Jimmy Donald Wales is one of the founders of Wikipedia. He is now the honorary chairman of the council of the Wikimedia Foundation and owns a for-profit company called Wikia (which has no direct relationship with Wikipedia). In May 2006, Wales was selected by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people.
Personal resume
On August 7, 1966, Jimmy Donnell Wales was born in Huntsville, a remote town in Alabama. My father is a grocery store manager, now retired; Mother and grandmother run a small private school "in the tradition of the one room schoolhouse", where Wales receives education. The school divides the first to fourth grades and the fifth to eighth grades into groups, and Wales' grade usually has four students.
In 1989, Wales graduated from the finance department of Auburn University. Later, he received a doctorate in economics from Indiana University, with his research direction being option pricing.
In 1994, Wales left the academic world and decided to go into business, and went to Chicago for development. In a few years in Chicago, Wales engaged in interest rate and foreign exchange speculation and made a fortune.
In 1998, Wales moved to Santiago and opened an Internet company.
On October 20, 1999, 32 volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica worth US $1250 were all online for free inquiry and download. This was a sensational news in that year. After being reported by more than 1200 media around the world, it attracted 15 million people in one day, which made the website just launched collapse instantly and could not operate normally for two weeks. The free lunch of the online version of Encyclopedia Britannica did not last long. Two years later, due to the difficult development of online advertising, Encyclopedia Britannica had to give up its promise of "free" and announced that it would charge an annual fee of $60 to individual users. So Jimmy Wales came up with the idea of building a truly "open, free" online encyclopedia.
Jimmy Donnell Wales worked with Larry Sanger, a doctoral student in philosophy at Ohio State University, to develop the free online encyclopedia Nupedia. At the beginning, they obviously held a reverence for the encyclopedia: the entries of Nupedia encyclopedia were all written by experts and scholars with professional backgrounds. They gingerly listed a roster of well-known scholars according to the rules of traditional encyclopedias, set up seven editing procedures to carefully check the level, and each writer must fax his or her own degree certificate to verify his or her identity, But time soon proved that they were beyond their capacity - 18 months of effort and 250,000 dollars only brought 12 words. This failure made Jimmy Wales realize how deep the encyclopedia is. It was obvious that the elite route like Encyclopedia Britannica could not go through. Soon, he found Wiki, a cooperative software with open source code: Wiki comes from wee kee wee kee
In 1995, when American Ward Cunningham, the founder of wiki technology, developed this community collaborative writing technology to browse, create, and change texts on the basis of the Web, the Hawaiian language meaning "hurry up" was abbreviated to a wiki that is now widely used. It was six years later that Wiki changed from technology to Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales decided to use this technology to develop an encyclopedia that everyone can write.
On January 15, 2001, the English version of Wikipedia officially came out. In just one month, the number of Wikipedia entries reached 200, and after one year, it increased to 18000.
In September 2004, the number of entries in Wikipedia reached 1 million. At that time, its total investment reached 500000 dollars, most of which were personal investments in Wales. Wales expressed this as follows: "A complete and comprehensive encyclopedia can be delivered free of charge in every language in the world, which can be easily consulted by even the poorest and most oppressed people".
From August 5 to 7, 2005, Jimmy Donnell Wales attended the Wikipedia Conference held at the Youth Hostel in Frankfurt, Germany. The Wikipedia Conference opened like a summer gathering of friends. More than 400 Wikipedians from more than 50 countries came out from behind the computer screen to discuss the development of Wikipedia and solve problems. From India to China, from Israel to Mozambique. Founder Jimmy Wales commented on this: "The only one lacking representation is Antarctica."
In October 2005, Wales delivered a speech at the "World Summit on the Information Society" in Tunisia.
In early 2006, Wales issued a personal appeal.
In March 2012, the media reported that Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, will serve as the British government's science and technology adviser, mainly focusing on how to make government decisions transparent by using new technologies such as the Internet, and how to let citizens participate in government decisions. The British Cabinet Office confirmed the news, saying Wells would help the British government to use new technology to assist public decision-making.
On December 16, 2015, he attended the opening ceremony of the Second World Internet Conference as a guest.
Personal impact
In 2006, Negroponte decided to pre install Wikipedia in his $100 laptop project, In response, Jimmy Wales said, "We are very happy to be able to provide our content on the $100 laptop. The $100 laptop itself brings knowledge to students in poor areas around the world. As you know, not every area can be connected to the Internet, so we provide an offline version of Wikipedia, which is also the core task of Wikipedia as a function of knowledge dissemination.
In 2006, he attended the annual wiki conference in Hong Kong. The Chinese Wikipedia Annual Conference is a wiki conference hosted by Chinese Wikipedia. The first session will be held from August 26 to August 27, 2006. Nearly four years after its founding, Chinese Wikipedia will hold its first cross regional conference in Hong Kong to discuss future development strategies and promote the communication of Chinese Wikipedia people around the world
Personal philosophy
Wales has always been an ardent follower of Ein Rand's objectivism philosophy. When he was interviewed by C-SPAN's Q&A talk show, he said: "The virtue of independence" is the most important part of his personal characteristics. When he was asked whether his pursuit of Rand's thought would connect him with any political philosophy, Wales called himself a libertarian. However, he said he did not like this name because he believed that the Liberal Party in the United States was just a group of "lunatics". He cited "freedom, personal rights, and never act with violence before getting along with others" as his basic principles in dealing with the world. From 1992 to 1996, he also ran an online forum called "Objectivism Philosophy Discussion".