.}}

Coordinates	3°5′00″N101°32′00″N
Name	Wikipedia
Logo
Logocaption	The logo of Wikipedia, a globe featuring glyphs from many different writing systems
Screenshot
Caption	Wikipedia's multilingual portal shows the project's different language editions.
Collapsible	yes
Caption	Screenshot of Wikipedia's multilingual portal.
Url
Type of organization	Nonprofit
Location	Miami, Florida
Type	Internet encyclopedia project
Language	257 active editions (276 in total)
Registration	Optional (required only for certain tasks such as editing protected pages, creating new article pages or uploading files)
Owner	Wikimedia Foundation (non-profit)
Author	Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger
Launch date
Commercial	No
Alexa	7 () Wikipedia was launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger and has become the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet,

has described Wikipedia as "a flawed and irresponsible research tool." John Seigenthaler, the founding editorial director of USA Today and founder of the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, called Jimmy Wales and asked if Wales had any way of knowing who contributed the misinformation. Wales replied that he did not, but nevertheless the perpetrator was eventually traced. This incident led to policy changes on the site, specifically targeted at tightening up the verifiability of all .

Wikipedia's open structure inherently makes it an easy target for Internet trolls, spamming, and those with an agenda to push. The addition of political spin to articles by organizations including members of the U.S. House of Representatives and special interest groups has been noted, and organizations such as Microsoft have offered financial incentives to work on certain articles. These issues have been parodied, notably by Stephen Colbert in The Colbert Report.

For example, in August 2007, the website WikiScanner began to trace the sources of changes made to Wikipedia by anonymous editors without Wikipedia accounts. The program revealed that many such edits were made by corporations or government agencies changing the content of articles related to them, their personnel or their work.

In practice, Wikipedia is defended from attack by multiple systems and techniques. These include users checking pages and edits (e.g. ''s and ''), computer programs ('bots') that are carefully designed to try to detect attacks and fix them automatically (or semi-automatically), filters that warn users making undesirable edits, blocks on the creation of links to particular websites, blocks on edits from particular accounts, IP addresses or address ranges.

For heavily attacked pages, particular articles can be semi-protected so that only well established accounts can edit them, or for particularly contentious cases, locked so that only administrators are able to make changes. Such locking is applied sparingly, usually for only short periods of time while attacks appear likely to continue.

Coverage of topics

Wikipedia seeks to create a summary of all human knowledge in the form of an online encyclopedia. Since it has virtually unlimited disk space it can have far more topics than can be covered by any conventional print encyclopedias. It also contains materials that some people may find objectionable, offensive, or pornographic. It was made clear that this policy is not up for debate, and the policy has sometimes proved controversial. For instance, in 2008, Wikipedia rejected an online petition against the inclusion of Muhammad's depictions in its English edition, citing this policy. The presence of politically sensitive materials in Wikipedia had also led the People's Republic of China to block access to parts of the site. (See also: IWF block of Wikipedia)

, Wikipedia articles cover about half a million places on Earth. However, research conducted by the Oxford Internet Institute has shown that the geographic distribution of articles is highly uneven. Most articles are written about North America, Europe, and East Asia, with very little coverage of large parts of the developing world, including most of Africa.

A 2008 study conducted by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Palo Alto Research Center gave a distribution of topics as well as growth (from July 2006 to January 2008) in each field:

Culture and the arts: 30% (210%)

Biographies and persons: 15% (97%)

Geography and places: 14% (52%)

Society and social sciences: 12% (83%)

History and events: 11% (143%)

Natural and the physical sciences: 9% (213%)

Technology and the applied science: 4% (−6%)

Religions and belief systems: 2% (38%)

Health: 2% (42%)

Mathematics and logic: 1% (146%)

Thought and philosophy: 1% (160%)

However, it must be considered that these numbers relate only to articles; it is possible that one topic contains a lot of short articles and another one quite large ones.

