Jimmy Wales

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jimmy Wales (2019)
Jimmy Wales in 2005 on Holbeinsteg in Frankfurt am Main , during a break from shooting an arte documentary on Wikipedia

Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales (born  August 7,  1966 in Huntsville , Alabama ) is an American Internet entrepreneur who was best known as the co-founder of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia .

Life

Wales is the son of general store owner Jimmy Wales senior and teacher Doris Wales, whose mother had previously run a private school. Wales is said to have started reading at the age of four - preferably in the World Book Encyclopedia , which his mother had bought from a salesman in 1968. He graduated from high school at a private school that, unlike most public schools, had had computers since 1979 . He then studied finance at Auburn University , where he received his bachelor's degree in 1989 . Wales began doctoral studies twice ; first at the University of Alabama , after which he received the master's degree ; then he studied at Indiana University . However , he did not submit a dissertation .

Wales is a supporter of the objectivism founded by the writer Ayn Rand and the economist Friedrich von Hayek .

In 1994 Wales became a futures and options trader on the Chicago Stock Exchange . This made him relatively wealthy; however, he does not consider himself rich.

Bomis

In 1996, Wales founded the Internet company Bomis with two business partners . There you could visit forums financed by advertising on the topics of entertainment, sports, science fiction, erotic and pornography for free. Wales has ceased to have an active interest in this company since 2006.

Nupedia and Wikipedia

In March 2000 he started the first project of an English-language Internet encyclopedia on the basis of peer review and with experts as authors in his company Bomis with Nupedia . He hired Larry Sanger as editor-in-chief; the two had met at a discussion forum moderated by Wales on Ayn Rand's objectivism on Usenet . Wales herself was enthusiastic about her philosophy, which colors everything he does and think . Rand's radical market ideas and Friedrich von Hayek's neoliberal thinking , which was just as influential for Wales , according to which decentralized markets also function better than centralized administration in terms of information processing, led to contradictions that Wales themselves became aware of. According to Wales, people were wondering: "Ui, there is a guy who is so pro-capitalist and at the same time has set up a non-profit foundation for shared (and still freely available) knowledge".

In January 2001, the programmer Ben Kovitz suggested to his friend Sanger that the wiki software should be used to overcome the structural problems of Nupedia - the peer review process ultimately proved to be too complex and slow. Sanger, in turn, recommended Wales use this procedure the next day.

On January 15, 2001, Wales released Wikipedia; Initially, this platform was only intended as an experimental addition to Nupedia. Wales determined the strategic goals of Wikipedia, above all neutrality in the presentation of a topic. Due to the unexpectedly rapid increase in the number of users and their contributions to Wikipedia, Nupedia was discontinued in September 2003. On June 20, 2003, Wales established the not-for-profit Wikimedia Foundation, which he led until late 2006. In October 2006 Wales handed over the management of the board to Florence Nibart-Devouard from France , but remained on the board as Chairman emeritus .

After the build-up years, Wales later (2009) was concerned with increasing not just the number, but above all the quality of the articles: “Our aim must be to be as good as Brockhaus !” Therefore, he welcomes it when publish more academic specialists on their subject in Wikipedia.

In the meantime, Wales has given back some of its privileges as it snubbed the community with uncoordinated deletions. It was about the deletion of - in his opinion - pornographic content.

At the start-up festival Pioneers 2016 in Vienna , Wales stated that he was inspired by Friedrich August von Hayek's article The Use of Knowledge in Society when founding Wikipedia .

Wikia

In 2004, he and Angela Beesley founded the Internet portal Wikia , a free hosting service for Wiki projects and forums that is financed through advertising, for example Google text advertising, and operates several commercial wikis. In 2007 Wales started the Wikia Search project , a free and collaborative alternative to the Google Internet search engine on a wiki basis , in which the search results are ranked by Internet users. The project is based on the open source programs Lucene , Nutch and Hadoop . A first alpha version of Wikia Search was activated on January 7, 2008. After around 15 months, Wales announced on its blog that it had ceased operating the free and collaborative search engine Wikia Search on March 31, 2009. There were only 10,000 visitors a month in the past six months. He primarily blamed the economic crisis for the low level of use. However, he wants to continue to campaign for free search engine projects.

Other initiatives

In 2017, Wales founded Wikitribune , an internet newspaper dedicated to countering fake news and "alternative facts" with fact-based reporting and investigative journalism. Wikitribune was discontinued in summer 2019. In October 2019, Wales launched WT.Social , a news-based social network .

