5. ^ "Brain scan: The free-knowledge fundamentalist". Technology Quarterly. The Economist. 2008-06-05. Retrieved 2008-06-09.
  6. ^ 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 Wales, is not happy about it.
  7. ^ Olson, Parmy (October 18, 2006). "A New Kid On The Wiki Block". Forbes. Retrieved 2009-03-28.
  8. Rogoway, Mike (July 27, 2007). "Misplaced Pages & its founder disagree on his birth date". Silicon Forest. The Oregonian. Retrieved October 31, 2008.
  9. 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 Wales' husband, Jimmy, wasn't sure what she was thinking when she bought a World Book Encyclopedia set from a traveling salesman in 1968.
  10. ^ Pink, Daniel H. (March 13, 2005). "The Book Stops Here". Wired. Vol. 13, no. 3. Retrieved October 31, 2008.
  11. ^ Mangu-Ward, Katherine (June 2007). "Misplaced Pages and beyond: Jimmy Wales' sprawling vision". Reason. Vol. 39, no. 2. p. 21. Retrieved 2008-10-31.
  12. Brown, David (2007-12-11). "Jimmy Wales '83". Alumni Profiles. Randolph School. Retrieved 2008-10-31.
  13. ^ 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)
  14. ^ 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)
  15. "Florida Marriage Collection, 1822–1875 and 1927–2001". Ancestry.com. Retrieved October 31, 2008.
  16. ^ Smith, Wes (January 15, 2007). "He's the "God-King," but you can call him Jimbo". Seattle Times. Retrieved October 31, 2008.
  17. Lewine, Edward (November 18, 2007). "The Encyclopedist's Lair". New York Times. Retrieved March 7, 2008.
    "Greatest misconception about Misplaced Pages: We aren’t democratic. Our readers edit the entries, but we’re actually quite snobby. The core community appreciates when someone is knowledgeable, and thinks some people are idiots and shouldn’t be writing."
  18. Kornacki, Steve (November 8, 2006). "Misplaced Pages's Success Amazes Its Founder". Tampa Tribune.
  19. The Canadian Press (March 2, 2008). "Canadian pundit, Misplaced Pages founder in messy breakup". Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Retrieved October 31, 2008.
  20. Moses, Asher (March 4, 2008). "Ex takes her revenge on Mr Misplaced Pages". The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved October 31, 2008.
  21. Bergstein, Brian (March 5, 2008). "Misplaced Pages's Wales defends breakup, expenses". USA Today. Retrieved October 31, 2008.
  22. Agrell, Siri (March 4, 2008). "Ms. Marsden's cyberspace breakup: tit-for-tat-for-T-shirt". The Globe and Mail. Retrieved 2008-10-31. Hi, my name is Rachel and my (now ex) boyfriend, Misplaced Pages founder Jimmy Wales, just broke up with me via an announcement on Misplaced Pages," she writes in the auction posting. "It was such a classy move that I was inspired to do something equally classy myself.
  23. ^ McNichol, Tom (May 1, 2007). "Building a Wiki World". Business 2.0. CNN. Retrieved October 31, 2007.
  24. ^ Schiff, Stacy (2006-07-31). "Know It All". The New Yorker. Retrieved 2008-10-31.
    "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')."
  25. ^ The Atlantic Monthly, September 2006, p. 93. "Wales, 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, Wales 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. Wales’s benign rule has allowed Misplaced Pages to do what it does best: grow. The numbers are staggering."
  26. ^ The Atlantic Monthly, September 2006, p. 88. "In 1996, Wales and two partners founded a Web directory called Bomis. Wales 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."
  27. ^ Brennen, Jensen (June 26, 2006). "Access for All". The Chronicle of Philanthropy. Vol. 18, no. 18.
  28. ^ Hansen, Evan (December 19, 2005). "Misplaced Pages Founder Edits Own Bio". Wired News. Retrieved October 31, 2008.
  29. ^ 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. doi:10.2307/4486062. Retrieved April 22, 2009.
  30. Gouthro, Liane (March 14, 2000). "Building the world's biggest encyclopedia". PC World. CNN. Retrieved October 31, 2008.
  31. ^ Marks, Paul (February 3, 2007). "Interview with Jimmy Wales: Knowledge to the people" (video). New Scientist. 193 (2589). Reed Business Information: 44. Retrieved 2008-10-31.
  32. ^ 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. Wales 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."
  33. ^ Sidener, Jonathan (December 6, 2004). "Everyone's encyclopedia". The San Diego Union-Tribune. p. C1. Retrieved April 22, 2009.
  34. 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.
  35. Tapscott, Don; Anthony D. (2008). Wikinomics. Penguin Group. p. 71. ISBN 1591841937. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: checksum (help)
  36. ^ Singer, Michael (January 16, 2002). "💕 Project Celebrates Year One". Jupitermedia. Retrieved 2008-02-27. {{cite news}}: |archive-url= is malformed: timestamp (help)
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