Jimmy Wales

At 57 years old, Jimmy Wales has this physical status:

Career

In 1994, Wales joined Chicago Options Associates, a Chicago futures and options brokerage firm. From an early age, Wales has been addicted to the internet, and he enjoys writing computer programs during his leisure hours. He had become an devoted follower of Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs), a sort of virtual role playing game, during his undergraduate studies in Alabama, and had thus seen the potential of computer networks to support large-scale collaborative projects.

Inspired by Netscape's highly successful initial public offering in 1995 and having amassed funds by "speculating on interest-rate and foreign-currency fluctuations," Wales opted to leave financial market and become an Internet entrepreneur. Bomis, a web portal that featured user-generated webrings and, for a time, pornographic photographs, was founded by he and two associates. With a market similar to Maxim magazine's, Wales referred to it as a "guy-oriented search engine"; the Bomis venture did not turn out to be profitable.

Even though Bomis had to make money, the fund for Wales provided him with the funding to pursue his true passion, an online encyclopedia. Wales had met Larry Sanger, a skeptic of objectivism's philosophy in the early 1990s while moderating an online discussion group dedicated to objectivism's philosophy. Both the Welsh and Sanger's lists had led to lengthy discussion, which was followed by a conference in order to continue the discussion and becoming friends. Wales hired Sanger, who at the time was a doctoral student at Ohio State University, to serve as the editor-in-chief, and Nupedia ("the free encyclopedia"), a peer-reviewed, open-content encyclopedia, was launched in March 2000. Nupedia's primary aim was to have expert-written entries on a variety of topics and also sell advertisements alongside the entries in order to make money. The project was characterized by a robust peer-review process designed to ensure that the authors' papers were of a similar quality to those of academic encyclopedias.

In a talk in October 2009, Wales recalled trying to write a Nupedia article about Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert C. Merton but was too afraid to submit his first draft to the prestigious finance professors who were to peer review it, even though he had written a paper on Option Pricing Theory and was familiar with the subject. This was the moment he learned that the Nupedia system was not going to work, according to Wales.

After advising Kovitz that Nupedia's growth slowed as a result of its onerous submission process, Sanger was introduced to the idea of a wiki in January 2001. Kovitz claimed that adopting the wiki platform would allow editors to contribute simultaneously and incrementally throughout the entire project, thus breaking Nupedia's bottleneck. Sanger was excited about the idea, and they built the first Nupedia wiki on January 10, 2001, after he introduced it to Wales. The wiki was initially designed as a collaborative effort for the public to write papers that would then be reviewed for publication by Nupedia's expert volunteers. The majority of Nupedia's experts, on the other hand, wanted nothing to do with the scheme, afraid that mixing amateur content with professionally researched and edited information would jeopardize Nupedia's credibility and damage the encyclopedia's credibility. The wiki project, which Sanger called "Wikipedia"), went online five days after it was launched.

Originally, Bomis set out to make Wikipedia a profitable market. Wikipedia was primarily intended to support Nupedia growth in Sanger. At worst, Wales was concerned that this would produce "complete garbage." The number of articles on Wikipedia had outgrown Nupedia's, to the surprise of Sanger and Wales, just a few days after its establishment, and a small group of editors had formed within a few days. It was Jimmy Wales and others who came up with the concept of an open-source, collaborative encyclopedia that would welcome contributions from ordinary people. Neither Sanger nor Wales knew what to expect from the Wikipedia initiative at first. Many of the early contributors to the site were familiar with the free culture movement, and, like Wales, many of them sympathized with the open-source movement.

Wales has said he was initially worried about the possibility of open editing, in which anyone can edit the encyclopedia, that he would awaken during the night and see what was new. Nonetheless, the early editors' cadre of the project helped create a strong, self-governing community that has been integral to the project's success. In a talk at SXSW in 2016, he remembered that he wrote the first words on Wikipedia: "Hello world," a term computer programmers often use to test new software.

