Jimmy Wales

Co-Founder, Wikipedia

As co-founder of not-for-profit online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales has unparalleled influence over the information accessed by the global public every day. He first became ‘addicted’ to the internet during the early ’90s when he worked for an options and trading firm in Chicago, and began writing code in his spare time. He left his job to become an internet entrepreneur, and after a few false starts, arrived at the idea for Wikipedia, outlining his aim to create a world ‘in which every single person is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge’. Wales’s for-profit company Wikia is a website hosting a collection of ‘wikis’ on different subjects, including Memory Alpha – catering to fans of Star Trek – and Wookieepedia, devoted to Star Wars. He is a vocal campaigner against internet censorship and hopes to persuade China to lift its existing block on Wikipedia.

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