Wikia, Inc.

Type	Private
Founded	2004
Founder(s)	Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley
Headquarters	San Francisco, California, US
Key people	Craig Palmer (CEO)
Products	Wiki hosting
Employees	127 (September 2011)[1]
Website	wikia.com
Alexa rank	169 (June 2012[update])[2]
Type of site	Wiki farm
Advertising	Direct and ad networks
Registration	Optional
Available in	Multilingual
Launched	2004
Current status	Active
Screenshot 220px Screenshot of Wikia's main page

This article's factual accuracy may be compromised due to out-of-date information. Please help improve the article by updating it. There may be additional information on the talk page. (December 2011)

Wikia (formerly Wikicities) is a free web hosting service for wikis (or wiki farm). It is normally free of charge for readers and editors, deriving most of its income from advertising, and publishes all user-provided text under copyleft licenses. Wikia hosts several hundred thousand wikis using the open-source wiki software MediaWiki. Its operator, Wikia, Inc., is a for-profit Delaware company founded in late 2004^[3] by Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley – respectively Chairman Emeritus and Advisory Board member of the Wikimedia Foundation – and headed by Craig Palmer as CEO.^[4]

On February 8, 2012, Beesley announced she was leaving Wikia to launch a startup called ChalkDrop.com.^[5]

History[link]

Wikia spent over a year going by the name "Wikicities" (inviting comparisons to GeoCities),^[6] but changed its name to "Wikia" on March 27, 2006, saying that "the name Wikicities has often caused confusion, with many people believing it was a site for city guides rather than wikis about any topic."^[7] In the month before the move, Wikia announced a US$4 million venture capital investment from Bessemer Venture Partners and First Round Capital.^[8] Nine months later, Amazon.com invested US$10 million in Series B funding,^[9] with Senior VP of Business Development Jeff Blackburn joining the company board.^[10]

In November 2006, Wikia claimed to have spent only $5.74 on marketing, while generating 40 to 50 million page views.^[10] The company later spent $2 million to purchase ArmchairGM, a sports forum and wiki, previously an independently hosted site.^[10]

Wikia announced the creation of its hundredth wiki on February 3, 2005.^[11] As of July 2007, it had over 3,000 wikis in over 50 languages.^[12] Wikia's growth stems not only from wikis founded on Wikia, but also from incorporating formerly independent wikis that joined Wikia over time, such as LyricWiki, The Vault, Uncyclopedia and WoWWiki.^[13][14][15]

On April 7, 2010, Wikia announced the creation of its 100,000th wiki.^[16] In May 2010, the company offered the removal of external ads (though not internal promotions) for a fee, but only for wikis with fewer than 20,000 page-views per month.^[17]

Topics and wikis[link]

Wikia covers a broad range of topics; almost any project not founded on hate, libel, pornography or copyright infringement is allowed, as long as it does not duplicate Wikimedia Foundation projects.^[18] Many hosted wikis follow the style of Wikipedia, but offer detail beyond what is considered appropriate for a general encyclopedia. For example, a minor character in a Star Wars film may have its own article on Wookieepedia.^[19] Another example is that content that is generally considered beyond the scope of information of Wikipedia articles on video games and related video game topics, such as detailed instructions, gameplay details, plot details, and so forth, are offered on video game related wikis hosted by Wikia. Gameplay concepts can also have their own articles. Wikia also allows wikis to have a point of view, rather than the neutral POV on Wikipedia. However, many wikis choose to follow a neutral point of view policy regardless.

Wikia requires all user text content to be published under a free license;^[20] most use the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, although Memory Alpha and Uncyclopedia use a noncommercial variant and some use the GNU Free Documentation License.^{[nb 1][21]}

Questions and answers site[link]

Wikia has struggled several times to open a question-and-answer site akin to Google Answers and similar ventures. In January 2009, the company relaunched this effort, which used the name "Wikianswers", which drew criticism from Answers.com, which had a preexisting site called WikiAnswers.^[22] Answers.com CEO Bob Rosenschein stated, "Wikia is creating market confusion by associating its Q&A category with our market-leading WikiAnswers domain and site."^[23]

In March 2010, Wikia re-launched "Answers from Wikia",^[24] where users could create topic-specialized knowledge market wikis based upon Wikia's own Wikianswers subdomain.

