Jimmy Wales

Jimmy Wales is the cofounder of Wikipedia. Other companies he has founded include Bomis, Nupedia, Fandom (formerly Wikia), the Wikimedia Foundation, WikiTribune, and WT.Social.

Jimmy Donal Wales was born in Huntsville, Alabama late at night on August 7, 1966. This led to a mixup with the date on his birth certificate, which was mistakenly marked as August 8. His parents are Jimmy Wales and Doris Ann Dudley Wales, who worked as a grocer and an educator, respectively. His mother and grandmother owned a very small private school, and Jimmy was one of the five total children in his grade. His mother was his teacher most of the time. The school's education model was based on the Montessori method.

Wales enjoyed reading encyclopedias as a child but found it aggravating that they were missing so many topics, especially when it came to current events. He routinely updated his encyclopedias with the updated information stickers sent out by the World Book.

Wales spent his high school years at the Randolph School. He graduated at age sixteen, then attended Auburn University where he graduated in 1986 with a bachelor's degree in finance. He then enrolled in the PhD finance program at the University of Alabama and earned a master's degree. After that, he took several classes in the PhD finance program at Indiana University; however, he never wrote his doctoral dissertation required to earn a PhD. In 2006, Wales was awarded an honorary doctorate degree from Knox College.

Before founding his many companies, Wales worked in financial services as a futures and options trader at Chicago Options Associates from 1994 to 2000.

Wales, Tim Shell, and Michael Davis cofounded Bomis in 1996, a web portal and content aggregator. The name is an acronym for their phrase "bitter old men in suits," a nickname the founders gave themselves. Bomis began as a universal directory of web rings (lists of topically related websites.) While the site was originally intended to be a directory of all topics, its focus shifted to subjects like cars, sports, women, and adult content––traditionally male topics of interest, described as lad culture. Wales has since tried to distance himself from Bomis's history. There are several recorded instances of him editing information about the company on his own Wikipedia page. Editing one's own Wikipedia page is strongly discouraged among the Wikipedia community, due to concerns of biased content.

Bomis funded the development of Wales's later companies, Nupedia and Wikipedia. Bomis shut down in 2007 after transferring its resources to the Wikimedia Foundation.

In 1999, Wales had the idea to create a free, open-source, collaborative web encyclopedia project. To assist in its development, he recruited his friend Larry Sanger, whom he had met from electronic mailing lists in the mid-1990s. Sanger was given a large amount of freedom when it came to the development process. He resisted the idea of a totally unmanaged open encyclopedia, thinking that such a thing could never prove itself to be a credible resource. He proposed that the project be overseen by an advisory board made up of professional editors and peer reviewers. The advisory board would address matters regarding project policy, which the public would ideally have a say in. Nupedia was officially launched on March 9, 2000.

Nupedia's homepage.

Unlike Wikipedia––Nupedia's successor––Nupedia's content was of a more academic nature. Articles were written by scholars instead of by the public. Each article underwent a painstaking seven-step review process before its publication. Though the site functioned as a free and open-source encyclopedia, its article publication process was unlike the wiki model that its successor Wikipedia employed. Ward Cunningham, developer of the first wiki––WikiWikiWeb––stated that the essence of a wiki is an ongoing collaboration of information between any and all internet users through the use of a standard web browser. Its content does not remain stagnant and is not created by only experts and professionals. Rather, it represents a continuous collaborative effort between ordinary people across the world for the purpose of disseminating free information.

After eighteen months, only twenty articles had been published on Nupedia. The slow review process and the free online publication of the Encyclopedia Brittanica around the time of Nupedia's launch were big factors in Nupedia's eventual demise. Eventually, Sanger convinced Nupedia's advisory board to scale back the seven-step review process to a two-step process. He also thought of new ways to get the public community involved with the site, such as by allowing commenting and moderated editing on articles and making it easier for them to contribute articles. By the time the new system was approved, Wikipedia was close to being founded. This meant there was less time for programmers to work on Nupedia.

Wikipedia immediately proved itself more successful than Nupedia. Due to the availability of community edits, Wikipedia's published articles outnumbered Nupedia's by six times at the end of February 2001, about two months after its founding. As Wikipedia kept growing, Nupedia remained underdeveloped and was eventually shut down by 2003.

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. -Jimmy Wales

Nupedia's slow growth led Wales and Sanger to brainstorm a new site model that would allow for easier community edits. The idea of a wiki-based site came from a friend of Sanger, who mentioned WikiWikiWeb to him in the very beginning of January 2001. Sanger proposed the idea to Wales, and the two agreed to pursue it. Development was quick and required no hired programmers. On January 15, Wikipedia was launched. The first edit was made that evening by Sanger, who made an edit to the homepage that said "Hello, World!"

A recreation of Wales's first edit on Wikipedia.

