Jimmy Wales

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Jimmy Wales

Jimmy Wales in December 2008
Born Jimmy Donal Wales
August 7, 1966 (1966-08-07) (age 42)
Huntsville, Alabama, U.S.A.
Residence St. Petersburg, Florida
Nationality American
Other names Jimbo (online nickname)[1]
Alma mater Auburn University
University of Alabama
Indiana University Bloomington
Occupation President of Wikia, Inc.
Known for Co-founding Wikipedia
Title Chairman of the Wikimedia Foundation
Term June 2003 – October 2006
Successor Florence Devouard
Board member of Wikimedia Foundation, Creative Commons, Socialtext, MIT Center for Collective Intelligence (advisory board)
Awards EFF Pioneer Award (2006), The Economist's Business Process Award (2008), The Global Brand Icon of the Year Award (2008)
Website
Personal weblog
English Wikipedia userpage

Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales (born August 7, 1966)[2] is an American Internet entrepreneur and co-founder and promoter of Wikipedia.[3][4][5][6]

Born in Huntsville, Alabama, Wales attended a small private school, then a university preparatory school, eventually attaining a bachelor's degree and master's degree in finance. During his graduate studies he taught at two universities.[1][7] Wales took a job in finance, and worked as the research director of a Chicago futures and options firm before retiring from the industry in 2000.[citation needed] 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.

In 2001, together with Larry Sanger and others, Wales helped launch Wikipedia, a free, open-content encyclopedia which subsequently enjoyed rapid growth and popularity.[8][9] As Wikipedia's public profile grew, Wales became the project's promoter and spokesman.[10] Wales has been historically cited as the co-founder of Wikipedia, though he has disputed the "co-" designation,[11] asserting that he was the sole founder of the encyclopedia.[12] 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.[13] In 2004, he co-founded Wikia, a privately-owned, free Web-hosting service, with fellow Wikimedia trustee Angela Beesley.[14]

Wales has been married twice and has a daughter with his second wife, Christine, from whom he is separated. He self-identifies as an Objectivist and, with reservations, a libertarian.[1] His role in creating Wikipedia, which has become the world's largest encyclopedia, prompted Time magazine to name him in its 2006 list of the world's most influential people.[15] Wales is the de facto leader of Wikipedia;[5][16] his position on the project has gained broad media attention and has led to controversy.[15][17][18][19][20][21]

Contents

Early life and education

Wales was born in Huntsville, Alabama, in the United States.[7] According to his 1997 marriage certificate (to Christine Rohan) and a number of other sources, he was born on August 7, 1966,[2] although there is some uncertainty about his birth date, which is given as August 8, 1966 on his driver's license.[22] His father, Jimmy,[23] worked as a grocery store manager while his mother, Doris, and his grandmother, Erma, ran the House of Learning,[24] a small private school in the tradition of the one-room schoolhouse, where Wales and his three siblings received their early education.[7][24] As a child, Wales was a keen reader with an acute intellectual curiosity,[5] and, in what he credits to the influence of the Montessori method on the school's philosophy of education, "spent lots of hours pouring [sic] over the Britannicas and World Book Encyclopedias".[1] There were only four other children in Wales' grade, so the school grouped together the first through fourth grade students and the fifth through eighth grade students.[1] 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.[1]

After eighth grade, Wales attended Randolph School,[25] a university-preparatory school in Huntsville, graduating at sixteen.[26] 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."[1] 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.[1][7][26] 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.[1][7]

Career

Chicago Options Associates and Bomis

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.[1][14][27] 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.[24] Wales had been addicted to the Internet from an early stage and used to write computer code as a pastime.[28] 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.[26][9]

Inspired by the remarkable initial public offering of Netscape in 1995, he decided to become an internet entrepreneur,[26] and in 1996 founded the web portal Bomis with two partners.[24][9] The website featured user-generated webrings and that, according to The Atlantic Monthly, "found itself positioned as the Playboy of the Internet."[9] For a time the company sold erotic photographs,[29] and Wales described the site as a "guy-oriented search engine" with a market similar to Maxim's.[1] Questions[specify] have arisen about the nature of its content.[7][30] Bomis did not become successful, but in March 2000 hosted and provided the initial funding for the Nupedia project.[7][24][31]

