Jimmy Wales

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Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales
Jimmy Wales (April 2006)
Born	1966-08-07 Huntsville, Alabama
Occupation	Chair of the Wikimedia Foundation
Website	User Page

Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales (born August 7, 1966) is the founder and Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit corporation that operates the free online encyclopedia, Misplaced Pages, and several other wiki projects. He is also founder of the for-profit company Wikia, Inc., which is legally unrelated to Wikimedia.

In May 2006, Wales was named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people.

Personal life and education

Wales was born in Huntsville, Alabama. His father was a grocery store manager, while his mother, Doris, and grandmother, Erma, ran a small private school, "in the tradition of the one-room schoolhouse," where Wales was educated. 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 2005 Time magazine article incorrectly reported that Wales was homeschooled. Strictly speaking he was not, but he did note that his schooling experience was "in a sense similar", since his mother and grandmother were his primary teachers. The school's philosophy of education was significantly influenced by the Montessori method, and students had a fair amount of freedom to study whatever they liked. Wales has said that he spent many hours poring over the World Book Encyclopedia during this time.

Preparatory school and university

After eighth grade, Wales went to Randolph School, a college prep school, which was an early supporter of computer labs and other technology for student use. Wales has said that the school was expensive for his family, but that education was regarded as 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 Bachelor's degree in finance from Auburn University and started with the Ph.D. finance programs at the University of Alabama that he left with a Master's in finance. After that, he took courses offered in 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 to earn a Ph.D.

Career

In 1994, Wales went on to became the Research Director at Chicago Options Associates a futures and options trader in Chicago which he did for six years. In 1996, he 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", with a market similar to Maxim magazine. In an interview with Wired News, 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.

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

Misplaced Pages and the Wikimedia Foundation

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

Using a wiki to create an encyclopedia was publicly proposed by Larry Sanger on January 10, 2001, and Wales worked on setting one up, starting it on January 15, 2001. Misplaced Pages was at that point a wiki-based site intended for collaboration on early encyclopedic content for submission to Nupedia for peer review, but 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. 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."

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 active Wikipedians to the five-member board; the remaining two members are elected community representatives. This move relieved him and Bomis from the increasing financial burden of supporting Misplaced Pages while keeping his leadership position.

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.

Controversy

While Larry Sanger referred to himself as the co-founder of Misplaced Pages as early as January 2002, Wales says he has always called himself the sole founder of Misplaced Pages. The press frequently referred to Sanger and Wales as co-founders, but this began to change after Sanger's departure. For example, a 2004 Newsweek magazine article stated that " created Misplaced Pages", without mentioning Sanger. In 2006, Wales told the Boston Globe that "it's preposterous" to call Sanger the co-founder. Sanger has strongly contested this assertion, claiming that, in addition to developing Misplaced Pages in its early phase, he also had the idea of applying the wiki concept to the building of a 💕. It is undisputed that he also coined the name of the project. He has said: "I remember very clearly the evening when I got the idea for Misplaced Pages." He nevertheless ascribed the broader idea 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." 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."

In late 2005, a related 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'."

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." Likewise, 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."

Other activities

Inspired by the success of Misplaced Pages, Wales has founded the for-profit company Wikia, Inc. (separate from Wikimedia), which hosts various wikis and manages the Wikia project.

He was appointed a fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School in 2005. On October 3, 2005, according to a press release, 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.

Philosophical and political views

Wales has been a passionate adherent of the Objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand. 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".

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.