Talk:Jimmy Wales/draft

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Jimmy Wales
BornAugust 1966
Occupation(s)President of Wikia, Inc.; board member and former chair of the Wikimedia Foundation

Jimmy "Jimbo" Donal Wales (born August 1966)[1] 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 — as well as the "God-King" within the Wikipedia community —Time listed Wales in 2006 as one of the world's most influential people.[2]

Early life and education

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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Encyclopedia.[3] The publisher would send out updates every so often, with stickers that could be placed next to the outdated entries.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."[4]

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."[4]

He received his bachelor's in finance from Auburn University in 1989,[5] 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.[6] 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.[7] Wales has written that no one can understand his ideas about Wikipedia without understanding Hayek.[8]

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.[3][4]

Development of his ideas

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Chicago Options Associates

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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 — she was selling steel for a Japanese steel company — and they married in 1998.[3] 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.[5]

Ayn Rand discussion group

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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.[9] 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.[6]

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.[10] Alan Deutschman writes that this passion for Rand is one of the mysteries behind the rise of Wales and the creation of Wikipedia:


Wales has said that he is not a libertarian — he has called the American Libertarian Party "lunatics," and aligns himself instead with "people who vote Republican but worry about right-wingers,"[8] 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.[10] 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 — where he allowed Chinese contributors to decide themselves how to handle the situation — illustrates his dislike of central governance.[8] Wales told Brian Lamb:


Bomis

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Tim Shell set up Bomis with Wales in 1996. Shell later joined the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation.

In 1996, Wales moved to San Diego, and together with a partner, Tim Shell, created Bomis.[11] The company maintained a website featuring user generated webrings — sets of sites related by topic and linked together to make finding material easier.[12] 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,"[6] or as Wales has called it, "a guy-oriented search engine."[3] 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.[13]

Nupedia

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File:P1030255.jpg
Wales speaking at Wikimania 2007

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.[5] 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.[14]

The project was launched in March 2000 with the words:


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.[16] 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.[17]

Wikipedia

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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.[18] 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.[19][20] 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.[21]

In mid-2003, Wales set up the Wikimedia Foundation,[22] a non-profit organization[23] 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.[24] 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."[25]

Wikia

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Wales would later co-found, with Angela Beesley, the for-profit company Wikia, Inc. in 2004.[18] Wikia is a wiki farm, in that it is a collection of different individual wikis on different subjects, all hosted on the same website.[26]

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."[10]

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."</ref> 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."[27]

Another wiki service offered at Wikia is Academic Publishing Wiki.