Philosopher Larry Sanger, whom Wales hired as editor-in-chief of Nupedia

Nupedia and the origins of Wikipedia

Main article: Nupedia

Though Bomis had struggled to make money, it provided Wales with the funding to pursue his greater passion, an online encyclopedia.[5] While moderating an online discussion group devoted to the philosophy of Objectivism in the early 1990s, Wales had encountered Larry Sanger, a sceptic of the philosophy.[5] 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.[5] Deciding to pursue his encyclopedia project years later, Wales invited 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.[1][7]

The intent behind Nupedia was to have expert-written entries on a variety of topics, and to sell advertising alongside the entries in order to make profit.[5] The project was characterized by an extensive peer-review process designed to make its articles of a quality comparable to that of professional encyclopedias.[32] In January 2001, Sanger was introduced to the concept of a wiki by extreme programming enthusiast Ben Kovitz after explaining to Kovitz the slow pace of growth Nupedia endured as a result of its onerous submission process.[9] Kovitz suggested that adopting the wiki model would allow editors to contribute simultaneously and incrementally throughout the project, thus breaking Nupedia's bottleneck.[9] Sanger was excited about the idea, and after proposing it to Wales, they created the first Nupedia wiki on January 10, 2001.[9]

The wiki was initially intended as a collaborative project for the public to write articles that would then be reviewed for publication by Nupedia's expert volunteers. The majority of Nupedia's experts, however, 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.[33] Thus the wiki project, dubbed "Wikipedia" by Sanger,[11] went live at a separate domain five days after its creation.[27][31]

Wikipedia

Main article: History of Wikipedia

Early development

Neither Sanger nor Wales expected very much from the Wikipedia initiative.[27][9] Wales, anticipating "complete rubbish", hoped that if they were lucky, Wikipedia might yield a couple of rough draft entries for Nupedia.[27] 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 collective of editors had gathered.[9][14] Many of the early contributors to the site were familiar with the idea of a free culture and, like Wales, some of them sympathized with the open-source movement.[33] This cadre of editors created the robust, self-regulating community that proved so conducive to the growth of the encyclopedia.[7] 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.[34][clarification needed]

Sanger developed Wikipedia in its early phase and guided the project.[8][11] The broader idea he ascribes to Wales, remarking in a 2005 memoir for Slashdot that "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", adding, "[t]he actual development of this encyclopedia was the task he gave me to work on."[35] Sanger worked on and promoted both the Nupedia and Wikipedia projects until Bomis discontinued funding for his position in February 2002;[36] Sanger resigned as editor-in-chief of Nupedia and as "chief organizer" of Wikipedia on March 1.[37][38] In the early years, Wales had supplied the financial backing for the project,[8][21] and entertained the notion of placing advertisements on Wikipedia before costs were reduced with Sanger's departure and plans for a nonprofit foundation were advanced instead.[39]

Controversies

Wales speaking at FOSDEM in Brussels in 2005.

Wales has asserted that he is the sole founder of Wikipedia,[12] and has publicly disputed Sanger's designation as a co-founder, describing the claim as "preposterous" to The Boston Globe in 2006,[40] and calling "the whole debate silly" in an April 2009 interview.[41] 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.[42][43] In August of that year, Wales identified himself as "co-founder" of Wikipedia.[44] 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.[11][45]

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.[46][47] 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."[30][48] 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.[30][27] Though Wales argued that his modifications were solely intended to improve the accuracy of the content,[30] he apologized for editing his own biography, a practice generally frowned upon at Wikipedia.[30][48]

Role

Wikisource
Wikisource has original text related to this article:

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."[49] The growth and prominence of Wikipedia made Wales an Internet celebrity.[clarification needed] Though he had never journeyed abroad prior to founding the site, Wikipedia saw him flying internationally on a near-constant basis as the public face of the project.[5][28]

Wales' unpaid role in the Wikipedia community has been characterised as benevolent dictator, constitutional monarch and spiritual leader.[20][50] He is also the closest the project has to a spokesman.[5] Despite his non-intensive involvement in the day-to-day operation of the encyclopedia, Wales has denied intending to reduce his role, telling The New York Times in 2008 that "Dialing down is not an option for me ... Not to be too dramatic about it, but, ‘to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language,’ that’s who I am. That’s what I am doing. That’s my life goal."[20]

Wales appearing as a member of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees on a panel at Wikimania, the conference for Wikimedia projects, in 2007.

