Who is Jimmy Wales?
Jimmy Wales is known as one of the founders of Wikipedia, the world’s largest collaborative encyclopedia on the Web, written and edited by millions of people all over the world.
What is Wikipedia?
First, it’s helpful to understand what a wiki is. A wiki is an online collaborative effort to contribute to a greater idea(S); a website that can be edited, organized, and collated by anyone who is in the wiki’s user base. A wiki is meant to be a collaborative, community effort that keeps on top of anywhere from one to hundreds of thousands of different topics, updating information as it becomes available.
Wikipedia is a wiki that is written and edited collaboratively by contributors around the world. With literally millions of contributors and articles, Wikipedia is one of the largest sites on the Web today.
How did Wikipedia get started?
Wikipedia was initially started by Jimmy Wales in 2001 as a companion site to Nupedia, which was meant to be an online encyclopedia curated by experts.
Wikipedia’s technology (open wiki collaboration and contribution by anyone with knowledge of a subject) soon became wildly popular; at the time of this writing, Wikipedia offers over three million peer-reviewed articles on a huge variety of topics.
How big is Wikipedia?
According to the official history of Wikipedia, there are 3,593,000 articles in the English Wikipedia.
Jimmy Wales’ honors and awards:
Jimmy Wales has received multiple honors for his groundbreaking achievements, including a Pioneer Award from The Electronic Frontier Foundation, included as part of Forbes’ annual Web Celebs feature, and recognition from the World Economic Forum.