Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales blasts “deranged” companies editing their own pages | TechCrunch Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales blasts “deranged” companies editing their own pages Posted NASA tests first rocket engine designed to send humans to Mars In a chat with Guy Kawasaki at South by Southwest, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales spoke out about self-interested parties editing their own pages on the Internet’s collaborative encyclopedia. “Companies think it’s a powerful marketing tool but I think they’re deranged and should leave us alone,” said Wales. Yet he believes that the best public relations teams know better and would rather avoid the embarrassment of getting caught publishing something misleading. “The top PR companies tend to be very good about their interactions with Wikipedia,” Wales insists. Wales spoke of the origins of Wikipedia, which was a pivot from the now-defunct Nupedia. “In order to succeed we had to be more academic than a traditional encyclopedia,” he said. Wikipedia, and the umbrella of sites under the Wikimedia Foundation are among the most prolific on the Internet. Alexa.com ranks Wikipedia.org as the 7th-most trafficked site in the world. And that’s without the help of China, where Wikipedia is banned.

Wales said that the shift to SSL security has made it harder for countries to filter portions of Wikipedia. “We won’t compromise and they don’t seem likely to compromise anytime soon,” he says of China. Wales also touched on the team’s ongoing legal battle with the United States, with concerns over the NSA surveillance. These were “serious implications for freedom of expression,” according to Wales. Related Articles About Jimmy | Jimmy Wales About Jimmy U.S. Internet Entrepreneur and Wiki Pioneer One of TIME Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People” Wikipedia: The 5th Most Visited Web Site Worldwide Ranked by Forbes Magazine as a “Web Celeb”, Jimmy Donal Wales is a U.S. Internet entrepreneur, wiki pioneer, and technology visionary, who is best known as the Founder of Wikipedia, an international collaborative free content encyclopedia on the Internet, and the Wikimedia Foundation. He is co-founder of Wikia, a privately owned free web hosting service he set up in 2004. The origins of Wikipedia began in March 2000, when Mr. Wales started Nupedia (“the free encyclopedia”), which was characterized by an extensive peer-review process designed to make its articles of a quality comparable to that of professional encyclopedias.

With the addition of wikis (a collection of web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content), the project was dubbed “Wikipedia.” Mr. Wales laid down the founding principles and content, establishing an Internet-based community of contributors during that year. Wikipedia was initially intended to be a wiki-based site for collaboration on early encyclopedic content for submission to Nupedia, but Wikipedia’s rapid growth quickly overshadowed Nupedia’s development. In a 2004 interview with Slashdot, Mr. Wales explained his motivations about Wikipedia, “Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That’s what we’re doing.” The success of the project has helped popularize a trend in web development (called Web 2.0) that aims to facilitate creativity, collaboration, and sharing among users. As Wikipedia expanded and its public profile grew, Mr. Wales took on the role of the project’s spokesperson and promoter through speaking engagements and media appearances.

His work with Wikipedia, which has become the world’s largest encyclopedia, prompted TIME Magazine to name him one of its “100 Most Influential People,” in 2006 in the “Scientists & Thinkers” category. In 2003, Mr. Wales founded the Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit charitable organization dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content, and to providing the full content of these wiki-based projects to the public free of charge. The Wikimedia Foundation operates some of the largest collaboratively edited reference projects in the world, including Wikipedia, the 5th most popular website in the world. In 2004, Wales co-founded, with Angela Beesley, the for-profit company Wikia, Inc. Wikia is a wiki farm – a collection of individual wikis on different subjects, all hosted on the same website. As part of his work at Wikia, Inc., Mr. Wales is developing a human-powered search engine, Search Wikia, which will be based on the same open, transparent, community-driven principles of Wikia and Wikipedia. The World Economic Forum recognized Wales as one of the “Young Global Leaders” of 2007.

This prestigious award acknowledges the top 250 young leaders across the world for their professional accomplishments, their commitment to society, and their potential to contribute to shaping the future of the world. Mr. Wales is a Fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. He serves on the Board of Directors of Socialtext, a provider of wiki technology to businesses and the non-profit organization Creative Commons. Mr. Wales has received an honorary doctorate from Knox College of Illinois and was presented with a Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 2006. Mr. Wales received his bachelor’s degree in finance from Auburn University and started with the Ph.D. finance program at the University of Alabama, where he left with a Master’s. After that, he took courses offered in the Ph.D. finance program at Indiana University. He taught at both universities during his postgraduate studies, but did not write the doctoral dissertation required to earn a Ph.D. From 1994 to 2000, Wales was the research director at Chicago Options Associates, a futures and options trading firm in Chicago.

Wikipedia - TruthWiki TruthWiki under Uncategorized Available in most languages, the definitions, quotes and “Wiki-species” are full of great details and seem as friendly and reliable as the old Britannica seemed, but a closer look reveals a catalogue of mainstream information rife with error, bias, and omission of some of the most important facts in the realms of health, environmental safety and agricultural sustainability. Founded with 99% pornography “trafficker” revenue, Wikipedia’s cofounder Jimmy Wales (1) took his web search engine called “Bomis” and created his own “online encyclopedia” full of bias, misinformation, and total lack of information regarding alternative health. Though Wales gave Wikipedia his blessing and vow of “neutrality” of information, the electronic encyclopedia lacks much credibility for many reasons, but is still used widely by US children who don’t know any better and want easy access to what they believe are “facts” for writing book reports, biographies and doing projects for school.

One major way Wikipedia fools people into believing they are posting facts is that Wikipedia sports a massive search engine with authority in Google that equates its rankings to high credibility sources, leading the public to believe in falsities – and on a site that can be altered by critics, liars and computer hacks alike. Claiming to use science-based facts for definitions of health and medicine topics, Wikipedia.org displays a flagrant bias toward anything holistic or organically based (2) , with many half-truths that are purported as legitimate and “real” science, agriculture and medicine. In 2002, the FBI was informed by Larry Sanger, the Wikipedia co-founder, that Wikimedia Commons, the parent company, was “rife with renderings of children performing sexual acts.” In 2005, the site was modified to remove and censor any connections to the true Jimmy Wales story and all the x-rated content that enabled his search engine to become so popular in the first place.

“Science-Based” Means Allopathic Information Only The information in Wikipedia is filtered to remove any talk of natural remedies, natural cures and organic medicine, referring to anything that is not lab-made as quack medicine, anti-science or even conspiracy theory when it challenges “science-based” information that has no independent research sourcing. The information that makes it through the Wikipedia filters and is published is pure mainstream, allopathic and biotechnology driven. Launched in 2001 (4) , Wikipedia launched 18,000 articles in its first year. At first, Wikipedia was called Nupedia and was known for catering to a male audience with mainly information on sports, cars and women. In the years that followed, Wales began “memory-holing” – – deleting information about his own inappropriate sexual business activities and exploiting control over Wikipedia by editing information from his own page. By 2003, Nupedia was dissolved into Wikipedia, but much of that content remains purported as “factual” information in Wikipedia today. Wikipedia was petitioned in 2014 (with more than 7,000 signatures) to allow for true scientific discourse about holistic approaches to healing.

The Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology, via Change.org, basically asked for Wikipedia to publish honest information from respected independent studies and journals, but Wikipedia only publishes health information from an allopathic standpoint, so the petition was rejected with rigor and flagrant bias – just business as usual for the porn king Jimmy Wales. There was also a “Kickstarter” campaign that raised thousands of dollars in 2015 to take down the “misinformation campaign” posing as an on-line encyclopedia. They were demanding fair representation for natural health, complimentary medicine, alternative medicine, energy medicine, chiropractic, orthomolecular, acupuncture and the healing arts. (3) Much like WebMD and National Geographic, one can find great detail and even facts regarding specific animals, plants, insects, raw materials, oceanography and even space exploration; yet when it comes to finding facts regarding safe agricultural practices, holistic healing or natural medicine that has worked for millennium, there’s is nary a fact to find. Hundreds of colleges and academic institutions, as well as news sites, refuse to use Wikipedia (or allow the students or teachers to use it) for research due to its numerous biases and inaccuracies (5) .

Though Wikipedia does not accept advertising, their fundraising efforts have been undermined by their stubborn anti-science “scientific” presentation of distorted and highly-filtered information. Anyone can edit Wikipedia The worst part of Wikipedia is that anyone can edit the pages, and that makes the majority of the online “encyclopedia” suspect. This editing includes revisions made by members of Wikipedia who may not have good intentions. In 2007, the BBC reported that Wikipedia allowed the CIA to edit entries. Today, the biotechnology field of chemical-agriculture is given the same reign of power as is pharmacology. Watchdog groups have revealed severe censorship, misinformation and even vandalism regarding information about natural health. This is mainly accomplished by ranking falsities high in Google, Bing, Yahoo, MSN.com, AOL and of course on Wikipedia’s own search engine. Certain Wikipedia “volunteers” are simply allowed to post, edit and research a variety of topics. They are all given credit as “honorable” and “authoritative” sources, without any conflicts of interest published and zero counterpoints. This also allows for false “expert” aliases, as discovered when a young college dropout once posed as a tenured college professor.

Even critical opinions are published as fact on Wikipedia when they serve the greater goal of spreading mainstream propaganda about the effectiveness of allopathic chemical drugs or the “safe and beneficial” manufacturing of genetically modified crops. Larry Sanger, cofounder of Wikipedia, ended up leaving the organization citing concerns over integrity and credibility. He is quoted as saying, “There is no credible mechanism to approve versions of articles. Vandalism, once a minor annoyance, has become a major headache-made possible because the community allows anonymous contribution. Many experts have been driven away because know-nothings insist on ruining their articles.” Currently, there are several credible alternatives to Wikipedia, including Citizendium, Wiki4CAM, the Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) Encyclopedia and of course TruthWiki.org . Wikipedia, by definition, indirectly supports biotechnology and the pharmaceutical industry, even though neither industry runs proper safety testing nor is required by US regulatory agencies to do so. What Wikipedia calls “science-based” actually involves and requires no scientific proof of effectiveness, safety or health benefit. Though Wikipedia does not run advertisements, they are indirectly advertising falsities as factual and misleading millions of readers in doing so.

The non-profit status simply serves as a cover story for propaganda spread by pharmaceutical companies like Merck, Pfizer and AstraZeneca, and agricultural chemical companies like Monsanto, Cargill, Bayer, Dupont, Dow, Syngenta and BASF. It’s just like the old days when JAMA advertised thousands of doctors endorsing the safety of cigarettes. (6) This is made even more evident as other online encyclopedias like WebMD, another propaganda portal, get busted for fraud. In fact, WebMD accepts bribe money to promote special interests, and documents revealed that the federal government paid the site’s content creators nearly $14 million to promote Obamacare. (7) Similarly, National Geographic (8) , considered to the a mainstream reliable source of information about nature, oceans and space exploration, and also one of the largest scientific and educational organizations in the world, accepts mass money payouts from drug and biotechnology industries as evidenced by their multi-paged advertising spreads in the print periodicals.

Their shameless endorsement of GMO (genetically modified organisms) “Frankencrops” flies in the face of health and environment detriment caused by chemical agriculture practices, yet it’s all still published as science-based “fact.” Dangerous pesticides are pushed as safe and appropriate for earth while other pages in the same publication speak of protecting Mother Nature and preserving rainforests. This is the same approach taken by Wikipedia regarding promoting deadly crop chemicals, except they claim to be non-profit. One should regard Wikipedia information with particular concern, since this spreading of disinformation maintains such a powerful force in the online search engines today. Wikipedia is nothing more than propaganda and a threat to health and the wellness community of the world. Inform your children. Here’s the most recent EDITING SCANDEL for Wikipedia, furthering devaluing the validity of information on the so-called online encyclopedia: Now that the truth about Wikipedia being a blackmail extortion racket has emerged, people are starting to connect the dots on the criminality and corruption that dominates the discredited disinfo site.

Not only was Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales a “porn king” who sold online pornography before launching Wikipedia, we also know that wikipedia deliberately censors large categories of truthful information on natural healing, the dangers of vaccines, the crimes of Hillary Clinton, the corruption and criminality of the biotech industry and much more. (9) Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales launches charitable social network, phone service | Fox News Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales launches charitable social network, phone service Facebook 0 Twitter 0 livefyre Email Print File photo. Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia.org. (REUTERS/Andrew Burton ) Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales thinks there’s “something really wrong with the web” and, as he wrote in a recent online “manifesto,” he wants “your help in fixing it.” For Wales, most social media networks treat users as commodities that can “be sold to advertisers,” while phone companies “spend huge amounts of money on” ads to sell users “what is essentially a commodity service.” Enter The People’s Operator. On Tuesday, Wales launched TPO , a charitable social network and phone service in the U.S.

This marks the American debut of the U.K.-based phone service in which users automatically donate 10 percent of their monthly phone bills to their chosen charity. The social network component of the business aims to give people the chance to connect through shared causes and interests, while being able to donate directly to charities through the site. "There’s been huge interest, from press coverage to people already signing up," Wales told FoxNews.com. "The response has been very international, so far.” Wales launched Wikipedia, the ubiquitous and free open content online encyclopedia, back in 2001, and said that he was initially struck by the charitable nature behind TPO when he first ran into one of its founders socially. The phone service was founded by Andrew Rosenfeld, Tom Gutteridge, and Mark Epstein out of London in 2012. The goal was to use the 10 percent of people’s phone bills that typically get fed to the mass advertising machine to something more charitable. Wales was initially approached by the company for advice on digital strategy, but eventually joined TPO’s board in 2014. “I got more and more involved and started playing a role in fleshing out its (TPO’s) strategy,” Wales said.

