Tech Features

PROFILE: Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales - share the knowledge

By Jenny Tobien Jan 12, 2011, 14:45 GMT

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales delivers a speach as he meets with students of the Skolkovo management school outside Moscow, Russia, 14 December 2010. EPA/MITYA ALESHKOVSKIY

Hamburg - Jimmy Wales is constantly on the go. Most of the year he travels round the globe. His mission? To make all human knowledge accessible to everyone.

'Wikipedia is going to be increasingly global in the future,' the 44-year-old American says. 'We will have enormous growth in the developing world.'

It was 10 years ago, in January 2001, that he launched the online encyclopedia. Now, ten years later, it offers 17 million entries in more than 260 languages.

Wales was born in 1966 in Alabama. His father was a grocery store manager and his mother an educator. Even as a boy he had an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and 'spent lots of hours' reading the Britannica and World Book Encyclopedia.

His earliest education was at home from his own mother, who ran a small private school on the Montessori method. Later Jimbo, as friends call him, got a master's degree in finance and worked as the research director of a Chicago futures and options firm for several years.

His driving passion is computers. Since the earliest days of personal computing he has been an Internet addict and even wrote computer codes as a hobby, according to his own biographical entry on Wikipedia.

In 1996, he and two partners founded Bomis, a men's web portal featuring entertainment and adult content. This website provided the initial funding for the peer-reviewed encyclopedia Nupedia in 2000.

Thanks to the Wiki software, which enables each user immediate access - as author or as editor - Wikipedia was founded the following year.

Today Wikipedia resembles pretty much what he originally envisioned, he told the German Press Agency dpa in an interview.

'But of course it's a lot larger and more popular than I had ever imagined,' he said.

So can we say that Wikipedia has made the world different and has made Wales a rich man?

'I hope that the world has become a little better.' And as for the financial side. 'The pages are non-commercial and they will stay that way,' Wales explained. But his for-profit Internet company Wikia is doing well and shows a profit.

'That may make me rich!' he said.

Wales is a self-avowed 'Objectivist to the core', Objectivism being an individualist philosophy developed by writer Ayn Rand. And he is an avid chess player.

He is separated from his second wife, with whom he has a daughter. Although 10-year-old Kira consults Wikipedia on occasion, her father favours traditional education.

'Anybody who says you don't need to know anything these days, just know where to look it up, is mistaken, in my opinion,' he said.

And Wales himself still loves to pore over books just as he did when he was a boy.

'Books are great. They're inexpensive and the batteries never run down,' he said.