Furthermore, the exact coverage of Wikipedia is under constant review by the editors, and disagreements are not uncommon (see also deletionism and inclusionism).

Quality

Because contributors usually rewrite small portions of an entry rather than making full-length revisions, high- and low-quality content may be intermingled within an entry. Critics sometimes argue that non-expert editing undermines quality. For example, historian Roy Rosenzweig claimed that: "Overall, writing is the Achilles' heel of Wikipedia. Committees rarely write well, and Wikipedia entries often have a choppy quality that results from the stringing together of sentences or paragraphs written by different people."

Reliability

As a consequence of the open structure, Wikipedia "makes no guarantee of validity" of its content, since no one is ultimately responsible for any claims appearing in it. Concerns have been raised regarding the lack of accountability that results from users' anonymity, the insertion of spurious information, vandalism, and similar problems.

Wikipedia has been accused of exhibiting systemic bias and inconsistency; Some commentators suggest that Wikipedia is generally reliable, but that the reliability of any given article is not always clear. Many university lecturers discourage students from citing any encyclopedia in academic work, preferring primary sources; some specifically prohibit Wikipedia citations. Co-founder Jimmy Wales stresses that encyclopedias of any type are not usually appropriate as primary sources, and should not be relied upon as authoritative.

However, an investigation reported in the journal Nature in 2005 suggested that for scientific articles Wikipedia came close to the level of accuracy of Encyclopædia Britannica and had a similar rate of "serious errors." These claims have been disputed by Encyclopædia Britannica.

Economist Tyler Cowen writes, "If I had to guess whether Wikipedia or the median refereed journal article on economics was more likely to be true, after a not so long think I would opt for Wikipedia." He comments that many traditional sources of non-fiction suffer from systemic biases. Novel results are over-reported in journal articles, and relevant information is omitted from news reports. However, he also cautions that errors are frequently found on Internet sites, and that academics and experts must be vigilant in correcting them.

In February 2007, an article in The Harvard Crimson newspaper reported that some of the professors at Harvard University include Wikipedia in their syllabi, but that there is a split in their perception of using Wikipedia. In June 2007, former president of the American Library Association Michael Gorman condemned Wikipedia, along with Google, stating that academics who endorse the use of Wikipedia are "the intellectual equivalent of a dietitian who recommends a steady diet of Big Macs with everything." He also said that "a generation of intellectual sluggards incapable of moving beyond the Internet" was being produced at universities. He complains that the web-based sources are discouraging students from learning from the more rare texts which are either found only on paper or are on subscription-only web sites. In the same article Jenny Fry (a research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute) commented on academics who cite Wikipedia, saying that: "You cannot say children are intellectually lazy because they are using the Internet when academics are using search engines in their research. The difference is that they have more experience of being critical about what is retrieved and whether it is authoritative. Children need to be told how to use the Internet in a critical and appropriate way." Wikipedia's community has also been described as "cult-like," although not always with entirely negative connotations, and criticized for failing to accommodate inexperienced users. Editors in good standing in the community can run for one of many levels of volunteer stewardship; this begins with "administrator," a group of privileged users who have the ability to delete pages, lock articles from being changed in case of vandalism or editorial disputes, and block users from editing. Despite the name, administrators do not enjoy any special privilege in decision-making; instead they are mostly limited to making edits that have project-wide effects and thus are disallowed to ordinary editors, and to block users making disruptive edits (such as vandalism).

As Wikipedia grows with an unconventional model of encyclopedia building, "Who writes Wikipedia?" has become one of the questions frequently asked on the project, often with a reference to other Web 2.0 projects such as Digg. Jimmy Wales once argued that only "a community ... a dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers" makes the bulk of contributions to Wikipedia and that the project is therefore "much like any traditional organization." Wales performed a study finding that over 50% of all the edits are done by just 0.7% of the users (at the time: 524 people). This method of evaluating contributions was later disputed by Aaron Swartz, who noted that several articles he sampled had large portions of their content (measured by number of characters) contributed by users with low edit counts. A 2007 study by researchers from Dartmouth College found that "anonymous and infrequent contributors to Wikipedia ... are as reliable a source of knowledge as those contributors who register with the site." Although some contributors are authorities in their field, Wikipedia requires that even their contributions be supported by published and verifiable sources. The project's preference for over credentials has been labeled "anti-elitism."