“We saw the potential for this to become really big and global, and I joined the company full-time back in December.” Wales is now TPO’s executive chairman and said that he views potential for the company to make a substantial mark globally. Just as Wikipedia grew by word-of-mouth – Wales said that the dictionary site’s popularity grew “organically” – TPO is experiencing what the tech entrepreneur deemed “a viral growth.” While people generally have to go directly to charities’ websites or find links to donate on organizations’ specific social media pages, TPO streamlines the process while creating a “genuine community,” Wales suggested. Charities themselves have also expressed great interest in the social media and phone service. “One of the things that a lot of the causes talk about is that, while they may have a strong social media presence – half a million followers on Twitter or Facebook, for instance – they can’t activate people to be donors. The options out there aren’t great,” Wales asserted. “Through the social network, you bring people together.

It’s a general interest social platform, in that, while friends and family can laugh about a silly cat picture, they can also tap directly into supporting causes that matter to them.” The donation platform for charities is “commission-free,” Wales added, different from other sites' programs that charge organizations steep commissions to be featured through their services. “Our goal is not to make money off of charities,” Wales said. The social site is a work in progress. Wales said that there is “a whole road map of features planned down the line.” One major request has been to make the site translated into various languages, and Wales said that a key to the company’s progress is soliciting users’ suggestions for improvements. Of course, it might be difficult to reorient users toward a new phone service or social media platform, when options like Facebook or Verizon stand as immediately recognizable brands. Wales said that the possibility of making a tangible impact on charities like the World Wildlife Fund, for instance, all through the regular routine of paying a cell phone bill or connecting with friends online is TPO’s main selling point. Another piece of the company’s appeal is its ability to benefit some smaller scale, under-the-radar charities.

“My favorite example is my niece in high school has been raising money for the high school marching band’s annual bus trip to Washington. She was saying ‘wow, every kid has a phone, every parent has a phone, everyone – aunts, uncles, grandparents. Instead of doing a car wash, she was looking at the numbers and realizing that ‘this could completely work,’ ” Wales said. “It’s about harnessing the local community of people who already know each other, who are friends, and getting them to go out and get people to sign up and say ‘hey grandma, hey Aunt Marcy, get on this social platform.’ You end up with a whole army of people raising money for something they are passionate about.” Advertisement Jimmy Wales Is Not an Internet Billionaire - The New York Times The New York Times Magazine |Jimmy Wales Is Not an Internet Billionaire Search Photo Jimmy Wales Credit Jim Naughten for The New York Times According to Wikipedia, the Tampa International Airport is a public airport six miles west of downtown Tampa, in Hillsborough County, Florida.

It’s also where Jimmy Wales flies in and out of a couple times a month, in coach, to visit his 12-year-old daughter, Kira, who is named after the protagonist in Ayn Rand’s anti-communist novel, “We the Living.” Kira lives with Wales’s ex-wife in a ranch-style home not far from the offices where Wales, along with a handful of colleagues he generally no longer speaks to, ran Wikipedia a decade ago. The original Florida mailing address for one of the Internet’s most life-changing innovations is a UPS store with a faded red awning. Next door is a Kahwa Café. That was Wales’s old life. In his new one, he lives in London with Kate Garvey, his third wife, whom he often describes as “the most connected woman in London.” Garvey doesn’t have a Wikipedia page, but if she did, it would probably note that she was Tony Blair’s diary secretary at 10 Downing Street and then a director at Freud Communications, the public relations firm run by Matthew Freud, a great-grandson of Sigmund Freud, who is also Rupert Murdoch’s son-in-law.

And that Blair, in his 2010 memoir, wrote that Garvey ran his schedule “with a grip of iron and was quite prepared to squeeze the balls very hard indeed of anyone who interfered.” Garvey and Wales were married last October before about 200 guests, including the Blairs, the political operative Alistair Campbell, David Cameron’s former aide Steve Hilton and Mick Hucknall, the lead singer of Simply Red. Garvey’s maid of honor gave a toast teasing her friend for marrying the one world-famous Internet entrepreneur who didn’t become a billionaire. But the wedding was still covered in The Daily Mail and The Sunday Times, much to Wales’s excitement. “Front page, above the fold,” he told me of the latter. Wales pulled up The Mail’s Web site on his MacBook to show me some photographs from the reception. “That was surreal,” he said. Wales has a complicated time balancing his new life with his old one. That was evident one morning this winter as he bounded into the lobby of the West End building where he rented office space and hurriedly signed himself in at the front desk.

Wales, his brown Tumi bag slung over his shoulder, was 45 minutes late, disheveled and a little frantic. He had left the keys to his and Garvey’s Marylebone apartment at his place outside Tampa; the nanny, here in London, was stranded with the couple’s 2-year-old daughter. “I forgot to drop off the key,” he said. Just when Wales thought he might have to run home, his assistant, who is based in Florida, texted that a building manager had let the nanny in. Global child-care crisis averted. Continue reading the main story Wales wore a too-tight black turtleneck under a black overcoat with a well-shorn beard, a look that could either read Steve Jobs superhero or Tekserve flasher. Almost any time you see Wales, 46, he looks like a well-groomed version of a person who has been slumped over a computer drinking Yoo-hoo for hours. After he composed himself, he explained that his office was too embarrassingly unkempt for public consumption. (“It’s a room with a couch, it’s a huge mess.”) So he joined me on a cracked sofa in a common lounge area downstairs.

With its ratty Oriental carpets and mismatched folding chairs, the space exuded a bohemian chic look that Wales, a savvy purveyor of his own image, seemed to delight in showing off. The building, a condemned former BBC space, had been slated for demolition. Wales would soon be moving. “I’m not the Google guys,” he said. Photo Jimmy Wales and Kate Garvey on their wedding day at Wesley’s Chapel in London last October. Credit Photograph by Fiona Hanson London is often described as Britain’s New York, L.A. and Washington all in one — the center for finance, entertainment and politics. But there are conspicuously few traces of Silicon Valley. Wales gladly fills the void. Before he showed me his wedding photos, he talked about his new friend, the British model Lily Cole , who rented office space across the hall. Then he took a call from the Boston Consulting Group, the business-advisory firm, to discuss a speech he would be giving at the World Economic Forum. Wales uses a cheap smartphone made by the Chinese company Huawei that a friend bought him for $85 in Nairobi.

