Jimmy Wales

• 1. Introduction

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  Jimmy Wales was three years old when a door-to-door salesman sold his mother a World Book Encyclopedia. The publisher mailed owners little stickers to paste over outdated pages, and the toddler put them to work on his family's set. Decades later he put it this way: "I joke that I started as a kid revising the encyclopedia by stickering the one my mother bought."

  Jimmy Donal Wales was born in Huntsville, Alabama, on the 8th of August 1966. He grew up to co-found Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. He is also a former financial trader, a serial founder of internet companies, and, since 2012, a Londoner.

  How does a child of a one-room school end up running an encyclopedia without any authority over it? Why did a futures trader bet on a web portal that was not an encyclopedia at all? Why does he insist he has no real power, yet find himself in a long public argument over who deserves the title of founder? And what did he believe about knowledge that made a strange experiment work?

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• 2. Schoolhouse Years

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  The first school Wales knew was called the House of Learning, and it was run by his mother, Doris Ann, and his grandmother, Erma. His father, Jimmy Don Wales, managed a grocery store. Wales and his three siblings were taught at the House of Learning, a small private school in the spirit of the one-room schoolhouse.

  There were only four other children in Wales's own grade, so the school folded the first through fourth grades into one group and the fifth through eighth into another. In a 2005 interview with Brian Lamb, Wales described the approach as a "Montessori-influenced philosophy of education". He said he spent many hours poring over the Britannica. He later blamed "constant interference and bureaucracy and very sort of snobby inspectors from the state" for helping form his political outlook.

  After eighth grade he moved to Randolph School, a university-preparatory school in Huntsville, and graduated at sixteen. Money was tight for the family, but he recalled that "education was always a passion in my household."

  Auburn University admitted him at sixteen as well, and he earned a bachelor's degree in finance there in 1986. Next came the PhD program in finance at the University of Alabama, which he left with a master's degree. He then entered the finance PhD program at Indiana University Bloomington. He taught at both universities, yet never wrote the dissertation a doctorate requires. He put that down to boredom.

  What he did pick up in Alabama was a habit of playing Internet fantasy games, and with it a growing fascination with the web.

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• 3. Trader Turned Founder

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  In 1994, Wales took a job in Chicago at Chicago Options Associates, a futures and options trading firm. He rose there to chief research officer. By his own account he was hooked on the Internet and spent his spare hours writing code.

  The games he had played in Alabama were multi-user dungeons, known as MUDs, which are role-playing worlds shared by many players over a network. Wales has said they showed him how computer networks could support huge collaborative projects.

  Then came the Netscape stock offering in 1995. Wales had built up savings by speculating on interest rates and currency swings, and the Netscape moment pushed him to quit trading and become an Internet entrepreneur.

  In 1996, Wales and two partners founded Bomis. It was a web portal built around user-generated webrings and, for a time, softcore pornography. Wales called it a "guy-oriented search engine" and compared its audience to that of Maxim magazine. The business did not turn out to be a success.

  Yet this struggling portal produced just enough money to pay for something far less obvious than a men's search engine.

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• 4. Hello World

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  Years before Bomis, in the early 1990s, Wales had moderated an online discussion group about the philosophy of Objectivism. A skeptic named Larry Sanger argued with him there, first on Wales's list and then on Sanger's own. The two eventually met in person to keep debating, and they became friends.

  When Wales later decided to build an online encyclopedia, he wanted a credentialed academic to lead it. He hired Sanger, then a philosophy doctoral student at Ohio State University, as editor-in-chief. In March 2000, Nupedia launched, billed as "the free encyclopedia". Experts would write entries, an elaborate peer-review process would check them, and advertising would pay the bills.

  In an October 2009 speech, Wales told of drafting a Nupedia article on the Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert C. Merton. He was too intimidated to hand his first draft to the finance professors who were supposed to review it. That, he said, was when he knew the model would not work.

  Sanger, meanwhile, was complaining about Nupedia's slow growth to Ben Kovitz, an enthusiast of extreme programming. In January 2001, Kovitz suggested a wiki, which would let many editors add to a project at once. Sanger liked the idea, and he and Wales set up the first Nupedia wiki on the 10th of January 2001.

  Most of Nupedia's experts wanted no part of it. They feared that amateur writing would damage the credibility of the professional work. The wiki, named Wikipedia, went live at its own domain five days later, on the 15th of January 2001.

  Neither founder expected much. Sanger saw it mainly as a feeder for Nupedia, and Wales worried it might produce "complete rubbish". Within days, though, Wikipedia held more articles than Nupedia, and a small band of editors had formed.

