   #copyright

Jimmy Wales

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Computing People

   CAPTION: Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales

   Jimmy Wales (August 2006)
      Born:    August 7, 1966
               Huntsville, Alabama, USA
   Occupation: President of Wikia, Inc.; Board member and Chairman
               Emeritus of the Wikimedia Foundation
     Spouse:   Christine
    Children:  1
    Website:   User page on Wikipedia

   Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales (born August 7, 1966 in Huntsville, Alabama)
   is the co-founder, board member and Chairman Emeritus of the Board of
   Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit corporation that
   operates the Wikipedia project, 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" 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.

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." 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. 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.

Career

   Jimmy Wales speaking at FOSDEM 2005
   Enlarge
   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. 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.

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. 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." Wales is no longer actively involved in
   the company.

   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.

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
   Enlarge
   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

   Using a wiki to create an encyclopedia was publicly proposed by Larry
   Sanger on January 10, 2001, and Wales worked on setting one up,
   starting it on January 15, 2001. 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. Sanger resigned from the project in 2002.
   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
   Enlarge
   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. 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.

   According to Daniel H. Pink from Wired magazine, by 2004, Wales had
   spent around US$500,000 on the establishment and operation of his Wiki
   projects, most of it his own funds. By the end of its February 2005
   fund drive, the Wikimedia 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 Wikimedia functions, such as "Wikimeets" and Wikimania.

   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."

   In late 2005, Wales was criticised for editing his own biography in a
   way some characterized as "revisionist history." In particular, Rogers
   Cadenhead drew attention to logs showing that Mr. Wales had removed
   references to Sanger as the co-founder of Wikipedia. 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.

   In both cases, Wales argued that his modifications were solely intended
   to improve the accuracy of the content. Wales explained that Sanger had
   been his employee, 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. However, Sanger
   strongly contests that description. He was identified as a co-founder
   of Wikipedia at least as early as September 2001 and referred to
   himself that way as early as January 2002.

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

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. 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.

Honours

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

   He was appointed a fellow of the Berkman Centre for Internet and
   Society at Harvard Law School in 2005. On October 3, 2005, according to
   a press release, 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 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.

Trivia

     * Wales appeared in the "Not My Job" segment of the November 4, 2006,
       episode 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 got none of the three questions right.

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.

   Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Wales"
   This reference article is mainly selected from the English Wikipedia
   with only minor checks and changes (see www.wikipedia.org for details
   of authors and sources) and is available under the GNU Free
   Documentation License. See also our Disclaimer.