OpenServing[link]

OpenServing was a short-lived Web publishing project owned by Wikia, founded on December 12, 2006,^[25][26] and abandoned, unannounced, in January 2008.^[27] Like Wikia, OpenServing was to offer free wiki hosting, but it would differ in that each wiki's founder would retain any revenue gained from advertising on the site.^[25][28][29] OpenServing used a modified version of the Wikimedia Foundation's MediaWiki software created by ArmchairGM, but was intended to branch out to other open source packages.^[25][30]

According to Wikia co-founder and chairman Jimmy Wales, the OpenServing site received several thousand applications in January 2007.^[31] However, after a year, no sites had been launched under the OpenServing banner. Angela Beesley, a co-founder and vice president of Community at Wikia described OpenServing as "never very popular or successful", and said Wikia's efforts had been refocused on wikia.com, to which openserving.com redirects.^[27]

ArmchairGM[link]

ArmchairGM was a sports forum and wiki site created by Aaron Wright, Dan Lewis, Robert Lefkowitz and developer David Pean. Launched in early 2006, the site was initially US-based, but sought to improve its links to sports associated with Britain over its first year. Its MediaWiki-based software included a Digg-style article-voting mechanism, blog-like comment forms with "thumbs up/down" user feedback, and the ability to write multiple types of posts (news, opinions, or "locker room" discussion entries).

In late 2006, the site was bought by Wikia for $2 million.^[32] After the purchase was made, the former owners applied ArmchairGM's architecture to other Wikia sites.

For Super Bowl XLI, the site made charity donations for every comment posted. The main hub of this commenting was in a live blog.^[33] An ArmchairGM contributor operating under the pseudonym Manny Stiles auctioned his blogging services on eBay in early 2007. Tampa Bay Devil Rays President Matt Silverman bought the 33-year-old blogger's work for $535, before adding another $1000. The money went to AIDS awareness.^[34]

On March 20, 2008, Sports Illustrated added a section to their website called the SI Vault Wiki, pointing to the ArmchairGM encyclopedia.^[35]

From September 2010 to February 2011, Wikia absorbed the site's encyclopedia articles and blanked all of its old blog entries, effectively discontinuing ArmchairGM in its original form.

On August 1, 2011, ArmchairGM's codebase was open-sourced.^[36]

Software and hardware[link]

Wikia runs a modified version of MediaWiki^[37] on Linux (Red Hat, Debian and Ubuntu) servers. The Wikia file store as of June 2011 includes over 8 million files stored on SSD.^[38]

Search engines[link]

Wikiasari[link]

Wikia Inc. initially proposed creating a copyleft search engine; the software (but not the site) was named "Wikiasari" by a November 2004 naming contest.^{[nb 2]} The proposal became inactive in 2005.

Search Wikia[link]

The "public alpha" of Wikia Search web search engine was launched on January 7, 2008,^[39] from the USSHC underground data center.^[40] This roll-out version of the search interface was roundly panned by reviewers in technology media.^[41] The project was ended in March 2009.^[42]

Current search engine[link]

Late in 2009, a new search engine was established to index and display results from all sites hosted on Wikia.^[43]

Company[link]

Wikia, Inc. is based in San Francisco.^[44] The company was originally incorporated in Florida in December 2004 and re-incorporated in Delaware as Wikia, Inc. on January 10, 2006.

Angela Beesley has served since the beginning as Wikia's Vice-President of Community Relations.^[45] Gil Penchina, a previous angel investor^[45] and former vice president and general manager at eBay, was hired as CEO on June 5, 2006.^[46] Michael E. Davis, a former business partner of Wales who served for years as a founding member of the Wikimedia Foundation board and was that organization's Treasurer, was named Treasurer and Secretary of Wikia in January 2006.

In October 2011, Wikia announced that Craig Palmer, the former CEO of Gracenote, would replace Penchina as CEO, and that Jennifer Betka would commence in the new position of senior vice president of marketing.^[4]

Wikia has technical staff in the USA, but also has an office in Poznań, Poland, in 2006. Explaining his choice of location, Wales commented "It's about reasonable salaries and high quality. You can find cheaper programmers in other parts of the world, but the quality's not there!"^[12]

Wikia derives income from advertising. The company initially used Google AdSense,^[47] but moved on to Federated Media before bringing ad management in-house.^[48]

Controversy[link]

Advertising and use of free content[link]

Wikia has sometimes expanded by acquiring an existing wiki's domain name, user lists, and databases, from a founder or co-founder in return for money and stock options.^[49] The original wiki is then shut down without consulting its editors or wider community, and the domain redirected to Wikia's version of the project. In at least two cases^{[nb 3][50]} the content was under a non-commercial license, raising the question of whether the wikis could legitimately be sold to Wikia for commercial use.^[51] In 2009, Wikia added an extension where users could create magazines of content pages, through partner MagCloud;^[52] however, this was not disabled on wikis with a "Noncommercial" clause on their license, which would break the license.

