Jimmy Wales

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Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales
Jimmy Wales (April 2006)
Born	August 7, 1966 Huntsville, Alabama
Occupation	President of the Wikimedia Foundation
Website	User Page

Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales is the founder and char of the Wikimedia Foundation and, together with Angela Beesley, co-founder of Wikia, Inc. He previously made his living as a trader in Chicago, which made him wealthy and as co-founder with Tim Shell of Bomis. In May 2006, Wales was named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people.

Early life and education

Wales was born in Huntsville, Alabama, and his legal given name is Jimmy, not "James". His father is a grocery store manager.

Wales' mother, Doris, and grandmother, Erma, ran a very small private school, as he put it "in the tradition of the one-room schoolhouse" and its philosophy of education was significantly influenced by the Montessori method. Wales attended this grammar school and his mother and grandmother were his primary teachers. 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. As such, he had a fair amount of freedom to study whatever he liked and he spent many hours poring over the World Book Encyclopedia during this time. A 2005 Time magazine article characterized this educational experience as homeschooling.

Preparatory school and university

After eighth grade, Wales went to Randolph School, a college prep school. There, he was exposed to its computer lab. He later claimed that the expense of this school was burdensome for his family. He received his Bachelor's degree from Auburn University and his Master's from the University of Alabama both in finance. Later, he took courses offered in the Ph.D. finance programs at the University of Alabama and Indiana University. He taught at both universities during his postgraduate studies, but did not write the doctoral dissertation required to earn a Ph.D.

Finance and Internet career

In 1994, Wales went on to became the Research Director working for Michael E. Davis at Chicago Options Associates a futures and options trader in Chicago which he did for six years. He earned enough to "support himself and his wife for the rest of their lives." Wired magazine chose to characterize his earnings as having "made a bundle betting on currency fluctuations."

In 1996, Wales founded a search portal called Bomis in San Diego, California, which, among other services, sold adult content.

Misplaced Pages and the Wikimedia Foundation Inc.

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

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. Ultimately, it was a failure in that it only produced 30 articles over the two-year lifetime of the project, at which point Wales dismissed Sanger in February 2002.

Sometime in 2000, Jeremy Rosenfeld was the first person to privately mention to Wales the idea to make the encyclopedia wiki-based, but Rosenfeld then took no further action. Wales failed to act promptly on this new idea. Sanger independently conceived of this idea on January 10 2001 and immediately declared his conception publicly. Wales started to set up a wiki on January 15, 2001 but then he delegated the actual development of the encyclopedia back to Sanger. Sanger later coined the name "Misplaced Pages" for the project.

When first operational, Misplaced Pages was intended for collaboration on early encyclopedic content for submission to Nupedia for peer review. Misplaced Pages growth rate was rapid and soon dwarfed Nupedia and by avoiding the rate-controlling step of peer review, article count grew exponentially.

After being dismissed, Sanger, posted a resignation on his Misplaced Pages user page to his now unpaid role within Misplaced Pages. He had no official title; he was merely saying goodbye. Wales has claimed that he is "perhaps anti-credentialist." He added: "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." Wales does care if the person has been banned by himself, his appointed Arbitration Committee or blocked by the Foundation volunteer "administrators".

While Wales was CEO of Bomis, the company had donated over US$100,000 (primarily through salaries and providing free Internet access) to Nupedia and Misplaced Pages. In mid-2003, Wales moved to St. Petersburg, Florida and set up the Wikimedia Foundation Inc. to support Misplaced Pages and its newer sibling or "sister" projects. For the Board of this new orgnaization, he appointed himself, Davis and Shell onto its Board, and he assinged two additional seats for elected community representatives. Finances between Bomis and the Foundation were separate.

By 2004, Wales had spent around US$500,000 on the establishment and operation of the Foundation. Wales has since claimed that this was a substantial fraction of his net worth. By the end of its February 2005 fund drive, the 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 Foundation 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.

Inspired by the success of Misplaced Pages, Wales has founded the for-profit company Wikia, Inc., which hosts various wikis and manages the Wikia project. It is financially and legal separate from the Foudnation.

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."

In a December 2005 appeal for donations to the Foundation, Wales explained his motivation for his Misplaced Pages work by saying "I'm doing this for the child in Africa." In response to critics who pointed out that these motivations were inconsistent with Wales' Objectivist worldview (see "Philosophical and political views" section in this article), he replied, "Do we have a source for me claiming that my 'Misplaced Pages activities do not serve a selfish end'? No, we do not. (…) For what is it worth, I think it is in my rational self-interest to care about what happens to kids in Africa, and far from being destructive of my self-interest, it is beneficial to my self-interest."

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.

Seigenthaler controversy

In late 2005, Wales chose to edit his own Misplaced Pages biography, removing references to Sanger and to the Bomis soft-core pictures. A minor controversy arose and Wales has avoided Misplaced Pages autobiography by his own hand since. This controversy was soon overshadowed by the John Seigenthaler Sr. Misplaced Pages biography controversy, in which Wales made serveral public appearances with the semi-retired journalist.

Philosophical and political views

Wales has been a passionate adherent of the Objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand. David Kelley has participated in a Objectivist Usenet group that Wales moderated. Wales has labeled himself a libertarian, qualifying his remark by referring to the Libertarian Party as "lunatics". From 1992 to 1996, he ran the electronic mailing list "Moderated Discussion of Objectivist Philosophy," and in 2002, he began moderating Atlantis, an Objectivism-related mailing list on the Objectivist community site We the Living.

Other activities

Wales was appointed a fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School in 2005. On October 3, 2005 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.

Wales lives in St. Petersburg, Florida with his wife Christine and their daughter.

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.