Captain curiosity: Jimmy Wales

It would be only natural to assume that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales knows a little about a lot. From the moment he could talk, he wanted to know the who, what, when and whys of life, and there’s no doubt it was his curiosity that drove him to launch the world’s largest free online encyclopaedia. 

However, there is one thing Jimmy doesn’t know, and he can’t find the answer on the internet – not even on Wikipedia – and that’s the whereabouts of his World Book Encyclopaedias, the books his mum bought from a door-to-door salesman when Jimmy was just 3; the ones he’d eagerly thumb through to satiate his relentless quest to learn, explore and discover, and carefully amend with the stickers sent for annual updates.

Growing up in the 70s, the World Books were treasured tomes, his only source to find answers to all the questions cluttering his head. "I’m not sure where they are," Jimmy admits. "My mother believes we sold them at a garage sale, while my father thinks they’re in a storage shed behind the house. Some day, I’m going to go there and dig through that storage shed and see what I can find."

House of Learning

According to Wikipedia, Jimmy was born in Huntsville, Alabama, on 7 August 1966. The town was nicknamed Space City for its proximity to the George C Marshall Space Flight Centre, a dynamic hub of technology and innovation set among the more sedate fields of cotton.

His father was a grocery store manager and his mother and grandmother ran the House of Learning, a one-room school where Jimmy and his 3 siblings were introduced to early education. However, Jimmy’s extraordinary intellectual curiosity demanded more challenges and he was sent to the Randolph School, an experimental private college launched by locals interested in catapulting students into a brave new world of computers, science, engineering and finance. 

While it was finance that led Jimmy to bachelors and masters degrees and a career in futures and options, it wasn’t what motivated him and internet project developer Larry Sanger to launch Wikipedia in January 2001. A spin-off of Jimmy’s first online encyclopaedia, Nupedia, Wikipedia was a non-profit venture curated by ordinary people passionate about supplying information. In just 12 months, the site erupted to contain more than 20,000 articles in 18 languages.

The future of Wikipedia

Today, ranked globally as the fifth most popular website, it is the world’s largest encyclopaedia with 7,000 new articles created every day and more than 15 billion page views a month. It features more than 40 million articles in 295 language editions – English leading the way with more than 5 million articles, while 12 other languages, including Cebuano, Russian, Waray, Polish and Vietnamese, boast more than one million articles each. 

Having stepped down as CEO of Wikipedia in 2009, Jimmy became chair of Wikia, the for-profit web-hosting company, and chair emeritus and board member of the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organisation founded in 2003 to fund Wikipedia and its sister projects. "Obviously, technology changes. I can’t see 300 years into the future, but at the Foundation we try to think long term.

This year, for the first time, we are raising an endowment fund. We’re looking to raise $100 million from major donors, which is unusual for us as most of the money is from small donors," he says. With this in mind, while Jimmy is cognisant that the platform’s editing environment needs to be updated and modernised, he doesn’t believe that the site has reached its pinnacle. 

"We’re trying to think 50 years ahead: What do we need to do today while things are healthy to keep Wikipedia safe and an institution for the long haul? "I think a lot about the growth and the languages of the developing world and all of the smaller languages of the world. That’s really important for the future of Wikipedia," he says.

We’re trying to think 50 years ahead: What do we need to do today while things are healthy to keep Wikipedia safe?

Still curious

And while Jimmy has been labelled an internet addict – "Addicted is a strong word. It is a very big part of my life for sure" – he can’t remember the last time he read his own Wiki entry. He does know, however, that it would have been edited by hundreds of people, in keeping with the practice of leaving sites open to editing from around 80,000 volunteers who make at least 5 edits per month to enforce the rules about accuracy and decency.

His Wikipedia page is accurate in telling us that Jimmy lives in London, is married to Kate Garvey (the former diary secretary to Tony Blair), and has 3 daughters. What it doesn’t tell us is that the challenges of parenting, along with the whereabouts of his World Books, cannot be resolved by searching Wikipedia. 

I’m very fortunate to have become somewhat successful, because I don’t think I’m very well suited to normal jobs.

"It is a constant learning process, and there are loads of things about children that are interesting and surprising. You learn very quickly that children are just as intelligent as adults," Jimmy says. "They don’t know very much because they’re new to the world and don’t have the experience or education. But they are very, very clever. They learn very early to outsmart you in an argument."

Still curious and passionate about freedom of expression, a cause he consistently lobbies, Jimmy considers himself a regular guy who just likes to be busy and do interesting things. "I’m very fortunate to have become somewhat successful, because I don’t think I’m very well suited to normal jobs."  

Jimmy Wales spoke at the 2017 World Business Forum Sydney www.wbfsydney.com