Once on Wikia, wiki communities have complained of inappropriate advertisements, or advertising in the body text area.^[53] There is no easy way for individual communities to switch to conventional paid hosting, as Wikia usually owns the relevant domain names. If a community leaves Wikia for new hosting, the company typically continues to operate the abandoned wiki using its original name and content, adversely affecting the new wiki's search rankings, for advertising revenue.^[54]

Wikia and the Wikimedia Foundation[link]

Wikia has been accused of unduly profiting from a perceived association with Wikipedia.^[55] Although Wikia has been referred to in the media as "the commercial counterpart to the non-profit Wikipedia",^[56][57] Wikimedia^[58] and Wikia staff^[59] call this description inaccurate.

In 2006, the Wikimedia Foundation shared hosting and bandwidth costs with Wikia, and received some donated office space from Wikia during the fiscal year ending June 30, 2006. At the end of fiscal year 2007, Wikia owed the Foundation US$6,000. As of June 2007, two members of the Foundation's Board of Directors also served as employees, officers, or directors of Wikia.^[60] In January 2009, Wikia subleased two conference rooms to the Wikimedia Foundation for the Wikipedia Usability Initiative.^[61] According to a 2009 email by Erik Möller, deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation, bid averaging was used "as a way to arrive at a fair market rate".^[62]

Domain and skin assimilation[link]

Wikia has merged separately founded wikis, such as Uncyclopedia, to subdomains of wikia.com against contributors' wishes, citing a need to boost its attractiveness to advertisers.^[63] The company intended to merge Memory Alpha, WoWWiki, and Zelda Wiki in a similar fashion;^[64][65] the proposal was successfully opposed by users of all three sites.^[66][67][68] Zelda Wiki is still an independent wiki, while WoWWiki and Memory Alpha were merged but allowed to keep their domain names.

In June 2008, Wikia adopted a new skin, Monaco, intending to implement it as the default on almost all hosted wikis.^[69] The skin had an uneven reception, with issues over the prominent branding, in-content format-altering ads, and the mandatory nature of the change.^[70] Many wiki users felt the choice of skin default should remain their own. The switch went ahead, but some wikis retained Monobook as their default. In September 2008, the Transformers Wikia moved content to their own server, citing the format-altering ads and mandatory changes as reasons for their departure.^[71][72] WikiFur moved likewise in August 2009.^[73]

In May 2009, Wikia removed the ability of individual users to choose a skin other than Monaco or Monobook, claiming a testing burden and relative lack of features. Soon after, Wikia removed the option to set the default skin to Monobook, with the exception of certain large wikis, namely, Uncyclopedia.^[74]

In August 2010, Wikia announced a new mandatory skin change, this time to a new look nicknamed "Oasis".^[75] The new skin omitted several features, such as the popular shoutbox.^[76] On September 23, 2010, Wikia introduced the new skin in public beta with the option to be the default skin for certain wikis, like Muppet Wiki.^[77] Wikia also revealed the official name of the new skin, Wikia.^[78] The Wikia skin became the default skin on Wikia on November 3, 2010. Wikia also changed the Terms of Use, prohibiting any modification that changes the default layout of the skin.^[79] As a result of the skin change, some users have proposed to move their wikis to another wiki farm and have created an "Anti-Wikia Alliance" with comments against the new skin, links to wiki farms and a database to keep all the moving wikis.^[80] Some wikis, like Guildwiki,^[81] have moved from Wikia to Curse.com, but decided to leave a presence on Wikia, but with a different purpose from their main site on a new host.^[82] Some large wikis like Halopedia,^[83][84] Club Penguin Wiki,^[85][86] WikiSimpsons^[87] and Grand Theft Wiki^[88] have already moved, while others such as MicroWiki,^[89] SmashWiki,^[90] WoWWiki,^[91] The Vault,^[92] Touhou Wiki,^[93] the Doom Wiki,^[94] and Half-Life Wiki (known as Combine OverWiki)^[95] have all moved from Wikia also. The new look has been described by Wikia as "sleek" and is supposed to be helpful to new users,^[96] but many of the changes have drawn criticism from older users.^[97] One such criticism is the greatly reduced width of page content, causing infoboxes and other templates to break the page if they go beyond the fixed margin. Because of this, subdomains such as Marvel Database^[98] and DozerfleetWiki^[99] have put notices on their front pages strongly encouraging users to switch their personal preferences to Monobook to make the sites easier to use.

