Jimmy Wales

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Theresa knott (talk | contribs) at 09:53, 11 July 2006 (Protected Jimmy Wales: A Morrow ). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Revision as of 09:53, 11 July 2006 by Theresa knott (talk | contribs) (Protected Jimmy Wales: A Morrow )(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)

Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales
Jimmy Wales (April 2006)
Born	August 8, 1966 Huntsville, Alabama
Occupation	President of the Wikimedia Foundation
Website	User Page

Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales is the founder and president of the Wikimedia Foundation and, together with Angela Beesley, co-founder of Wikia, Inc. He is the chairman of the board for both organizations. He previously made his living as a speculator in the foreign exchange markets, which made him wealthy. In May 2006, Wales was named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people.

Early life and education

Wales was born in Huntsville, Alabama, and his legal given name is Jimmy, not "James". His father, now retired, was a grocery store manager.

Wales' mother, Doris, and grandmother, Erma, ran a very small private school, as he put it "in the tradition of the one-room schoolhouse" and its philosophy of education was significantly influenced by the Montessori method. Wales attended this grammar school and his mother and grandmother were his primary teachers. 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. As such, he had a fair amount of freedom to study whatever he liked and he spent many hours poring over the World Book Encyclopedia during this time.

A 2005 Time magazine article characterized this educational experience as homeschooling and Wales, while disagreeing with that characterization, acknowledged that it was "in a sense, similar."

Preparatory school and university

After eighth grade, Wales went to Randolph School, a college prep school. There, he was exposed to its modern computer labs and other technology equipment. He later claimed that the expense of this school was burdensome for his family. He received his Bachelor's degree from Auburn University and his Master's from the University of Alabama both in finance. 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 did not write the doctoral dissertation required to earn a Ph.D.

Finance and Internet career

Wales went on to become a trader working for Michael E. Davis at Chicago Options Associates, Inc. Within two years (1994 to 1996) had earned enough to "support himself and his wife for the rest of their lives." Wired magazine chose to characterize his earnings as having "made a bundle betting on currency fluctuations."

In 1996, Wales moved to San Diego, California and founded a search portal called Bomis, which also sold adult content 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." 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." He is no longer actively involved in the company.

Misplaced Pages and the Wikimedia Foundation Inc.

Jimmy Wales on the Holbeinsteg bridge in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, during a shooting break of a documentary film on Misplaced Pages created by French-German TV station arte.

Main article: History of Misplaced Pages

In March 2000, Wales 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 US$100,000 (primarily through salaries and providing free Internet access) to Nupedia and Misplaced Pages, and continued supporting them into 2002.

The concept of using a wiki to create an online encyclopedia was publicly proposed by Larry Sanger on January 10, 2001. Wales started to set one up on January 15, 2001. When first operational, Misplaced Pages was a wiki-based site intended for collaboration on early encyclopedic content for submission to Nupedia for peer review. Sanger coined the name "Misplaced Pages" for the project. Misplaced Pages's rapid growth soon made it the dominant project and Nupedia was mothballed.

Sanger dropped out of the project in 2002, posting a resignation on his Misplaced Pages user page. He has since criticized Wales's approach to the project, describing Wales as "decidedly anti-elitist". Wales later took issue with this description in a C-SPAN interview, describing himself as not anti-elitist but "perhaps anti-credentialist." He added: "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." Wales does care if the person has been banned by himself, his appointed Arbitration Committee or blocked by the Foundation volunteer "administrators".

Wales' personality and leadership style set the tone for this central aspect of the collaboration process both of content creation and policy enforcement. The community-defined policies remain in constant flux, in particular on sensitive community issues such as whether one administrator is allowed to ever remove the block of a editor if such a block was imposed by some other active administrator. Wales' worldview has an impact upon core societal goals within the Foundation such as trust, presumptions of good faith, rehabilitation and forgiveness or lack thereof.