The phone, which he often shows to reporters, is the perfect prop to segue to his current obsession of expanding Wikipedia onto mobile devices in the developing world. It is not, however, the perfect phone for participating in an international conference call with the Boston Consulting Group. Several calls were dropped. Wales suggested conducting the meeting over instant messenger, an idea that was rejected. Once the call finally got under way, though, Wales seemed distracted. On his MacBook, he was following his Wikipedia “talk” page, where the site’s volunteers log their discussions and disagreements over entries. The page had lit up with a raging debate about the banning of some editors on the Turkish version of Wikipedia. Wales watched as the online version of a cafeteria food fight ensued. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Wikipedia is built as a wiki — a Web site that allows users to collectively create, add and edit content — and more than a million people have edited at least one entry.

But the veracity and updating of its more than 24 million encyclopedia entries relies largely on an army of more than 80,000 dedicated volunteers known as “ the community .” This global collection of grass-roots volunteers makes for a collectively brilliant creation, but it can also lead to online hysteria and “edit wars” over minutia like how to categorize hummus. “They love it in Israel, so shouldn’t it be in Category: Israeli cuisine? ” one editor wrote on a Wikipedia page called “Lamest Edit Wars.” “Or is it a purely Arab food that Zionists have illegally occupied?” Though Wales no longer runs the day-to-day operations of Wikipedia — traveling the world giving talks on free speech and Internet freedom — he still spends an inordinate amount of time interacting with, and thinking about, the community. Wales, or “Jimbo” as he is called, is the person the community turns to when disputes are not settled in their online arbitration committees. Wales may not speak Turkish or know much about Turkey, but he is the B.D.F.L., or the Benevolent Dictator for Life. As B.D.F.L., Wales’s responsibilities are seemingly limitless.

Before the Turkish debate, Wales had weighed in on arguments over whether the Wikipedia entry for the military historian Lynette Nusbacher should mention her gender change (he said it should, but the entry was later removed) and whether the entry on homeopathy should describe the practice as “quackery” (Wales agreed that it could, as long as the word “quackery” was attributed to the American Medical Association). “Argumentum ad Jimbonem” means dutifully following what Wales says, but there are even arguments about that. One Wikipedia editor said, for instance, that Wales was no longer comfortable with the B.D.F.L. description. (There is, among some, a debate over what to call him.) Some users have also disputed the Latinized version of “Jimbo.” (Should it be “Jimboni” or “Jimbini”?) Either way, the Google guys probably wouldn’t put up with this. Wales doesn’t have much choice. He realized early on that the community would revolt if he were to monetize Wikipedia by selling ads.

He may now travel the world giving speeches and even include Bono as a friend, but Wales’s celebrity relies largely on being the guy who made the sum of the world’s information free without making a penny himself. As such, his reputation remains inextricably linked to the noisy, online volunteers who got him there. It’s a tricky balancing act, and it all seemed to work fine until Wales moved to London and began to, or at least tried to, enjoy some of the trappings of his success. Wikipedia, which is now available in 285 languages, gets more than 20 billion page views and roughly 516 million unique visitors a month. It is the fifth-most-visited Web site in the world behind Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook; and ahead of Amazon, Apple and eBay. Were Wikipedia to accept banner and video ads, it could, by most estimates, be worth as much as $5 billion. But that kind of commercial sellout would probably cause the members of the community, who are not paid for their contributions, to revolt. “The paradox,” says Michael J. Wolf, managing director at Activate, a technology-consulting firm in New York and a member of the Yahoo!

board, “is that what makes Wikipedia so valuable for users is what gets in its way of becoming a valuable, for-profit enterprise.” Wales suffers from the same paradox. Being the most famous traveling spokesman for Internet freedom brings in a decent living, but it’s not Silicon Valley money. It’s barely London money. Wales’s total net worth, by most estimates, is just above $1 million, including stock from his for-profit company Wikia, a wiki-hosting service. His income is a topic of constant fascination. Type “ Jimmy Wales ” into Google and “net worth” is the first pre-emptive search to pop up. “Everyone makes fun of Jimmy for leaving the money on the table,” says Sue Gardner, the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that runs Wikipedia. Wales is well rehearsed in brushing off questions about his income. In 2005, Florida Trend magazine reported that he made enough money in his brief stint as an options-and-futures trader in Chicago, before starting Wikipedia, that he would never have to work again. But that was before he had to pay child support and rent for homes in Florida and London. When I brought up the topic recently, Wales seemed irritated.

“It rarely crosses my mind,” he said. “Reporters ask me all the time and expect me to say: ‘I’m heartbroken. Where’s my billion dollars?’ ” On two occasions, he compared himself to an Ohio car salesman. “There are car dealers in Ohio who have far more money than I’ll ever have, and their jobs are much, much less interesting than mine,” he said during one conversation. When his net worth came up again, he brought up Ayn Rand. “Can you imagine Howard Roark saying, ‘I just want to make as much money as possible?’ ” Wales asked rhetorically. Wales likes to invoke the higher purpose of Wikipedia. He applies his libertarian worldview to the Internet and has taken on institutions like the United States government and Apple for threatening to curb the free exchange of information on the Web. He also packs his schedule with sponsored events that have supported his new life. These days, corporations, universities and foundations typically pay Wales more than $70,000 to deliver a standard but eloquent speech about Internet rights.

Last fall, I watched Wales speak on a panel titled “Champions of Action” at the Clinton Global Initiative, the annual gathering that matches wealthy donors with worthy causes, run by the former president. Onstage in a darkened ballroom of a Sheraton Hotel in New York, he sat alongside Madeleine K. Albright, the former secretary of state; Paul Farmer, the Harvard professor and co-founder of Partners in Health; and Tawakkol Karman, a Yemeni human rights activist and a 2011 Nobel Peace Prize recipient. Wales was there, in part, to promote the site. (Wikipedia uses its donations to keep its servers running and for about 160 paid employees.) But in between discussing health access in Haiti and the uprisings in the Middle East, the misspelling of Karman’s first name on Wikipedia came up. “They write it, all the world, in the wrong way,” she told the crowd. “Maybe I have to show a passport or something.” Wales assured her that he had fixed the entry. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Powerful people like to be around Wales. A common criticism is that Wales likes to be around them, too — and perhaps a little too much.