See also[link]

• Comparison of wiki farms

Notes[link]

References[link]

External links[link]

	Wikinews has news related to this article:
Potential Wikia mass exodus Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales to start wiki-based search engine

• Wikia home page
• Video of and notes from Wales Talk on Free Culture, Transparency, and Search (over half the talk is on Wikia) at New York University (January 31, 2007)
• Global Villages Convene in wiki town halls – St. Petersburg Times (April 4, 2005)
• From Wikipedia's Creator, A New Site for Anyone, Anything – Wall Street Journal (March 28, 2005)

Jimmy Wales
Wales in December 2008
Born	Jimmy Donal Wales (1966-08-07) August 7, 1966 (age 45) Huntsville, Alabama, United States
Residence	London, United Kingdom[1]
Other names	Jimbo
Alma mater	Auburn University University of Alabama Indiana University Bloomington
Occupation	Internet entrepreneur, formerly a Financial trader
Title	President of Wikia, Inc. (2004–present) Chairman of Wikimedia Foundation (June 2003 – October 2006) Chairman Emeritus, Wikimedia Foundation (October 2006–present)
Successor	Florence Devouard
Board member of	Wikimedia Foundation Creative Commons Socialtext Sunlight Foundation (advisory board) MIT Center for Collective Intelligence (advisory board) CiviliNation[2]
Awards	see below
Signature
Website
www.jimmywales.com

Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales ( /ˈdoʊnəl ˈweɪlz/; born August 7, 1966^[3]) is an American Internet entrepreneur best known as a co-founder and promoter of the online non-profit encyclopedia Wikipedia and the Wikia company.^[4][5] Wales was born in Huntsville, Alabama, United States, where he attended Randolph School, a university-preparatory school, then earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in finance. While in graduate school, he taught at two universities, but left before completing a PhD in order to take a job in finance and later worked as the research director of a Chicago futures and options firm. In 1996, he and two partners founded Bomis, a male-oriented web portal featuring entertainment and adult content. The company would provide the initial funding for the peer-reviewed free encyclopedia Nupedia (2000–2003) and its successor, Wikipedia.

On January 15, 2001, with Larry Sanger and others, Wales launched Wikipedia, a free, open content encyclopedia that enjoyed rapid growth and popularity, and as Wikipedia’s public profile grew, he became the project’s promoter and spokesman. He is historically cited as a co-founder of Wikipedia, though he has disputed the "co-" designation, declaring himself the sole founder.^[6][7] Wales serves on the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit charitable organization he helped establish to operate Wikipedia, holding its board-appointed "community founder" seat. In 2004, he co-founded Wikia, a for-profit wiki-hosting service. His role in creating Wikipedia, which has become the world’s largest encyclopedia, prompted Time magazine to name him in its 2006 list of the world’s most influential people.

Early life and education[link]

Wales was born in Huntsville, Alabama, on August 7, 1966.^[3][8] His father, Jimmy,^[9] worked as a grocery store manager while his mother, Doris, and his grandmother, Erma, ran the House of Learning,^[10] a small private school in the tradition of the one-room schoolhouse, where Wales and his three siblings received their early education.^[10][11] As a child, Wales was a keen reader with an acute intellectual curiosity^[5] and, in what he credits to the influence of the Montessori method on the school’s philosophy of education, "spent lots of hours pouring [sic] over the Britannicas and World Book Encyclopedias." There were only four other children in Wales’ grade, so the school grouped together the first through fourth grade students and the fifth through eighth grade students. As an adult, Wales was sharply critical of the government’s treatment of the school, citing the “constant interference and bureaucracy and very sort of snobby inspectors from the state” as a formative influence on his political philosophy.^[12]

After eighth grade, Wales attended Randolph School,^[13] a university-preparatory school in Huntsville, graduating at sixteen.^[14] Wales said that the school was expensive for his family, but that "education was always a passion in my household... you know, the very traditional approach to knowledge and learning and establishing that as a base for a good life."^[12] He received his bachelor’s degree in finance from Auburn University. Wales then entered the PhD finance program at the University of Alabama before leaving with a master's degree to enter the PhD finance program at Indiana University.^[11][12][14] He taught at both universities during his postgraduate studies but did not write the doctoral dissertation required for a PhD, something he ascribed to boredom.^[11][12]

Career[link]

Chicago Options Associates and Bomis[link]

The staff of Wales’ internet company Bomis photographed in Summer 2000. Wales is third from the left in the back row, with his then-wife Christine.

