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Jimmy Wales

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Jimmy Wales
(January 2011)
BornJimmy Donal Wales
(1966-08-07) August 7, 1966 (age 58)
Huntsville, Alabama, U.S.
Other namesJimbo
Alma materAuburn University
University of Alabama
Indiana University Bloomington
Occupation(s)Internet entrepreneur, formerly a financial trader
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
Sunlight Foundation (advisory board)
MIT Center for Collective Intelligence (advisory board)
CiviliNation
Awardssee below
Websitewww.jimmywales.com

Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales (/ˈdoʊnəl ˈweɪlz/; born August 7, 1966) is an American Internet entrepreneur best known as the co-founder and promoter of the online non-profit encyclopedia Misplaced Pages and the for-profit Wikia web-hosting company. Wales was born in Huntsville, Alabama, United States, where he attended 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, but left before completing a Ph.D in order to take a job in finance and later worked as the research director of a Chicago futures and options firm. In 1996, he and two partners founded Bomis, a male-oriented web portal featuring entertainment and adult content. The company would provide the initial funding for the peer-reviewed 💕 Nupedia (2000–03) and its successor, Misplaced Pages.

On January 15, 2001, with Larry Sanger and others, Wales launched 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, declaring himself the sole founder.

Wales serves on the board of trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit charitable organization he helped establish to operate Misplaced Pages, holding its board-appointed "community founder" seat. In 2004, he co-founded Wikia, a for-profit wiki-hosting service. 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 100 Most Influential People in the World".

Early life and education

Wales was born in Huntsville, Alabama, 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. During an interview in 2005 with Brian Lamb, in what he credits to the influence of the Montessori method on the school’s philosophy of education, Wales said he had "spent lots of hours poring 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 PhD finance program at the University of Alabama before leaving with a master's degree to enter the PhD finance program at Indiana University. He taught at both universities during his postgraduate studies but did not write the doctoral dissertation required for a PhD, something he ascribed to boredom.

Career

The staff of Wales' internet company Bomis photographed in Summer 2000. Wales is third from the left in the back row, with his then-wife Christine

Chicago Options Associates and Bomis

In 1994, Wales took a job with Chicago Options Associates, a futures and options trading firm in Chicago, Illinois. Wales has described himself as having been addicted to the Internet from an early stage and he wrote computer codes during his leisure time. 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, and having accumulated capital through "speculating on interest-rate and foreign-currency fluctuations", he decided to leave the realm of financial trading and became an Internet entrepreneur. In 1996, he and two partners founded Bomis, a web portal featuring user-generated webrings and, for a time, erotic photographs. Wales described it as a "guy-oriented search engine" with a market similar to that of Maxim magazine; the Bomis venture did not ultimately turn out to be successful, however.

Nupedia and the origins of Misplaced Pages

Main article: 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 skeptic 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. Years later, after deciding to pursue his encyclopedia project and seeking a credentialed academic to lead it, Wales hired 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 organizing 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 criticize articles and give feedback. It was like handing in an essay at grad school, and basically intimidating to participate in.

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

In an October 2009 speech, Wales recollects attempting to write a Nupedia article on Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert C. Merton, but being too intimidated to submit his first draft to the prestigious finance professors who were to peer review it, even though he had published a paper on Option Pricing Theory and was comfortable with the subject matter. Wales characterized this as the moment he realized that the Nupedia model was not going to work.

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

While Sanger saw Misplaced Pages primarily as a tool to aid Nupedia development, Wales felt that Misplaced Pages might have the potential to become the truly collaborative, open effort of knowledge building he dreamed of. Initially, neither Sanger nor Wales knew what to expect from the Misplaced Pages initiative. Wales feared that at worst, it might produce "complete rubbish". 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 with journalist Irina Slutsky at SXSW 2006, taken from her program Geek Entertainment TV 
Further information: History of Misplaced Pages § Early roles of Wales and Sanger

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.

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.

Role

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." Although his formal designation is 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 was also the closest the project had to a spokesperson in its early years. The growth and prominence of Misplaced Pages made Wales an Internet celebrity. Although he had never traveled outside North America prior to the site's founding, his participation in the Misplaced Pages project has seen him flying internationally on a near-constant basis as its public face.

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." In May 2010, the BBC reported that Wales had relinquished many of his technical privileges on Wikimedia Commons (a Misplaced Pages sister project that hosts much of its multimedia content) after criticism by the project’s volunteer community over what they saw as Wales' hasty and undemocratic approach to deleting sexually explicit images he believed "appeal solely to prurient interests".

Wikimedia Foundation

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

In mid-2003, Wales set up the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), a non-profit organization founded in St. Petersburg, Florida and later 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. Since 2006 he has been accorded 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 one hand, he estimated that Misplaced Pages was worth US$3 billion; on the other, he weighed his belief that the donation made its success possible.