During a visit to Los Angeles in February, Wales tweeted : “Lunch with Felicia. Dinner with Charlize. L.A. is . . . wow,” referring to the actresses Felicia Day and Charlize Theron. He also recently tweeted: “Just got measured for my clothes for Sean Parker’s wedding. This oughta be innerstin’. :-)” But, as I learned at the Clinton Global Initiative, some famous people treat Wales a little bit like their own personal editor. After the Karman incident, the hip-hop artist Will.i.am stopped Wales to complain about an error on his Wikipedia page. “Everyone thinks he’s William James Adams Jr., but it’s not James and it’s not junior,” Wales told me as he opened his MacBook and corrected the entry. That kind of proximity to famous people doesn’t sit well with some members of the Wikipedia community who assert that Wales’s new life is, in some ways, contradictory to the egalitarian online world he created. Several contributors protested that Wales had used a firsthand, unsourced experience to change Will.i.am’s entry. A user called Fram said Wales had violated Wikipedia protocol, which requires factual information be attributed to published materials.

“People are not necessarily trustworthy when it comes to personal information,” Fram wrote after changing Will.i.am’s full name back, referencing two published sources. The same rule applied when Wales tried to get his own birthday changed, from Aug. 8, 1966 (as his passport and driver’s license used to read) to his actual birthday, Aug. 7. “This is unverifiable information, I’m sorry to say,” he wrote on his entry’s talk page. “Maybe I’ll have to upload a signed note from my mom as documentary evidence.” One of the amazing things about Wikipedia is how it has emboldened anonymous volunteers with the same power as established experts. In many ways, Wales has been similarly emboldened. He grew up in Huntsville, Ala., the son of a teacher and a retail manager, before he left to study finance at Auburn University. (“It’s pretty weird,” Wales said in 2005. “I used to be just a guy. Now I’m Jimmy Wales.”) At 20, he married Pamela Green, whom he met when he worked at an Alabama grocery store.

Later, he worked briefly as a trader in Chicago where he met his second wife, Christine Rohan, a steel trader. In 1996, when Wales still wore a shaggy beard, listened to Insane Clown Posse and quoted “This is Spinal Tap” in meetings, he co-founded Bomis , a search engine that came with a “Bomis Babe Report,” a blog with photos of scantily clad celebrities and porn stars. He and Rohan moved to San Diego to get in on the Internet boom. (In 2005, Wales objected on his Wikipedia page to an entry that said Bomis peddled porn. “The mature audience [NOT pornography] portion of the business is significantly less than 10 percent of total revenues,” he told the community.) Porn or not, Bomis’s profits financed Wales’s side project, Nupedia, an online encyclopedia with peer-reviewed entries written by experts and academics that served as the predecessor to Wikipedia. Photo Jimmy Wales in 2001, the year that his company started Wikipedia. Credit Robert Burroughs for The New York Times Wales was obsessed with the idea of an online encyclopedia that anyone could edit.

He had grown up reading his parents’ collection of World Book encyclopedias with stickers that marked updated entries, and in graduate school he developed an interest in the burgeoning open-source software movement that allowed programmers to collaborate. As Nupedia floundered and his business partners tried to expand Bomis, Wales saw a potentially larger cultural experiment in a free open-sourced encyclopedia and devoted almost all of his attention to it. In January 2001, he registered the domain names and . The project went live on Jan. 15, 2001, henceforth known as Wikipedia Day. Like many Internet entrepreneurs of the early aughts, Wales aimed to create something cool first and worry about a business model later. And at first, Wikipedia was a hand-to-mouth operation. Wales, who relocated with Rohan to St. Petersburg, Fla., for cheap real estate, would hand deliver a check from Bomis to keep Wikipedia’s Tampa servers running. In those early days, Wales still thought he could turn his free encyclopedia into a billion-dollar idea. “I think Jimmy thought he could get very rich off this,” his friend and partner at Bomis, Terry Foote, told me.

Foote, who went to high school with Wales, was the best man in his second wedding. He didn’t attend the third. “Fame tends to change people,” Foote said of their falling out. Wales mostly declined to discuss the status of his friendships from Wikipedia’s early days. “Moving to London has had a big impact on my social circle,” he said. “My wife, you know, knows everyone.” The Internet bubble had burst before Wales could implement a revenue-generating business model for Wikipedia. After the crash, he was stuck with an oddity — a popular but penniless online encyclopedia run by strong-willed volunteers likely to reject the idea of advertising. But as Wikipedia grew, Wales undertook a shrewd branding transformation. In June 2003, he set up a nonprofit foundation to run the operation. In a 2004 interview with the Web site Slashdot, he publicized the mission statement that would definitively distance his Wikipedia future from his seedier Bomis Babe Report roots. “Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That’s what we’re doing,” he said.

Andrew Keen, a technology writer who has clashed with Wales, told me that Wales “was a soft-porn guy who stumbled on to this thing.” But Wales’s lofty goal got him a TED Talk in 2005. Then Bono personally invited him to the World Economic Forum in Davos. During that trip, people who were close to Wales say he morphed from a schlubby computer guy to an activist with dramatically improved access to information and power. His mantra of an Internet unconstrained by corporate or government interests resonated; Time magazine named him one of its 100 Most Influential People of 2006 . The following year at Davos, Wales and Garvey were both named “Young Global Leaders.” (Wales, who separated from Rohan in 2008, says he first recalls meeting Garvey in Monaco in 2009. Their romantic relationship began in 2010.) “Jimmy has had an ongoing valedictory lap for having catalyzed one of the greatest creations in the history of human knowledge,” Jonathan L. Zittrain, a Harvard law professor and co-founder of the school’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, said.

“It’s hard to begrudge him for that. I think he’s been feeling his way around. It’s not like there’s a lot of precedent for this.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story But some have wondered if Wales, who couldn’t figure out a way to become rich off his innovation, was cynically making a play to cash in on being a great humanitarian. “Did Jimmy have the vision or did he settle into his spontaneous role?” asked Scott Glosserman, a filmmaker who helped make “ Truth in Numbers? ” a 2010 documentary about Wikipedia. Wales had granted Glosserman and the other filmmakers unfettered access for the documentary, which turned out to be critical of Wikipedia, pointing out inaccuracies inherent in trusting a teenager as much as a tenured professor. Wales disliked the film and refused to help promote it. “It was like throwing the magic beans away and the next day seeing a beanstalk,” Glosserman said of Wikipedia’s evolution. High-minded or not, empowering the masses has made Wales beholden to them. That was an easy enough dynamic when he lived in St.

Petersburg, Fla., and drove a 4-year-old dented Hyundai, but being benevolent dictator becomes a bit more complicated when you’re going to parties with the Blairs. Despite the community’s occasional discomfort with his friends in high places, it’s clear that Wales has tried to use those connections to promote issues the community tends to care most about. Last January, the volunteers voted to make Wikipedia go dark to protest two pieces of antipiracy legislation in Washington, a move that contributed to the bills being blocked. Not long after the Stop Online Piracy Act (S.O.P.A.) blackout, Wales worked with The Guardian newspaper to prevent the extradition to the United States of Richard O’Dwyer, the 25-year-old whose search engine, TVShack.net , was suspected of promoting piracy. He also opposed the British government’s proposed Communications Data Bill (also known as the “snoopers’ charter”). Wales called the legislation that would have required the tracking of British citizens’ Internet, text and e-mails “technologically incompetent” and threatened to encrypt Wikipedia pages so they could not easily be monitored. Lawmakers have since shelved the bill. Wales, however, ensures he is not taken for a radical.

