Jimmy Wales

Jimmy Donal Wales was born in August 1966 in Huntsville, Alabama, to Jimmy Wales, a grocer, and Doris Ann Dudley Wales, an educator who co-owned the Montessori-based House of Learning school with his grandmother, where Wales and his brother were taught.⁠[1]

Wales attended Auburn University, earned a finance bachelor’s in 1986 and a finance master’s from the University of Alabama in 1988, then pursued a doctorate and taught at Indiana University before moving in 1992 to trade futures and options in Chicago.⁠[1]

From 1994 to 2000, Wales was research director at Chicago Options Associates, a futures and options trading firm in Chicago.⁠[2]

In 1996, Wales and two partners founded Bomis, a male-oriented search engine and web portal.⁠[3]

In March 2000, Wales and Larry Sanger launched NupediaNupediaNupedia was a free online encyclopedia project publicly launched in March 2000, funded by Jimmy Wales’s Internet company Bomis with Larry Sanger as editor-in-chief; its articles were written by experts and had to pass a multistep peer review. Because the process was cumbersome and output slow, the project stalled after its companion wiki took off, and it was never restored after its server crashed in September 2003.Open the full entry, the first free, peer-reviewed, open-content encyclopedia.⁠[3]

On January 15, 2001, Wales and Sanger placed the wiki project, named Wikipedia by Sanger, on a separate domain and made it live.⁠[3]

In 2003, Wales founded the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation.⁠[2]

In 2004, Wales and British web entrepreneur Angela Beesley Starling founded Wikicities, later renamed Wikia and then Fandom; the platform now has over 40 million content pages on 250,000 wikis in over 80 languages.⁠[4]

In December 2005, Wales’s many edits to his own Wikipedia entry drew attention: more than once he removed a credit to Larry Sanger as co-founder, and he removed the word “pornography” in describing Bomis, preferring the term “search portal.”⁠[5]

Wales received an honorary doctorate from Knox College, a Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 2006, recognition by the World Economic Forum as one of its Young Global Leaders of 2007, and induction into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2013.⁠[2]

On February 28, 2008, Wales announced on his blog that Wikia had that day released its social networking features for MediaWiki under the GNU GPL 2.0.⁠[6]

In March 2009, Wales talked with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the birth and growth of Wikipedia and the role of Friedrich Hayek’s insights in its design; he said that reading Hayek’s The Use of Knowledge in Society as an undergraduate deeply influenced his thinking.⁠[7]

In October 2012, Wales married Kate Garvey, Tony BlairTony BlairTony Blair is a British politician who served as prime minister from 1997 to 2007 and Labour leader from 1994 to 2007. His government pursued devolution, a national minimum wage and the Northern Ireland peace process, while its Iraq War decisions drew sustained scrutiny. After leaving office, he worked in Middle East diplomacy and policy advisory services, founding the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, where he is executive chairman. He became an advisor to the Skydance board in October 2026.Open the full entry’s former diary secretary and a director at Freud Communications in London. It was his third marriage; he has a daughter with his second wife, Christine Rohan, and a daughter with Garvey.⁠[8]

In November 2019, Wales launched WT:Social, an ad-free, news-focused social network on which users can edit incorrect or deceptive headlines; an offshoot of WikiTribune, it relies on individual donors, promises never to sell user data, and offers instant access through a subscription of $12.99 a month or $100 a year.⁠[9]

His earlier crowd-funded WikiTribune ultimately failed to attract a sustainable audience. Wales called WT:Social “a radical, crazy experiment of mine.”⁠[10]

On June 18, 2023, Wales appeared on episode 385 of the Lex Fridman Podcast, discussing Wikipedia’s origin and design, ChatGPT, criticism of political bias on Wikipedia, Wikipedia’s funding and Larry Sanger, among other topics.⁠[11]

In 2025, The Seven Rules of Trust: A Blueprint for Building Things That Last, written by Wales with Dan Gardner, was published by Crown Currency; it draws on Wikipedia’s experience to discuss building and maintaining trust and neutrality.⁠[12]

Personal website: Public link: https://jimmywales.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[6]

X: Public account: https://x.com/jimmy_wales (opens in a new window)⁠[6]

Wikimedia Foundation: Official website: https://wikimediafoundation.org/ (opens in a new window)⁠[13]

Fandom: Official website: https://about.fandom.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[4]