DigitalNow: Association Leadership in the Digital Age

Founder of Wikipedia

Jimmy Wales is the revolutionary luminary behind the concept of Wikipedia, a project to produce a free content encyclopedia that could be edited by anyone. Wikipedia - a name name taken from the Hawaiian term, "wiki," meaning "fast" - formally began on January 15, 2001. Wikipedia has grown to be one of the most well-known sites on the Internet. The Wikimedia Foundation is a grant-based organization that supports Wikipedia and any projects related to the site. According to Wales, Wikipedia gives every person in the world free access to the sum of all human knowledge.

Wales is currently a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School. He is also on the Board of Directors at Socialtext, an organization which provides wiki technology to businesses. In 2006, Wales was cited by TIME magazine as one of the 100 people with the most influence on science and technology.

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, began his career in the business world. In 1994, Wales became the Research Director at Chicago Options Associates, a futures and options trader in Chicago, a position he held for six years. In March of 2000 he began his Internet career, creating a peer-reviewed, open-content encyclopedia, Nupedia.com ("the free encyclopedia"), and hired Larry Sanger to be its editor-in-chief.

Sanger proposed using a wiki to create an encyclopedia on January 10, 2001, and Wales worked on setting one up, starting it on January 15, 2001. Wikipedia was at that point a wiki-based site intended for collaboration on early encyclopedic content for submission to Nupedia for peer review, but Wikipedia's rapid growth soon made it the dominant project and Nupedia was "mothballed."

In mid-2003, Wales set up the Wikimedia Foundation, a St. Petersburg, Florida-based non-profit organization, to support Wikipedia and its younger sibling projects.

In 2004, Wales was quoted as saying that he had spent around $500,000 on the establishment and operation of his Wiki projects. By the end of its February 2005 fund drive, the Wikimedia Foundation was supported entirely by grants and donations. Wales has become increasingly involved with promoting and speaking about its projects, and to this end, he travels to conferences and Wikimedia functions, such as "Wikimeets" and Wikimania.

In an interview with Slashdot, Wales explained the purpose of Wikipedia by saying, "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." In a December 2005 appeal for donations to Wikimedia, Wales explained his motivation for his Wikipedia work by saying "I'm doing this for the child in Africa."

Inspired by the success of Wikipedia, Wales has founded the for-profit company Wikia, Inc. (separate from Wikimedia), which hosts various wikis and manages the Wikia project.

He was appointed a fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School in 2005. On October 3, 2005, Wales joined the Board of Directors of Socialtext, a provider of wiki technology to businesses. In 2006, he joined the Board of Directors of the non-profit organization Creative Commons.

Wales was the first person listed in the "Scientists & Thinkers" section of the May 8, 2006 special edition of Time ("The lives and ideas of the world's most influential people"), listing 100 influential people.

Speech Topic:
- Free Knowledge for Free Minds