In a 2003 study of Wikipedia as a community, economics Ph.D. student Andrea Ciffolilli argued that the low transaction costs of participating in wiki software create a catalyst for collaborative development, and that a "creative construction" approach encourages participation. In his 2008 book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, Jonathan Zittrain of the Oxford Internet Institute and Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society cites Wikipedia's success as a case study in how open collaboration has fostered innovation on the web. A 2008 study found that Wikipedia users were less agreeable and open, though more conscientious, than non-Wikipedia users. A 2009 study suggested there was "evidence of growing resistance from the Wikipedia community to new content."

At OOPSLA 2009, Wikimedia CTO and Senior Software Architect Brion Vibber gave a presentation entitled "Community Performance Optimization: Making Your People Run as Smoothly as Your Site" in which he discussed the challenges of handling the contributions from a large community and compared the process to that of software development.

curators collaboration on the article Hoxne Hoard in June 2010.]] The Wikipedia Signpost is the community newspaper on the English Wikipedia, and was founded by Michael Snow, an administrator and the former chair of the Wikimedia Foundation board of trustees. It covers news and events from the site, as well as major events from sister projects, such as Wikimedia Commons.

Notable users of Wikipedia include film critic Roger Ebert and University of Maryland physicist Robert L. Park.

Wikipedians sometimes award one another barnstars for good work. These personalized tokens of appreciation reveal a wide range of valued work extending far beyond simple editing to include social support, administrative actions, and types of articulation work. The barnstar phenomenon has been analyzed by researchers seeking to determine what implications it might have for other communities engaged in large-scale collaborations.

60% of registered users never make another edit after their first 24 hours. Possible explanations are that such users only register for a single purpose, or are scared away by their experiences. Goldman writes that editors who fail to comply with Wikipedia cultural rituals, such as signing talk pages, implicitly signal that they are Wikipedia outsiders, increasing the odds that Wikipedia insiders will target their contributions as a threat. Becoming a Wikipedia insider involves non-trivial costs; the contributor is expected to build a user page, learn Wikipedia-specific technological codes, submit to an arcane dispute resolution process, and learn a "baffling culture rich with in-jokes and insider references." Non-logged-in users are in some sense second-class citizens on Wikipedia, as "participants are accredited by members of the wiki community, who have a vested interest in preserving the quality of the work product, on the basis of their ongoing participation," but the contribution histories of IP addresses cannot necessarily with any certainty be credited to, or blamed upon, a particular user.

Operation

Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia chapters

logo]] Wikipedia is hosted and funded by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization which also operates Wikipedia-related projects such as Wiktionary and Wikibooks. The Wikimedia chapters, local associations of users and supporters of the Wikimedia projects, also participate in the promotion, the development, and the funding of the project.

Software and hardware

The operation of Wikipedia depends on MediaWiki, a custom-made, free and open source wiki software platform written in PHP and built upon the MySQL database. The software incorporates programming features such as a macro language, variables, a transclusion system for templates, and URL redirection. MediaWiki is licensed under the GNU General Public License and it is used by all Wikimedia projects, as well as many other wiki projects. Originally, Wikipedia ran on UseModWiki written in Perl by Clifford Adams (Phase I), which initially required CamelCase for article hyperlinks; the present double bracket style was incorporated later. Starting in January 2002 (Phase II), Wikipedia began running on a PHP wiki engine with a MySQL database; this software was custom-made for Wikipedia by Magnus Manske. The Phase II software was repeatedly modified to accommodate the exponentially increasing demand. In July 2002 (Phase III), Wikipedia shifted to the third-generation software, MediaWiki, originally written by Lee Daniel Crocker. Several MediaWiki extensions are installed to extend the functionality of MediaWiki software. In April 2005 a Lucene extension was added to MediaWiki's built-in search and Wikipedia switched from MySQL to Lucene for searching. Currently Lucene Search 2.1, which is written in Java and based on Lucene library 2.3, is used.

