JIMMY WALES’ WIKIPEDIA

NAME THE OUTLIER AMONG THESE TECH ENTREPRENEURS: Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Sergey Brin and Larry Page (Google), Elon Musk (X, etc.), Pierre Omidyar (eBay), Peter Thiel (PayPal), and Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia).

Jimmy Wales “has failed to become a billionaire,” notes David Shariatmadari in “ ‘People Thought I Was a Communist Doing This As a Non-Profit’: Is Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales the Last Decent Tech Baron?” The Guardian, October 27, 2025.

To me, he’s certainly the odd-on favorite as the last decent tech baron. Here are tidbits from Shariatmadari’s article in The Guardian, together with my usual Internet sleuthing (Wikipedia included, of course). 

Thank an Unnamed Door-to-Door Salesman. Shariatmadari recounts, “Wales enjoyed a modest but comfortable childhood in Huntsville, Alabama, the son of a grocery store manager and a schoolteacher. He spent ‘countless hours’ reading The World Book Encyclopedia his mother had bought from a door-to-door salesman, eagerly awaiting the updates that arrived by post once a year.”

Shariatmadari continues, “When he became a trader in Chicago in the 90s, he ‘loved it’ because ‘it was very mathematical.’ ”

This and a following image by Pål Hansen/The Guardian

I’m liking this guy the more I read.

Pre-Wikipedia. Shariatmadari describes that 25 years ago, “Wales was a former trader and internet entrepreneur in his mid-30s. He had co-founded a ‘guy-oriented search engine’ called Bomis, but his real passion was encyclopedias. The money from Bomis had allowed him to found Nupedia, a free online encyclopedia written by experts—but it was proving slow to get off the ground. The laborious process of peer review meant that it only managed to generate 21 articles in its first year (among them ‘Donegal fiddle tradition’ and ‘polymerase chain reaction’).”

Well, I did wonder about PCRs, but never about fiddling tradition anywhere. 

Wales back in 2005. Image by Gary Bogdon/The New York Times/eyevine via The Guardian. 

And Then…. “We know the rest of the story:” Shariatmadari relates, “his new project, Wikipedia, founded on the principle that anyone could edit it, grew rapidly. By 2002, there were about 25,000 entries in the English version; by 2006, there were 1m. There are now more than 7m (the digital version of Encyclopedia Britannica [another of SimanaitisSays frequent sources] has 100,000).”

 “Alongside this, Shariatmadari notes, “are 18 foreign-language versions of Wikipedia that have more than 1m articles each, ranging from Arabic to Vietnamese. It has become part of the plumbing of the internet—perhaps even more essential: Diane von Fürstenberg once told Wales that ‘we all use Wikipedia more often than we pee.’ ”

Well, at my age, some days it’s about even. 

Wikipedia the Canary. Shariatmadari describes, “In some ways, Wikipedia has been the canary in the coal mine for many of today’s hot-button issues—rows over diversity, the use of language, concerns about anonymity, trolling and misinformation. During the pandemic, when quackery and conspiracism were rife, a group of editors made it their mission to police medical misinformation on the site. Crucially, they tried to maintain everyone’s trust while doing so, citing evidence and recording every twist and turn of the debate in the editors’ ‘talk’ pages, which are preserved for ever.”

Wikipedia Contributors. I suspect there’s no better source of contributor information than, you guessed it, “Wikipedia: Contributing to Wikipedia.”

Wikipedia Funding. As for funding, see the Wikimedia Foundation. It’s a non-profit 501(c)(3). Check out its FAQs as well.

Woke and D.E.I. Shariatmadari recounts, “On the day I meet Wales, Musk suggests to his 228 million followers on X that ‘Wikipedia should be called Wokipedia (or Dickipedia 😂).’ ”

Quelle jackass! 

“In late 2024, using the slogan ‘Stop donating to Wokepedia,’ various rightwing accounts (including Musk’s) shared graphs purporting to show that Wikipedia’s parent foundation spent “$50m of their total $177m budget on diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

Geez. And this is a reason to stop donating?? 

Shariatmadari quotes Wales: “Wikipedia is completely global. It’s a free encyclopedia for every single person on the planet in their own language. So diversity, equity and inclusion are fundamental to the mission. We actually care about people who are native speakers of Swahili being active in Wikipedia, because that’s our goal: an encyclopedia for everyone. It isn’t ‘woke nonsense’. It is all about the mission.”

Full Disclosure: I am a monetary contributor to the Wikipedia mission. I encourage you to be one as well. ds 

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2025