Story of Jimmy Wales: Co-founder of Wikipedia

The world is making progress at a massive speed. So may it be in engineering, medical or creative prospects, the people are putting forward their best ideas to improve even further. And, no doubt, technology is playing a vital role in all this development. From cooking recipes to educational courses, everything is available on a single click. All this has become possible due to constant hard work of the people who had an ambitious vision. Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, is one of such people who dreamt of building world’s largest encyclopedia, and that too, free for everyone’s use.

Early Life
Born on August 7, 1966 at Huntsville, Alabama Wales took his schooling at the Randolph School. He lived with his father, who ran a grocery store, and his mother, who ran a single room school. Jimmy wales, with his siblings, studied in this school before attending primary school. He graduated at the age of 16 and got his Bachelor’s degree in Finance from the Auburn University. While pursuing his postgraduate studies he went on to teach at the University of Alabama and the Indiana University.

Risks from Earlier Life
Wales was interested and quite good at computer coding. In 1994, while working with Chicago Options Associates, a trading firm, he spent his free time playing with the computer code wishing to build a knowledge sharing platform. Despite his bright career ahead in the firm, he decided to quit so that he could bring his dream into reality. As a result he started a company named ‘Bomis’ with his two partners. The website was designed for a purpose to gather humongous views and therefore contained some unethical material aimed to sustain male needs. Bomis worked quite well bringing in enough money which Wales used to finance his next big project.

The initial idea of starting a knowledge sharing platform was that people would contribute useful articles and expert editorial team would edit the content. The site was named ‘Nupedia’ which provided quality information and also challenged the professional encyclopedias already in the market. The idea was immensely apprehended and thousands of people all around the world started contributing quality informative articles to the website. Jimmy witnessed a major problem when the incoming articles were coming in a huge amount while the edited version were taking a lot of time to be uploaded. He had to find a way to balance both sides where the rate of uploading the edited articles would match the incoming articles.

Wikipedia’s birth and funding
This is when Jimmy Wales  and his colleagues came up with another ambitious idea. The idea put forward allowed maximum number of submissions on a single topic and, an added provision was that any user could be able to edit the article. Jimmy thought that finding faults and editing them in an article was easy but collecting the facts and information was the toughest part. The idea of crowd sourced editing worked and Wikipedia was born. Here, n number of people could edit and add the information to the already written article. Thus, making it more and more factual with every edit. January 15, 2001 was the official launch date of Wikipedia. Wikipedia was funded from the money earned from Bomis before it was made non profit organization.

The concept was receiving overwhelming response that Jimmy Wales and his teammates ever emancipated. Here, people from around the globe were providing quality and informative articles and simultaneously editing it constantly. Wales put few best editors to look over the uploaded articles and correct them regularly to maintain the quality of the information. In 2011, 10 years from launch, Wikipedia became the highest visited online encyclopedia platform. The website holds more than 30 million articles in more than 287 languages available freely for its visitors. Wales has avoided advertisements on his website to provide distraction free readings.

Wikipedia, on October 2013, was ranked as the 6^th highest visited website across the globe. Jimmy Wales’ vision of providing quality education has revolutionized the way people could learn. From leaving his PhD dissertation thesis, his promising job mid-way to accomplishing the world’s largest information providing website Wales has come a long way and has definitely made this world a better place.