.]] Wikipedia currently runs on dedicated clusters of Linux servers (mainly Ubuntu), with a few OpenSolaris machines for ZFS. As of December 2009, there were 300 in Florida and 44 in Amsterdam. Wikipedia employed a single server until 2004, when the server setup was expanded into a distributed multitier architecture. In January 2005, the project ran on 39 dedicated servers in Florida. This configuration included a single master database server running MySQL, multiple slave database servers, 21 web servers running the Apache HTTP Server, and seven Squid cache servers.

Wikipedia receives between 25,000 and 60,000 page requests per second, depending on time of day. Page requests are first passed to a front-end layer of Squid caching servers. Further statistics are available based on a publicly available 3-months Wikipedia access trace. Requests that cannot be served from the Squid cache are sent to load-balancing servers running the Linux Virtual Server software, which in turn pass the request to one of the Apache web servers for page rendering from the database. The web servers deliver pages as requested, performing page rendering for all the language editions of Wikipedia. To increase speed further, rendered pages are cached in a distributed memory cache until invalidated, allowing page rendering to be skipped entirely for most common page accesses. Two larger clusters in the Netherlands and Korea now handle much of Wikipedia's traffic load.

Mobile access

Wikipedia's original medium was for users to read and edit content using any standard web browser through a fixed internet connection. However, Wikipedia content is now also accessible through the mobile web.

Access to Wikipedia from mobile phones was possible as early as 2004, through the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), via the Wapedia service. In June 2007, Wikipedia launched en.mobile.wikipedia.org, an official website for wireless devices. In 2009 a newer mobile service was officially released, located at en.m.wikipedia.org, which caters to more advanced mobile devices such as the iPhone, Android-based devices, or the Palm Pre. Several other methods of mobile access to Wikipedia have emerged (See ). Several devices and applications optimise or enhance the display of Wikipedia content for mobile devices, while some also incorporate additional features such as use of Wikipedia metadata (See ), such as geoinformation.

Language editions

There are currently 262 language editions (or language versions) of Wikipedia; of these, 3, the English, German, and French Wikipedias have over 1 million articles, 24 have over 100,000 articles and 81 have over 1,000 articles. The largest, the English Wikipedia, has articles. According to Alexa, the English subdomain (en.wikipedia.org; English Wikipedia) receives approximately 54% of Wikipedia's cumulative traffic, with the remaining split among the other languages (Japanese: 10%, German: 8%, Spanish: 5%, Russian: 4%, French: 4%, Italian: 3%).

Since Wikipedia is web-based and therefore worldwide, contributors of a same language edition may use different dialects or may come from different countries (as is the case for the English edition). These differences may lead to some conflicts over spelling differences, (e.g. color vs. colour) or points of view. Though the various language editions are held to global policies such as "neutral point of view," they diverge on some points of policy and practice, most notably on whether images that are not licensed freely may be used under a claim of fair use.

Jimmy Wales has described Wikipedia as "an effort to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language." Though each language edition functions more or less independently, some efforts are made to supervise them all. They are coordinated in part by Meta-Wiki, the Wikimedia Foundation's wiki devoted to maintaining all of its projects (Wikipedia and others). For instance, Meta-Wiki provides important statistics on all language editions of Wikipedia, and it maintains a list of articles every Wikipedia should have. The list concerns basic content by subject: biography, history, geography, society, culture, science, technology, foodstuffs, and mathematics. As for the rest, it is not rare for articles strongly related to a particular language not to have counterparts in another edition. For example, articles about small towns in the United States might only be available in English.