In mid-2003, Wales moved to St. Petersburg, Florida and set up the Wikimedia Foundation Inc. to support Misplaced Pages and its newer sibling or "sister" projects. He appointed himself and two business partners to the five-member board; the remaining two members are elected community representatives. He then ceased the financial support that he and Bomis had been providing to Misplaced Pages.

In 2004, Wales was quoted as saying that he had spent around US$500,000 on the establishment and operation of his Wiki projects. By the end of its February 2005 fund drive, the Wikimedia Foundation was supported entirely by grants and donations. Wales has become increasingly involved with promoting and speaking about its projects, and to this end, he travels to conferences and Wikimedia functions, such as "Wikimeets" and Wikimania. The Foundation's travel budget was US$25,000 in 2005; how much of this total was used by Wales himself has not been published. On April 14, 2006, he gave a talk at Stewart Brand's LongNow Foundation entitled "Vision: Misplaced Pages and the Future of Free Culture," where he discussed the philosophical underpinnings of Misplaced Pages, his support for the Free Culture movement, and the difficulties the Wikimedia Foundation may confront as it grows in size.

Motivations behind Misplaced Pages

In an interview with Slashdot, Wales explained the purpose of Misplaced Pages by saying, "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."

In a December 2005 appeal for donations to Wikimedia, Wales explained his motivation for his Misplaced Pages work by saying "I'm doing this for the child in Africa." In response to critics who pointed out that these motivations were inconsistent with Wales' Objectivist worldview (see "Philosophical and political views" section in this article), he replied, "Do we have a source for me claiming that my 'Misplaced Pages activities do not serve a selfish end'? No, we do not. (…) For what is it worth, I think it is in my rational self-interest to care about what happens to kids in Africa, and far from being destructive of my self-interest, it is beneficial to my self-interest."

Attribution dispute

Wales initially opposed having an article about himself on Misplaced Pages. On September 9, 2004, he dropped this initial opposition and the article that was written said that he "is an Internet entrepreneur, most famous for his founding, with Larry Sanger, of Misplaced Pages ... Wales became famous after he co-founded Misplaced Pages in January 15, 2001". Larry Sanger referred to himself as the co-founder of Misplaced Pages as early as January 2002, and so did the Misplaced Pages community. In the early period, the press usually referred to Sanger and Wales as co-founders.

The press became increasingly more careless about assigning attribution to Sanger. For example, a 2004 Newsweek magazine article stated that " created Misplaced Pages", without mentioning Sanger.

The above was the status quo until March 28, 2005 when Wales indicated that he has always called himself the sole founder of Misplaced Pages. Sanger then needlessly reminded Wales that, in addition to developing Misplaced Pages in its early phase, Sanger also had the idea of applying the wiki concept to the building of a 💕. Sanger said: "I remember very clearly the evening when I got the idea for Misplaced Pages." He conceded other broad ideas 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 early 2006, Wales told the Boston Globe that "it's preposterous" to call Sanger the co-founder, but he has since then declined to comment about the matter.

Autobiography controversies

In late 2005, a controversy arose regarding Wales and the 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 were in line with his view that 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 Wired interview, "People shouldn't do it, including me. I wish I hadn't done it." The article said: "Wales has also repeatedly revised the description of a search site he founded called Bomis, which included a section with adult photos called 'Bomis Babes'."

Wales has credited a Bomis employee named Jeremy Rosenfeld as the person who "initially came up with the idea to make the encyclopedia wiki-based." This claim is disputed by Sanger.

This controversy was soon overshadowed by the John Seigenthaler Sr. Misplaced Pages biography controversy, in which Wales made serveral public appearances with the semi-retired journalist.

Philosophical and political views

Wales has been a passionate adherent of the Objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand. He is a vocal supporter of David Kelley and Kelley's faction within the movement, sometimes leading to communication difficulties with other Objectivists. When asked by Brian Lamb in his appearance on 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," and in 2002, he began moderating Atlantis, an Objectivism-related mailing list on the Objectivist community site We the Living.

Other activities

Wales was appointed a fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School in 2005. On October 3, 2005 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 lives in St. Petersburg, Florida with his wife and daughter.

Awards

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 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.