Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales (born August 7, 1966) is an Internet entrepreneur and a wiki enthusiast, best known as the co-founder of
Wikipedia.
Wales was born in Huntsville, Alabama, and is a graduate
of Auburn University and the University of Alabama. He successfully completed all the
coursework (but never wrote a dissertation) in two
different Ph.D programs in Finance at the University of Alabama and Indiana University. During that time, he taught
extensively at both universities.
Later, he worked as a professional futures and options trader in Chicago, and within
a few years made a fortune that left him independently wealthy. He co-authored an article published in a peer-reviewed journal
(Robert Brooks, Jon Corson and J. Donal Wales, "The Pricing of Index Options When the Underlying Assets All Follow a Lognormal
Diffusion", Advances in Futures and Options Research, Volume 7, 1994).
In the mid-1990s Wales started Bomis, a search
portal focusing on aspects of pop culture, which also sells original content,
including "adult content" [1] (http://babes.bomis.com/). By 2005 he was no longer CEO or president of Bomis.
With Larry Sanger, Wales in 2001
founded Wikipedia, a wiki-based online
encyclopedia derived from the free software model. He and Sanger had previously worked on the now-defunct Nupedia encyclopedia project. (Sanger did most of the development work, while Wales mainly provided the necessary
capital. Because Sanger was Wales' employee, Wales considers himself the sole founder of Wikipedia.)
Wales is currently the director of the Wikimedia Foundation, a Tampa-based non-profit organization that encompasses Wikipedia and its younger sister projects. Wales says he
spent around US$500,000 on the establishment and operations of his Wiki projects. He is known as Wikipedia's "benevolent dictator" or its "God-King." (Wired magazine wryly
noted that "The God-King drives a Hyundai" when they profiled him in March
2005.) Despite the creation of the Wikimedia Foundation, Wales retained the ultimate control by appointing, in addition to
himself, two business partners who are not active Wikipedia editors to the five-member board, thus effectively having a
controlling three-vote majority.
More recently, Wales founded Wikia, which runs Wikiasari, a wiki-style search engine, and Wikicities,
a for-profit wiki hosting service.
Wales admires the Objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand, and while in graduate school owned and moderated an Internet mailing list known as the "Moderated Discussion of
Objectivist Philosophy." He also takes a strong interest in firearms policy and legal issues, especially constitutional issues.
Wales lives in St. Petersburg, Florida, with his wife Christine and daughter Kira.
References
- Pink, Daniel H. "The Book Stops Here." Wired. March 3, 2005. [2] (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.03/wiki.html?pg=3&topic=wiki&topic_set=)
External links
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