Jimmy Wales

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Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales is the founder, board member and Chairman Emeritus of the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation,^[3]^[4] a non-profit corporation that operates Wikipedia and several other wiki projects, including Wiktionary and Wikinews. He is also the co-founder, along with Angela Beesley, of the for-profit company Wikia, Inc.

Personal life

Wales' father worked as a grocery store manager while his mother, Doris, and his grandmother, Erma, ran a small private school "in the tradition of the one-room schoolhouse"^[5] where Wales received his education. Most of the time there were four children in his grade so the school grouped the first, second, third and fourth grade students and the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grade students.

Currently, Wales works and lives in St. Petersburg, Florida.^[6] He lives in a "modest"^[7] single story house.

Education

After eighth grade, Wales attended Randolph School, a university-preparatory 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."^[5] He received his Bachelor's degree in finance from Auburn University and started with the Ph.D. finance program at the University of Alabama, where he left with a Master's in finance.^[5] 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.^[5]

Career

Jimmy Wales speaking at FOSDEM 2005

From 1994-2000, Wales served as research director at Chicago Options Associates, a futures and options trader in Chicago.^[5] By "betting on interest rate and foreign-currency fluctuations" he had soon earned enough to "support himself and his wife for the rest of their lives", according to Daniel Pink of Wired Magazine.^[8]

Bomis and Nupedia

In 1996, Wales founded a search portal called Bomis, which also sold erotic materials 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.^[5] 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."^[9] Wales is no longer actively involved in the company.^{[citation needed]}

In March 2000, he started a peer-reviewed, open-content encyclopedia, Nupedia.com ("the free encyclopedia"), and hired Larry Sanger to be its editor-in-chief.^[5]

Wikipedia

Jimmy Wales (far left) at a session on Open Source, Open Access, at the Owning the Future conference held in New Delhi, India, August 24, 2006

Main article: History of Wikipedia

Using a wiki to create an encyclopedia was publicly proposed by Larry Sanger on January 10, 2001,^[10] and Wales worked on setting one up, starting it on January 15, 2001.^{[citation needed]} Wikipedia was at that point a wiki-based site intended for collaboration on early encyclopedic content for submission to Nupedia for peer review, but Wikipedia's rapid growth soon made it the dominant project and Nupedia was mothballed.^{[citation needed]} Sanger resigned from the project in 2002.^[11]

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

In mid-2003, Wales set up the Wikimedia Foundation, a St. Petersburg-based non-profit organization, to support Wikipedia and its younger sibling projects.^{[citation needed]} 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.^{[citation needed]}

Wales has explained his motivations about Wikipedia. In an interview with Slashdot, he said, "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."^[12]

In late 2005, Wales was criticised for editing his own biography in a way some characterized as "revisionist history."^[9]^[13]^[14] In particular, Rogers Cadenhead drew attention to logs showing that Mr. Wales had removed references to Sanger as the co-founder of Wikipedia.^[14]^[15] He 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.^[9] An article in the July 31, 2006 issue of the New Yorker magazine[1] expanded on this topic:

Even Wales has been caught airbrushing his Wikipedia 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.”)

In both cases, Wales argued that his modifications were solely intended to improve the accuracy of the content.^[9] Wales explained that Sanger had been his employee^[16], and that he had always considered himself to be the sole founder of Wikipedia. In 2006, Wales told the Boston Globe that "it's preposterous" to call Sanger the co-founder.^[17] However, Sanger strongly contests that description. He was identified as a co-founder of Wikipedia at least as early as September 2001^[18] and referred to himself that way as early as January 2002.^[19] ^[20]^[21]

Following this incident, Wales apologized for editing his own biography, which is practice generally frowned upon at Wikipedia. Wales said in the Wired interview, "People shouldn't do it, including me. I wish I hadn't done it."^[9] However, he continues to assert that he is the sole founder of Wikipedia.^[17]

Wikia

Main article: Wikia

Wikia (formerly known as Wikicities) is a wiki hosting service created in October 2004 by Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley, according to a Wikia press release.^[22] It is a collection of wikis running on MediaWiki software and operated by Wikia, Inc. that target different communities. It is free of charge for readers and editors, and gets its income from advertisements. Following the change in name, Wikia announced that it had received US$4 million in venture capital from a group of investors. "'We've had a lot of interest from investors, and it was really a matter of sorting through the investors to be sure that people who are investing were people who were believers in our mission,' said Wales, who operates Wikipedia and Wikia separately from his St. Petersburg offices" reports the Tampa Bay Business Journal.^[23]

Campaigns Wikia is a political wiki created by Jimmy Wales.^[24]

Media appearances and honors

Wales being interviewed on the red carpet of the 2006 Time 100, by Amanda Congdon for Rocketboom, a daily Internet vidcast

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,^[25] 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.^[26]

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.^[27]

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.^[28]

On November 4, 2006, Wales appeared in the "Not My Job" segment of Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!, a weekly news-quiz show on National Public Radio. The topic was "It must be True, I read it on Wikipedia". He answered all three questions incorrectly. ^[29]

Jimmy Wales was nominated for Beard of the Year 2006.^[30]

Wikisaria

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Wales has announced he has obtained funding for a new internet search engine to be developed as a "google killer" - meaning it will be developed to outshine google.com searches.

