Experts
Jimmy Wales
Chairman, Wikia; Co-Founder, Wikipedia
Recent Activity
Wikia Gaming joins Wikia Entertainment in the 1 million article club
Just got some new numbers (thanks Doug and Przemek for putting these together) for Wikia’s growth, especially in gaming and entertainment, traditionally our strongest wikis. Gaming just crossed 1,000,000 and currently with 1,003,977 articles… joining Entertainment (1.1 million articles) in the “over a million” category. The raw breakdown looks like this: [...]
April 3, 2009, 4:29 AM
Update on Wikia - doing more of what’s working
If there is one thing that I’ve learned in my career, it is to do more of what’s working, and less of what’s not. In past 24 months, Wikia.com has seen tremendous expansion. Nielsen recently recognized Wikia.com as the fifth fastest growing member community destination in February 2009: RANK Site Feb 08 Feb 09 % growth 1 Twitter.com 475,000 7,038,000 1382% 2 Zimbio 809,000 2,752,000 240% 3 Facebook 20,043,000 65,704,000 228% 4 Multiply 821,000 2,394,000 192% 5 Wikia 1,381,000 3,758,000 172% source: [...]
March 31, 2009, 10:00 AM
Jimmy Carter: “Obama can change our reputation in ten minutes”
"...if he will say these things in the first ten minutes, our whole reputation around the world would be improved."
January 20, 2009, 3:45 AM
Free software and social networking
Today at Wikia we have released our social networking features for MediaWiki under the GNU GPL 2.0. The best place to see this running live is at Halopedia, our Halo site. I am excited about all the stuff going on in this space. With google’s open social initiative, our work in social search and [...]
February 28, 2008, 7:29 AM
Wikia Search plugin for Firefox
Daniel F. Gass, who signs his emails “15 year old conquering the web” already conquered a part of it since last night, creating a Wikia search plugin for Firefox! Awesome! Thanks, Daniel! Now I wonder what open source toolbars out there might support more functionality…
January 7, 2008, 12:57 AM
Jimmy Wales is an American Internet entrepreneur known for his role in the creation of Wikipedia, a free, open-content encyclopedia launched in 2001. He serves on the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, holding the board-appointed "community founder" seat. In 2004, he co-founded Wikia, a privately owned, free Web-hosting service, along with Angela Beesley.
Together with Larry Sanger and others, Wales helped lay the foundation for Wikipedia, which subsequently enjoyed rapid growth and popularity. As Wikipedia expanded and its public profile grew, Wales took on the role of the project's spokesman and promoter through speaking engagements and media appearances. Wales has been historically cited as the co-founder of Wikipedia but he disputes the "co-" designation, asserting that he is the sole founder of Wikipedia. Wales' work developing Wikipedia, which has become the world's largest encyclopedia, prompted Time magazine to name him in its 2006 list of the world's most influential people.
Born in Huntsville, Alabama, Wales attended a small private school, then a university preparation school, eventually attaining a bachelor's degree and master's degree in finance. During his graduate studies he taught at two universities.