Private life

He was married to Pamela Green from 1986 to 1993. In March 1997, Jimmy Wales married Christine Rohan for the second time. They have a daughter (* 2000) and lived in Saint Petersburg , Florida , where he was on the road for about 200 to 250 days a year. In 2011, Rohan divorced. In 2011 he took part in a celebrity campaign for the Swiss watch manufacturer Maurice Lacroix . In 2012 he married Kate Garvey for the third time, with whom he has two daughters (* 2012 and * 2014). He lives with her in London .

Jimmy Wales describes himself as a passionate cook, which is an essential facet of himself.

Other activities

Jimmy Wales carries 2014 on the CeBIT on Wikipedia Zero ago

In 2011 he sat on a jury consisting of renowned public figures who were involved in the selection of the universal logo for human rights . Wales has been a free advisor to the UK Government since 2012. Its aim is to develop new ways for more transparency in political decision-making and for more citizen participation in legislative projects.

On April 30, 2012 he was a participant in a conference of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences on the encyclical " Pacem in terris " (Peace Encyclical), which he described as "still relevant today".

Since 2014, he has been a member of an eight-member advisory board with external experts from European countries, which Google Inc. founded in response to criticism of the implementation of the ECJ ruling of May 13, 2014 on the right to be forgotten , and which the company founded with the Development of a deletion guideline advised. Seven of the eight members pleaded in the Advisory Board's report that requests for deletion of search results should be handled more generously in future if they lead to pages with degrading and untrue representations. Wales, on the other hand, spoke out in the Advisory Board and in a special vote on its report, citing “freedom of expression”, in principle against such claims for deletion and the “right to be protected on the Internet” created by the EU Court of Justice.

Since the beginning of 2016 he has been a member of the board of the British Guardian Media Group, which publishes the daily newspaper The Guardian , among other things .

Awards

Jimmy Wales accepts the 2008 Quadriga Prize
Jimmy Wales receives an honorary doctorate from Maastricht University in 2015

Fonts

  • Robert Brooks, Jon Corson, Jimmy Donal Wales: The Pricing of Index Options When the Underlying Assets All Follow a Lognormal Diffusion , in: Advances in Futures and Options Research 7, 1994, ISSN  1048-1559 , abstract .

See also

literature

  • Susan Meyer: Jimmy Wales and Wikipedia (= Internet biographies ), The Rosen Publishing Group, New York, NY 2013, ISBN 978-1-448-86912-1 (Early life and education, Early career and blossoming success, Nupedia: the foundations of Wikipedia, Wikipedia rises, Wikipedia and the future of research, Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia and beyond ).

Web links

Commons : Jimmy Wales  - album with pictures, videos and audio files
 Wikinews: Jimmy Wales  - on the news
Wikiquote: Jimmy Wales  - Quotes
items
Interviews

