Jimmy Wales

Jimmy Donal Wales (born August 8, 1966) is an American and British internet entrepreneur and former financial trader. He is best known for co-founding Wikipedia, a non-profit free encyclopedia, and Fandom (formerly Wikia), a for-profit wiki hosting service. He has also worked on Bomis, Nupedia, WikiTribune, and Trust Café (formerly WT Social).

Born in Huntsville, Alabama, Wales attended Randolph School and earned finance degrees from Auburn University and the University of Alabama. He worked as a financial options trader in Chicago during the 1990s before shifting his focus to the internet economy. While in graduate school, he was teaching at two universities, but left before completing a PhD to work in finance, later becoming chief research officer at Chicago Options Associates.

In 1996, Wales co-founded Bomis, which funded the free peer-reviewed encyclopedia Nupedia (2000–2003). On January 15, 2001, with Larry Sanger and others, he launched Wikipedia, which grew rapidly. Wales became its promoter and public face, though he has at times disputed Sanger's role, claiming sole founder status.

Wales has served on the Wikimedia Foundation board of trustees since its creation, holding its board-appointed "community founder" seat. He gives annual "State of the Wiki" addresses at Wikimania. In 2006, Time named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world for his role in creating Wikipedia.

Jimmy Donal Wales was born in Huntsville, Alabama, on August 8, 1966. His father, Jimmy Don Wales, was a grocery store manager, while his mother, Doris Ann (née 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 years old, his mother bought a World Book Encyclopedia from a door-to-door salesman. World Book sent out stickers for owners to paste on the pages to update the encyclopedia, and Wales used them on his copy, stating, "I joke that I started as a kid revising the encyclopedia by stickering the one my mother bought."

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' 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 age 16. 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." 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 Bloomington. 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.

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, he and two partners founded Bomis, a web portal featuring user-generated webrings and, for a time, softcore pornography. 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. 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.

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. The project was characterized by an extensive peer-review process designed to make its articles of a quality comparable to that of professional encyclopedias.

The idea was to have thousands of volunteers writing articles for an online encyclopedia in all languages. Initially, we found ourselves organizing the work in a very top-down, structured, academic, old-fashioned way. It was no fun for the volunteer writers because we had a lot of academic peer review committees who would criticize articles and give feedback. It was like handing in an essay at grad school, and basically intimidating to participate in.

Wales has previously referred to himself as an Objectivist, referring to the philosophy of writer Ayn Rand in the mid-20th century that emphasizes reason, individualism, and capitalism. Wales first encountered the philosophy through reading Rand's novel The Fountainhead during his undergraduate period and, in 1992, founded an electronic mailing list devoted to "Moderated Discussion of Objectivist Philosophy". Though he has stated that the philosophy "colors everything I do and think", he has said, "I think I do a better job—than a lot of people who self-identify as Objectivists—of not pushing my point of view on other people."

When asked by Brian Lamb about Rand's influence on him in his appearance on C-SPAN's Q&A in September 2005, Wales cited integrity and "the virtue of independence" as personally important. When asked if he could trace "the Ayn Rand connection" to a personal political philosophy at the time of the interview, Wales labeled himself a libertarian, qualifying his remark by referring to the Libertarian Party as "lunatics", and citing "freedom, liberty, basically individual rights, that idea of dealing with other people in a manner that is not initiating force against them" as his guiding principles. In a 2014 tweet, he expressed support for open borders.

An interview with Wales served as the cover feature of the June 2007 issue of the libertarian magazine Reason. In that profile, he described his political views as "center-right". In a 2011 interview with The Independent, he expressed sympathy with the Occupy Wall Street and Occupy London protesters, saying, "You don't have to be a socialist to say it's not right to take money from everybody and give it to a few rich people. That's not free enterprise." Dan Hodges in The Daily Telegraph has described Wales as a "Labour sympathizer". In 2015, Wales offered to help Ed Miliband with the Labour Party's social media strategy, but Miliband declined the offer.

In 2015, Wales signed up as the committee chair for Democrat Lawrence Lessig's 2016 presidential campaign. In 2016, Wales and eleven other business leaders signed an open letter to American voters urging them not to vote for Donald Trump in that year's presidential election. In May 2017, Wales said on Quora that he is a centrist and a gradualist, and believes "that slow step-by-step change is better and more sustainable and allows us to test new things with a minimum of difficult disruption in society." In May 2022, Wales said that he did not identify with any particular political label. In May 2024, in the run-up to the 2024 United Kingdom general election, he was a joint signatory of a public letter of support for the UK Labour Party.

Wales has cited Austrian School economist Friedrich Hayek's essay, "The Use of Knowledge in Society", which he read as an undergraduate, as "central" to his thinking about "how to manage the Wikipedia project". Hayek argued that information is decentralized—that each individual only knows a small fraction of what is known collectively—and that as a result, decisions are best made by those with local knowledge, rather than by a central authority. Wales reconsidered Hayek's essay in the 1990s while reading about the open source movement, which advocated for the collective development and free distribution of software. He was particularly moved by "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", an essay which was later adapted into a book of the same name, by one of the founders of the movement, Eric S. Raymond, as it "opened [his] eyes to the possibilities of mass collaboration."

Wales has been married three times. At the age of 20, he married Pamela Green, a co-worker at a grocery store in Alabama. They divorced in 1993. He met his second wife, Christine Rohan, through a friend in Chicago while she worked as a steel trader for Mitsubishi. They were married in Monroe County, Florida, in March 1997, and had a daughter before separating in 2008. They divorced in 2011. Wales moved to San Diego in 1998, and after becoming disillusioned with the housing market there, moved in 2002 to St. Petersburg, Florida.

He had a brief relationship with Canadian conservative columnist Rachel Marsden in 2008 that began after Marsden contacted Wales about her Wikipedia biography. After accusations that Wales' relationship constituted a conflict of interest, he stated that there had been a relationship but that it was over and that it had not influenced any matters on Wikipedia, a statement Marsden disputed.

2008 Global Brand Icon of the Year Award,

2009: The Business Process Award at the 7th Annual Innovation Awards and Summit by The Economist

2011: The Leonardo European Corporate Learning Award

2013: Induction into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2013.

2014: Mohammed bin Rashid Knowledge Award