  Wales has said he was so nervous about open editing that he would wake in the night to watch what people were adding. In a 2016 talk at SXSW, he recalled that his first words on the site were "Hello world", the classic phrase programmers use to test new software.

  Bomis paid for all of it, and it considered putting advertisements on Wikipedia. Then Bomis stopped funding Sanger's position in February 2002, and Sanger resigned on the 1st of March 2002. Costs fell, and plans for a nonprofit foundation moved forward instead of ads.

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• 5. The Founder Question

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  In September 2001, The New York Times identified both Wales and Sanger as Wikipedia's founders. The project's first press release, in January 2002, described both men as founders too. In August 2002, Wales himself used the word "co-founder". Yet today Wales says he is the sole founder, and he publicly disputes Sanger's claim.

  Over the years his tone about the argument has hardened and softened by turns. In February 2006, The Boston Globe quoted him calling Sanger's statements "preposterous". By April 2009 he called the debate "silly". In 2013 he told The New York Times it was "the dumbest controversy in the history of the world".

  In November 2025, Wales sat down with the German journalist Tilo Jung on the podcast Jung & Naiv. He stood up and walked out in under a minute, calling Jung's questions about his founder status "stupid".

  Sanger, for his part, has been more generous than the dispute suggests. In a 2005 memoir for Slashdot, he wrote that the idea of an open, collaborative encyclopedia for ordinary contributors was "entirely Jimmy's, not mine". He added that his own job was developing it.

  Still, a scandal in late 2005 gave Sanger ammunition. The writer Rogers Cadenhead pointed to edit logs showing that Wales had removed mentions of Sanger as co-founder from Wales's own biography page. Wales had also changed how the page described Bomis, in a way critics said played down the adult nature of some of its products.

  Sanger said that "the truth will out", and called the edits an attempt to rewrite history. Wales argued he was only improving accuracy. He nonetheless apologized, since editing your own biography is discouraged on the site he had started.

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• 6. Constitutional Monarch

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  In a 2004 interview with Slashdot, Wales set out his mission in one image: "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."

  Formally, Wales is a board member of the Wikimedia Foundation and its chairman emeritus. Informally, the community has treated him as a benevolent dictator, a constitutional monarch, or a spiritual leader. In two 2014 interviews with The Guardian, he said he had always rejected the first label. He preferred the second, explaining that, like Queen Elizabeth II, he has no real power.

  In 2020 he elaborated: he is like the modern UK monarch, with "the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, and the right to warn."

  The foundation itself dates to mid-2003, when Wales set up the Wikimedia Foundation in St. Petersburg, Florida. It was later headquartered in San Francisco, California. Wikipedia's intellectual property and domain names were transferred to it. Wales chaired the board from 2003 to 2006, then became chairman emeritus. In 2008 the board installed a "community founder's seat" for him. His foundation work, including conference appearances, has always been unpaid.

  Wales has joked that handing over Wikipedia was both the "dumbest and the smartest" thing he ever did. He once estimated that the site was worth US$3 billion. He still believed the gift made its success possible.

  He has also been clear he will not fade into the background. He told The New York Times in 2008 that "Dialing down is not an option for me." Before the site existed, he had never traveled outside North America. Since then, as its public face, he has flown abroad almost constantly.

  Power attracted scrutiny. In March 2008, a former foundation employee, Danny Wool, accused Wales of misusing foundation funds for recreation. Wool also said Wales's Wikimedia credit card had been taken away. Wales denied this. The then-chairperson, Florence Devouard, and former interim executive director Brad Patrick denied any wrongdoing. Devouard did privately scold Wales for "constantly trying to rewrite the past".

  Later that month, the former Novell computer scientist Jeff Merkey claimed Wales had improved Merkey's own entry in return for donations. Wales called that "nonsense".

  In May 2010, the BBC reported that Wales had given up many of his technical privileges on Wikimedia Commons. Volunteers had objected to his quick deletion of sexually explicit images he judged to appeal only to prurient interests.

  In early 2016, editors saw a conflict of interest in the foundation's Knowledge Engine project, since heavy spending on search research might benefit a company of Wales's own.

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• 7. Ideas and Causes

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  As an undergraduate, Wales read Friedrich Hayek's essay "The Use of Knowledge in Society", and he calls it central to how he thinks about managing Wikipedia. Hayek argued that each person knows only a sliver of what society collectively knows. Decisions, he said, belong with those who hold local knowledge rather than with a central authority.

  In the 1990s Wales returned to Hayek while reading about the open-source software movement. One essay in particular, Eric S. Raymond's "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", "opened his eyes to the possibilities of mass collaboration."

  His time as a futures and options trader gave him an interest in game theory and in how incentives shape cooperation. He rejects the idea that promoting Wikipedia is altruism, which he defines as "sacrificing your own values for others".