Wikimedia Foundation

Main article: Wikimedia Foundation

In mid-2003, Wales set up the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), a non-profit organization founded in St. Petersburg, Florida, and based in San Francisco, California.[51][52] All intellectual property rights and domain names pertaining to Wikipedia were moved to the new foundation,[53] whose purpose is to establish general policy for the encyclopedia and its sister projects.[9] 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.[54] The work he carries out for the foundation has always been unpaid, including his appearances to promote the organization at computer and educational conferences.[29] 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.[55]

In March 2008, Wales was accused by former Wikimedia Foundation employee Danny Wool of subsidizing personal expenditures with foundation funds. Wool also stated that Wales had his Wikimedia credit card taken away in part because of his spending habits, though Wales denied this claim.[56] Foundation Chair Florence Devouard and former foundation interim Executive Director Brad Patrick denied any wrongdoing by Wales or the foundation, saying that Wales accounted for every expense and that, for items for which he lacked receipts, he paid out of his own pocket.[57] Later in March 2008, it was alleged by Jeffrey Vernon Merkey that Wales had edited Merkey's Wikipedia entry to make it more favorable in return for donations to the Wikimedia Foundation, an allegation Wales dismissed as "nonsense."[58][59]

Wikia

Main article: Wikia

In 2004, Wales and then-fellow member of the WMF Board of Trustees Angela Beesley founded the for-profit company Wikia, Inc.[14] Wikia is a wiki farm—a collection of individual wikis on different subjects, all hosted on the same website.[60] It hosts some of the largest wikis outside Wikipedia, including Memory Alpha (devoted to Star Trek), Battlestar Wiki (Battlestar Galactica) and Wookieepedia (Star Wars).[61] Another service offered by Wikia was Wikia Search, an open source web search engine intended to challenge Google and introduce transparency and public dialogue about how it's created into the search engine's operations;[62] but the project was abandoned in March 2009.[63] 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.[64]

Personal life

Jimmy Wales with his second wife Christine

Wales' first wife, Pam, was quoted in a September 2008 W magazine article as saying that Wales discouraged her from pursuing a nursing degree when they were married, out of a belief that altruism was evil: "His whole 'Mr. Save the World' is so contrary to what he said every day for seven years."[28] She also remarked on his high ambition, relating that he had been determined to become a millionaire before the age of 40.[28] Wales met his second wife, Christine Rohan, through a friend in Chicago while she was working as a steel trader for Mitsubishi.[1][26] The couple were married in Monroe County, Florida in March 1997,[65] and had a daughter named Kira before separating.[57] Wales moved to San Diego in 1998, and after being dissuaded by the housing market there, relocated in 2002 to St. Petersburg, Florida,[21] where he has remained as of 2007.[26][66]

Wales had a brief relationship with Canadian conservative columnist Rachel Marsden in 2008 that began after Marsden contacted Wales about her Wikipedia biography.[67] After accusations that Wales' relationship constituted a conflict of interest, Wales announced in March 2008 on his Wikipedia user page (and later on his personal blog) that there had been a relationship but that it was over and claimed that it had not influenced any matters on Wikipedia.[68][69] Marsden stated that Wales ended the relationship "via an announcement on Wikipedia".[70]

Portrait of Wales by Joi Ito.

