Imagine having access to nearly all of mankind‘s learning – across cultures, languages and the arc of history – available for free to anyone with an internet connection. That has been the lifelong mission of Jimmy Wales, the philosopher-academic tuned internet entrepreneur who co-founded Wikipedia 20 years ago.
Seeking Knowledge From An Early Age
Growing up in small-town Alabama in the 1960s, a young Jimmy Wales was an avid reader across genres, gifted enough to be put in advanced classes. After breezing through high school aged 16, you learned finance at university. But soon your curiosity got the better of you. Not content with just a career, you chose to keep learning across subjects, diving into a PhD program in Management where you could discuss heady ideas to your heart‘s content.
You took a break in between for a stint in finance trading options and futures that earned you good money. But the lure of innovating at the intersection of technology and access to information soon gripped you.
Charting New Territory with Nupedia
Partnering with friends Tim Shell and Michael Davis, you started web portal Bomis in 1996 createing premium content for men. Yet the bigger goal simmered in your mind – leveraging this newfangled thing called the internet to make all human knowledge free and easily accessible.
Your first attempt was Nupedia – an online encyclopedia with articles written by experts and meticulously fact-checked before publication in 2000. This was the opposite of much questionable content proliferating online. But the lengthy approval process hampered scaling it.
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 2001 | Launched Wikipedia allowing open editing and publishing of articles |
| 2002 | ~20,000 articles created, editing opened to all |
| 2003 | Wales incorporates non-profit Wikimedia Foundation |
| 2004 | Wikipedia gets first server donation; budget $500K |
| 2006 | Becomes world‘s 6th most visited website |
| 2015 | Reaches 35M articles across 287 languages |
| 2022 | Crosses 91M+ articles in 309 languages |
The Wikipedia Revolution
In 2001, you and web manager Larry Sanger evolved this content model into something pioneering – Wikipedia allowed anyone to edit or create entries that went live instantly without checks. This openness led to an explosion in participation around crowdsourced knowledge.
In the first year itself, volunteers wrote 20,000 articles in 18 languages on this platform underpinned by Ward Cunningham‘s wiki software. You watched in awe as this fledgling community evolved rules around contributions and self-policed vandalism.
Despite server crashes and controversies around accuracy, the exponential growth continued. In 2003, you set up the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation to fund and govern this vision rooted in free knowledge. Critical to you was staying not-for-profit and transparent.
By 2006, Wikipedia had became the world‘s 6th most visited website with 100,000+ editors working on over 5 million articles in 250 languages! This "great miracle of collaboration" felt like it justified your faith in the common man‘s yearning to learn.
Expanding Horizons of Open Knowledge
I know purists criticize the model as vulnerable editorial bias and misinformation. But your commitment has been to correct course through consensus-driven community participation. And focus on the big picture – the staggering breadth of human understanding available to all to read, update in 300 languages.
Over 20 years, Wikipedia has redefined how we distribute, consume, discuss and update shared knowledge across barriers. Today this repository of over 55 million articles is the 5th most visited website globally. We take this modern marvel at our fingertips for granted because you imagined possibilities early on.
While no longer involved operationally, you continue to wholeheartedly evangelize the vision through the Wikimedia Foundation and Wiki hosting site Fandom. Ever the neutral steward not sensationalist iconoclast, your net worth hovers modestly under $2 million. Ideals drive you more than riches or fame.
I admire how you created something that so profoundly impacts learning. Your promise that "each person has something unique and meaningful to contribute" has been realized at unprecedented scale. True success surely lies in enabling hundreds of millions more minds to blossom through unlocking access to the world‘s knowledge treasure chest!