Wales at Wikimania 2012's Google Reception

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

On November 4, 2011, Wales delivered an hour-long address at The Sage Gateshead in the United Kingdom to launch the 2011 Free Thinking Festival on BBC Radio Three. His speech, which was entitled "The Future of the Internet", was largely devoted to Misplaced Pages. Twenty days later, on November 24, Wales appeared on the British topical debate television program Question Time.

In May 2012, it was reported that Wales was advising the UK government on how to make taxpayer-funded academic research available on the internet at no cost. His role reportedly involved working as "an unpaid advisor on crowdsourcing and opening up policymaking", and advising the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills and the UK research councils on distributing research.

Political and economic views

Wales in June 2008

Wales is a self-avowed Objectivist, referring to the philosophy invented by writer Ayn Rand in the mid-20th century emphasizing reason, individualism, and capitalism. 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 by Brian Lamb about Rand’s influence on him 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 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. In that profile, he described his political views as "center-right".

In a 2011 interview with The Independent, he expressed sympathy with the Occupy Wall Street and Occupy London protesters, saying, "You don't have to be a socialist to say it's not right to take money from everybody and give it to a few rich people. That's not free enterprise."

The January/February 2006 issue of Maximum PC reported that Wales had refused to comply with a request from 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 had already yielded to Chinese government pressure. Wales let it be known that he would rather see companies such as Google follow suit on Misplaced Pages's policy of freedom of information. 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...".

Wales cites Austrian School economist Friedrich 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 decentralized – 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".

Wales petitioned the Home Secretary of the United Kingdom against the extradition of Richard O'Dwyer to the USA. After an agreement was reached to avoid the extradition, Wales commented, "This is very exciting news, and I'm pleased to hear it... What needs to happen next is a serious reconsideration of the UK extradition treaty that would allow this sort of nonsense in the first place."

Personal life

Wales with his second wife Christine

Wales married Kate Garvey in London on 6 October 2012. She is Tony Blair's former diary secretary, whom he met in Davos, Switzerland. It is his third marriage. Wales has two daughters: one with his second ex-wife and one with Garvey.

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 lived as of 2007.

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 stated that there had been a relationship but that it was over and claimed that it had not influenced any matters on Misplaced Pages, a claim which was disputed by Marsden.

Wales is an atheist. In an interview with Big Think, he said his personal philosophy is firmly rooted in reason and he is a complete non-believer.

Honors, awards and positions

Wales at the Gottlieb Duttweiler Awards Show, 2011

Wales is a member of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School and the advisory board of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, the Board of Directors at Creative Commons, Socialtext, and Hunch.com, and former co-chair of the World Economic Forum on the Middle East 2008.

Wales was listed in the "Scientists & Thinkers" section of the Time 100 in 2006 and number 12 in Forbes "The Web Celebs 25". Wales has also given a lecture in the Stuart Regen Visionary series at New Museum which "honors special individuals who have made major contributions to art and culture, and are actively imagining a better future" and by the World Economic Forum as one of the "Young Global Leaders" of 2007. In April 2011, Wales served on the jury of the Tribeca Film Festival.

Wales has received a Pioneer Award, the Gottlieb Duttweiler Prize and the Leonardo European Corporate Learning Award in 2011, the Monaco Media Prize, the 2009 Nokia Foundation annual award, the Business Process Award at the 7th Annual Innovation Awards and Summit by The Economist, the 2008 Global Brand Icon of the Year Award, and on behalf of the Wikimedia project the Quadriga award of Werkstatt Deutschland for A Mission of Enlightenment. Wales has also received honorary degrees from Knox College, Amherst College, Stevenson University, Argentina's Universidad Empresarial Siglo 21, and Russia's MIREA University.

