Jimmy Wales

2008/9 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Computing People

Jimmy Wales
Jimmy Wales in 2005
Born	Jimmy Donal Wales August 7, 1966 (1966-08-07) Huntsville, Alabama, U.S.A.
Nationality	United States
Other names	Jimbo
Occupation	President of Wikia, Inc.; Board member and Chair Emeritus of the Wikimedia Foundation
Spouse	Christine
Children	Kira
Website blog.jimmywales.com

Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales (born August 7, 1966) is an American Internet entrepreneur. From 1994 to 2000, he worked as a research director at Chicago Options Associates. During this time, he founded the adult webportal Bomis. Since 2000, he was involved in several wiki-related initiatives. He co-founded the free online encyclopedia Nupedia (2000) (which was renamed to Wikipedia in 2001), the charitable Wikimedia Foundation (2003), and the free web hosting service Wikia (2004). He had a public disagreement with Larry Sanger over both their roles in the foundation of Wikipedia.

Jimmy Wales is a self-described libertarian and Objectivist. Time listed him as one of the most influential thinkers in 2006.

Early life

Jimmy Donal Wales was born on August 7, 1966 in Huntsville, Alabama in the United States.

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 early education. He and only four other children were placed in the same grade, so the school grouped together the first through fourth grade students and the fifth through eighth grade students. After eighth grade, Wales attended Randolph School, a university-preparatory school in Huntsville, Alabama. 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. 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

Chicago Options Associates and Bomis

From 1994 to 2000, Wales served as research director at Chicago Options Associates, a futures and options trading firm in Chicago. By "speculating 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. During this time one of the projects Wales undertook was the creation of the web portal Bomis, a website featuring user generated content that linked to adult content on the Internet and which The Atlantic Monthly called the "Playboy of the Internet." Bomis also provided the initial funding for the Nupedia project.

Wales 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 that of " Maxim" magazine's scantily clad women. In a phone interview with Wired News, he also explained that he disputed the categorization of Bomis content as "soft-core pornography" saying, "If R-rated movies are soft porn, it was porn. In other words, no, it was not. That description is inaccurate."

Wikia

Wales would later co-found, with Angela Beesley, the for-profit company Wikia, Inc. in 2004. Wikia is a wiki farm, in that it is a collection of different individual wikis on different subjects, all hosted on the same website.

Another service offered by Wikia is an open source web search engine named Wikia Search with which Wales meant to challenge Google and introduce transparency and public dialogue about how it's created into the search engine's operations, adding "I trust Google reasonably well, but that's like saying you have a favorite politician. I trust this politician, but I still want the city council to meet publicly. I still want a certain transparency in how government is run, even if you trust the person who's in charge now." According to Wales, "It is meant to take on Google by creating a search engine where all the editorial decisions are made by the general public and all the software is open."

Another wiki service offered at Wikia is Academic Publishing Wiki.

Honours and awards

• Mid- 2005 – Wales is appointed as a member of the Berkman Centre for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.
• October 3, 2005 – According to a press release, Wales joins the Board of Directors of Socialtext, a provider of wiki technology to businesses.
• 2006 – Wales joins the Board of Directors of the non-profit organization Creative Commons.
• May 8, 2006 – Wales is 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.
• June 3, 2006 – Wales receives an honorary degree from Knox College.
• May 3, 2006 – The Electronic Frontier Foundation awards him a Pioneer Award.
• October 6, 2006 – Wales appears on PBS' Charlie Rose. and was nominated for Beard of the Year 2006.
• January 23, 2007 – Forbes magazine ranks Wales twelfth in its first annual "The Web Celebs 25".
• April 2, 2007 – Wales is featured in the April 2, 2007 issue of Time magazine in the article "10 Questions: Jimmy Wales". He answers ten questions culled from Time's readership. His is the second interview to consist of reader questions (the first being Chris Rock). Previously, the questions had been composed by a Time staff member. In his replies, he acknowledges the limitations of Wikipedia, while defending its usefulness.
• April 26, 2007 – Wales has a run-in with The Chaser, an Australian satire group. He is used in the first occurrence of the "Mr. Ten Questions" segment in Season 2 of The Chaser's War on Everything, in which a "reporter" (a.k.a. Andrew Hansen) asks the victim ten questions of variable relevance without pausing for a response until all questions are asked. Wales manages to score a 4 out of 10; however, some of the answers did not seem to match the questions being asked. Hansen also states that he edited Wales' page to state that he was a teenage drug lord from Malaysia. This change has since been reverted.

