Talk:Jimmy Wales/draft

Jimmy "Jimbo" Donal Wales (born August 1966) is an American Internet entrepreneur, known to the public for his role in founding the free, open content encyclopedia, Wikipedia, in January 2001.

Wales is a member of the board of trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, and is co-founder of Wikia, a privately owned free web hosting service he set up with a former Wikimedia board member, Angela Beesley, in 2004.

Hailed as an Internet rock star and the prophet of peer production &mdash; as well as the "God-King" within the Wikipedia community &mdash;Time listed Wales in 2006 as one of the world's most influential people.

Early life and education
Wales was born in Huntsville, Alabama. His father managed a grocery store, while his mother, Doris, and his grandmother, Erma, ran a small private school called The House of Learning that he attended with his three siblings until he was in eighth grade. The philosophy of the school was influenced by Montessori, and Wales was given a lot of free time to follow his own curriculum. He told C-Span that, as a result, he would spend many hours pouring over the World Book Encyclopedia. The publisher would send out updates every so often, with stickers that could be placed next to the outdated entries. "I read it voraciously," he told an interviewer. "I really loved it."

In 1979, he moved on to Randolph School, a university-preparatory school, also in Huntsville, which he attended until 1983. The school's computer lab was built while he was there, and he learned how to program and use e-mail on an old PDP-11. It was expensive for his family, but, he said, "[e]ducation 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 in finance from Auburn University in 1989, then entered the Ph.D. program, also in finance, at the University of Alabama, leaving with a master's. Marshall Poe writes that it was at Alabama that Wales developed an interest in the Internet, playing fantasy games called MUDs, and seeing for himself the potential of networked computers to facilitate collaboration between large numbers of self-interested volunteers. The Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek wrote in a famous essay, "The Use of Knowledge in Society," in 1945 about the benefits of distributed knowledge, and how it arises out of the cooperation of individuals acting in their own interests. Wales has written that no one can understand his ideas about Wikipedia without understanding Hayek.

After Alabama, he moved to Indiana University to do his Ph.D. there instead, and taught for the faculty, but academic life bored him, and he left without completing the program.

Chicago Options Associates
From 1994 to 2000, Wales served as research director at Chicago Options Associates, a futures and options trading firm in Chicago, where he speculated on interest rates and foreign-currency fluctuations. He met his wife, Christine, during this period &mdash; she was selling steel for a Japanese steel company &mdash; and they married in 1998. Daniel Pink of Wired writes that Wales earned enough during those six years to support himself and his wife for the rest of their lives.

Ayn Rand discussion group
Marshall Poe writes that Wales was a frequent contributor to online philosophy discussion lists, and in 1992, he started his own, a list devoted to the study of Ayn Rand's Objectivism. It was here that Wales's hands-off moderation style first became apparent. He welcomed anyone to join the list, and moderated lightly, preferring, as Poe puts it, to let fools talk themselves out rather than confronting them.

Wales has called himself an "Objectivist to the core", even naming his daughter, Kira, after the heroine in Rand's first novel, We the Living. Alan Deutschman writes that this passion for Rand is one of the mysteries behind the rise of Wales and the creation of Wikipedia:

The biggest mystery may be how a former options trader and self-professed follower of objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand &mdash; a combative elitist who glorified the heroic, capitalistic individual and denigrated the envious, ignorant masses &mdash; became the guiding force behind a collectivist Web site that's often criticized for its "mob mentality."

Wales has said that he is not a libertarian &mdash; he has called the American Libertarian Party "lunatics," and aligns himself instead with "people who vote Republican but worry about right-wingers," but the issues he feels strongest about in politics certainly form the core of libertarian theory: "freedom, liberty, basically individual rights, that idea of dealing with other people in a matter that is not initiating force against them is critical to me. [D]ealing with people with reason rather than force is core." Alan Deutschman writes that Wales is a staunch defender of these ideas, offering as an example that he has never cooperated with China's efforts to censor Wikipedia, while Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft have all caved in. Katherine Mangu-Ward argues in Reason that, logistically, it would be next to impossible for Wikipedia to start removing objectionable content, but she agrees that Wales's hands-off approach to the China issue &mdash; where he allowed Chinese contributors to decide themselves how to handle the situation &mdash; illustrates his dislike of central governance. Wales told Brian Lamb:

[M]y mother and grandmother had this small private school and one of the most difficult things for them was dealing with the government who, you know, it was demonstrable that the kids at the school were often two grades ahead of the public schools. And we get kids who are failing in the public schools, they were a year behind and they would come for a couple of years and they would leave two years ahead. And even so there was constant interference and bureaucracy and very sort of snobby inspectors from the state who came out and didn‘t care for this, that and the other, and our books weren‘t new enough and things like this. And so that from a very early age I thought, you know, it‘s no simple answer to say the government is going to take care of something.

