•
•
Feature Story Person of the
Month.
About
Jimmy Wales,
founder of Wikipedia May 4,
2005.
---- Jimmy
Wales got lucky when he hired
Larry Sanger, and Ben
Kovitz. The
combination brought Wikipedia to
life in 2005. By January 2006 --
Wikipedia officially launched
itself on January 15th,
2001.
/ CLICK
FOR MORE
TIMELINE •
•
Crispin Sartwell of
Dickinson College in Carlisle,
Pennsylvania says Wikipedia is
the best Encyclopedias -- whether
paper (Britannica, for example)
or software (Encarta) -- are
intended to be representations of
the scope of human knowledge at
the moment of their publication.
This idea, of course, has a long
history. But the most interesting
thing about it may be its future,
as represented by the
magnificent, nonprofit Wikipedia.
• • "Wiki" is
the Hawaiian word for quick, and
it refers to a website that can
be updated easily by anyone from
any Web browser. The first wiki
armature was developed in 1995,
and Wikipedia -- the brainchild
of one Jimmy Wales -- was founded
in 2001. Under Wales' brilliant
conception, anyone can go into
Wikipedia (wikipedia.org) and
create a new article or edit an
old one: It is entirely
accessible and entirely
alterable.
• • This is
anarchy, of course, and
completely antithetical to the
encyclopedic tradition, which has
emphasized a kind of solemn
definitiveness and authority.
Britannica and Encarta, for
instance, not only employ experts
to write their articles but
subject everything they publish
to a rigorous review process. At
Wikipedia, you (or any old
maniac) can march right onto the
"nuclear fusion" page and add
your thoughts.
But as Wikipedia says about
itself, the point is not that
it's hard to make mistakes but
that it's easy to correct them.
Because thousands of people --
ordinary, unpaid, outside
participants -- monitor and edit
Wikipedia, errors and vandalism
are often corrected in seconds.
One feature of the site is a list
of recently updated pages, so
that one can keep track of
changes. One can even revert to a
previous version of an article if
mistaken or malevolent parties
have messed it
up.
• • The result
is not perfect. In one brief
instance, a character from "Star
Wars" was labeled Benedict XVI.
But such is the exception, not
the rule, and usually quickly
rectified. Overall, the
encyclopedia gets ever larger and
ever more accurate. The English
version has grown to more than
half a million entries, and in
checking the "recent changes"
section I once found a dozen or
more revisions every minute. The
site also provides contexts in
which changes can be proposed and
discussed among
writers.
• • So is it to
be trusted? Does it have the
credibility of Britannica? Well,
I have monitored over a decent
period a number of entries on
matters about which I know
something and have found them
almost invariably accurate. And I
have watched some of them grow,
becoming ever more elaborate and
interlinked.
• • In fact,
open architecture is in some
sense the only possible way to do
what an encyclopedia purports to
do: represent the state of human
knowledge in real time. Such a
project is by its nature so huge
that it requires what Wikipedia
has: thousands of experts,
editors, checkers and so on with
expertise in different fields
working over a period of years.
Also, Wikipedia, unlike the World
Book, for example, or even
Encarta, is updated continuously.
When we use the term "public
property," we usually mean state
property, but Wikipedia
compromises the concept of
ownership without dispossessing
anyone: It is truly public
property.
• • What is
perhaps most fascinating about
Wikipedia is its demonstration in
practical anarchy. It is an
ever-shifting, voluntary,
collaborative enterprise. If it
is in the long run successful, it
would show that people can make
amazing things together without
being commanded, constrained,
taxed, bribed or punished.
• • There are
people who want to deface or even
destroy Wikipedia. The right-wing
blogger Ace of Spades -- out of
mischief and because he heard
Wikipedia's operators were
liberals -- recently called on
its readers to "punk" the site to
put up as much misinformation and
nonsense as possible. Other blogs
gleefully expose errors, even if
those defects persist only for a
few
minutes.
• • If the
vandals are successful, they'll
more or less confirm the common
wisdom that people are too evil
and miserable to be allowed to
govern
themselves.
• • But if
Wikipedia grows into the greatest
reference work ever made, it will
suggest that great things are
possible when you merely let
people go and see what happens.
