Jimmy Wales – Wikimedia Foundation
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Jimmy Wales
Trustee,
Board of Trustees
Profile on Meta-Wiki
Posts by Jimmy Wales
Jimmy Wales
is an Internet
entrepreneur
and
wiki
enthusiast, and founder of the Wikipedia project.
Jimmy was born in
Huntsville
Alabama
in 1966, and is a graduate of
Auburn University
and the
University of Alabama
. He worked as Research Director at Chicago Options Associates, a futures and options trading firm then located in
Chicago
. In the mid-
1990s
he started
Bomis
, a search portal focusing on aspects of
pop culture
, one of the first users of the freely licensed data of the
Open Directory Project
In 1999, Jimmy had the concept of a freely distributable encyclopedia and founded
Nupedia
, by hiring philosopher Larry Sanger as editor-in-chief and assigning two programmers to write software for it. Nupedia failed, perhaps due to being a top-down cathedral model, as opposed to Wikipedia, which is the ultimate bazaar. After two years of working with the Nupedia concept, that team opened Wikipedia to help channel content into Nupedia; Wikipedia became an instant success, but not in the envisioned way, and Nupedia was shut down. In 2003, Jimmy set up the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization, to support Wikipedia and its sister projects.
In 2004, Jimmy founded
Wikia
. He was appointed a fellow of Harvard Law School’s
Berkman Center for Internet and Society
in mid-2005, and in October of 2005 joined the Board of Directors of
Socialtext
, a provider of wiki technology to businesses.
Profiles —
Profiles
Other members of Board of Trustees
Raju Narisetti
Trustee, Board of Trustees
Recent posts by Jimmy Wales
View all
Celebrating the people who go above and beyond to build free knowledge: Meet our 2020 Wikimedian of the Year
Community
When I first created Wikipedia back in 2001, the internet was a very different place. Only seven percent of people worldwide had a broadband connection, and more people spent time building personal websites than getting their news online. I knew what I wanted to create: a free encyclopedia, written by volunteers, for everyone in the….
15 October 2020
By
Jimmy Wales
Photo credits
Bothrops bilineatus PN Carrasco
File provided by Wikimedia Commons
Edunavia1
CC BY-SA 4.0
Open the Knowledge Journalism Awards - Exteded
ICFJ
Wikipedia 25 - Birthday blog header
Wikimedia Foundation
CC BY-SA 4.0
Jimmy Wales - August 2019
File provided by Wikimedia Commons
Zachary McCune / Wikimedia Foundation
CC BY-SA 4.0
Sandister Tei, the 2020 Wikimedian of the Year
Wikimedia Foundation
CC BY-SA 4.0