Bomis


In 1996, Wales moved to San Diego, and together with a partner, Tim Shell, created Bomis. The company maintained a website featuring user generated webrings &mdash; sets of sites related by topic and linked together to make finding material easier. Poe writes that Bomis users built hundreds of webrings on cars, computers, sports, and particularly on "babes," turning the site into what Poe calls the "Playboy of the Internet," or as Wales has called it, "a guy-oriented search engine." The aim was to make money from the sale of advertising.

Commentators have used the nature of Bomis to criticize Wales, reportedly calling him a "porn king," to which he responds by sending them links to Yahoo's midget porn category page.

Nupedia
In 2000, Wales decided to take advantage of the peer-to-peer ideas that people had started talking about, and set up Nupedia, a peer-reviewed, open-content encyclopedia, to be written by academic volunteers and financed by Bomis. Larry Sanger, a Ph.D. philosophy student Wales had met on the objectivism discussion list, was hired as the project's editor-in-chief. Poe writes that, with perfect timing, Sanger had sent Wales a business proposal for a cultural news blog just as Wales was looking for someone to run Nupedia. Sanger accepted the position and joined Wales in San Diego in early February 2000.

The project was launched in March 2000 with the words:

Suppose scholars the world over were to learn of a serious online encyclopedia effort in which the results were not proprietary to the encyclopedists, but were freely distributable under an open content license in virtually any desired medium. How quickly would the encyclopedia grow?

Nupedia was characterized by an extensive peer-review process designed to make its articles of a quality comparable to that of professional encyclopedias, and this became part of its problem. Articles were assigned, submitted, evaluated, and copy edited at a disappointingly slow rate, in part because no stage of the seven-step editing process could begin until the previous stage had been completed. Sanger has said that, by January 2001, barely two dozen articles had been completed.

Wikipedia
After Sanger publicly proposed on January 10, 2001 the idea of using a wiki to create an encyclopedia, Wales installed wiki software on a server and authorized Sanger to pursue the project under his supervision. Sanger dubbed the project "Wikipedia" and, with Wales, laid down the founding principles, content and established an Internet-based community of contributors during that year. Wikipedia was initially intended to be a wiki-based site for collaboration on early encyclopedic content for submission to Nupedia, but Wikipedia's rapid growth quickly overshadowed Nupedia's development. Sanger worked on and promoted both the Nupedia and Wikipedia projects until Bomis discontinued funding for his position in February 2002; Sanger resigned as editor-in-chief of Nupedia and as "chief organizer" of Wikipedia on March 1. Wales has said that he initially was so worried with the concept that he would wake up in the middle of the night, wanting to check the site for vandalism.

In mid-2003, Wales set up the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization based in St. Petersburg, Florida, to support Wikipedia and its younger sibling projects. The Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees consists of seven directors as of May 2007. In a 2004 interview with Slashdot, Wales explained his motivations about Wikipedia, "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."

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."

Wales revealed that Wikia, his for-profit Silicon Valley startup, was working on Search Wikia, which he touted as "the search engine that changes everything … Just as Wikipedia revolutionized how we think about knowledge and the encyclopedia, we have a chance now to revolutionize how we think about search." 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.

Honors and awards

 * Mid-2005 – Appointed as a member of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.
 * October 3, 2005 – Joined the board of directors of Socialtext, a provider of wiki technology to businesses.
 * 2006 – Joined the Board of Directors of the non-profit organization Creative Commons.
 * May 8, 2006 – Listed in the "Scientists & Thinkers" section of the special edition of Time listing Time's 100 most influential people.
 * June 3, 2006 – Received an honorary degree from Knox College.
 * May 3, 2006 – Awarded an Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award.
 * January 23, 2007 – Ranked twelfth in Forbes magazine's first annual "The Web Celebs 25".