In the beginning of the project, Sanger developed Wikipedia and accompanied it. "The idea of an open source, collaborative encyclopedia, accessible to participation by ordinary people was entirely Jimmy's, not mine," he said in a 2005 memoir for Slashdot, and Bomis was completely funded. "The initial development of this encyclopedia was the task he gave me to work on," explains Will. Sanger worked on and promoted both Nupedia and Wikipedia until Bomis withdrew support in February 2002; Sanger resigned as editor-in-chief of Nupedia and as "chief organizer" of Wikipedia on March 1 of that year. Bomis donated the financial assistance for Wikipedia early on and entertained the possibility of posting advertisements on Wikipedia before Sanger's departure and proposals for a non-profit foundation were delayed.

Wales has claimed that he is the sole founder of Wikipedia, and has publicly condemned Sanger's appointment as a co-founder. At least by the New York Times and as founders of Wikipedia's first press release in January 2002, Sanger and Wales were listed as co-founders as early as September 2001. Wales referred to Wikipedia as "co-founder" in August. Sanger and Wales as co-founders are shown on his personal website. For example, Sanger and Wales have traditionally been cited or listed as co-founders in early news citations and press releases. In a May 2009 interview, Wales was cited by The Boston Globe as calling Sanger's statement "preposterous" and "the entire discussion" "silly" and referred to "the whole discussion" "silly." Wales told The New York Times in 2013 that the conflict is "the dumbest controversy in the history of the world."

Wales wrote his own biographical entry on the English Wikipedia in late 2005. Rogers Cadenhead, a writer, drew attention to logs revealing that Wales had deleted references to Sanger as the co-founder of Wikipedia. "having seen edits like this," Sanger said, "it doesn't seem that Jimmy is attempting to rewrite history." However, this is a futile process, because the truth will come out" in our brave new world of transparent growth and maximum collaboration. Wales was also seen to have modified Bomis references in a way that was characterized as downplaying the sexual characteristics of some of the company's old goods. Although Wales claimed that his updates were solely intended to increase the content's accuracy, he apologised for editing his own biography, a practice that is normally discouraged on Wikipedia.

"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet has free access to the sum of human knowledge," Wales explained in a 2004 interview with Slashdot. We're doing this. Despite the fact that his official title is board member and chairman of the Wikimedia Foundation, Wales' social capital within the Wikipedia community has given him the honor of being a benevolent emperor and spiritual king. Wales debating Wikipedia in two interviews with The Guardian in 2014. In the first interview, he said that although he "has always condemned" the term "benevolent tyrant," he does refer to himself as the "constitutional monarch." He elaborated on his "constitutional monarch" designation in the second, saying that he has no real power, unlike Queen Elizabeth II. He was also the closest the project needed to a spokesperson in its early years. Wales became a household name on Wikipedia thanks to the website's growth and success. Despite the fact that he had never ventured outside North America prior to the site's establishment, his involvement in the Wikipedia project has seen him fly around the world on a near-constant basis as its public face.

When Larry Sanger left Wikipedia, Wales' take was different from Sanger's. Wales was largely hands-off. Despite participating in other initiatives, Wales has denied trying to minimize his position in Wikipedia, telling The New York Times in 2008 that "Dialing down is not an option for me," says the author. That's what I'm doing. That's my life goal. After criticism by the project's volunteer community over Wales' hasty and undemocratic policy of deleting sexually explicit images he believed "appeal solely to prurient interest," the BBC announced in May 2010.

Wales founded the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), a non-profit group established in St. Petersburg, Florida, and later headquartered in San Francisco, California. All intellectual property rights and domain names relating to Wikipedia were relocated to the new foundation, whose aim is to promote the encyclopedia and its sister projects. Since its inception, Wales has been a member of the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees, and has served as the Foundation's official chairman from 2003 to 2006. Since 2006, he has been given the honorary title of chairman emeritus and occupies the board-appointed "community founder" position, which was first established in 2008. His service for the charity has always been unpaid, with his appearances to promote it at computer and educational conferences. Wales has often joked that donating Wikipedia to the foundation was both the "dumbest and smartest" thing he had done. On one hand, he estimated that Wikipedia was worth US$3 billion; on the other hand, he weighed in on the fact that the donation made it possible. "I see my role as being very much like the modern monarch of the United Kingdom," Wales said in 2020: "I see my position as being very like the modern monarch of the United Kingdom: there is no absolute power, but there is the right to be informed, the right to encourage, and the right to warn."

