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Jimmy Wales is an american internet entrepreneur. He’s famous for being the Founder of the non-profit encyclopedia Wikipedia and also for a web hosting company, Wikia. On the 15th of January in 2001, Jimmy with other co-founders, released to the world Wikipedia, the first, open content encyclopedia. Nowadays Wikipedia is the sixth most visited website in the world, according to Alexa Rank.
Jimmy has a background in Finance, with a Bachelor Degree that he received from Auburn University. With the idea of following his studies, he got into two Phd programs, first at the University of Alabama and then at the Indiana University, in their finance program, but never finished his dissertation.
Jimmy Wales is also on the board of trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization that is behind Wikipedia. He currently holds his seat as “community founder”. In 2004, three years later, after funding Wikipedia, Jimmy launched Wikia, a free web hosting service that operates a network of collaboratively published video games, entertainment, and lifestyle content.
Jimmy belongs to the “Jeff Bezos” generation. He went to college and he almost got a Phd, he’s not a dropout and with a background in finance and not in Computer Science, he was able to build one of the most important website the world could ever need. Although at the beginning, Wikipedia wasn’t considered a great source of the information, with the years that lack of trust has progressively disappeared, by making it a point of reference for everyone on the internet.
He could have chosen the profitable path and maybe being one of the richest man in the world; but I think he realised that knowledge can’t be bought or patented. Knowledge is something we all share and have, so there is no way to make money out of it.