CLICK
FOR MORE JIMMY WALES PEOPLE STORY
•
Part
02h
TIMELINE- Jimmy
Wales:Wikipedia.org •
1966 -
Jimmy Donal "Jimbo"
Wales was born August 7, 1966 in
Huntsville, Alabama. Wales
attended a small private school,
then a university preparation
school, eventually attaining a
bachelor's degree and master's
degree in finance. During his
graduate studies he taught at two
universities. In 1996 along with
two partners, he founded Bomis, a
web portal targeted at males,
which hosted and provided the
initial funding for the Nupedia
peer-reviewed encyclopedia
(2000-2003), and for its
successor, Wikipedia. •
• His father, Jimmy,
worked as a grocery store manager
while his mother, Doris, 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.
•
• Wales has
characterised the school's
philosophy of education as
influenced by the Montessori
method, and stated that he "spent
lots of hours pouring over the
Britannicas and World Book
Encyclopedias." He and only four
other children were placed in the
same grade, so the school grouped
together the first through fourth
grade students and the fifth
through eighth grade students.
Wales is 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. (CLICK
FOR MORE STORY Source
Wikipedia) •
Early life and education •
1979 -
After eighth grade,
Wales attended Randolph School, a
university-preparatory school in
Huntsville, •
1981 -
Graduated from
Huntsville,
at sixteen.
•
• Wales has 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 (notable for
its free market economists) and
entered the Ph.D. finance program
at the University of Alabama
before leaving with a Master's
degree to enter the Ph.D. finance
program at Indiana University. He
taught at both universities
during his postgraduate studies,
but did not write the doctoral
dissertation required for a
Ph.D., something which he has
ascribed to boredom. Career
•
Chicago
Options Associates and Bomis •
1994 -
In 1994, rather than
undertaking to write his doctoral
dissertation, Wales took a job
with Chicago Options Associates,
a futures and options trading
firm in Chicago, Illinois. By
"speculating on interest rate and
foreign-currency fluctuations,"
he had soon earned enough to
"support himself and his wife for
the rest of their lives,"
according to Daniel Pink of
Wired. Wales had been addicted to
the Internet from an early stage,
used to write computer code as a
pastime, and was an obsessive
player of Multi-User Dungeons, a
type of virtual role-playing
game. •
1994 -
Published works:
Brooks, Robert; Jon Corson, Jimmy
Donal Wales (1994). "The Pricing
of Index Options When the
Underlying Assets All Follow a
Lognormal Diffusion." Advances
in Futures and Options
Research. •
1995 -
Inspired by the
remarkable initial public
offering of Netscape in 1995, he
decided to become an internet
entrepreneur. •
1996
- In 1996, along with
two partners, he founded Bomis, a
web portal targeted at males,
which hosted and provided the
initial funding for the Nupedia
peer-reviewed encyclopedia
(2000 - 2003), and for its
successor, Wikipedia. The website
featured user-generated webrings
and that, according to The
Atlantic Monthly, "found itself
positioned as the Playboy of the
Internet." For a time the company
sold erotic photographs, and
Wales described the site as a
"guy-oriented search engine" with
a similar market to Maxim's.
Questions have arisen about the
nature of its content. •
1997 -
Wales met his second
wife, Christine Rohan, through a
friend in Chicago while she was
working as a steel trader for
Mitsubishi. The couple were
married in Monroe County, Florida
in March 1997, and had a daughter
named Kira before separating.
Wales moved to San Diego in 1998,
and relocated again in 2002, to
St. Petersburg, Florida where he
has remained as of 2007. •
1998 -
Wales moved to San Diego
in 1998, and relocated again in
2002, to St. Petersburg,
Florida. •
2000 -Wales worked in
finance, and as the research
director of a Chicago futures and
options firm and retired from the
industry in 2000. •
2000 -
Web portal Bomis,
(founded in 1996, did not become
successful) -- but in March 2000
hosted and provided the initial
funding for the Nupedia
project. •
2000 -
Wales starts a
peer-reviewed, open-content
encyclopedia, Nupedia ("the free
encyclopedia"). Nupedia was
characterized by an extensive
peer-review process designed to
make its articles of a quality
comparable to that of
professional encyclopedias. •
2000 -
Wales hires Larry
Sanger, a doctoral student in
philosophy at Ohio State
University, as Nupedia's
editor-in-chief.
•
2001 -
Wikipedia
officially launched itself on
January 15th. It is now the
largest, fastest growing and most
popular general reference work
currently available on the
Internet. Wikipedia in 2009
became the biggest online
encyclopedia offering
multilingual, open access and
free content in multiple
languages.
•
2001 -
The extreme
programming enthusiast Ben Kovitz
introduced Larry Sanger to the
concept of a wiki. After
explaining to Kovitz the slow
pace of growth Nupedia endured as
a result of its onerous
submission process.