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.[62] Though he has stated that the philosophy "colours everything I do and think",[5] 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."[71] Wales first encountered Objectivism when reading Rand's novel The Fountainhead while an undergraduate,[1] and later ran an electronic mailing list on the philosophy.[5] 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.[1] He rejects the notion that his mission in promoting Wikipedia is altruistic, which he defines as "sacrificing your own values for others", stating "[t]hat participating in a benevolent effort to share information is somehow destroying your own values makes no sense to me".[28] An interview with Wales served as the cover feature of the June 2007 issue of the libertarian magazine Reason.[7]

Wales cites Austrian School economist Friedrich von Hayek's essay "The Use of Knowledge in Society", which he read as an undergraduate,[27] as "central" to his thinking about "how to manage the Wikipedia project".[7] Hayek argued that information is decentralised – 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.[7] 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".[27] 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".[72]

Honors, awards and positions

Jimmy Wales receiving the Quadriga award on October 3, 2008

Published work

Notes

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p Lamb, Brian (September 25, 2005). "Q&A: Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder". C-SPAN. http://www.q-and-a.org/Transcript/?ProgramID=1042. Retrieved on 2006-10-31. 
  2. ^ a b "Jimmy Wales". Britannica Book of the Year. 2007. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1192821/Jimmy-Wales. Retrieved on 2007-07-25.  In support of this date, the Britannica article cites:
  3. ^ "Wikipedia: 50 languages, 1/2 million articles". Wikimedia Foundation Press Release. Wikimedia Foundation. 2004-04-25. http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_press_releases/500,000_Wikipedia_articles&oldid=473206. Retrieved on 2009-04-10. "The Wikipedia project was founded in January 2001 by Internet entrepreneur Jimmy Wales and philosopher Larry Sanger," quoted from the April 25th, 2004 first-ever press release issued by the Wikimedia Foundation.
  4. ^ "Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, reaches its 100,000th article". Wikipedia Press Release. Wikipedia. 2003-01-21. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Press_releases/January_2003&oldid=93032067. Retrieved on 2009-04-10. 
  5. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k "Brain scan: The free-knowledge fundamentalist". Technology Quarterly (The Economist). 2008-06-05. http://www.economist.com/science/tq/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11484062. Retrieved on 2008-06-09. 
  6. ^ Keen, Andrew (2008-06-02). "Andrew Keen on New Media". The Independent. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/online/andrew-keen-on-new-media-837997.html. Retrieved on 2008-06-08. 
  7. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l Mangu-Ward, Katherine (June 2007). "Wikipedia and beyond: Jimmy Wales' sprawling vision". Reason 39 (2): p. 21. http://www.reason.com/news/show/119689.html. Retrieved on 2008-10-31. 
  8. ^ a b c Singer, Michael (January 16, 2002). "Free Encyclopedia Project Celebrates Year One". Jupitermedia. Archived from the original on 2003-03-16. http://web.archive.org/web/20030316/siliconvalley.internet.com/news/article.php/3531_956641. Retrieved on 2008-02-27. 
  9. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Poe, Marshall (September 2006). "The Hive". The Atlantic Monthly. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200609/wikipedia. Retrieved on 2008-02-29. 
    a b g h i "Wales, though, was a businessman. He wanted to build a free encyclopedia, and Wikipedia offered a very rapid and economically efficient means to that end. The articles flooded in, many were good, and they cost him almost nothing. [...] In 2003, Wales [decided to] diminish his own authority by transferring Wikipedia and all of its assets to the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, whose sole purpose is to set general policy for Wikipedia and its allied projects. [...] Wales’s benign rule has allowed Wikipedia to do what it does best: grow. The numbers are staggering."