He treads carefully when weighing in on more extreme members of the free-culture movement, like Julian Assange — who he has criticized for using the “wiki” name — and online hacking collectives like Anonymous. Wales and I met for lunch the day after the 26-year-old computer programmer and Internet activist Aaron Swartz killed himself. The community had erupted with calls for Wales to weigh in, but he was hesitant. “People have been pushing me to comment, but I didn’t know him,” Wales told me. He has also stayed mostly mum on Edward Snowden, the contractor for the National Security Agency who leaked confidential information about widespread snooping by the United States government. “Wikipedia expresses the very essence of the Internet,” Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist, told me. “Used to be the victors wrote history. Now everyone gets a chance.” Not even Wales is spared. After the site caught on, Wales tried to edit his own entry to call himself the sole founder. The trouble was that in 2000 he hired Larry Sanger, an academic and proselyte of an open-source Internet, to help him start his online encyclopedia.

The idea of letting anyone (and not just experts) oversee the encyclopedia entries was Wales’s idea, but Sanger has said he talked a skeptical Wales into using wiki technology and came up with the name Wikipedia. Wales’s attempt to change his entry was a violation of Wikipedia protocol that sent the community into a tizzy. His page currently calls him the co-founder. An entire “controversy” section explains the Sanger dispute and references a 2001 New York Times article and a 2002 Wikipedia news release that both name Wales and Sanger as co-founders. “That’s funny, isn’t it?” Wales says in a way that makes clear he doesn’t find it funny at all. “It’s the dumbest controversy in the history of the world.” Sanger declined to comment for this article, but on the talk page of Wales’s entry, he wrote that “it was only when Wikipedia emerged into the broader public eye and Jimmy started jetting around the world” that he tried to rewrite history. After separating from Christine, Wales briefly lived in New York and would travel to London frequently to visit Garvey at her Covent Garden apartment.

In 2011, Wales, who didn’t travel outside the United States until he was 37, moved to London, and he and Garvey, who declined to comment for this article, found a rental in Marylebone. Wales seems to have adapted to this new life with ease. He uses Britishisms that make him sound a little like the famous faux-Brits Gwyneth Paltrow or Madonna. He told me he had “a good ol’ time” at the Olympics, where he attended beach volleyball and an equestrian event as Boris Johnson’s guest. Living in Marylebone is nice, he says, because “we have loads of friends and people pop by.” Unlike in the United States, where politicians are remote Wikipedia subjects, in Britain he “literally” (pronounced LIT-ruh-lee) knows them. “My wife,” he said again, “is the most connected woman in London.” The community, however, would not be left behind. Since expanding his circle in London, Wales has recused himself from weighing in on certain Wikipedia entries, including Tony Blair’s page and several members of the House of Lords whom he now knows personally.

Even so, the community questioned whether Wales had any part in an allegedly whitewashed entry on the Kazakh government, which Blair has advised. (Wales called the accusation “totally stupid.”) Even before he married Garvey, some members argued that he had grown increasingly out of touch. “Jimbo does not own Wikipedia,” wrote one volunteer. “He may have co-founded it, but so what? It has always belonged to the community.” Wales concedes that this is more or less true. “In theory, I have the authority to do anything and to make policy by fiat,” he said. “In practice, if I tried to do that, people would go crazy and revolt.” That collective ownership model won’t make anyone rich, but Wales argues that in the long run it makes Wikipedia far more enduring and valuable to society than Facebook or Twitter. It openly bothers Wales that Wikipedia doesn’t get more credit for events like the uprisings that led to the Arab Spring. “People like to talk about the Facebook and Twitter revolutions, but I think that’s the most superficial endpoint of the whole process,” he told me.

“It’s incredibly important that people are able to self-organize and go demonstrate, but what led them to believe that was even possible?” He pointed to activists reading about the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, revolts in Europe and the early days of democracy in the United States. “It’s one thing to go out on the street and demand change,” he said. “It’s another to say, ‘O.K., we won, the bad guy’s gone, now what?’ ” Wikipedia, he says, can inform those decisions. And that’s why Wales’s current project is to expand Wikipedia to the developing world. Last year, as part of a “Wikipedia Zero” campaign, the foundation established partnerships with telecommunications companies to provide mobile phones preloaded with Wikipedia in developing countries like Thailand, Malaysia, Serbia and, potentially, South Africa. In speeches, Wales largely focuses on this mission to spread the online encyclopedia to every person in the developing world at no data charge. One night in New York, Wales took a break from his evangelism to have dinner with friends. He had just finished taping an appearance on “The Colbert Report” and wore a white dress shirt with an asymmetrical collar and purple trim piping by the British designer Ozwald Boateng.

Six years ago, a less media-savvy Wales felt like he struggled on “Colbert.” This time he shut himself in the greenroom with a publicist. “Since you were last on, Wikipedia has been ubiquitous,” Colbert said. “You must be rolling in the cash, right?” Wales laughed it off, and reminded the audience that Wikipedia still needed their donations. At dinner afterward, he seemed adrenaline-fueled, coyly soaking up compliments on his successful performance. The next day he would be off to London, then Florida, then Germany, then California to deliver a keynote speech at a cybersecurity firm. The community, of course, would be with him all the way. Advertisement Continue reading the main story A few months later, as I was reading something he had written on the question-and-answer Web site Quora , I thought about Wales sipping wine out of milk glasses and eating oysters after “Colbert.” In response to a question about how to get his help with a start-up idea, Wales advised against using the type of buzzwords that impressed Bono before that first trip to Davos. “‘A world-changing next-generation platform for Gen Z blah blah blah’ — yuck,” he wrote.

He advised aspiring Internet entrepreneurs to “treat me like a business person,” including, he noted, offering compensation with stock options — “yay.” Internet ubiquity is great and all, but it would be nice to get paid for it, too. Correction: July 21, 2013 An article on June 30 about Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia referred imprecisely to the original location of Wikipedia in St. Petersburg, Fla. Although the original mailing address was a location in a strip mall, the organization’s offices were in a nearby office building. The article also referred incorrectly to the time a filmmaker, Scott Glosserman, spent with Mr. Wales for a documentary about Wikipedia called “Truth in Numbers?” While over all Mr. Glosserman spent more than a year working on the documentary, he did not personally spend a year with Mr. Wales for the film. Correction: July 7, 2013 An article last Sunday about Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, misstated the relationship between Sigmund Freud and Matthew Freud, who runs a public relations firm that has employed Kate Garvey, Wales’s wife. Matthew is Sigmund’s great-grandson, not his grandson.