Translated articles represent only a small portion of articles in most editions, in part because automated translation of articles is disallowed. Articles available in more than one language may offer "Interwiki links", which link to the counterpart articles in other editions.

Cultural significance

's music video for his song "White & Nerdy."]] In addition to logistic growth in the number of its articles, Wikipedia has steadily gained status as a general reference website since its inception in 2001. According to Alexa and comScore, Wikipedia is among the ten most visited websites worldwide. Of the top ten, Wikipedia is the only non-profit website. The growth of Wikipedia has been fueled by its dominant position in Google search results; about 50% of search engine traffic to Wikipedia comes from Google, a good portion of which is related to academic research. The number of readers of Wikipedia worldwide reached 365 million at the end of 2009. In October 2006, the site was estimated to have a hypothetical market value of $580 million if it ran advertisements.

Wikipedia's content has also been used in academic studies, books, conferences, and court cases. The Parliament of Canada's website refers to Wikipedia's article on same-sex marriage in the "related links" section of its "further reading" list for the Civil Marriage Act. The encyclopedia's assertions are increasingly used as a source by organizations such as the U.S. Federal Courts and the World Intellectual Property Organization – though mainly for supporting information rather than information decisive to a case. Content appearing on Wikipedia has also been cited as a source and referenced in some U.S. intelligence agency reports. In December 2008, the scientific journal RNA Biology launched a new section for descriptions of families of RNA molecules and requires authors who contribute to the section to also submit a draft article on the RNA family for publication in Wikipedia.

satirical newspaper headline "Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence."]] Wikipedia has also been used as a source in journalism, often without attribution, and several reporters have been dismissed for plagiarizing from Wikipedia. In July 2007, Wikipedia was the focus of a 30-minute documentary on BBC Radio 4 which argued that, with increased usage and awareness, the number of references to Wikipedia in popular culture is such that the term is one of a select band of 21st-century nouns that are so familiar (Google, Facebook, YouTube) that they no longer need explanation and are on a par with such 20th-century terms as Hoovering or Coca-Cola. Many parody Wikipedia's openness, with characters vandalizing or modifying the online encyclopedia project's articles. Notably, comedian Stephen Colbert has parodied or referenced Wikipedia on numerous episodes of his show The Colbert Report and coined the related term "wikiality."

receiving the Quadriga A Mission of Enlightenment award.]] On September 16, 2007, The Washington Post reported that Wikipedia had become a focal point in the 2008 U.S. election campaign, saying, "Type a candidate's name into Google, and among the first results is a Wikipedia page, making those entries arguably as important as any ad in defining a candidate. Already, the presidential entries are being edited, dissected and debated countless times each day." An October 2007 Reuters article, titled "Wikipedia page the latest status symbol," reported the recent phenomenon of how having a Wikipedia article vindicates one's notability.

Wikipedia won two major awards in May 2004. The first was a Golden Nica for Digital Communities of the annual Prix Ars Electronica contest; this came with a €10,000 (£6,588; $12,700) grant and an invitation to present at the PAE Cyberarts Festival in Austria later that year. The second was a Judges' Webby Award for the "community" category. Wikipedia was also nominated for a "Best Practices" Webby. On January 26, 2007, Wikipedia was also awarded the fourth highest brand ranking by the readers of brandchannel.com, receiving 15% of the votes in answer to the question "Which brand had the most impact on our lives in 2006?"

In September 2008, Wikipedia received Quadriga A Mission of Enlightenment award of Werkstatt Deutschland along with Boris Tadić, Eckart Höfling, and Peter Gabriel. The award was presented to Jimmy Wales by David Weinberger.