    c "Wales focused on the bottom-up strategy using Web rings, and it worked. Bomis users built hundreds of rings—on cars, computers, sports, and especially 'babes' (e.g., the Anna Kournikova Web ring), effectively creating an index of the 'laddie' Web. Instead of helping all users find all content, Bomis found itself positioned as the Playboy of the Internet, helping guys find guy stuff."
    d e f "The wiki [technology] quickly gained a devoted following within the software community. And there it remained until January 2001, when Sanger had dinner with an old friend named Ben Kovitz. [...] Over tacos that night, Sanger explained his concerns about Nupedia’s lack of progress, the root cause of which was its serial editorial system. [...] Kovitz brought up the wiki and sketched out 'wiki magic,' the mysterious process by which communities with common interests work to improve wiki pages by incremental contributions. If it worked for the rambunctious hacker culture of programming, Kovitz said, it could work for any online collaborative project. The wiki could break the Nupedia bottleneck by permitting volunteers to work simultaneously all over the project."
  10. ^ Halstead, Larry (April 7, 2005). "Wikipedia teams with Yahoo!". Tampa Bay Business Journal. http://www.bizjournals.com/tampabay/stories/2005/04/04/daily39.html?jst=b_ln_hl. Retrieved on April 12, 2009. 
  11. ^ a b c d Bergstein, Brian (March 25, 2007). "Sanger says he co-started Wikipedia". MSNBC. Associated Press. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17798723/. Retrieved on 2007-03-26. "The nascent Web encyclopedia Citizendium springs from Larry Sanger, a philosophy Ph.D. who counts himself as a co-founder of Wikipedia, the site he now hopes to usurp. The claim does not seem particularly controversial—Sanger has long been cited as a co-founder. Yet the other founder, Jimmy Wales, is not happy about it." 
  12. ^ a b Olson, Parmy (October 18, 2006). "A New Kid On The Wiki Block". Forbes. http://www.forbes.com/2006/10/18/sanger-wikipedia-citizendium-face-cx_po_1018autofacescan02.html. Retrieved on 2009-03-28. 
  13. ^ Terdiman, Daniel (April 30, 2008). "Wikimedia Foundation restructures its board". CNET News. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-9932493-52.html?tag=nefd.top. Retrieved on May 19, 2009. 
  14. ^ a b c d McNichol, Tom (May 1, 2007). "Building a Wiki World". Business 2.0 (CNN). http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2007/03/01/8401010/. Retrieved on 2007-10-31. 
  15. ^ a b c Anderson, Chris (April 30, 2006). "Jimmy Wales: The (Proud) Amateur Who Created Wikipedia". Time. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1187286,00.html. Retrieved on February 17, 2008. 
  16. ^ Frith, Holden (March 26, 2007). "Wikipedia founder launches rival online encyclopaedia". The Times. http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article1571519.ece. Retrieved on 2008-03-07. 
  17. ^ Evans, Mark (March 2, 2006). "Co-founder has learned to roll with the punches". National Post. http://www.financialpost.com/story.html?id=b90a61b6-298d-431f-8648-f255979d3492&k=87006. Retrieved on 2008-10-31. 
  18. ^ Bergstein, Brian (March 5, 2008). "Wikipedia's Wales Hit Over Expenses". Time in partnership with CNN. Archived from the original on 2008-03-06. http://web.archive.org/web/20080306222102/http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1719719,00.html. Retrieved on 2008-10-31. 
  19. ^ Harris, Scott Duke (March 5, 2008). "Wikipedia founder dogged by tawdry tales online". San Jose Mercury News. https://secure.passport.mnginteractive.com/mngi/servletDispatch/ErightsPassportServlet.dyn?url=http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_8459494?nclick_check=1&forced=true. Retrieved on 2008-03-11. 
  20. ^ a b c Cohen, Noam (March 17, 2008). "Open-Source Troubles in Wiki World". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/17/technology/17wikipedia.html?em&ex=1205899200&en=d6bb01e811e055d8&ei=5087%0A. Retrieved on October 31, 2008. 
  21. ^ a b c Smith, Wes (January 15, 2007). "He's the "God-King," but you can call him Jimbo". Seattle Times. http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2003525473_btwikipedia15.html. Retrieved on 2008-10-31. 
