Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales (born August 7, 1966) is an Internet entrepreneur and a wiki enthusiast, best known for founding Wikipedia.
Education and early life
Born in Huntsville, Alabama, Wales attended Auburn University and the University of Alabama as an undergraduate, then took coursework in the Ph.D. programs in Finance at the University of Alabama and Indiana University. During that time, he taught extensively at both universities, although he did not write a doctoral dissertation and thus did not earn a postgraduate degree. He went on to become a futures and options trader in Chicago, and within a few years made a fortune that left him independently wealthy.
In the mid-1990s, Wales founded Bomis, a search portal focusing on aspects of pop culture. Bomis also sells original content, including a "Bomis Babes" adult-content section. Wales is no longer president or CEO of Bomis.
In March 2000, he founded Nupedia.com, "the free encyclopedia," a peer-reviewed open-content encyclopedia, hiring Larry Sanger to be the encyclopedia's editor-in-chief.
Recent work
The development of Wikipedia
full article: History of Wikipedia
On January 15, 2001, Wales and Sanger set up Wikipedia, a similar wiki-based site intended for collaboration on early encyclopedic content before submitting it to Nupedia for peer review. Wikipedia's rapid growth soon made it the dominant project and "the free encyclopedia", and Nupedia was mothballed. (Sanger did most of the early development of Wikipedia, while Wales mainly provided the necessary capital. Because Sanger was Wales' employee, Wales considers himself the sole founder of Wikipedia, though Sanger continues to call himself the "co-founder".)
In mid-2003, Wales set up the Wikimedia Foundation, a Tampa-based non-profit organization, to support Wikipedia and its younger sister 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.
Wales is sometimes wryly referred to as Wikipedia's "benevolent dictator" or its "God-King," though he rarely tells the community what to do. Wired Magazine's Daniel Pink, while profiling Wikipedia for the magazine's March 2005 issue, quipped that "The God-King drives a Hyundai". Despite the creation of the Wikimedia Foundation, Wales retained ultimate control by appointing, in addition to himself, two business partners who are not active Wikipedia editors to the five-member board, thus effectively having a controlling three-vote majority.
Other projects
More recently, in the clutches of wiki-addiction, Wales has founded two for-profit projects: Wikia, which runs Wikiasari, a wiki-style search engine; and Wikicities, a wiki hosting service.
Trivia
Wales admires the objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand, and while in graduate school owned and moderated an Internet mailing list known as the "Moderated Discussion of Objectivist Philosophy". He also takes an interest in firearms policy and United States constitutional legal issues.
Wales lives in St. Petersburg, Florida, with his wife Christine and daughter Kira.
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.
References
- Pink, Daniel H., "The Book Stops Here," Wired, March 3, 2005. [1]
External links
- Personal home page
- Personal blog
- USA Today interview
- Newsweek article
- Extremely outdated list of Objectivism mailing lists
- Wales' Wikipedia user page
- Video of Jimmy Wales discussing Wikipedia 40 minutes from a talk Jimmy held at Stanford on 2005-02-09 available as an avi in torrent form and licensed under the Creative Commons