Final

Jimbo Wales

1. Jimbo Wales was born in Huntsville Alabama on August 7th 1966. He is an internet entrepreneur who founded the open content encyclopedia, Wikipedia in 2001. Wikipedia is currently the worlds largest encyclopedia. In addition to his work with wikipedia, Wales also founded a for profit site called wikia. He also has served as  an advisor to both governments and universities. Jimbo Wales also keeps a blog in his spare time called: http://jimmywales.com.                                                         (source used http://www.biography.com/people/jimmy-wales-39135)

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Jimbo in color

 

Jimmy Wales is critical to digital literacy. He is what is known as an information socialist. And information socialist is someone who believes that information should be available for all. His organization, Wikipedia has revolutionized the way information is acquired and processed. Wikipedia is a non-profit digital encyclopedia which provides universal access to knowledge for all people. Most importantly, it’s free. The site is funded primarily by donations. His site, Wikipedia, goes along with the idea that all should be able to have access to knowledge and benefit from our growing interconnected world. The Internet is the factor that makes all this knowledge available on every Wi-Fi connected corner of the globe. (http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/FAQ/en)

Jimmy Wales is very similar to another digital pioneer, Brewster Khale. Brewster Khale like Wales, is an information Socialist. He is also called a digital librarian. Brewster believes in universal access to knowledge. He founded a site called Alexa, which provides web traffic information. He also founded the “internet Archive”. The Internet Archive provides archives of World Wide Web documents which are universally accessible. So far the site contains more than 85 billion web pages. Wales and Khale are both similar in their pursuit of universal Access to knowledge. (http://internethalloffame.org/inductees/brewster-kahle-0)

Throughout these last two paragraphs I have discussed the concept of Universal Access to Knowledge. But what does that concept mean? It is simply defined form Brewster Khales archive, as “Advances in computing and communications means that we can cost effectively store every book, sound, recording, movie, software, and public web page ever created, and provide access to these collections via the internet to students and adults all over the world”. ( https://archive.org/details/SDForumBK) Jimmy Wales’s Wikipedia site and Brewster Khales work both are great examples of this idea that all should have access to knowledge.

Jimbo Wales

 

Jimbo is also a decent public speaker and has given TED talks. See th below link for his talk:

https://embed-ssl.ted.com/talks/jimmy_wales_on_the_birth_of_wikipedia.html