Jimmy Wales - Encyclopedia of Alabama
Skip to content
Huntsville native Jimmy Wales (1966- ) is an entrepreneur who is best known as the major founder of
Wikipedia,
a groundbreaking open-forum online encyclopedia. He is also the president of Fandom (formerly Wikia), a wiki hosting service, and chair emeritus of the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit funding arm of Wikipedia. Wales is credited with transforming the way people share, use, and create information on the World Wide Web with his innovative concept of an encyclopedia created by a community of contributors and readers that is self-organized and self-governed. Wales has earned both criticism and praise for his project and was named one of the 100 Most Influential People by
Time
magazine in 2006.
Wikipedia
currently includes more than 50 million articles in more than 258 languages.
Jimmy Donal Wales was born in
Huntsville
Madison County
, on August 8, 1966, to Jimmy Wales, a grocer, and Doris Ann Dudley Wales, an educator who co-owned the private Montessori-based House of Learning Elementary School with her mother. Wales and his brother were educated at the school by their mother and grandmother. Wales credits his early exposure to the
Encyclopedia Britannica
and
World Book Encyclopedia
as well as the less structured teaching style of the school for his later entrepreneurial creativity.
Raised in Huntsville, a center of the
space industry
, Wales was instilled with the optimism that surrounded innovation and science at that time, greatly affecting his love of technology. Recognizing this early interest, Wales's parents enrolled him in 1979 in the Randolph School, a private college preparatory institution in south Huntsville that offered computer science courses, unlike typical public schools at the time. Wales entered
Auburn University
at the age of 16 and earned a bachelor's degree in finance in 1986; that same year he married Pamela Green. He then completed a master's degree in finance at the
University of Alabama
in 1988. While there, Wales became interested in the Internet through his participation in fantasy role-playing games, which contributed to his later views on non-hierarchical, group-created and run Internet entities. He then entered the doctoral program and also taught courses in finance at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. An avid follower of philosopher Ayn Rand, he founded and served as moderator of the Ayn Rand Philosophy Discussion List, an e-mail-based forum that was an early form of social media. Wales has often stated that he subscribes to Rand's philosophy of Objectivism, a worldview based on radical individualism, completely unregulated capitalism, and a belief in an objective reality that exists outside of human consciousness.
In 1992, Wales left Indiana University before completing his degree when he lost interest in graduate school. He moved to Chicago, Illinois, and became a futures and options trader. The following year, he divorced Green. In 1996, Wales decided to turn his personal interest in the Internet into a for-profit venture. He and business associates Tim Shell and Michael Davis co-founded a content aggregator and service provider that they named Bomis, a play on the phrase "bitter old men in suit," a name they used to refer to themselves. The site began as a web portal but quickly evolved into a website aimed at attracting men, largely promoting content about women, including pornography, as well as sports and business. Wales frequently has defended himself from critics for providing this type of service. In 1997, he married fellow trader Christine Rohan, with whom he had one daughter. The following year, the couple relocated to San Diego, California.
In 1999, Wales began exploring ways to create a user-built, free online encyclopedia and in 2000 hired Lawrence M. "Larry" Sanger, a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the Ohio State University and participant in Wales's Ayn Rand group, to oversee the process and serve as editor in chief. Wales chose the name
Nupedia
to reflect its goal to be unique among encyclopedias. Unlike its later incarnation
Wikipedia,
Nupedia
was modeled largely on the academic journal structure, at Sanger's prompting, and featured articles written by scholars that were peer reviewed and then edited by Sanger. The process was much slower than the men had hoped, and Wales was displeased with the lack of openness in the structure. A fortuitous lunch with a friend who worked on wiki software gave Sanger the idea for an additional open encyclopedia project based on the wiki model, which allows multiple users to access a site and add to, change, and manage its content, while keeping track of all the changes. This concept appealed to Wales, who had been schooled during his undergraduate and graduate career in free-market economics and the libertarian views of Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek. Wales and Sanger agreed to explore the wiki model as a way to create their encyclopedia.
Wikipedia Home Page
Wales and Sanger expected
Wikipedia
to be little more than an interesting side project to
Nupedia
when it launched on January 15, 2001, with funding from Bomis. By the end of that year, however, the site boasted more than 15,000 entries by some 350 contributors. The rapid expansion forced Wales and Sanger to establish ground rules to structure the wide-ranging entries and content and to determine what would and would not be considered appropriate, stressing neutrality and fact-based writing as the guiding principle. The addition of a discussion page for each article provided a forum for disagreements outside the confines of the entry itself. By the end of 2001, however, the open structure of
Wikipedia
had brought Sanger, with his greater need for structure, into conflict with some of the more vocal volunteer contributors and editors, who viewed themselves, with Wales's encouragement, as equal partners in the venture. As a result, Wales asked Sanger to leave, although he initially cited financial difficulties as the reason for the "downsizing." There is continuing dispute about who is the creator of
Wikipedia,
but Sanger generally is credited with bringing in the wiki concept and the name. Wales is most often given credit for the open and free concept behind
Wikipedia
and has been accused of erasing Sanger from the company's history. After leaving the project in 2002, Sanger founded
Citizendium,
a free online encyclopedia that aims to address concerns about
Wikipedia
's reliability by requiring authors to use their real names, forbidding instant editing by anyone, and employing experts to review entries.