At the Wikimania conference, Wales gives the annual "State of the Wiki" address.

The foundation's involvement has heightened controversies. Danny Wool, a former Wikimedia Foundation employee, was charged in March 2008 with misusing the foundation's funds for recreation purposes. Wool also said that Wales had his Wikimedia credit card taken away in part due to his spending habits, which Wales denied. In private, Devouard chastised Wales for every expense, as well as items for which he did not have receipts, he paid out of his own pocket; in private, he chastised Wales for "constantly attempting to rewrite the past."

In March 2008, former Novell computer scientist Jeff Merkey said that Wales had edited Merkey's Wikipedia entry to make it more useful in exchange for gifts to the Wikimedia Foundation, which Wales dismissed as "nonsense." Wikipedia editors characterized the WMF's Knowledge Engine project as a point of interest for Wales, and Wikia's business Wikia could profit from the WMF's spending a significant amount of money on search research in early 2016. In 2009, Wikia started to build a search engine, but it was ended.

Wikia, a Wales-based non-profit corporation formed in 2004 by Wales and then-fellow member of the WMF Board of trustees, founded the for-profit corporation Wikia. Wikia is a wiki farm — a collection of individual wikis on certain topics that are all hosted on the same website. Memory Alpha (devoted to Star Trek) and Wookieepedia (Star Wars) are two of Wikipedia's most popular wikis outside of Wikipedia, including Memory Alpha (devoted to Star Trek) and Wookieepedia (Star Wars). Wikia Search, an open source search engine that aims to defy Google and increase visibility and public discussion about how it is integrated into the search engine's operations, was discontinued in March 2009. On June 5, 2006, Wales stepped down as Wikia CEO Gil Penchina, a former vice president and general manager at eBay, was recalled. In September 2009, Penchina announced Wikia as the company's highest-profitable sector. In addition to his work with Wikia, Wales also serves as a public speaker for the Harry Walker Agency. He has also participated in a celebrity endorsement campaign for Swiss watchmaker 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. BBC Radio Three hosted an hour. The Future of the Internet" in his address, which was largely dedicated to Wikipedia. Wales appeared on the British national debate television show Question Time on November 24, just 20 days later.

In May 2012, it was announced that Wales was advising the UK government on how to make taxpayer-funded academic research available on the internet at no cost. According to reports, his position as "an unpaid advisor on crowdsourcing and policymaking" as well as advising the Department of Finance, Innovation and Skills, and the UK research councils on publishing research.

In January 2014, it was revealed that Wales had recruited The People's Operator as co-chair of the mobile phone network.

On March 21, 2014, Wales appeared on a panel at a Clinton Global Initiative University conference hosted at Arizona State University, alongside John McCain, Saudi Arabian women's rights activist Manal al-Sharif, and Harvard University undergraduate Shree Bose. The topic of discussion was "the age of participation" and the ability of an increasing number of people to "express their own views, pursue their own education, and open their own businesses." Wales encouraged young people to participate in social reform, and compared government crackdown of the Internet to a human rights infringement.

In reaction to Google's victory over Gonzalez, Google named Wales to serve on a seven-member committee on privacy, resulting in Google's being overwhelmed with calls to delete websites from their search results. Wales said he wanted the committee to be seen as "a blue-ribbon commission" by lawmakers and the committee should also advise the legislators as well as Google.

Wales revealed in 2017 that he would launch WikiTribune, a web publication aimed at combating fake news by a team of freelance journalists and volunteer contributors. Wales said it would be "news by the people and for the people" and that it would be the "first time that professional journalists and citizen journalists will work side-by-side as equals, editing them live as they progress, and in all cases supported by a community checking and rechecking all facts."

In October 2019, Wales launched WT Social, an ad-free social media platform.

The Jimmy Wales Foundation for Freedom of Expression is a UK-based charity established by Wales to combat human rights abuses in the field of freedom of expression. After receiving a reward from Dubai's chief, who felt he was unable to comply with such tight censorship rules, but insists he was not allowed to give back. Orit Kopel, the charity's CEO, as of 2016, is in charge of the charity's governance.

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