Wikipedia and Jimmy Wales

Marc ÁlvarezLaia Pallarès

Sergio RuizVladimir Suasnavas

Jimmy W

ales

Jmmy Donal «Jimbo» Wales (born August 7, 1966 in Huntsville, United Sates) is a business man of the Internet, co-founder and promoter of Wikipedia. He founded also Nupedia, predecessor of Wikipedia, together with Tim Shell, of the company Bomis. He graduated in Auburn and Alabama Universities. Together with Larry Sanger, Wales founded Wikipedia, an encyclopedia based on the concept wiki and the model of free software.

Wales is the President of Wikimedia foundation, situated in San Francisco.

In an interview made on 2004, Wales explained his motivations to create Wikipedia saying:

“Imagine a world in which every person had free access to the sum of the whole human knowledge. This is what we are doing.”

The 4th of November 2009 the Nokia Foundation gave their annual award to Jimmy Wales"For his contributions to the evolution of the World Wide Web as a participatory and democratic platform“

The 14th October 2010, he received the keys of the City of Tijuana for his conference on the event called innovating Tijuana, carried out in this city.Wales is member of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School and the advisory board of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, the Board of Directors at Creative Commons, Socialtext, and Hunch.com, and former co-chair of the World Economic Forum on the Middle East 2008.

Awards:

Wales was listed in the "Scientists & Thinkers" section of the Time 100 in 2006 and number 12 in Forbes "The Web Celebrities 25". Wales has also given a lecture in the

Stuart Regen Visionary series at New Museum which honours special individuals who have made major contributions to art and culture, and are actively imagining a

better future, and by the World Economic Forum as one of the 'Young Global Leaders' of 2007.

Wales has received a Pioneer Award, the Gottlieb Duttweiler Prize in 2011, the Monaco Media Prize, the 2009 Nokia Foundation annual award, the Business

Process Award at the 7th Annual Innovation Awards and Summit by The Economist, The 2008 Global Brand Icon of the Year Award, and on behalf of the Wikimedia

project the Quadriga award of Werkstatt Deutschland for A Mission of Enlightenment.

Wales has also received honorary degrees from Knox College Amherst College, Stevenson University, and Argentina's Universidad Empresarial Siglo 21.

Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 18 million articles (over 3.6 million in English) have been written collaboratively by

volunteers around the world, and almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site. 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, ranking around seventh among all

websites on Alexa and having 365 million readers. The name Wikipedia was coined by Larry Sanger and is a portmanteau of wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites, from the Hawaiian

word wiki, meaning "quick") and encyclopaedia.

Wikipedia first was a complementary of Nupedia; Nupedia is an English encyclopaedia that was written by experts. Nupedia was founded in 2000. Jimmy Wales was one of the most important people in Nupedia before starting the project of Wikipedia. Nupedia at the start had the Nupedia Open Content License but also before starting the Wikipedia it changed to the GNU Free Documentation License by Richard Stallman.

History

Wikipedia is an open editing model, all the people that have an account in

Wikipedia can change all the articles except some very prone to vandalism;

Also someone that has an account can create a new article, but this

article isn’t a property of the creator, it is the property of all the people that

visit Wikipedia.It is important that the new articles are available to visit at the moment when they are created, nobody checks the

new articles. The German and Hungarian versions are a little bit

different because they have a system to keep the articles clean. It contains a

memory of the old articles if the readers want to have a look at them.

In 2010 the English Wikipedia introduced restrictions for controversial and vandalism-prone articles like “George Bush” article. Another rule of wikipedia of 2010 was that the new and unregistered users can’t change some articles before someone checks the changes that they want to do. The German editors of

Wikipedia say that if the English model is successful, they will introduce it in their own Wikipedia.