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Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales (born August 7, 1966), is an Internet entrepreneur and a wiki enthusiast.
Wales was born in Huntsville, Alabama, and is a graduate of Auburn University and the University of Alabama. He worked as a professional futures and options trader in Chicago. He also 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." In the mid-1990s Wales started Bomis, a search portal focusing on aspects of pop culture, which also sells original content, and Wikia, a wiki-style search engine.
With Larry Sanger, Wales founded Misplaced Pages, a wiki-based online encyclopedia derived from the open source model. He and Sanger had previously worked on the now-defunct Nupedia encyclopedia project. Wales is currently the director of the Wikimedia Foundation, a Tampa-based non-profit organization that encompasses Misplaced Pages and its younger sister projects. As such, he is Misplaced Pages's designated agent and is humorously known as its "benevolent dictator". According to the Herald Sun, an Australian newspaper, as of mid-2003 Wales has spent over AU$400,000 on Misplaced Pages and Nupedia; later, Time Magazine reported that Wales spent around US$500,000 on his Wiki projects.
Wales is married, and lives in St. Petersburg, Florida with his wife Christine and his daughter Kira.
See also
External links
- Personal home page
- USA Today interview
- Extremely outdated list of Objectivism mailing lists
- Wales' Misplaced Pages user page