Individual evidence

  1. ^ "The discovery of the ivory woodpecker" , Berliner Zeitung , October 11, 2008, interview with Jimmy Wales
  2. ^ Brian Bergstein: "Sanger says he co-started Wikipedia. Wales insists Sanger what employee and not deserving of co-founder status " , Associated Press / MSNBC March 26, 2007
  3. ↑ heise online: “Nerdy culture”: Interview with Wikipedia founder Wales. In: heise online. plus.google.com, accessed January 10, 2016 .
  4. ↑ Kerstin Kohlenberg: "Die anarchische Wiki-Welt" , Die Zeit , September 7, 2006, No. 37, pp. 17-19.
  5. ^ A b c The free-knowledge fundamentalist . In: The Economist . 2008, ISSN  0013-0613 ( economist.com [accessed October 13, 2015]).
  6. ↑ Brian Lamb: “Q&A: Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder” , C-SPAN , September 25, 2005
    “I made enough money - I used to be a futures and options trader and I'm not a wealthy person but I'm a person who lives within my means. So I have enough money to live and I can't think of anything cooler to be doing so this is what I do. "
  7. ↑ Christian Stöcker: Treasury of knowledge: A world power on the net. In: Spiegel Online August 31, 2010, accessed May 6, 2015.
  8. ^ The free-knowledge fundamentalist . In: The Economist . 2008, ISSN  0013-0613 ( economist.com [accessed October 13, 2015]). Literally:… which colors everything I do and think .
  9. ^ The free-knowledge fundamentalist . In: The Economist . 2008, ISSN  0013-0613 ( economist.com [accessed October 13, 2015]). Literally: Gee, this is a guy who is very pro-capitalist and yet he started a non-profit foundation for sharing knowledge.
  10. ^ Marshall Poe: The Hive. In: The Atlantic , September 2006.
  11. ↑ a b Mark Diening: Because of Guru. The missionary. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales wants to cover the world with knowledge. In: Tagesspiegel, April 7, 2009.
  12. ↑ The porn dispute in Wikipedia escalates. Heise on May 9, 2010.
  13. ↑ Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales felt inspired by the economist Hayek. In: kurier.at. Retrieved May 25, 2016 .
  14. ↑ Süddeutsche Zeitung from September 16, 2010: Wikipedia founder: "Books are a great thing" ( Memento from September 19, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
  15. ↑ Heise online : Participation search engine , December 23, 2006
  16. ↑ Roland Lindner: "Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. The know-it-all ” , FAZ , January 22, 2007
  17. ↑ Roland Lindner: "Google is not good enough" , FAZ, November 22, 2007
  18. ↑ Jimmy Wales: "Update on Wikia - doing more of what's working," blog.jimmywales.com, March 31, 2009
  19. ↑ Ben Schwan: “WikiSearch at the end. On the failure in Web 2.0 ” , the daily newspaper , April 1st, 2009
  20. ↑ Jimmy Wales , whoswho.de
  21. ↑ Edward Lewine: "The encyclopedist's Lair" , New York Times , November 18, 2007
  22. ↑ Spark brings Sir Bob Geldof & Jimmy Wales together with Maurice Lacroix
  23. ↑ nypost.com
  24. ^ A life in the day: Jimmy Wales
  25. ↑ telegraph.co.uk
  26. ↑ NYT June 27, 2013
  27. ^ "The man and the knowledge" (paper edition, p. 20) or "Trump would be blocked immediately" (Internet edition) , Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , September 17, 2019, Interview Gustav Thiele with Jimmy Wales.
  28. ↑ The jury , humanrightslogo.net
  29. ↑ Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia chief to advise Whitehall on policy , The Daily Telegraph , March 12, 2012 (with addenda of March 13, 2012)
  30. ↑ Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia founder advises British government , Handelsblatt , March 13, 2012
  31. ^ Wikipedia founder pays tribute to the Pope Encyclical , Vatican Radio , May 3, 2012
  32. ↑ Fundador de Wikipedia elogia encíclica "Pacem in Terris" del Papa Juan XXIII , Aciprensa , May 3rd 2012
  33. ↑ Deletion requests: Google establishes advisory board with Wikipedia founder , derStandard.at, July 1, 2014
  34. ^ Google: Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger in the deletion advisory board
  35. ↑ Heribert Prantl : When in doubt, for the deletion . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of February 5, 2015, p. 5.
  36. ↑ Baroness Rebuck and Jimmy Wales join Guardian Media Group board , theguardian.com January 27, 2016, accessed November 8, 2016]
  37. ↑ Electronic Frontier Foundation : "EFF Honors Craigslist, Gigi Sohn, and Jimmy Wales with Pioneer Awards," May 3, 2006
  38. ↑ Time Magazine, "The People Who Shape Our World," May 8, 2006
  39. ↑ Time Magazine: “TIME Magazine Celebrates New 'TIME 100' List of Most Influential People With Star-Studded Event April 19th,” April 15, 2006
  40. ^ Knox College Honorary Degrees ( Memento of September 2, 2006 in the Internet Archive )
  41. ↑ Advisory Board ( Memento from June 11, 2010 in the Internet Archive ), MIT Center for Collective Intelligence and MIT Reports to the President 2006–2007 (PDF; 542 kB), p. 26.
  42. ↑ Speakers. Jimmy Wales ( Memento June 15, 2008 on the Internet Archive ), icommonssummit.org, World Economic Forum, 2007
  43. ↑ David M. Ewalt: "The Web Celeb 25" , Forbes Magazine , January 23, 2007
  44. ^ Quadriga Prize for Wikipedia
  45. ↑ Press release of July 8, 2010 ( Memento of July 11, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
  46. ↑ Wikipedia founder receives award ( Memento from July 19, 2011 in the Internet Archive ), Oberbayerisches Volksblatt, October 15, 2010
  47. ↑ Press release of October 8, 2010 ( Memento of November 15, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
  48. ↑ Migros magazine of January 31, 2011 (PDF; 526 kB)
  49. ↑ Press release of September 21, 2011 ( Memento of December 14, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
  50. ↑ internethalloffame.org
  51. ^ Communication from CERN
  52. ↑ Salzburger Nachrichten: Wikipedia founder received an honorary doctorate , accessed on May 18, 2014
  53. ↑ Maastricht University awards honorary doctorates to Frans Timmermans and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales ( Memento from December 24, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
  54. ↑ Ynetnews: Dan David Foundation announces 2015 laureates , accessed February 11, 2015
  55. ↑ Résumé: This book describes the life and career of Jimmy Wales, who gave the world Wikipedia
personal data
SURNAME Wales, Jimmy
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wales, Jimbo; Wales, Jimmy Donal (full name)
SHORT DESCRIPTION American businessman, Wikimedia chairman
DATE OF BIRTH 7th August 1966
PLACE OF BIRTH Huntsville, Alabama , USA