Amy Chozick is a staff reporter at The Times. This is her first article for the magazine. Wikipedia - TruthWiki TruthWiki under Uncategorized Available in most languages, the definitions, quotes and “Wiki-species” are full of great details and seem as friendly and reliable as the old Britannica seemed, but a closer look reveals a catalogue of mainstream information rife with error, bias, and omission of some of the most important facts in the realms of health, environmental safety and agricultural sustainability. Founded with 99% pornography “trafficker” revenue, Wikipedia’s cofounder Jimmy Wales (1) took his web search engine called “Bomis” and created his own “online encyclopedia” full of bias, misinformation, and total lack of information regarding alternative health. Though Wales gave Wikipedia his blessing and vow of “neutrality” of information, the electronic encyclopedia lacks much credibility for many reasons, but is still used widely by US children who don’t know any better and want easy access to what they believe are “facts” for writing book reports, biographies and doing projects for school.

One major way Wikipedia fools people into believing they are posting facts is that Wikipedia sports a massive search engine with authority in Google that equates its rankings to high credibility sources, leading the public to believe in falsities – and on a site that can be altered by critics, liars and computer hacks alike. Claiming to use science-based facts for definitions of health and medicine topics, Wikipedia.org displays a flagrant bias toward anything holistic or organically based (2) , with many half-truths that are purported as legitimate and “real” science, agriculture and medicine. In 2002, the FBI was informed by Larry Sanger, the Wikipedia co-founder, that Wikimedia Commons, the parent company, was “rife with renderings of children performing sexual acts.” In 2005, the site was modified to remove and censor any connections to the true Jimmy Wales story and all the x-rated content that enabled his search engine to become so popular in the first place.

“Science-Based” Means Allopathic Information Only The information in Wikipedia is filtered to remove any talk of natural remedies, natural cures and organic medicine, referring to anything that is not lab-made as quack medicine, anti-science or even conspiracy theory when it challenges “science-based” information that has no independent research sourcing. The information that makes it through the Wikipedia filters and is published is pure mainstream, allopathic and biotechnology driven. Launched in 2001 (4) , Wikipedia launched 18,000 articles in its first year. At first, Wikipedia was called Nupedia and was known for catering to a male audience with mainly information on sports, cars and women. In the years that followed, Wales began “memory-holing” – – deleting information about his own inappropriate sexual business activities and exploiting control over Wikipedia by editing information from his own page. By 2003, Nupedia was dissolved into Wikipedia, but much of that content remains purported as “factual” information in Wikipedia today. Wikipedia was petitioned in 2014 (with more than 7,000 signatures) to allow for true scientific discourse about holistic approaches to healing.

The Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology, via Change.org, basically asked for Wikipedia to publish honest information from respected independent studies and journals, but Wikipedia only publishes health information from an allopathic standpoint, so the petition was rejected with rigor and flagrant bias – just business as usual for the porn king Jimmy Wales. There was also a “Kickstarter” campaign that raised thousands of dollars in 2015 to take down the “misinformation campaign” posing as an on-line encyclopedia. They were demanding fair representation for natural health, complimentary medicine, alternative medicine, energy medicine, chiropractic, orthomolecular, acupuncture and the healing arts. (3) Much like WebMD and National Geographic, one can find great detail and even facts regarding specific animals, plants, insects, raw materials, oceanography and even space exploration; yet when it comes to finding facts regarding safe agricultural practices, holistic healing or natural medicine that has worked for millennium, there’s is nary a fact to find. Hundreds of colleges and academic institutions, as well as news sites, refuse to use Wikipedia (or allow the students or teachers to use it) for research due to its numerous biases and inaccuracies (5) .

Though Wikipedia does not accept advertising, their fundraising efforts have been undermined by their stubborn anti-science “scientific” presentation of distorted and highly-filtered information. Anyone can edit Wikipedia The worst part of Wikipedia is that anyone can edit the pages, and that makes the majority of the online “encyclopedia” suspect. This editing includes revisions made by members of Wikipedia who may not have good intentions. In 2007, the BBC reported that Wikipedia allowed the CIA to edit entries. Today, the biotechnology field of chemical-agriculture is given the same reign of power as is pharmacology. Watchdog groups have revealed severe censorship, misinformation and even vandalism regarding information about natural health. This is mainly accomplished by ranking falsities high in Google, Bing, Yahoo, MSN.com, AOL and of course on Wikipedia’s own search engine. Certain Wikipedia “volunteers” are simply allowed to post, edit and research a variety of topics. They are all given credit as “honorable” and “authoritative” sources, without any conflicts of interest published and zero counterpoints. This also allows for false “expert” aliases, as discovered when a young college dropout once posed as a tenured college professor.

Even critical opinions are published as fact on Wikipedia when they serve the greater goal of spreading mainstream propaganda about the effectiveness of allopathic chemical drugs or the “safe and beneficial” manufacturing of genetically modified crops. Larry Sanger, cofounder of Wikipedia, ended up leaving the organization citing concerns over integrity and credibility. He is quoted as saying, “There is no credible mechanism to approve versions of articles. Vandalism, once a minor annoyance, has become a major headache-made possible because the community allows anonymous contribution. Many experts have been driven away because know-nothings insist on ruining their articles.” Currently, there are several credible alternatives to Wikipedia, including Citizendium, Wiki4CAM, the Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) Encyclopedia and of course TruthWiki.org . Wikipedia, by definition, indirectly supports biotechnology and the pharmaceutical industry, even though neither industry runs proper safety testing nor is required by US regulatory agencies to do so. What Wikipedia calls “science-based” actually involves and requires no scientific proof of effectiveness, safety or health benefit. Though Wikipedia does not run advertisements, they are indirectly advertising falsities as factual and misleading millions of readers in doing so.

The non-profit status simply serves as a cover story for propaganda spread by pharmaceutical companies like Merck, Pfizer and AstraZeneca, and agricultural chemical companies like Monsanto, Cargill, Bayer, Dupont, Dow, Syngenta and BASF. It’s just like the old days when JAMA advertised thousands of doctors endorsing the safety of cigarettes. (6) This is made even more evident as other online encyclopedias like WebMD, another propaganda portal, get busted for fraud. In fact, WebMD accepts bribe money to promote special interests, and documents revealed that the federal government paid the site’s content creators nearly $14 million to promote Obamacare. (7) Similarly, National Geographic (8) , considered to the a mainstream reliable source of information about nature, oceans and space exploration, and also one of the largest scientific and educational organizations in the world, accepts mass money payouts from drug and biotechnology industries as evidenced by their multi-paged advertising spreads in the print periodicals.