Honors and awards

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Notes

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  1. ^ Rogoway, M. "Wikipedia & its founder disagree on his birth date", Silicon Forest, (The Oregonian), July 27, 2007, retrieved August 8, 2007.
  2. ^
  3. ^ a b c d e Lamb, Brian. "Q&A Jimmy Wales", C-Span, September 25, 2005, retrieved July 11, 2006
  4. ^ a b c Brown, David. "Alumni profiles: Jimmy Wales '83", Randolph School, December 11, 2007, retrieved December 18, 2007.
  5. ^ a b c Pink, Daniel H. "The Book Stops Here", Wired, March 2005.
  6. ^ a b c Poe, Marshall. "The Hive", The Atlantic Monthly, September 2006, retrieved January 18, 2008.
  7. ^ Hayek, Friedrich. "The Use of Knowledge in Society", The American Economic Review, XXXV, No. 4; September, 1945, pp. 519-30, courtesy of The Library of Economics and Liberty.
  8. ^ a b c Mangu-Ward, Katherine. "Wikipedia and beyond: Jimmy Wales' sprawling vision", Reason, volume 39, issue 2, June 2007, retrieved January 18, 2008.
  9. ^ Wales, Jimmy. "Objectivism of Ayn Rand", Indiana University, September 23, 1992, retrieved January 18, 2008. Wales indicates in his invitation that the list started in September 1992, although he wrote in February 1993 that it had been operating for over two years. Marshall Poe and the Encyclopaedia Britannica write that Wales started the list in 1989. The confusion may arise from there having been more than one list; Wales wrote in April 1993 that he was involved in three such lists (Wales, Jimmy. Post from alt.philosophy.objectivism, April 24, 1993). Also see Poe, Marshall. "The Hive", The Atlantic Monthly, September 2006, and "Jimmy Wales," Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2008, both retrieved January 18, 2008.
  10. ^ a b c d "Why Is This Man Smiling?", Fast Company, issue 114, April 2007, retrieved May 2, 2007.
  11. ^ "Tim Shell professional info", February 15, 2001, as indexed at Archive.org, retrieved January 20, 2008.
  12. ^ The whois shows the name was registered in 1996, but Katherine Mangu-Ward writes that Wales created the company in 1998 after moving to San Diego. See Mangu-Ward, Katherine. "Wikipedia and beyond: Jimmy Wales' sprawling vision", Reason, volume 39, issue 2, June 2007, retrieved January 18, 2008.
  13. ^ Mangu-Ward, Katherine. "Wikipedia and beyond: Jimmy Wales' sprawling vision", Reason, volume 39, issue 2, June 2007, retrieved January 18, 2008. Also see Hansen, Evan. "Wikipedia Founder Edits Own Bio", Wired, December 19, 2005, retrieved February 14, 2006.
  14. ^ Poe, Marshall. "The Hive", The Atlantic Monthly, September 2006, p. 3. Also see Sanger, Larry. "The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir, Part I", posted April 18, 2005.
  15. ^ Poe, Marshall. "The Hive", The Atlantic Monthly, September 2006, p. 3.
  16. ^ Gouthro, Liane. "Building the world's biggest encyclopedia", PC World, March 14, 2000, retrieved November 25, 2007.
  17. ^ Moody, Glyn. "This time, it'll be a Wikipedia written by experts", The Guardian, July 13, 2006.
  18. ^ a b McNichol, Tom (2007-03-01). "Building a Wiki World". Business 2.0. CNN. Retrieved 2007-03-10. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  19. ^ My resignation—Larry Sanger 2002-03-01. Retrieved on 2006-10-19.
  20. ^ Wikipedia's co-founder eyes a Digital Universe 2006-01-06.
  21. ^ In Search of an Online Utopia. msnbc.msn, 2007-02-01. Retrieved on 2008-01-15.
  22. ^ Wikimedia foundation bylaws. Wikimedia. Retrieved on 2008-01-15.
  23. ^ "Open media to connect communities", BBC News, 2005-11-05. Retrieved on 2007-01-15.
  24. ^ Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees. Wikimedia. Retrieved on 2007-01-15.
  25. ^ Wales, Jimmy (2004-07-28). ""Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales Replies"". Slashdot. Retrieved 2006-06-07. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  26. ^ Wikia. Main Page, 2007-05-12. Retrieved on 2008-01-15.
  27. ^ Lewine, Edward (2007-11-18). "The Encyclopedist's Lair". The New York Times Magazine. Retrieved 2007-11-23. Greatest misconception about Wikipedia: We aren't democratic. Our readers edit the entries, but we're actually quite snobby. The core community appreciates when someone is knowledgeable, and thinks some people are idiots and shouldn't be writing.
  28. ^ "Creative Commons Adds Two New Board Members", Creative Commons, March 30, 2006, retrieved January 15, 2008.
  29. ^ Anderson, Chris. "Jimmy Wales: The (Proud) Amateur Who Created Wikipedia", Time, April 30, 2006, retrieved May 8, 2006.
  30. ^ "EFF Honors Craigslist, Gigi Sohn, and Jimmy Wales with Pioneer Awards", Kansas City infoZine News, April 28, 2006, retrieved June 5, 2006.
  31. ^ Ewalt, David M. "The Web Celeb 25", January 23, 2007, retrieved April 23, 2007.

Further reading

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