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Jimmy Wales

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Jimmy Wales speaking at FOSDEM 2005 in Brussels, Belgium.

Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales (born August 7, 1966) is a U.S. Internet entrepreneur and a wiki pioneer who is best known as the head of Misplaced Pages, an international collaborative free content encyclopedia on the Internet.

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 grade and fifth through eighth grade. 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 (as a side business among other projects) sold original images depicting nude and partially-nude women (but not masturbation or other sexual acts), and included a "Bomis Babes" blog. Because of his position with Bomis, Wales has been described as a peddler of pornography by some of his critics. Wales disputes this, however, telling Wired that "If R-rated movies are porn, it was porn. In other words, no, it was not." Bomis has since ceased the adult-content portion of its business, and Wales is no longer actively involved in the company. While Wales was CEO, Bomis donated over one hundred thousand dollars (primarily through salaries and providing free Internet access) to Nupedia and Misplaced Pages, and continued supporting them into 2002.

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

Work on Misplaced Pages and recent activities

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

Misplaced Pages started on January 15, 2001. Wales assigned his employee Larry Sanger to set it up. 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. Sanger did most of the early development of Nupedia, while Wales mainly provided the necessary capital.

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 . 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 has disagreed with Sanger's viewpoint, describing himself as not anti-elitist, but "perhaps anti-credentialist." Elaborating, Wales has described his approach to Wikipedias thus: "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. Since then he has become increasingly involved with promoting and speaking about the foundation's projects. As of 2005, Wales is the foundation's president and chairman of the board.

In 2004, Wales had been 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.

More recently, 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 edited his own biography on Misplaced Pages, a practice generally frowned upon within the Misplaced Pages community. Wales's edits 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."

In late December 2005 Wales told Times Online that despite "resistance to the idea" of advertisements on Misplaced Pages, "at some point questions are going to be raised over the amount of money we are turning down" thus indirectly implying the possibilty of future ads on the site. It should be noted however that Misplaced Pages is owned by the Not for profit Wikimedia Foundation and virtually all of the site's contributors are unpaid volunteers. Wales has also been known to assure people in the past that Misplaced Pages would never run ads, and has stated that he is personally opposed to the idea.

To promote Wikimedia, Wales travels the world, both to conferences and Wikimedia functions (like "Wikimeets" and Wikimania). He has frequently been engaged as a speaker.

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

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.


References

  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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