•
• Kovitz suggested
that adopting the wiki model
would allow editors to contribute
simultaneously and incrementally
throughout the project, thus
breaking Nupedia's
bottleneck.
•
•
The
first Nupedia Wiki -
Sanger was excited about the
idea, and after proposing it to
Wales, they created the first
Nupedia wiki on January 10, 2001.
It was initially intended as a
collaborative wiki for the public
to write articles that would then
be reviewed for publication by
Nupedia's expert volunteers.
•
• The majority of
Nupedia's experts wanted nothing
to do with this project, fearing
that mixing amateur content with
professionally researched and
edited material would compromise
the integrity of Nupedia's
information and damage the
credibility of the
encyclopedia.
•
• Thus the project,
dubbed "Wikipedia" by Sanger,
went live at a separate domain
five days later.
•
• Neither Sanger nor
Wales expected very much from the
Wikipedia initiative. Wales,
anticipating "complete rubbish,"
hoped that if they were lucky,
Wikipedia might yield a couple of
rough draft entries for Nupedia.
To the surprise of Sanger and
Wales, within a few days of
launching the number of articles
on Wikipedia had outgrown that of
Nupedia, and a small community of
editors - many of whom
shared Wales' admiration for the
open-source movement - had
gathered. Sanger developed
Wikipedia in its early phase and
guided the project. •
2001 -Sanger was identified as
co-founder at least as early as
September 2001, by The New York
Times and was referred to as a
founder alongside Wales in
Wikipedia's first press release
in January 2002. In a 2005 memoir
for Slashdot, Sanger, however,
ascribed the broader idea to
Wales: "To be clear, the idea of
an open source, collaborative
encyclopedia, open to
contribution by ordinary people,
was entirely Jimmy's, not mine,
and the funding was entirely by
Bomis. The actual development of
this encyclopedia was the task he
gave me to work on." •
2001 -
Wales, together with Larry Sanger
and others, launched Wikipedia, a
free, open-content encyclopedia
which subsequently enjoyed rapid
growth and popularity. As
Wikipedia's public profile grew,
Wales became the project's
promoter and spokesman. Wales has
been historically cited as the
co-founder of Wikipedia, though
he has disputed the "co-"
designation, asserting that he
was the sole founder of the
encyclopedia. He serves on the
Board of Trustees of the
Wikimedia Foundation, the
non-profit charitable
organization which operates
Wikipedia, holding the
board-appointed "community
founder" seat. In 2004, he
co-founded Wikia, a
privately-owned, free Web-hosting
service, along with fellow
Wikimedia trustee Angela
Beesley. •
2002 -Sanger worked on and promoted
both the Nupedia and Wikipedia
projects until Bomis discontinued
funding for his position in
February 2002, as chief of
Nupedia and as "chief organizer"
of Wikipedia on March 1. Wales
has said that he initially was so
worried with the concept that he
would wake up in the middle of
the night, wanting to check the
site for vandalism. In the early
years, Wales supplied the
financial backing for the
project. Originally, Wales had
intended to place advertisements
on Wikipedia but that idea was
abandoned. •
2002 -In August of that year, Wales
identified himself as
"co-founder" of Wikipedia. Sanger
assembled on his personal webpage
many links which appear to
confirm his role in founding
Wikipedia, all of which described
Wales and Sanger as the
co-founders. •
2002 -
Wales relocated to St.
Petersburg, Florida where he has
remained as of 2007. •
2003 -
03h
Wikimedia
Foundation and
Wikia,
Inc. •
2003 -
The
Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), a
non-profit organization founded
in mid-2003, was set up by Jimmy
Wales in St. Petersburg, Florida.
It is now based in San Francisco,
California. All intellectual
property rights and domain names
pertaining to Wikipedia were
moved to the new foundation,
whose purpose is to establish
general policy for the
encyclopedia and its sister
projects. •
2004 -
In a 2004 interview with
Slashdot, Wales outlined his
vision for Wikipedia. "Imagine a
world in which every single
person on the planet is given
free access to the sum of all
human knowledge. That's what
we're doing." The growth and
prominence of Wikipedia made
Wales an Internet celebrity.
