By Marika Sboros
Alabama-born Jimmy Wales has a low boredom threshold. He studied finance at university, but dropped out of a PhD programme when it got too boring.
He became a trader but found that boring too. After a short stint as research director of a Chicago futures and options firm, he left to follow his Internet addiction and see what opportunities lay in cyberspace.
Those turned out to be legion. Wales is founder of the phenomenally successful free, online encyclopedia known as Wikipedia. He built it as a wiki — a website, staffed almost entirely by passionate volunteers, that allows users to create, add and edit content.
At heart is his vision for a world in which “every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.” That’s what happens, he says, at Wikipedia.
He founded the Wikipedia Foundation, nonprofit organisation whose work involves issues across the digital divide, including poverty world wide, and his special vision of empowering people everywhere to have the information they need to make good decisions. .
Wales is also Founder of Wikia, a for-profit company, legally unrelated to Wikimedia, and an angel investor for start-ups, including Impossible.com and Quora.com. Time Magazine named him one of 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2006.
Wales was ranked by Forbes magazine as a “Web celeb”, and no longer runs the day-to-day operations of Wikipedia. He remains involved, and travels the world from his new home in London, giving talks of free speech and Internet freedom.
His formal designation is board member and chairman emeritus of the Wikimedia Foundation, and his social capital within the Wikipedia community has garnered him status variously described as “benevolent dictator, constitutional monarch, and spiritual leader”.
At the World Economic Forum last year, he was a member of the Annual Meeting of the New Champions 2014.