  His earlier philosophy came from Ayn Rand. He read her novel The Fountainhead as an undergraduate. In 1992 he started a mailing list called "Moderated Discussion of Objectivist Philosophy". He says the philosophy "colors everything I do and think", though he claims to push it on others less than many self-described Objectivists do.

  On C-SPAN's Q&A in September 2005, he called himself a libertarian and referred to the Libertarian Party as "lunatics". In June 2007, the libertarian magazine Reason put him on its cover, and he described his views as "center-right".

  His labels have drifted since. In 2011 he told The Independent he sympathized with the Occupy protesters, saying you do not have to be a socialist to find it wrong to take money from everyone and give it to a few rich people. In 2015 he chaired Lawrence Lessig's committee for a presidential campaign. In May 2017, he called himself a centrist and gradualist. By May 2022 he said he used no particular political label. In May 2024, he co-signed a public letter backing the UK Labour Party.

  The cause he returns to most is freedom of information. On the 14th of May 2014, he told the BBC that a European Court of Justice ruling on removing information from Google results was "one of the most wide-sweeping internet censorship rulings that I've ever seen". Google then invited him onto a seven-member advisory committee on privacy, appointed on the 26th of May 2014.

  Wales testified before a US Senate committee on the 11th of December 2007. In 2012 he petitioned the UK Home Secretary against the extradition of Richard O'Dwyer to the United States. In 2013 he called David Cameron's planned Internet porn filter "ridiculous" and described Edward Snowden as "a hero".

  He is not an absolutist about disclosure. In 2010 he criticized WikiLeaks, saying its release of Afghan war documents "could be enough to get someone killed". He also objected to its use of the word wiki, arguing that "The essence of wiki is a collaborative editing process".

  During the 2014 Gamergate controversy, Wales replied sharply to a computer science student who accused the site of bias. He wrote that every personal experience he had with the movement involved insults, threats and doxxing. When supporters pushed back, he answered, "it isn't about what I believe. Gg is famous for harassment."

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• 8. Beyond Wikipedia

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  In 2004, Wales and Angela Beesley, then a fellow Wikimedia trustee, founded a for-profit company called Wikia. It hosts many separate wikis on one site, including Memory Alpha for Star Trek and Wookieepedia for Star Wars. Wikia also built Wikia Search, an open-source engine meant to challenge Google. That project was abandoned in March 2009.

  On the 5th of June 2006, Wales stepped down as Wikia's chief executive. The former eBay executive Gil Penchina replaced him, and in September 2009 Penchina declared the company profitable.

  Later ventures went after trust in news and online talk. In January 2014, Wales became co-chair of the mobile network The People's Operator. In 2017 he announced WikiTribune, which would pair professional journalists with volunteers to fight fake news. He called it "news by the people and for the people". In October 2019 he launched an ad-free social network, WT Social.

  He also set up the UK charity, the Jimmy Wales Foundation for Freedom of Expression. The cause arose when the ruler of Dubai gave him a prize. Wales felt he could not accept it given Dubai's censorship laws, but says he was not allowed to return it.

  The honors piled up. Time named him one of the 100 most influential people in 2006. On the 5th of December 2013, he received the UNESCO Niels Bohr Medal in Copenhagen. In December 2014, he shared the first Mohammed bin Rashid Knowledge Award, worth $1 million, with the web's inventor, Sir Tim Berners-Lee. In May 2015, he won the Dan David Prize, also $1 million. The British Academy gave him its President's Medal in September 2017. In June 2016, the Italian village of Esino Lario made him an honorary citizen.

  His private life has had its own turns. At twenty, Wales married Pamela Green, a co-worker at a grocery store in Alabama, and they divorced in 1993. He married Christine Rohan, a steel trader for Mitsubishi, in Monroe County, Florida, in March 1997. They had a daughter and divorced in 2011.

  In 2008, he had a brief relationship with the Canadian columnist Rachel Marsden, who first contacted him about her own Wikipedia biography. When critics alleged a conflict of interest, he said it had not influenced anything on the site. Marsden disputed that.

  On the 6th of October 2012, Wales married Kate Garvey, a former diary secretary to Tony Blair, at Wesley's Chapel in London. They have two daughters. He has lived in London since 2012 and became a British citizen in 2019. He describes himself as a complete non-believer, and he loves to cook. On The Tim Ferriss Show in 2021, he revealed that after reading Ferriss's book The 4-Hour Workweek, he secretly spent a month in Buenos Aires.

  In October 2025, Penguin Random House published his book The Seven Rules of Trust. The publisher calls it a reflection on the global crisis of credibility, and it examines the rules of trust behind the encyclopedia's growth.

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