Jimmy Wales

Jimmy Wales is an American and British internet entrepreneur and former financial trader, best known for co-founding Wikipedia, the free nonprofit online encyclopedia, and Fandom (formerly Wikia), a for-profit wiki hosting service. Born in Huntsville, Alabama, he earned finance degrees from Auburn University and the University of Alabama and worked as a financial options trader in Chicago during the 1990s before turning to internet ventures. On January 15, 2001, Wales launched Wikipedia alongside Larry Sanger and others, and the project grew rapidly into the largest reference work ever assembled through open collaborative editing. He serves as the public face and promoter of Wikipedia, holding the role of board member and chairman emeritus of the Wikimedia Foundation, and his influence within the Wikipedia community has been described as that of a benevolent dictator or constitutional monarch. In 2006 Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world for his role in creating Wikipedia, which reshaped how a networked, crowd-edited reference source could be built and distributed online.