In 1994, Wales took a job with Chicago Options Associates, a futures and options trading firm in Chicago, Illinois.^[12][15][16] Wales has described himself as having been addicted to the Internet from an early stage and he wrote computer codes during his leisure time. During his studies in Alabama, he had become an obsessive player of Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs)—a type of virtual role-playing game—and thereby experienced the potential of computer networks to foster large-scale collaborative projects.^[14][17] Inspired by the remarkable initial public offering of Netscape in 1995, and having accumulated capital through "speculating on interest-rate and foreign-currency fluctuations",^[10] he decided to leave the realm of financial trading and became an Internet entrepreneur.^[14] In 1996, he and two partners founded Bomis,^[10][18] a web portal featuring user-generated webrings and, for a time, erotic photographs.^[19] Wales described it as a "guy-oriented search engine" with a market similar to that of Maxim magazine;^[11][12][20] The Bomis venture did not ultimately turn out to be successful, however.^[10][11][21]

Nupedia and the origins of Wikipedia[link]

Philosopher Larry Sanger, whom Wales hired as editor-in-chief of Nupedia.

Though Bomis had struggled to make money, it provided Wales with the funding to pursue his greater passion, an online encyclopedia.^[11] While moderating an online discussion group devoted to the philosophy of Objectivism in the early 1990s, Wales had encountered Larry Sanger, a skeptic of the philosophy.^[5] The two had engaged in detailed debate on the subject on Wales' list and then on Sanger's, eventually meeting offline to continue the debate and becoming friends.^[5] Years later, after deciding to pursue his encyclopedia project and seeking a credentialed academic to lead it,^[17] Wales hired Sanger—who at that time was a doctoral student in philosophy at Ohio State University—to be its editor-in-chief, and in March 2000, Nupedia ("the free encyclopedia"), a peer-reviewed, open-content encyclopedia, was launched.^[11][12] The intent behind Nupedia was to have expert-written entries on a variety of topics, and to sell advertising alongside the entries in order to make profit.^[5] The project was characterized by an extensive peer-review process designed to make its articles of a quality comparable to that of professional encyclopedias.^[22]

The idea was to have thousands of volunteers writing articles for an online encyclopedia in all languages. Initially we found ourselves organizing the work in a very top-down, structured, academic, old-fashioned way. It was no fun for the volunteer writers because we had a lot of academic peer review committees who would criticize articles and give feedback. It was like handing in an essay at grad school, and basically intimidating to participate in.

—Jimmy Wales on the Nupedia project New Scientist, January 31, 2007^[23]

In an October 2009 speech, Wales recollects attempting to write a Nupedia article on Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert C. Merton, but being too intimidated to submit his first draft to the prestigious finance professors who were to peer review it, even though he had published a paper on Option Pricing Theory and was comfortable with the subject matter. Wales characterized this as the moment he realized that the Nupedia model was not going to work.^[24]

In January 2001, Sanger was introduced to the concept of a wiki by extreme programming enthusiast Ben Kovitz after explaining to Kovitz the slow pace of growth Nupedia endured as a result of its onerous submission process.^[25] Kovitz suggested that adopting the wiki model would allow editors to contribute simultaneously and incrementally throughout the project, thus breaking Nupedia's bottleneck.^[25] Sanger was excited about the idea, and after he proposed it to Wales, they created the first Nupedia wiki on January 10, 2001.^[25] The wiki was initially intended as a collaborative project for the public to write articles that would then be reviewed for publication by Nupedia's expert volunteers. The majority of Nupedia’s experts, however, wanted nothing to do with this project, fearing that mixing amateur content with professionally researched and edited material would compromise the integrity of Nupedia’s information and damage the credibility of the encyclopedia.^[26] Thus, the wiki project, dubbed "Wikipedia" by Sanger,^[6] went live at a separate domain five days after its creation.^[16][21]

Wikipedia[link]