Their shameless endorsement of GMO (genetically modified organisms) “Frankencrops” flies in the face of health and environment detriment caused by chemical agriculture practices, yet it’s all still published as science-based “fact.” Dangerous pesticides are pushed as safe and appropriate for earth while other pages in the same publication speak of protecting Mother Nature and preserving rainforests. This is the same approach taken by Wikipedia regarding promoting deadly crop chemicals, except they claim to be non-profit. One should regard Wikipedia information with particular concern, since this spreading of disinformation maintains such a powerful force in the online search engines today. Wikipedia is nothing more than propaganda and a threat to health and the wellness community of the world. Inform your children.

Here’s the most recent EDITING SCANDEL for Wikipedia, furthering devaluing the validity of information on the so-called online encyclopedia: Wikipedia Co-Founder Jimmy Wales Describes The Site's Hold-Out On Social Media | The Huffington Post Wikipedia Co-Founder Jimmy Wales Describes The Site's Hold-Out On Social Media 09/26/2011 07:28 pm ET | Updated Nov 26, 2011 410 Bianca Bosker Executive Tech Editor, The Huffington Post In an age when airport terminals tweet and even dry cleaners ask to be “liked” on Facebook, social media has a surprise holdout: Wikipedia. The online encyclopedia pioneered new ways for individuals to share, connect and collaborate online a full seven years before Facebook was conceived and now offers 17.9 million articles accessed by more than 400 million users a month, making it the fifth most popular website worldwide. But Wikipedia is keeping mainstream social networking sites at arm’s reach, eschewing features such as Facebook's “like” buttons and Google-plus links on its site.

It's a move that underscores the power the Wikipedia community has to determine the direction of the site, as well as the encyclopedia's reticence to align itself with any single web company. The site maintains profiles on services such as Twitter, but Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales told The Huffington Post that the encyclopedia has no plans to deepen its integration with social media companies. “We’ve never been particularly good at partnering with people. Our community strives for neutrality in all respects: this applies to what is contained in the encyclopedia, but our community is also passionate about being vendor neutral,” Wales said during an interview Monday at the OMMA Global conference in New York City . “In the Wikipedia context, these decisions are community driven, even at that very, very core level. Communities can sometimes be quite paranoid about certain things.” Wales also said he has doubts about the degree to which users would care to share their activity on Wikipedia, expressing concerns with Facebook’s latest push to promote a “new class” of social applications that, once approved, would publicize any interaction a user has with the apps. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg praised these apps as a way to facilitate “frictionless” sharing and “realtime serendipity” when he unveiled them last week.

“Things like sharing what you’re reading, that’s where Facebook bumps up against the line of what people find slightly weird and creepy,” Wales said. “If I go to read something on Wikipedia, that’s my own personal business…You should feel safe and private knowing that whatever you want to learn, you go to Wikipedia to learn it and you don’t have to worry that you’ve accidentally told Facebook you want to learn it.” The increasing popularity of social networking sites, to which Americans devote 22 percent of their time online according to Nielsen, has had a negligible influence on Wikipedia, Wales said. “It hasn’t affected us at all,” he said. Wales, who spoke highly of individual Wikipedia contributors he has met, including an avid editor in Kazakhstan and a retiree with an interest in baronetcy, acknowledged that there were elements of the encyclopedia that resembled a social networking site: it forges connections between individuals around the world, offers a platform through which people can communicate and provides an outlet for their contributions. The key difference, he noted, is that on Wikipedia, the conversations that take place between the members of the community have the end goal of creating content and building a site for an audience of readers.

The greatest challenge Wikipedia now faces is expanding into developing countries, according to Wales. As part of its effort to offer more entries in a greater number of languages, Wikipedia has plans to open its first office outside the United States in India. “Wikipedia’s vision statement is to provide a free encyclopedia for every single person on the planet in their own language, so it’s core to our mission that we focus a lot on the developing world where Wikipedia is behind where it could be,” Wales said. “We already have a free encyclopedia in English, and we want to improve it, but really, I’m more and more focused on growth in the developing world.” At the same time, Wikipedia is struggling to retain its dwindling pool of editors and diversify its pool of contributors, nearly 90 percent of whom are male. Wikipedia already has plans to simplify its editing software, which the organization hopes will entice more users who don't have an extensive tech background to contribute to the site. To date, however, Wales said something far more basic has been the most important factor contributing to Wikipedia’s success: fun.

"It's fun and people enjoy doing it," said Wales of editing the online encyclopedia, adding that he contributes to Wikipedia almost daily and is particularly interested in the House of Lords article . "People do fun and interesting things because they’re fun and interesting." CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Wales described Wikipedia as "actually building something." He was referring to Wikia , a for-profit company co-founded by Wales. More: Wikipedia blackout coming Wednesday, says co-founder Jimmy Wales - The Washington Post Wikipedia blackout coming Wednesday, says co-founder Jimmy Wales The inside track on Washington politics. Be the first to know about new stories from PowerPost. Sign up to follow, and we’ll e-mail you free updates as they’re published. You’ll receive free e-mail news updates each time a new story is published. You’re all set! Got it By T.J. Ortenzi By T.J. Ortenzi January 17, 2012 Wikipedia will black out its Web site Wednesday to protest SOPA, the of anti-piracy legislation that’s being considered by Congress.

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales made the announcement on Twitter on Monday, saying the site would shut down English versions of the crowd-sourced online encyclopedia at midnight Eastern Standard Time on Tuesday until midnight Wednesday. I am just starting to do press interviews about the upcoming blackout of Wikipedia to protest #sopa and #pipa (”Protect IP”). — Jimmy Wales (@jimmy_wales) January 16, 2012 Wales called the move a “ community decision .” He pointed to a page that was created to gauge support for a possible blackout. Users have until 6:59 p.m. Tuesday to weigh in on the decision. Wales and other SOPA opponents hope to draw attention to language in SOPA that, according to some , is too broad and could hurt free speech and innovation. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales. (AP) The online protests are changing the debate. Over the weekend, the White House hinted that it would oppose the current version of the bill. And key sponsors are stepping away from its most controversial aspects. If Wikipedia blacks out as promised, Wales expects an estimated 25 million daily visitors to be affected.

His advice for students who might rely on the site: “Do your homework early.” View Photo Gallery: It used to be that being a big donor, a pundit, an elected official or elder statesman was the way into the political elite. Today, it’s through HTML, javascript and ruby — in other words, computer programming.

Question: Jimmy Wales was the co-founder of which major Web site?
Answer: Wikipedia