page_title: Jimmy Wales
section_title: Personal philosophy
hierarchical_section_title: Jimmy Wales / Political and economic views / Personal philosophy
caption_attribution_description: English: Jimbo at the CC Board Meeting (2008).
context_page_description: Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales is an American-British Internet entrepreneur. He is a co-founder of the online non-profit encyclopedia Wikipedia and the for-profit web hosting company Wikia.
  Wales was born in Huntsville, Alabama, where he attended Randolph School, a university-preparatory school. He earned bachelor's and master's degrees in finance from Auburn University and the University of Alabama respectively. In graduate school, Wales taught at two universities; however, he departed before completing a PhD to take a job in finance and later worked as the research director of a Chicago futures and options firm.
  In 1996, he and two partners founded Bomis, a web portal featuring entertainment and adult content. Bomis provided the initial funding for the free peer-reviewed encyclopedia, Nupedia, and its successor, Wikipedia. On January 15, 2001, with Larry Sanger and others, Wales launched Wikipedia—a free, open-content encyclopedia that enjoyed rapid growth and popularity. As Wikipedia's public profile grew, he became its promoter and spokesman. Though he is historically credited as co-founder, he has disputed this, declaring himself the sole founder.
context_section_description: Wales is a self-avowed Objectivist, referring to the philosophy invented by writer Ayn Rand in the mid-20th century that emphasizes reason, individualism, and capitalism. Wales first encountered the philosophy through reading Rand's novel The Fountainhead during his undergraduate period and, in 1992, founded an electronic mailing list devoted to "Moderated Discussion of Objectivist Philosophy". Though he has stated that the philosophy "colours everything I do and think", he has said, "I think I do a better job—than a lot of people who self-identify as Objectivists—of not pushing my point of view on other people."
  When asked by Brian Lamb about Rand's influence on him in his appearance on C-SPAN's Q&A in September 2005, Wales cited integrity and "the virtue of independence" as personally important. When asked if he could trace "the Ayn Rand connection" to a personal political philosophy at the time of the interview, Wales labeled himself a libertarian, qualifying his remark by referring to the Libertarian Party as "lunatics", and citing "freedom, liberty, basically individual rights, that idea of dealing with other people in a manner that is not initiating force against them" as his guiding principles.
  An interview with Wales served as the cover feature of the June 2007 issue of the libertarian magazine Reason. In that profile, he described his political views as "center-right". Prior to 2008, Wales attended George Soros's birthday.
  In a 2011 interview with The Independent, he expressed sympathy with the Occupy Wall Street and Occupy London protesters, saying, "You don't have to be a socialist to say it's not right to take money from everybody and give it to a few rich people. That's not free enterprise."
  Dan Hodges in The Telegraph has described Wales as a "Labour sympathizer". In 2015, he offered to help Ed Miliband with the Labour Party's social media strategy, but Miliband turned him down.
  In 2015, Wales signed up as the committee chair for Lawrence Lessig's 2016 presidential campaign.
  In 2016, Wales and eleven other business leaders signed on to an open letter to American voters urging them not to vote for Donald Trump in that year's presidential election.
  In May 2017, he said on Quora that he is a centrist and a gradualist, and believes "that slow step-by-step change is better and more sustainable and allows us to test new things with a minimum of difficult disruption in society."
caption: Wales at the Creative Commons Board Meeting in June 2008
exif: {"Image Make": "Canon", "Image Model": "Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III", "Image XResolution": "300", "Image YResolution": "300", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image DateTime": "2008:06:19 17:24:23", "Image ExifOffset": "164", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/60", "EXIF FNumber": "6/5", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Aperture Priority", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "100", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2008:06:20 03:11:44", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2008:06:20 03:11:44", "EXIF ShutterSpeedValue": "5906891/1000000", "EXIF ApertureValue": "526069/1000000", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "1", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "5/8", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire", "EXIF FocalLength": "50", "EXIF SubSecTimeOriginal": "91", "EXIF SubSecTimeDigitized": "91", "EXIF FocalPlaneXResolution": "1872000/473", "EXIF FocalPlaneYResolution": "83200/21", "EXIF FocalPlaneResolutionUnit": "2", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard"}