Published work

See also

References

Notes

  1. "Board of Directors". CiviliNation website. Retrieved February 19, 2011.
  2. Hough, Stephen (March 11, 2012). "Jimmy Wales: Misplaced Pages chief to advise Whitehall on policy". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved May 30, 2012.
  3. ^
  4. "Misplaced Pages: 50 languages, 1/2 million articles". Wikimedia Foundation Press Release. Wikimedia Foundation. April 25, 2004. Retrieved April 10, 2009."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. January 21, 2003. Retrieved April 10, 2009.
  5. ^ "Brain scan: The free-knowledge fundamentalist". The Economist. June 5, 2008. Retrieved June 9, 2008.
  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 PhD 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 March 28, 2009.
  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 October 31, 2008.
  12. ^ Lamb, Brian (September 25, 2005). "Q&A: Jimmy Wales, Misplaced Pages founder". C-SPAN. Retrieved October 31, 2006.
  13. Brown, David (December 11, 2007). "Jimmy Wales '83". Alumni Profiles. Randolph School. Retrieved October 31, 2008.
  14. ^ 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)
  15. ^ McNichol, Tom (May 1, 2007). "Building a Wiki World". Business 2.0. CNN. Retrieved October 31, 2007.
  16. ^ Schiff, Stacy (July 31, 2006). "Know It All". The New Yorker. Retrieved October 31, 2008.
    "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')."
  17. ^ 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."
  18. 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."
  19. ^ Brennen, Jensen (June 26, 2006). "Access for All". The Chronicle of Philanthropy. Vol. 18, no. 18.
  20. ^ Hansen, Evan (December 19, 2005). "Misplaced Pages Founder Edits Own Bio". Wired News. Retrieved October 31, 2008.
  21. ^ 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.
  22. Gouthro, Liane (March 14, 2000). "Building the world's biggest encyclopedia". PC World. CNN. Retrieved October 31, 2008.
  23. ^ Marks, Paul (February 3, 2007). "Interview with Jimmy Wales: Knowledge to the people" (video). New Scientist. 193 (2589). Reed Business Information: 44. doi:10.1016/S0262-4079(07)60293-0. Retrieved October 31, 2008.
  24. Jimmy Wales (October 7, 2009). The Future of Free Culture: Jimmy Wales, Founder of Misplaced Pages (SWF,FLV,FLASH) (Videotape). New Haven, Connecticut, United States: Yale University. Event occurs at 43:19. Retrieved August 18, 2011.
  25. ^ 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."
  26. ^ Sidener, Jonathan (December 6, 2004). "Everyone's encyclopedia". The San Diego Union-Tribune. p. C1. Retrieved April 22, 2009.
  27. Charles Leadbeater (July 1, 2009). We-Think: Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production. Profile Books. p. 14. ISBN 978-1-86197-837-0. Retrieved June 4, 2011. Sanger wanted to revitalise Nupedia, but Wales saw a more radical possibility: to create an entirely open, highly collaborative approach to knowledge.
  28. Emmanuel Gobillot (June 28, 2011). Leadershift: Reinventing Leadership for the Age of Mass Collaboration. Kogan Page Publishers. p. 84. ISBN 978-0-7494-6303-8. Retrieved June 4, 2011. Wikis would speed up Nupedia's development whilst transforming it into the true collaborative effort Wales dreamed of. As a result of this new technology, Misplaced Pages was born in earnest on 15 January 2001.
  29. Larry Sanger (November 1, 2005). "The Early History of Nupedia and Misplaced Pages: A Memoir". In Chris DiBona; Danese Cooper; Mark Stone (eds.). Open Sources 2.0: The Continuing Evolution. O'Reilly Media, Inc. p. 312. ISBN 978-0-596-00802-4. Retrieved June 4, 2011. 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. I was merely a grateful employee; I thought I was very lucky to have a job like that land in my lap.
  30. Getz, Arlene (February 1, 2007). "In Search of an Online Utopia". Newsweek. MSNBC. Archived from the original on April 18, 2007. Retrieved October 31, 2008.
  31. Tapscott, Don; Anthony D. (2008). Wikinomics. Penguin Group. p. 71. ISBN ]. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help)
  32. ^ Singer, Michael (January 16, 2002). "💕 Project Celebrates Year One". Jupitermedia. Retrieved February 27, 2008. {{cite news}}: |archive-url= is malformed: timestamp (help)
  33. Sanger, Larry (April 18, 2005). "The Early History of Nupedia and Misplaced Pages: A Memoir". Slashdot. Retrieved October 31, 2005.
  34. Sanger, Larry (January 18, 2002). "What Misplaced Pages is and why it matters". meta.wikimedia.org. Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved October 31, 2008.
  35. Sanger, Larry (March 5, 2007). "My resignation—Larry Sanger". meta.wikimedia.org. Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved October 17, 2009.
  36. Terdiman, Daniel (January 6, 2006). "Misplaced Pages's co-founder eyes a Digital Universe". CNET News. Retrieved October 31, 2008.
  37. ^ Smith, Wes (January 15, 2007). "He's the "God-King," but you can call him Jimbo". Seattle Times. Retrieved October 31, 2008.
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  85. Petitioning Home Secretary, UK: .@ukhomeoffice: Stop the extradition of Richard O'Dwyer to the USA #SaveRichard
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    "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."
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  120. MIREA (June 16, 2011). "Moscow State Technical University Website". Retrieved June 22, 2011. Rector prof. RAN AS Whitefish J. Wales handed a diploma and the mantle of Honorary Doctor Bauman MIREA.

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