Sanger began spending much of his time promoting Wikipedia and trying to attract contributors. Some of Wikipedia's first main contributors were from Nupedia. Wales and Sanger were not expecting the site to be popular, but by the end of the year, Wikipedia had over 15,000 entries made by 350 contributors. Writing guidelines were established, addressing the importance of neutrality and the need for facts to support claims.

Disagreements regarding Wikipedia's management were rife between Sanger and Wales. Sanger disliked that he didn't have greater control of the site, due to the model of community edits Wales wished to follow. Sanger's edits and page deletions led to a fight between him and the Wikipedia community, which in turn caused conflict between him and Wales. Due to financial issues, Bomis––Wikipedia's funder––was forced to lay off many of its employees, including Sanger. Laid off in February 2002 from both Nupedia and Wikipedia, Sanger remained as a volunteer contributor to both sites until March when he resigned. He resumed his contributions to Wikipedia in September but permanently left in January 2003 due to the same editing conflicts.

Since his leaving, Wales has continuously claimed himself to be the sole founder of Wikipedia by omitting mentions of Sanger or outright denying the fact when discussing the company. According to Sanger, Wales first began doing this publicly in 2004. He allegedly took credit for developments Sanger made to the site and said that Sanger was opposed to changes that he was actually not. Some of the changes Wales made on his own Wikipedia page included editing out Sanger's name in the discussion of Wikipedia's founding. Since 2009, the Wikipedia pages of Sanger, Wales, and Wikipedia have detailed both founders (as well as the ensuing controversy over the issue.) However, Wales's own website continues to omit Sanger in the story of Wikipedia's founding, and he refers to himself as the founder and not cofounder.

In 2003, Wales transferred the ownership of Wikipedia to the Wikimedia Foundation.

The nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation was founded by Wales in 2002 in St. Petersburg, Florida. The foundation oversees Wikipedia's operations, finances, and set policies. Wales has served on the foundation's board since its founding and as chair of the board from 2003 to 2006. Wikimedia's stated mission is "to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally."

In 2008, Wales was accused of misusing foundation funds for personal expenditures. He also failed to provide receipts for many of his expenses. At one point, the missing receipts totaled $30,000. His company credit card was soon revoked (though he denied this) and he was ordered to repay the owed money. The claims of misused funds were denied by Wales and Wikimedia's executive director, Sue Gardner.

In October 2004, Wales and Angela Beesley Starling, a Wikimedia Foundation board member, founded Wikicities. Wikicities was a collection of wiki communities intended to develop free content with the MediaWiki software. In March 2006, Wikicities rebranded to Wikia. Over 1,500 wiki communities were posted by September.

In January 2016, Wikia launched Fandom, a wiki site for media content such as video games, movies, and television shows. In October of that year, wikia.com became known as Fandom powered by Wikia, with Wikia, Inc. remaining the site's parent company. The wikia.com domain was changed to fandom.com in early 2019.

WikiTribune was founded in April 2017 as a news platform dedicated to fighting fake news. Wales described it as “news by the people and for the people.” Content was created through a combination of journalists paid by WikiTribune and volunteer contributors. All twelve of WikiTribune's hired editorial staff were let go in October 2018. Wales stated this was because of the perceived notion that the journalists were "above" the public community. Along with the layoff, Wales introduced new site changes that made it easier for members of the community to write and edit pages without being green-lit by journalists first. In November 2019, WikiTribune was relaunched as WT.Social, a social network and news site.

WT.Social was launched in November 2019 with the intention of becoming a mainstream alternative to popular social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. Unlike those websites, WT.Social offered more user privacy by not using advertisements. Similar to Reddit, WT.Social is separated by SubWikis, which are internet forum boards on various subjects.

Wales has received many awards recognizing his contributions and achievements in the world of knowledge. In 2006, he was honored with the Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which honors "leaders on the electronic frontier" who use information technology to extend the freedom and innovation of computer-based communications. He received a President's Medal in September 2017 at the British Academy's Prizes & Medals ceremony. He received it for "facilitating the spread of information through his work creating and developing Wikipedia, the world's largest free online encyclopedia."

Wales won the Dan David Award in 2015. The award is given annually to three people who have made exceptional contributions to the fields of sciences, arts, and humanities. The prize is $1 million for each awardee. He received the UNESCO Niels Bohr Medal in 2013 for having made outstanding and influential contributions to the world through Wikipedia.

Wales has been married three times. His most recent and current marriage was to Kate Garvey, former secretary of British Prime Minister Tony Blair. They married in 2012 and have two daughters together. The family resides in London. Wales was officially granted British citizenship in 2019.

Wales is a fan of author Ayn Rand, who wrote the well-known books Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. She has become a popular symbol of the Libertarian movement, although she never identified herself as such. Wales does not identify himself as a Libertarian either, nor a Democrat or Republican. The political issues that concern him the most are freedom, liberty, and human rights.