In 2002, Wales moved from San Diego to St. Petersburg, Florida, where Bomis headquarters had relocated. There, he founded the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) to oversee the operations and finances and set policies for
Wikipedia
and also transferred control of the site from himself to WMF. Initially planning to fund
Wikipedia
through advertisements, by 2003 Wales had decided that a nonprofit foundation should be its fiscal agent. During this time, Wales was accused of misusing foundation funds, but both he and the board's director deny any wrongdoing. He has served on the board since its creation and as chair from 2003 to 2006. The following year, Wales and WMF board member Angela Beesley founded Wikia, a for-profit company to host sites that use the wiki model created by others; they include
Wookieepedia
(a Star Wars-themed wiki) and
Memory Alpha
(a Star Trek-themed wiki). WMF oversees the operations of a number of collaborative online projects, including
Wikiquote, Wiktionary,
Wikimedia Commons, and Wikiversity. (The company was renamed Fandom in 2016.) Wales served as CEO of Wikia until 2006 and continues to serve as Fandom president. Also in 2006, Wales was awarded an honorary doctorate from Knox College in Illinois. In 2008, he co-chaired the World Economic Forum. Wales serves on the boards of Internet open-source licensing company Creative Commons and the collective-intelligence decision-making system Hunch.
Wales has been crtiticized for introducing editorial regulations that require changes to a living person's entry to be reviewed before publishing, a departure from the open editing policies that has outraged many
Wikipedia
users and participants. The policy change was implemented to combat increasing levels of vandalism on the site. Additionally, several analysts have noted that
Wikipedia
's growth and participation rates have begun to decline, although Wales counters that the site has stabilized now that it is well known and popular, being among the top 50 Internet sites in terms of daily usage. He has also said that most topics have been covered by now and that foreign language sites are expanding; only 20 percent of
Wikipedia
articles are in English. Wales has also been criticized for editing content to gloss over facts of his life and business and for other instances relating to other entries on the site.
In 2011, Wales and Rohan divorced, and the following year he married Kate Garvey, a former secretary to British Prime Minister Tony Blair; the couple has two daughters. He settled in London the following year and has lived there since. Wales spent much of the 2010s consulting and attending panel sessions and other speaking events related to Internet freedom and online community building. In 2013, he was awarded the UNESCO Niels Bohr Medal for his contributions to knowledge and in 2017 received the President's Medal of the British Academy. That same year, he launched
WikiTribune,
a user-created news outlet combining the efforts of professional and citizen journalists. Two years later, he founded the social network WT:Social as an ad-free competitor to Facebook. In 2019, he became a British citizen. In 2023, Wales was one of the founders of the Free Our Feeds initiative in support of the AT Protocol, which aims to protect and develop open social media technology in the face of increasing control by tech billionaires. He still remains involved in Wikipedia and travels the world meeting with the various Wikipedia communities in each country.
External Links
Wikipedia
Written by
Claire M. Wilson
Auburn University
Published
July 13, 2010
January 15, 2025
Share
Copied!
Copy Link
Share on Facebook
Share on X
Send via Email
Related Articles
Tallulah Bankhead
Tallulah Bankhead (1902-1968) was a talented actress and comedian, a popular public personality, and a determined champion of racial tolerance and equality. Although best remembered today for her performance in the film Lifeboat and as a madcap Jazz Age celebrity, her awards for film, live theater, and radio demonstrate that…
Alabama Filmmakers Co-op
The organization was most active in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when it had a screening room and workshop facilities in Huntsville, a staff of seven, and satellite programs in Birmingham and Anniston. In 2006, it celebrated 30 years as an alternative screening society presenting independent, experimental, and foreign…
The Huntsville Times
The Huntsville Times served the city of Huntsville and the state for more than 100 years. Among notable editorials and stories, the Times took a stand against Gov. George Wallace's plan to close public schools to avoid integration, and it broke the story that James Earl Ray planned to plead…
The
Confederados
The Confederados were individuals from the U.S. Confederate states who left the American South and resettled in São Paulo, Brazil, immediately after the Civil War. Although the exact number of individuals is difficult to determine, between 2,000 and 4,000 emigrants are estimated to have participated in the movement between 1865…
Share this Article
Wales, Jimmy
Share on Facebook
Share on X
Send via Email
Close Window
Close Window