Jimmy Donal “Jimbo” Wales is an American Internet entrepreneur. He is known as a co-founder of the online non-profit encyclopedia Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia with exclusively free content and no ads (though donations are accepted), based on open collaboration through a model of content editing using web-based applications such as web browsers, called wiki.
Early life and education
Jimmy Donal “Jimbo” Wales was born shortly before midnight on 7th of August 1966, in Huntsville, Alabama. However, his birth certificate records for his birthdate as August 8. Wales’ father, Jimmy, served as a grocery store manager, while his mother, Doris Ann (née Dudley), and grandmother, Erma, ran a small private school, the House of Learning, in the tradition of the one-room schoolhouse, where Wales earned his early education, along with his three siblings. Wales enjoyed reading when he was a child.
After 8th grade, Wales attended Randolph School, a university-preparatory school in Huntsville, graduating at sixteen. Wales received his bachelor’s degree in finance from Auburn University in 1986. Wales began his Auburn education when he was 16 years old. Wales then entered the Ph.D. finance program at the University of Alabama before leaving with a master’s degree to enter at Indiana University the Ph.D. finance program.
Career
In 1994, Wales got a job with Chicago Options Associates, a futures and options trading firm in Chicago, Illinois. Wales has portrayed himself as having been addicted from an early stage to the Internet and during his leisure time, he would write computer code.
Inspired by the exceptionally successful first public offering of Netscape in 1995, and having gathered capital through speculating on interest-rate and foreign-currency fluctuations, Wales decided to become an Internet entrepreneur and depart the realm of financial trading. In 1996, Wales and two associates established Bomis, a web portal featuring user-generated webrings and, for a time, erotic photographs. Bomis has a market similar to that of Maxim magazine; unfortunately, the venture did not conclusively turn out to be successful.
Though Bomis had at the time fought to make money, it gave Wales with the funding to continue his greater passion, an online encyclopedia. While leading an online discussion group in the early 1990s, dedicated to the philosophy of Objectivism Wales had encountered a skeptic of the philosophy named Larry Sanger. The two had engaged in a thorough debate on the subject on Wales’s list and then on Sanger’s, eventually reaching offline to extend the debate and becoming friends. Years later, after deciding to continue his encyclopedia project and seeking a credentialed academic to manage it, Wales hired Sanger, who at that time was a doctoral student in philosophy at Ohio State University, to be its editor-in-chief, and in March 2000, Nupedia (the free encyclopedia), a peer-reviewed, open-content encyclopedia, was started. The objective was to have expert-written entries on a variety of topics and market advertising alongside the entries to earn a profit. The project was distinguished by a thorough peer-review process produced to make its articles of a quality equivalent to that of known encyclopedias.
Wikipedia
Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger began Wikipedia on January 15, 2001. Sanger invented its name, as a portmanteau of the wiki, the Hawai’ian Sanger saw Wikipedia as a tool to support Nupedia development. Wales worried that, at worst, it might provide complete rubbish. To the astonishment of the two founders, a few days since they started, the number of articles on Wikipedia had surpassed that of Nupedia, and a small organization of editors had begun. It was Wales, along with few others, who came up with a comprehensive concept of an open-source, collaborative encyclopedia that would allow contributions from other people. Initially, neither Wales nor Sanger understood what to anticipate from the Wikipedia initiative. Several of the initial contributors to the site were familiar with the model of the free culture movement, and, like Wales, many of them sympathized with the open-source movement.
Sanger developed Wikipedia in its initial phase and supervised the project. Sanger developed and managed on both the Wikipedia and Nupedia projects until Bomis stopped funding for his position in February 2002; Sanger resigned as Nupedia’s editor-in-chief and as Wikipedia’s chief organizer on March 1 of that year. Early on, Bomis provided the financial support for Wikipedia and entertained the idea of placing ads on Wikipedia before they reduced the cost with Sanger’s departure and plans for a non-profit foundation were advanced instead.
Initially, an English-language encyclopedia immediately developed a version in different languages. With 5,853,473 articles, the English Wikipedia is the largest of the more than 290 Wikipedia encyclopedias.
Overall, Wikipedia contains articles more than 40 million in 301 various languages, and by February 2014, it had nearly 500 million unique visitors monthly and reached 18 billion page views.
Personal life
Jimmy Wales has been wedded three times. At the age of twenty, Wales married his first wife, Pamela Green, a co-worker at a grocery store in Alabama. The two divorced in 1993. Wales met his second wife, Christine Rohan, through a Chicago friend while she was working as a steel trader for Mitsubishi. The two were married in Monroe County, Florida in March 1997, and had a daughter before parting ways in 2008. Wales transferred to San Diego in 1998, and after becoming disillusioned with the housing market there, relocated to St. Petersburg, Florida in 2002.
On October 6, 2012, Wales married Kate Garvey at Wesley’s Chapel in London. Garvey was Tony Blair’s former diary secretary, whom Wales met in Davos, Switzerland. Wales has three daughters, one with Rohan and two with Garvey.