While Sanger saw Wikipedia primarily as a tool to aid Nupedia development, Wales felt that Wikipedia might have the potential to become the truly collaborative, open effort of knowledge building he dreamed of.^[27][28][29] Initially, neither Sanger nor Wales knew what to expect from the Wikipedia initiative.^[16][17] Wales feared that at worst, it might produce "complete rubbish".^[16] To the surprise of Sanger and Wales, within a few days of launching the number of articles on Wikipedia had outgrown that of Nupedia, and a small collective of editors had formed.^[15][17] Many of the early contributors to the site were familiar with the model of the free culture movement, and, like Wales, many of them sympathized with the open-source movement.^[26] Wales has said that he was initially so worried with the concept of open editing, where anyone can edit the encyclopedia, that he would awake during the night and monitor what was being added.^[30][31] Nonetheless, the cadre of early editors helped create a robust, self-regulating community that has proven conducive to the growth of the project.^[11]

Sanger developed Wikipedia in its early phase and guided the project.^[6][32] The broader idea he ascribes to Wales, remarking in a 2005 memoir for Slashdot that "the idea of an open source, collaborative encyclopedia, open to contribution by ordinary people, was entirely Jimmy's, not mine, and the funding was entirely by Bomis", adding, "the actual development of this encyclopedia was the task he gave me to work on."^[33] Sanger worked on and promoted both the Nupedia and Wikipedia projects until Bomis discontinued funding for his position in February 2002;^[34] Sanger resigned as editor-in-chief of Nupedia and as "chief organizer" of Wikipedia on March 1 of that year.^[35][36] In the early years, Wales had supplied the financial backing for the project,^{[clarification needed][32][37]} and entertained the notion of placing advertisements on Wikipedia before costs were reduced with Sanger's departure and plans for a nonprofit foundation were advanced instead.^[38]

Controversy[link]

Wales has asserted that he is the sole founder of Wikipedia,^[7] and has publicly disputed Sanger’s designation as a co-founder. Sanger and Wales were identified as co-founders at least as early as September 2001 by The New York Times and as founders in Wikipedia's first press release in January 2002.^[39][40] In August of that year, Wales identified himself as "co-founder" of Wikipedia.^[41] Sanger assembled on his personal webpage an assortment of links that appear to confirm the status of Sanger and Wales as co-founders.^[6][42] For example, Sanger and Wales are historically cited or described in early news citations and press releases as co-founders.^[6] Wales was quoted by The Boston Globe as calling Sanger’s claim "preposterous" in February 2006,^[43] and called "the whole debate silly" in an April 2009 interview.^[44]

In late 2005, Wales edited his own biographical entry on the English Wikipedia. Writer Rogers Cadenhead drew attention to logs showing that in his edits to the page, Wales had removed references to Sanger as the co-founder of Wikipedia.^[45][46] Sanger commented that "having seen edits like this, it does seem that Jimmy is attempting to rewrite history. But this is a futile process because in our brave new world of transparent activity and maximum communication, the truth will out."^[20][47] Wales was also observed to have modified references to Bomis in a way that was characterized as downplaying the sexual nature of some of his former company’s products.^[16][20] Though Wales argued that his modifications were solely intended to improve the accuracy of the content,^[20] he apologized for editing his own biography, a practice generally discouraged on Wikipedia.^[20][47]

Role[link]

Wales delivering the keynote 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."^[48] Although his formal designation is board member and chairman emeritus of the Wikimedia Foundation, Wales' social capital within the Wikipedia community has accorded him a status that has been characterized as benevolent dictator, constitutional monarch and spiritual leader.^[49][50][51] He was also the closest the project had to a spokesperson in its early years.^[5] The growth and prominence of Wikipedia made Wales an Internet celebrity^[52]. Although he had never traveled outside North America prior to the site's founding, his participation in the Wikipedia project has seen him flying internationally on a near-constant basis as its public face.^[5][53]

Despite involvement in other projects, Wales has denied intending to reduce his role within Wikipedia, telling The New York Times in 2008 that "Dialing down is not an option for me ... Not to be too dramatic about it, but, 'to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language,' that's who I am. That's what I am doing. That's my life goal."^[50] In May 2010, the BBC reported that Wales had relinquished many of his technical privileges on Wikimedia Commons (a Wikipedia sister project that hosts much of its multimedia content) after criticism by the project’s volunteer community over what they saw as Wales' hasty and undemocratic approach to deleting sexually explicit images he believed "appeal solely to prurient interests".^[54]

Wikimedia Foundation[link]

Wales appearing as a member of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees at Wikimania 2007.