Though he had never journeyed
abroad prior to founding the
site, Wikipedia saw him flying
internationally as the public
face of the project. •
2004 -
Co-founded Wikia, a
privately-owned, free Web-hosting
service, along with fellow
Wikimedia trustee, Angela
Beesley. •
2004 -
Wales and then-fellow
member of the WMF Board of
Trustees Angela Beesley founded
the for-profit company Wikia,
Inc. Wikia is a wiki farm -- a
collection of individual wikis on
different subjects, all hosted on
the same website. It hosts some
of the largest wikis outside
Wikipedia, including Memory Alpha
(devoted to Star Trek),
Battlestar Wiki (Battlestar
Galactica) and Wookieepedia (Star
Wars). Another service offered by
Wikia was an open source web
search engine named Wikia Search,
intended to challenge Google and
introduce transparency and public
dialogue about how it's created
into the search engine's
operations; but the project was
abandoned in March 2009. Wales
stepped down as Wikia CEO to be
replaced by angel investor Gil
Penchina, a former vice president
and general manager at eBay, on
June 5, 2006. •
2005 -
Jimmy
Wales' lecture at Stanford
University on February 9,
2005. •
2005 -
In late 2005, Wales
edited his own biographical entry
on the English Wikipedia. Writer
Rogers Cadenhead drew attention
to logs showing that in his edits
to the page, Wales had removed
references to Sanger as the
co-founder of Wikipedia. Sanger
commented that "having seen edits
like this, it does seem that
Jimmy is attempting to rewrite
history. But this is a futile
process because in our brave new
world of transparent activity and
maximum communication, the truth
will out." Wales was also
observed to have modified
references to Bomis in a way that
was characterized as downplaying
the sexual nature of some of his
former company's products. Though
Wales argued that his
modifications were solely
intended to improve the accuracy
of the content, he apologized for
editing his own biography, a
practice generally frowned upon
at Wikipedia. •
2005 -
In a 2005 memoir for
Slashdot, Sanger, however,
ascribed the broader idea of
Wikipedia to Wales: "To be clear,
the idea of an open source,
collaborative encyclopedia, open
to contribution by ordinary
people, was entirely Jimmy's, not
mine, and the funding was
entirely by Bomis. The actual
development of this encyclopedia
was the task he gave me to work
on." •
2006 -
Wales has asserted that he is the
sole founder of Wikipedia, and
has publicly disputed Sanger's
designation as a co-founder,
describing the claim as
"preposterous" to The Boston
Globe in 2006, and calling "the
whole debate silly" in an April
2009 interview. •
2006 -
Originally its
chairman, Wales has held the
honorary title of Chairman
Emeritus of the foundation since
2006. He is now one of eight
directors who make up its Board
of Trustees. The work he carries
out for the foundation has always
been unpaid, including his
appearances to promote the
organization at computer and
educational conferences. •
2007 -
In a 2007 interview,
Wales said that he thought that
"donating" Wikipedia to the
foundation was both the "dumbest
and the smartest" thing he'd
done. On the one hand, he noted,
Wikipedia was worth US$3 billion
(by his estimation); on the
other, donating it made possible
the success he achieved. •
2005 -
Wales is appointed as
a member of the Berkman Center
for Internet & Society at
Harvard Law School. •
2005 -
Wales, on October 3rd,
joins the Board of Directors of
Socialtext, a provider of wiki
technology to businesses. •
2006 -
Wales stepped down as Wikia CEO
to be replaced by angel investor
Gil Penchina, a former vice
president and general manager at
eBay, on June 5, 2006. •
2006 -
Wales joins the Board of
Directors of the non-profit
organization Creative
Commons. •
2006 -
The Electronic Frontier
Foundation, on May 3rd, awards
him a Pioneer Award. •
2006 -
Wales, on May 8th, is
listed in the "Scientists &
Thinkers" section of the 100
influential people special
edition of TIME magazine. •
2006 -On June 3rd, Wales
receives an honorary degree from
Knox College. •
2006 -
Wales is appointed to the
advisory board of the MIT Center
for Collective Intelligence. •
2007 -
Forbes magazine ranks
Wales twelfth in its first annual
"The Web Celebs 25." •
2007 -
Wales is recognized by the
World Economic Forum as one of
the 'Young Global Leaders' of
2007. •
2008 -
Wales co-chairs the World
Economic Forum on the Middle East
2008, in Sharm el-Sheikh,
Egypt. •
2008 -CORUM awards him
The Global Brand Icon™ of
the Year Award for 2008. Wales
has established himself as the
world's 'uncompromising defender'
of free speech," said Karthik
Siva, founder and CEO of the
Global Brand Forum. •
2008 -
Jimmy Wales receives and
accepts on behalf of the
Wikimedia project the Quadriga
Award by Werkstatt
Deutschland, on October 3,
2008, at the Komische Oper, in
Berlin, Germany, for a "Mission
of Enlightenment," along with
Serbian President, Boris Tadic,
Eckart Höfling and Peter
Gabriel. The award was presented
by David Weinberger. The annual
award recognizes four people or
organizations that "try to create
a better world through courage,
dedication, and responsible
action." •
2008 -
Wales, on October 30th, is
awarded the "Business Process
Award" at the 7th Annual
Innovation Awards and Summit by
The Economist, for public
collaboration as a form of
product and content
development." •
2009 -
Wikia Search project
abandoned; offered in 2004, as
another service by Wikia - an
open source web search engine
named Wikia Search, intended to
challenge Google and introduce
transparency and public dialogue
about how it's created into the
search engine's operations. •
2009 -
Wales, Jimmy; Andrea
Weckerle, published works: "Most
Define User-Generated Content Too
Narrowly," Advertising
Age, March 30, 2009. •
2009 -
Jimmy Wales Keynote at
Hollywood Digital Spring in Santa
Monica on May 5th; One on One
conversation with Ronald Grover,
Los Angeles Buureau Chief,
BusinessWeek.