Roles of Wikipedia creators

Wales has publicly disagreed with Sanger's role in the founding of Wikipedia. Wales continues to assert that he is the sole founder of Wikipedia, which he bases on the specific fact that Sanger was his employee. In 2006, Wales told The Boston Globe that "it's preposterous" to call Sanger the co-founder; however, Sanger 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. In addition to developing Wikipedia in its early phase and guiding the project, Sanger is also responsible for the idea of applying the wiki concept to the building of a free encyclopedia. It is undisputed that he also coined the name of the project. He nevertheless ascribed the broader idea to Wales: "To be clear, the idea of an open source, collaborative encyclopedia, open to contribution by ordinary people, was entirely Jimmy's, not mine, and the funding was entirely by Bomis. (…) The actual development of this encyclopedia was the task he gave me to work on." In response to Wales' revisionism, Sanger posted on his personal webpage a collection of evidence about his role in founding Wikipedia by referencing earlier versions of Wikipedia pages, citing Wikipedia press releases, and linking to early media coverage, all of which described Wales and Sanger as the co-founders. In a discussion with Brian Bergstein of the Associated Press, Wales said: "When you write this up please do not uncritically repeat Sanger's absurd claim to be the co-founder of Wikipedia." He added: "I am not bent out of shape about it. The facts are on my side, which is why I bother so little about it." Wales' role in the Wikipedia community has been described as "benevolent dictator for life".

Wikipedia biography

In late 2005, Wales edited his own biography page on Wikipedia. In this regard, Rogers Cadenhead drew attention to logs showing that Wales had references to Sanger as the co-founder of Wikipedia. Sanger, who is widely acknowledged as Wikipedia's co-founder, commented that "having seen edits like this, it does seem that Jimmy is attempting to rewrite history. But this is a futile process because in our brave new world of transparent activity and maximum communication, the truth will be out." Wales 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. An article in the July 31, 2006 issue of The New Yorker magazine expanded on this topic:

"Even Wales has been caught airbrushing his Wikipedia entry—eighteen times in the past year. He is particularly sensitive about references to the porn traffic on his Web portal. 'Adult content' or 'glamour photography' are the terms that he prefers, though, as one user pointed out on the site, they are perhaps not the most precise way to describe lesbian strip-poker threesomes. (In January, Wales agreed to a compromise: ' erotic photography.')"

In both cases, Wales argued that his modifications were solely intended to improve the accuracy of the content. He apologized for editing his own biography, which is a practice generally frowned upon at Wikipedia. Wales said in the Wired interview, "People should not do it, including me. I wish I had not done it."

Wales had previously edited his entries on Wikipedia and on the Wikimedia Foundation's website in 2004 to indicate his date of birth is August 7, 1966. He also made a statement in 2006 in which he wrote in part: "My date of birth is not August 8, 1966." The Encyclopædia Britannica, Current Biography, and Who’s Who in America support these statements. According to a researcher’s note on the Britannica’s website in June 2007, Wales contacted Britannica claiming that the date of August 7, 1966 was incorrect but was unwilling to provide them with a documented alternative. On July 27, 2007, when asked by Oregonian reporter Mike Rogoway when his birthday was Wales is reported to have mysteriously stated, "Nobody knows." Moreover, on his blog Rogoway claims that a Florida public records search shows that Wales’ drivers license lists his date of birth as August 8, 1966. In August 2007, Wales expanded on this in his Wikipedia talk page by stating, in part: "In any event, the quotes in the Oregonian are correct."

Personal philosophy

Wales is a self-avowed " Objectivist to the core", to the extent of having named his daughter Kira after the heroine in Ayn Rand's We the Living, although he says, "I think I do a better job — than a lot of people who self-identify as Objectivists — of not pushing my point of view on other people." When asked by Brian Lamb in his appearance on C-SPAN's Q&A about Rand, Wales cited "the virtue of independence" as important to him personally. When asked if he could trace "the Ayn Rand connection" to having a political philosophy at the time of the interview, Wales reluctantly labeled himself a libertarian, qualifying his remark by referring to the Libertarian Party as "lunatics" and citing "freedom, liberty, basically individual rights, that idea of dealing with other people in a matter that is not initiating force against them" as his guiding principles. From 1992 to 1996, he ran the electronic mailing list "Moderated Discussion of Objectivist Philosophy." An interview with Wales served as the cover feature of the June 2007 issue of the libertarian magazine Reason.

Wales is credited with operating his business frugally as well as living frugally, as noted by his choice of driving a Hyundai instead of a Ferrari, which he previously drove. He attempts to use his mobile phone in Europe sparingly because of the high rates charged.

On December 6, 2007, Wales, while at the Online Information conference in London's Olympia, stated that teachers who prohibit students from citing Wikipedia are "bad educators". Wales reasoned that new editing and checking procedures make Wikipedia more reliable.

Published work

• 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.