Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales

Founder of Wikipedia 

We have decided to highlight Jimmy Wales as one of the biggest socially innovative Internet entrepreneurs, who has made a huge impact in the field of knowledge sharing. 

Jimmy Wales is the co-founder and brain behind Wikipedia. Wikipedia was created in 2001 and is a free, open-content encyclopedia. It is now the largest encyclopedia in the world.

His influence has helped popularize a trend in web development, which is also called Web 2.0. His aim is to facilitate creativity, collaboration and sharing among users. Time Magazine named him one of the world's most influential people in 2006 because of his massive global impact. 

Jimmy Wales was born August 7, 1966 in America. He grew up in Huntsville, Alabama, and he received his early education from a small private school run by his mother and grandmother. Education was one of the key values in his upbringing because of the teacher aspect within the family. In an interview he has formulated it this way:

"Education was always a passion in my household…you know, the traditional approach to knowledge and learning and establishing that as a base for a good life".

Jimmy has always had a great interest in finance and he has a bachelor's degree in finance from Auburn University. Furthermore he has a PhD in a finance program at the Alabama University. 

You may ask yourself, why is he a social innovator? One of his famous punch lines is: "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 perspective - to share and educate everyone for free - is innovative in itself. The free licensing of Wikipedia content means that it is free to copy, free to modify, free to redistribute, and free to redistribute in modified forms, with attribution links. People from all over the world are using this source, because Wikipedia is a platform for information and collaboration between people. It is flexible, adoptable and easy to access. 

When Wikipedia was created in 2001, all of its technology and software elements had been around since 1995. Its innovation was entirely social— free licensing of content, neutral point of view, and total openness to participants, especially new ones. The core engine of Wikipedia, as a result, is "a community of thoughtful users, a few hundred volunteers who know each other and work to guarantee the quality and integrity of the work." 

Wikipedia is a growing organism and will continue to accelerate its growth. It is one of the top 20 websites, with 5 billion page views monthly. And from that, Jimmy Wales has made himself into a legend of our time. 

The name "Wikipedia" is a combination of "wiki” and "encyclopedia". Wiki is a term that describes an online tool for collaborative authoring. Software programmer Ward Cunningham was the first to use this term which he got from Hawaiian wiki-wiki, which means ‘quick-quick’. “Encyclopedia" derives from the Latin word "enkuklopaideia" and it means "all-around education".