In mid-2003, Wales set up the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), a non-profit organization founded in St. Petersburg, Florida and later headquartered on the West Coast of the United States, in San Francisco, California.^[55][56] All intellectual property rights and domain names pertaining to Wikipedia were moved to the new foundation,^[57] whose purpose is to establish general policy for the encyclopedia and its sister projects.^[17] Wales has been a member of the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees since it was formed and was its official chairman from 2003 through 2006.^[58] Since 2006 he has been accorded the honorary title of Chairman Emeritus and holds the board-appointed "community founder" seat.^[59] His work for the foundation, including his appearances to promote it at computer and educational conferences, has always been unpaid.^[19] Wales has often joked that donating Wikipedia to the foundation was both the "dumbest and the smartest" thing he had done. On one hand, he estimated that Wikipedia was worth US$3 billion; on the other, he weighed his belief that the donation made its success possible.^{[23][57][60][61]}

Wales' association with the foundation has led to controversy. In March 2008, Wales was accused by former Wikimedia Foundation employee Danny Wool of misusing the foundation's funds for recreational purposes. Wool also stated that Wales had his Wikimedia credit card taken away in part because of his spending habits, a claim Wales denied.^[62] Then-chairperson of the foundation Florence Devouard and former foundation interim Executive Director Brad Patrick denied any wrongdoing by Wales or the foundation, saying that Wales accounted for every expense and that, for items for which he lacked receipts, he paid out of his own pocket; in private, Devouard upbraided Wales for "constantly trying to rewrite the past".^[63] Later in March 2008, it was claimed by Jeffrey Vernon Merkey that Wales had edited Merkey's Wikipedia entry to make it more favorable in return for donations to the Wikimedia Foundation, an allegation Wales dismissed as "nonsense".^[64][65]

Wikia and later pursuits[link]

In 2004, Wales and then-fellow member of the WMF Board of Trustees Angela Beesley founded the for-profit company Wikia.^[15] Wikia is a wiki farm—a collection of individual wikis on different subjects, all hosted on the same website. It hosts some of the largest wikis outside Wikipedia, including Memory Alpha (devoted to Star Trek) and Wookieepedia (Star Wars).^[66] Another service offered by Wikia was Wikia Search, an open source search engine intended to challenge Google and introduce transparency and public dialogue about how it is created into the search engine’s operations,^[67] but the project was abandoned in March 2009.^[68] Wales stepped down as Wikia CEO to be replaced by angel investor Gil Penchina, a former vice president and general manager at eBay, on June 5, 2006.^[69] Penchina declared Wikia to have reached profitability in September 2009.^[70]In addition to his role at Wikia, Wales is a public speaker represented by the Harry Walker Agency.^[71][72] He has also participated in a celebrity endorsement campaign for the Swiss watch maker Maurice Lacroix.^[73]

On November 4, 2011, Wales delivered an hour-long address, at The Sage Gateshead in the United Kingdom, to launch the 2011 Free Thinking Festival on BBC Radio Three.^[74] His speech, which was entitled, "The Future of the Internet", was largely devoted to Wikipedia. Twenty days later, on November 24, Wales appeared on the British topical debate television program Question Time.^[75]

Political and economic views[link]

Wales in June 2008

Wales is a self-avowed "Objectivist to the core",^[67] referring to the philosophy developed by writer Ayn Rand in the mid-20th century emphasizing reason, individualism, and capitalism. Wales first encountered the philosophy through reading Rand's novel The Fountainhead while an undergraduate,^[12] and in 1992 founded an electronic mailing list devoted to "Moderated Discussion of Objectivist Philosophy".^[5][76] Though he has stated that the philosophy "colours everything I do and think",^[5] he has said "I think I do a better job—than a lot of people who self-identify as Objectivists—of not pushing my point of view on other people."^[77] When asked by Brian Lamb about Rand’s influence on him in his appearance on C-SPAN's Q&A in September 2005, Wales cited integrity and "the virtue of independence" as important to him personally. When asked if he could trace "the Ayn Rand connection" to having a political philosophy at the time of the interview, Wales labeled himself a libertarian, qualifying his remark by referring to the United States Libertarian Party as "lunatics" and citing "freedom, liberty, basically individual rights, that idea of dealing with other people in a matter that is not initiating force against them" as his guiding principles.^[12] An interview with Wales served as the cover feature of the June 2007 issue of the libertarian magazine Reason.^[11] In that profile, he described his political views as "center-right".