•04headlineTVI
Bylines / Portrait of Wales by
Joi
Ito
- Anyone who knows Wikipedia will
love Jimmy
Wales
•
•
"People do
what they want," said Wikipedia's
founder at the recent Digital
Hollywood Spring keynote address.
"There is no master plan what
people are interested in." The
question is, how can we partner
with people to have a symbiotic
realationship. The Wiki model got
good at traditional core
demographics. We see outside that
geek fandom world.
•
• "We made it
ourselves!" is the core of the
community pride and any editing
war can be solved through
conversation. Cool off a bit and
restart the dialogue!
•
•
Philosophy
• Wales is a
self-avowed "Objectivist to the
core," and named his daughter
Kira after the heroine in Ayn
Rand's debut novel We the
Living, although he has said
"I think I do a better job-- than
a lot of people who self-identify
as Objectivists&emdash;of not
pushing my point of view on other
people."
•
• Wales first
encountered Objectivism when
reading Rand's novel The
Fountainhead while an
undergraduate, and later ran an
electronic mailing list on
Moderated Discussion of
Objectivist Philosophy. When
asked about Rand's influence by
Brian Lamb in his appearance on
C-SPAN's Q&A in September
2005, Wales cited integrity and
"the virtue of independence" as
important to him personally.
•
• When asked if he
could trace "the Ayn Rand
connection" to having a political
philosophy at the time of the
interview, Wales reluctantly
labeled himself a libertarian,
qualifying his remark by
referring to the United States
Libertarian Party as "lunatics"
and citing "freedom, liberty,
basically individual rights, that
idea of dealing with other people
in a matter that is not
initiating force against them" as
his guiding principles.
•
• He rejects the
notion that his mission in
promoting Wikipedia is
altruistic, which he defines as
"sacrificing your own values for
others "stating " that
participating in a benevolent
effort to share information is
somehow destroying your own
values makes no sense to me." An
interview with Wales served as
the cover feature of the June
2007 issue of the libertarian
magazine Reason. The Use
of Knowledge in
Society" •
•
Wales cites Austrian
School economist Friedrich von
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 argues that
knowledge is decentralised -
that each individual only knows a
small fraction of what is known
collectively - and that as a
result, systems in which
decisions are made centrally fail
to aggregate knowledge as
efficiently as in decentralised
models.
•
• Wales reconsidered
the essay in the 1990s, while
reading about the open source
movement (which advocated that
software be free and
distributed).
•
• He was moved in
particular by The Cathedral
and the Bazaar, an essay and
later book by one of the founders
of the movement, Eric S. Raymond,
which "opened [his] eyes
to the possibilities of mass
collaboration." In it, Raymond
contrasts the traditional
hierarchical mode of software
development, where access to
source code is restricted to a
choice group of developers ("The
Cathedral"), with the open source
model whereby access to the code
is available to anyone on the
Internet ("The Bazaar").
Raymond's argument in favour of
the latter "crowdsourcing" model
was summarized by the aphorism
"Given enough eyeballs, all bugs
are shallow."
Wikipedia
Success "No
gatekeepers and free access make
up the secret of success for this
network of now 262 languages and
more than 10 million articles."
Karthik Siva, founder
and CEO of the Global Brand
Forum.
http://www.wmagazine.com/celebrities/2008/09/jimmy_wales
Part
05h
- Editors
Notes •
Reviews
/
Editorial Chart • Editorial
Calendar / Events Calendar /
NBS100
TeleComunication Study -
Regulatory Frequency
Seizure
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