  22. ^ Rogoway, Mike (July 27, 2007). "Wikipedia & its founder disagree on his birth date". Silicon Forest. The Oregonian. http://blog.oregonlive.com/siliconforest/2007/07/on_wikipedia_and_its_founders.html. Retrieved on October 31, 2008.. 
  23. ^ Kazek, Kelly (August 11, 2006). "Geek to chic: Wikipedia founder a celebrity". The News Courier. http://valdostadailytimes.com/entertainment/cnhinspopculture_story_223174601.html. "Doris Wales’ husband, Jimmy, wasn’t sure what she was thinking when she bought a World Book Encyclopedia set from a traveling salesman in 1968." [dead link]
  24. ^ a b c d e Pink, Daniel H. (2005-03-13). "The Book Stops Here". Wired 13 (3). http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.03/wiki.html. Retrieved on 2008-10-31. 
  25. ^ Brown, David (2007-12-11). "Jimmy Wales '83". Alumni Profiles (Randolph School). http://www.randolphschool.net/alumni/welcome/profiles.asp?newsid=432566. Retrieved on 2008-10-31. 
  26. ^ a b c d e f Barnett, Cynthia (September 2005). "Wiki Mania". Florida Trend 48 (5): p. 62. Archived from the original on October 17, 2002. http://web.archive.org/web/20061017142949/http://www.floridatrend.com/issue/default.asp?a=5617&s=1&d=9/1/2005. 
  27. ^ a b c d e f g Schiff, Stacy (2006-07-31). "Know It All". The New Yorker. http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/07/31/060731fa_fact. Retrieved on 2008-10-31. 
    b "Even Wales has been caught airbrushing his Wikipedia entry—eighteen times in the past year. He is particularly sensitive about references to the porn traffic on his Web portal. 'Adult content' or 'glamour photography' are the terms that he prefers, though, as one user pointed out on the site, they are perhaps not the most precise way to describe lesbian strip-poker threesomes. (In January, Wales agreed to a compromise: 'erotic photography')."
  28. ^ a b c d e Lipsky-Karasz, Alisa (September 2008). "Mr. Know-It-All". W magazine. http://www.wmagazine.com/celebrities/2008/09/jimmy_wales. Retrieved on 2008-10-31. 
  29. ^ a b Brennen, Jensen (2006-06-29). "Access for All". The Chronicle of Philanthropy 18 (18). 
  30. ^ a b c d e Hansen, Evan (2005-12-19). "Wikipedia Founder Edits Own Bio". Wired News. http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2005/12/69880. Retrieved on 2008-10-31. 
  31. ^ a b Rosenzweig, Roy (June 2006). "Can History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past" (reprint). The Journal of American History 93 (1): 117-146. http://chnm.gmu.edu/resources/essays/d/42. Retrieved on 2009-04-22. 
  32. ^ Gouthro, Liane (March 14, 2000). "Building the world's biggest encyclopedia". PC World (CNN). http://archives.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/03/14/nupedia.idg/. Retrieved on 2008-10-31. 
  33. ^ a b Sidener, Jonathan (December 6, 2004). "Everyone's Encyclopedia". The San Diego Union-Tribune. http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20041206/news_mz1b6encyclo.html. Retrieved on April 22, 2009. 
  34. ^ Getz, Arlene (2007-02-01). "In Search of an Online Utopia". Newsweek (msnbc.com). Archived from the original on 2007-04-18. http://web.archive.org/web/20070418204627/http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16926950/site/newsweek/. Retrieved on 2008-10-31. 
  35. ^ Sanger, Larry (April 18, 2005). "The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir". Slashdot. http://features.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/18/164213. Retrieved on 2005-10-31. 
  36. ^ Sanger, Larry (January 18, 2002). "What Wikipedia is and why it matters". meta.wikimedia.org. Wikimedia Foundation. http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_and_why_it_matters&oldid=149626. Retrieved on 2008-10-31. 
  37. ^ Sanger Larry (March 5, 2007). "My resignation--Larry Sanger". meta.wikimedia.org. Retrieved on 2008-10-31.
  38. ^ Terdiman, Daniel (January 6, 2006). "Wikipedia's co-founder eyes a Digital Universe". CNET News. Retrieved on October 31, 2008.
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    C "Greatest misconception about Wikipedia: We aren’t democratic. Our readers edit the entries, but we’re actually quite snobby. The core community appreciates when someone is knowledgeable, and thinks some people are idiots and shouldn’t be writing."
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