Jimmy Wales

Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales (born August 7, 1966) is a British-American Internet entrepreneur, webmaster, and former financial trader.

He is a co-founder of Wikipedia and the for-profit wiki hosting service Fandom (formerly Wikia).

He has worked on other online projects, including Bomis, Nupedia, WikiTribune, and WT Social.

Wales was born in Huntsville, Alabama, United States, where he attended Randolph School, a university-preparatory school.

He earned bachelor's and master's degrees in finance from Auburn University and the University of Alabama, respectively.

In graduate school, Wales taught at two universities; he departed before completing a PhD to take a job in finance and later worked as the research director of Chicago Options Associates.

Wales was born in Huntsville, Alabama, shortly before midnight on August 7, 1966; however, his birth certificate lists his date of birth as August 8.

His father, Jimmy Sr., was a grocery store manager, while his mother, Doris Ann (Dudley), and his grandmother, Erma, ran the House of Learning, a small private school in the tradition of the one-room schoolhouse, where Wales and his three siblings received their early education.

As a child, Wales enjoyed reading.

When he was three, in 1968, his mother bought a World Book Encyclopedia from a door-to-door salesman.

As he grew up and learned to read, it became an object of reverence, but Wales soon discovered that the World Book had shortcomings: No matter how much was in it, there were many more things that were not.

World Book sent out stickers for owners to paste on the pages to update the encyclopedia, and Wales was careful to put the stickers to work, stating, "I joke that I started as a kid revising the encyclopedia by stickering the one my mother bought."

He received his bachelor's degree in finance from Auburn University in 1986.

He began his Auburn education when he was 16 years old.

He then entered the PhD finance program at the University of Alabama before leaving with a master's degree to enter the PhD finance program at Indiana University.

At the University of Alabama, he played Internet fantasy games and developed his interest in the web.

He taught at both universities during his postgraduate studies but did not write the doctoral dissertation required for a PhD, something he ascribed to boredom.

While moderating an online discussion group devoted to the philosophy of Objectivism in the early 1990s, Wales had encountered Larry Sanger, a skeptic of the philosophy.

The two had engaged in detailed debate on the subject on Wales' list and then on Sanger's, eventually meeting offline to continue the debate and becoming friends.

In 1994, Wales took a job with Chicago Options Associates, a futures and options trading firm in Chicago, Illinois.

Wales has described himself as having been addicted to the Internet from an early stage, writing computer code during his leisure time.

During his studies in Alabama, he had become an obsessive player of Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs)—a type of virtual role-playing game—and thereby experienced the potential of computer networks to foster large-scale collaborative projects.

Inspired by the successful initial public offering of Netscape in 1995, and having accumulated capital through "speculating on interest-rate and foreign-currency fluctuations", Wales decided to leave the realm of financial trading and became an Internet entrepreneur.

In 1996, Wales and two partners founded Bomis, a web portal primarily known for featuring adult content.

In 1996, he and two partners founded Bomis, a web portal featuring user-generated webrings and, for a time, erotic photographs.

Wales described it as a "guy-oriented search engine" with a market similar to that of Maxim magazine; the Bomis venture did not ultimately turn out to be successful.

Though Bomis had at the time struggled to make money, it provided Wales with the funding to pursue his greater passion, an online encyclopedia.

Bomis provided the initial funding for the free peer-reviewed encyclopedia Nupedia (2000–2003).

Years later, after deciding to pursue his encyclopedia project and seeking a credentialed academic to lead 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 launched.

The intent behind Nupedia was to have expert-written entries on a variety of topics and to sell advertising alongside the entries to make a profit.

On January 15, 2001, with Larry Sanger and others, Wales launched Wikipedia, a free open-content encyclopedia that enjoyed rapid growth and popularity.

As its public profile grew, Wales became its promoter and spokesman.

Though he is historically credited as a co-founder, he has disputed this, declaring himself the sole founder.

Wales serves on the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees, the charity that he helped establish to operate Wikipedia, holding its board-appointed "community founder" seat.

During an interview in 2005 with Brian Lamb, Wales described his childhood private school as a "Montessori-influenced philosophy of education", where he "spent lots of hours poring over the Britannica and World Book Encyclopedias".

There were only four other children in Wales's grade, so the school combined the first- through fourth-grade students, and the fifth- through eighth-grade students.

As an adult, Wales was sharply critical of the government's treatment of the school, citing the "constant interference and bureaucracy and very sort of snobby inspectors from the state" as a formative influence on his political philosophy.

After eighth grade, Wales attended Randolph School, a university-preparatory school in Huntsville, graduating at sixteen.

He said that the school was expensive for his family, but that "education 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."

For his role in creating Wikipedia, Time named him one of "The 100 Most Influential People in the World" in 2006.