Some media sources satirize Wikipedia's susceptibility to inserted inaccuracies. An example can be found in a front-page article in The Onion in July 2006, with the title "Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years of American Independence." Others draw upon Wikipedia's motto, such as in "The Negotiation," an episode of The Office, where character Michael Scott says "Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject, so you know you are getting the best possible information." "My Number One Doctor", a 2007 episode of the TV show Scrubs, also lampooned Wikipedia's reliance on editors who edit both scholarly and pop culture articles with a scene in which Dr. Perry Cox reacts to a patient who says that a Wikipedia article indicates that the raw food diet reverses the effects of bone cancer by retorting that the same editor who wrote that article also wrote the Battlestar Galactica episode guide.

In July 2009, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a comedy series called Bigipedia, which was set on a website which was a parody of Wikipedia. Some of the sketches were directly inspired by Wikipedia and its articles.

Related projects

A number of interactive multimedia encyclopedias incorporating entries written by the public existed long before Wikipedia was founded. The first of these was the 1986 BBC Domesday Project, which included text (entered on BBC Micro computers) and photographs from over 1 million contributors in the UK, and covering the geography, art, and culture of the UK. This was the first interactive multimedia encyclopedia (and was also the first major multimedia document connected through internal links), with the majority of articles being accessible through an interactive map of the UK. The user-interface and part of the content of the Domesday Project were emulated on a website until 2008. One of the most successful early online encyclopedias incorporating entries by the public was h2g2, which was created by Douglas Adams and is run by the BBC. The h2g2 encyclopedia was relatively light-hearted, focusing on articles which were both witty and informative. Both of these projects had similarities with Wikipedia, but neither gave full editorial privileges to public users. A similar non-wiki project, the GNUPedia project, co-existed with Nupedia early in its history; however, it has been retired and its creator, free software figure Richard Stallman, has lent his support to Wikipedia. created in October 2002, detailed the September 11 attacks; this project was closed in October 2006. Wiktionary, a dictionary project, was launched in December 2002; Wikiquote, a collection of quotations, a week after Wikimedia launched, and Wikibooks, a collection of collaboratively written free textbooks and annotated texts. Wikimedia has since started a number of other projects, including Wikiversity, a project for the creation of free learning materials and the provision of online learning activities. None of these sister projects, however, has come to meet the success of Wikipedia.

Several languages of Wikipedia also maintain a reference desk, where volunteers answer questions from the general public. According to a study by Pnina Shachaf in the Journal of Documentation, the quality of the Wikipedia reference desk is comparable to a standard library reference desk, with an accuracy of 55%.

Other websites centered on collaborative knowledge base development have drawn inspiration from or inspired Wikipedia. Some, such as Susning.nu, Enciclopedia Libre, Hudong, Baidu Baike, and WikiZnanie likewise employ no formal review process, whereas others use more traditional peer review, such as Encyclopedia of Life, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Scholarpedia, h2g2, and Everything2. The online wiki-based encyclopedia Citizendium was started by Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger in an attempt to create an "expert-friendly" Wikipedia.

See also

, philosophical background

Democratization of knowledge

Interpedia, an early proposal for a collaborative Internet encyclopedia

GNUPedia

Nupedia

List of online encyclopedias

List of wikis

Network effect

USA Congressional staff edits to Wikipedia

User-generated content

Wikipedia Review

Notes

Further reading

;Academic studies

Priedhorsky, Reid, Jilin Chen, Shyong (Tony) K. Lam, Katherine Panciera, Loren Terveen, and John Riedl. "Creating, Destroying, and Restoring Value in Wikipedia". Proc. GROUP 2007, doi: 1316624.131663.

(a blog post by the autor)

;Books (See book rev. by Baker, as listed below.)

;Book reviews and other articles

Crovitz, L. Gordon. "Wikipedia's Old-Fashioned Revolution: The online encyclopedia is fast becoming the best." (Originally published in Wall Street Journal online – April 6, 2009, 8:34 A.M. ET)

Baker, Nicholson. "The Charms of Wikipedia". The New York Review of Books, March 20, 2008. Accessed December 17, 2008. (Book rev. of The Missing Manual, by John Broughton, as listed above.)

Rosenzweig, Roy. Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past. (Originally published in Journal of American History 93.1 (June 2006): 117–46.)