This effort is to be via a for profit company called Wikisaria with Wales explaining he will not only use the normal mathematical algorithms for his search engine, but will also use a wiki format to allow users to input their fine tuning or tweaking of search results so that the searches that result will be far superior to other search engines.... as the search engine uses those inputs or updates to make search results better.

Major web search engines such as Google already allow users to give feedback to the operators,^[31] but Wikisaria will likely take this further.

Personal philosophy

Wales has been a passionate adherent of Ayn Rand's Objectivism. 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.^[5] From 1992 to 1996, he ran the electronic mailing list "Moderated Discussion of Objectivist Philosophy".^[32]

Published works by Wales

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. See also Log-normal distribution.

Sources and notes

^ http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,13129-2516400_2,00.html
^ Wikimedia Foundation, Board, Jimmy Wales article, 27 October 2006.
^ Wikimedia Foundation Inc.. Bylaws. wikimediafoundation.org. Retrieved on 2006-05-21.
^ Wikimedia Foundation Florence Devouard replaces Mr. Wales as chair of the board of trustees for a one year term.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g ^h Lamb, Brian (September 25, 2005). Q&A: Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder. C-SPAN. Retrieved on 2006-07-11.
^ LaMonica, Martin. "Newsmaker:Open-Sourcing the News." CNET.com News January 7, 2005. Retrieved August 21, 2006 from http://news.com.com/Open-sourcing+the+news/2008-1025_3-5515166.html.
^ http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,13129-2516400,00.html
^ Pink, Daniel H. (2005-03-13). The Book Stops Here. Wired. Retrieved on 2006-10-09.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e Hansen, Evan. Wikipedia Founder Edits Own Bio. Wired News. Wired. Retrieved on 2006-02-14.
^ http://www.larrysanger.org/roleinwp.html
^ My resignation--Larry Sanger: retrieved on October 19, 2006
^ Wales, Jimmy (2004-07-28). "Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales Replies". Slashdot. Retrieved on 2006-06-07.
^ Rhys Blakely. Wikipedia founder edits himself. Times Online. Retrieved on 2006-10-15.
^ ^a ^b Rogers Cadenhead. Wikipedia Founder Looks Out for Number 1. Retrieved on 2006-10-15.
^ Wikipedia diff showing modification by Mr. Wales. Retrieved on 2006-10-15.
^ Jonathan Sidener. "Everyone's Encyclopedia", San Diego Union Tribune. Retrieved on 2006-10-15.
^ ^a ^b Knott, Janet. "Bias, sabotage haunt Wikipedia's free world", The Boston Globe, 2006-02-12. Retrieved on 2006-04-12.
^ Peter Meyers. "Fact-Driven? Collegial? This Site Wants You", New York Times, 2001-09-20. Retrieved on 2006-10-15.
^ Sanger, Larry. What Wikipedia is and why it matters. Retrieved on 2006-04-12.
^ In addition to developing Wikipedia in its early phase, Sanger claims he is also responsible for the idea of applying the wiki concept to the building of a free encyclopedia. It is undisputed that he also coined the name of the project. 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."
^ Sanger, Larry. "The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir", Slashdot, 2005-04-18. Retrieved on 2005-04-18.
^ Beesley, Angela et. al. (February 3, 2005). 100 Wikicities. Retrieved on October 15, 2006.
^ Hinman, Michael. Venture capitalists invest wiki-millions. Tampa Bay Business Journal.
^ McCarthy , Caroline (2006). Wikipedia founder launches political site. News.com. CNET. Retrieved on 2006-12-05.
^ "Wikipedia Founder Joins Socialtext Board", Socialtext, 3 October 2005.
^ "Creative Commons Adds Two New Board Members", Creative Commons, 30 March 2006.
^ EFF Honors Craigslist, Gigi Sohn, and Jimmy Wales with Pioneer Awards. Kansas City infoZine News (2006-04-28). Retrieved on 2006-06-05.
^ Anderson, Chris. "Jimmy Wales: The (Proud) Amateur Who Created Wikipedia", Time, 2006-05-08. Retrieved on 2006-04-30.
^ "This Week's Show Nov. 4, 2006".
^ ?http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/tms/2006/12/beard_of_the_year.shtml
^ Google: Contact Us: Search
^ Wales, Jimmy (23 September 1992). "Re: Objectivism of Ayn Rand". talk.philosophy.misc. (Google Groups).

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