The January/February 2006 issue of Maximum PC reported that Wales had refused to comply with a request from the People's Republic of China to censor "politically sensitive" articles in Wikipedia. Other big business Internet companies such as Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft had already yielded to Chinese government pressure. Wales let it be known that he would rather see companies such as Google follow suit on Wikipedia's policy of freedom of information.^[78] In 2010, he criticized whistleblower website WikiLeaks and its editor in chief Julian Assange, saying that their publication of Afghan war documents "could be enough to get someone killed," and he expressed irritation at their use of the name "wiki":^[79] "What they're doing is not really a wiki. The essence of wiki is a collaborative editing...".^[80]

Wales cites Austrian School economist Friedrich von Hayek's essay "The Use of Knowledge in Society", which he read as an undergraduate,^[16] as "central" to his thinking about "how to manage the Wikipedia project".^[11] Hayek argued that information is decentralized – that each individual only knows a small fraction of what is known collectively – and that as a result, decisions are best made by those with local knowledge rather than by a central authority.^[11] Wales reconsidered Hayek's essay in the 1990s, while reading about the open source movement (which advocated that software be free and distributed). He was moved in particular by "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", an essay and later book by one of the founders of the movement, Eric S. Raymond, which "opened [his] eyes to the possibilities of mass collaboration."^[16] From his background in finance and working as a futures and options trader, Wales developed an interest in game theory and the effect of incentives on human collaborative activity, a fascination to which he credits enabling much of his effort with Wikipedia.^[81] He has rejected the notion that his role in promoting Wikipedia is altruistic, which he defines as "sacrificing your own values for others", stating "[t]hat participating in a benevolent effort to share information is somehow destroying your own values makes no sense to me".^[53]

Personal life[link]

Wales with his second wife Christine

Wales has been married and divorced twice.^[12][53] In the summer of 2012, he is planning to marry Kate Garvey,^[82] Tony Blair's former diary secretary, whom he met in Davos, Switzerland.^[83] He has two daughters.

At the age of 20, Wales married Pam, a co-worker at a grocery-store in Alabama.^[53] He met his second wife, Christine Rohan, through a friend in Chicago while she was working as a steel trader for Mitsubishi.^[12][14] The couple were married in Monroe County, Florida in March 1997,^[84] and had a daughter before separating.^[12][53] Wales moved to San Diego in 1998, and after being dissuaded by the housing market there, relocated in 2002 to St. Petersburg, Florida,^[37] where he lived as of 2007^[update].^[14][85]

Wales had a brief relationship with Canadian conservative columnist Rachel Marsden in 2008 that began after Marsden contacted Wales about her Wikipedia biography.^[86] After accusations that Wales' relationship constituted a conflict of interest, Wales stated that there had been a relationship but that it was over and claimed that it had not influenced any matters on Wikipedia,^[87][88] a claim which was disputed by Marsden.^[89]

Wales is an atheist. In an interview with Big Think, he claimed his personal philosophy is firmly rooted in reason and he is a complete non-believer.^[90]

Honors, awards and positions[link]

Wales with the Gottlieb Duttweiler Prize on January 26, 2011

Wales is a member of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School^[12] and the advisory board of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence,^[91] the Board of Directors at Creative Commons,^[92] Socialtext,^[93] and Hunch.com,^[94] and former co-chair of the World Economic Forum on the Middle East 2008.^[95]

Wales was listed in the "Scientists & Thinkers" section of the Time 100 in 2006^[96] and number 12 in Forbes "The Web Celebs 25".^[97] Wales has also given a lecture in the Stuart Regen Visionary series at New Museum which "honors special individuals who have made major contributions to art and culture, and are actively imagining a better future"^[98] and by the World Economic Forum as one of the "Young Global Leaders" of 2007.^[99] In April 2011, Wales served on the jury of the Tribeca Film Festival.^[100]

Wales has received a Pioneer Award,^[101] the Gottlieb Duttweiler Prize in 2011,^[102][103] the Monaco Media Prize,^[104] the 2009 Nokia Foundation annual award,^[105] the Business Process Award at the 7th Annual Innovation Awards and Summit by The Economist,^[106] the 2008 Global Brand Icon of the Year Award,^[107] and on behalf of the Wikimedia project the Quadriga award of Werkstatt Deutschland for A Mission of Enlightenment.^[108]Wales has also received honorary degrees from Knox College,^[109] Amherst College,^[110] Stevenson University,^[110][111] Argentina's Universidad Empresarial Siglo 21,^[112] and Russia's MIREA University.^[113]

See also[link]

Meta has related information at: List of Wikipedias

• The Wikipedia Revolution
• User:Jimbo Wales

Published work[link]