;Learning resources

. (Includes related courses, Web-based seminars, slides, lecture notes, text books, quizzes, glossaries, etc.)

;Other media coverage

Is Wikipedia Cracking Up?, The Independent, February 3, 2009

External links

Wikipedia – multilingual portal (contains links to all language editions of the project)

* at the English Wikipedia

Wikipedia mobile phone portal

Wikipedia at the Open Directory Project

Wikipedia topic page at The New York Times

Video of TED Talk by Jimmy Wales on the birth of Wikipedia

Audio of interview with Jimmy Wales about Wikipedia in general on the EconTalk podcast

Wikipedia and why it matters – Larry Sanger's 2002 talk at Stanford University about Wikipedia. video archive and

, describing an intelligence project utilizing Wikipedia, and how Wikipedia articles could be auto-generated from web content

Category:Advertising-free websites Category:Collaborative projects Category:Free encyclopedias Category:General encyclopedias Category:Human–computer interaction Category:Hypertext Category:Internet properties established in 2001 Category:Multilingual websites Category:Online encyclopedias Category:Open content projects Category:Scientific revolution Category:Social information processing Category:Virtual communities Category:Web 2.0 Category:Wikimedia projects Category:Wikis Category:Creative Commons-licensed websites

Coordinates	3°5′00″N101°32′00″N
Name	Jimmy Wales
Caption	Wales in December 2008
Birth name	Jimmy Donal Wales
Birth date	August 07, 1966
Birth place	Huntsville, Alabama United States
Nationality	American
Other names	Jimbo (online alias)
Known for	Co-founding Wikipedia
Website	Blog.JimmyWales.com

Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales (; born August 7, 1966)

Wales had a brief relationship with Canadian conservative columnist Rachel Marsden in 2008 that began after Marsden contacted Wales about her Wikipedia biography. and according to The Atlantic Monthly it "found itself positioned as the Playboy of the Internet". Nonetheless, the cadre of early editors helped create a robust, self-regulating community that has proven conducive to the growth of the project.

Role

speech ("The State of the Wiki") at Wikimania, the conference for Wikimedia projects, in Buenos Aires in 2009]] In a 2004 interview with Slashdot, Wales outlined his vision for Wikipedia: "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."

Wikimedia Foundation

Board of Trustees on a panel at Wikimania 2007.|upright]] In mid-2003, Wales set up the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), a non-profit organization founded in St. Petersburg, Florida and headquartered on the West Coast of the United States, in San Francisco, California.

Thought and influences

Wales is a self-avowed "Objectivist to the core"; "What they're doing is not really a wiki. The essence of wiki is a collaborative editing...".

Honors, awards and positions

on October 3, 2008]] .]] Mid-2005 — Wales was appointed as a member of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.

Published work

References

Further reading

External links

Jimmy Wales, Wales' official blog

' active Wikipedia userpage

Jimmy Wales interviewed on Channel 4 News (UK) via YouTube - 10 Years of Wikipedia WikiLeaks is not a Wiki.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsI7EYHo7Z0 , Wales' role in the English Wikipedia as conceived by its editors

Jimmy Wales gives 20 minute lecture on the birth of Wikipedia at TED Global 2005.

Audio of interview with Wales about Wikipedia on EconTalk podcast

, from April 9, 2009.

Raju Narisetti's interview of Jimmy Wales (Washington Post video)

Category:1966 births Category:American bloggers Category:American businesspeople Category:American libertarians Category:Ashoka USA Fellows-2010 Category:Auburn University alumni Category:Berkman Fellows Category:History of Wikipedia Category:Indiana University alumni Category:Living people Category:Objectivists Category:People from Huntsville, Alabama Category:People from St. Petersburg, Florida Category:Recipients of the Gottlieb Duttweiler Prize Category:University of Alabama alumni Category:WEF YGL honorees Category:Wikia Category:Wikimedia Foundation Category:Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees members