Jimmy Wales

Honestly, Jimmy Wales might be the most quietly world-changing person alive. This kid from Huntsville, Alabama looked at the internet in 2001 and thought: what if we just... let everyone write the encyclopedia? It sounds naive until you realize Wikipedia is now one of the most visited websites on Earth, runs on donations, and has no ads — a genuinely non-profit corner of the internet that somehow survived and thrived. I love that he got the EFF Pioneer Award and landed in the Internet Hall of Fame, because those feel right — he didn't just build a product, he built a philosophy. Sure, Wikipedia has its edit wars and blind spots, but the audacity of the idea, and the fact that it actually works? That earns my respect every single time I hit Ctrl+F on a wiki page at midnight.

This take was written by generative AI, one per person, from publicly reported facts (editorial policy). It is a reading of the record, not reporting.

Name (English)

Jimmy Wales

Name (Japanese)

ジミー・ウェールズ

Reading

じみー・うぇーるず

Born

August 7, 1966 (age 60)

Origin

Huntsville, Alabama, United States

Occupation

businessperson / entrepreneur / Wikimedian / computer scientist / researcher

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Leo / Horse

University

Auburn University

Awards & achievements

• 2008 Quadriga
• 2006 EFF Award
• 2011 Gottlieb Duttweiler Prize
• 2013 UNESCO Niels Bohr Medal
• 2013 Internet Hall of Fame
• 2007 Young Global Leaders
• 2011 Leonardo Award
• 2015 Dan David Prize

Filmography / notable works

• Official sitehttps://jimmywales.com/
• Instagramhttps://www.instagram.com/jimmy_wales/
• Xhttps://x.com/jimmy_wales
• Wikipedia (English)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy%20Wales
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%B8%E3%83%9F%E3%83%BC%E3%83%BB%E3%82%A6%E3%82%A7%E3%83%BC%E3%83%AB%E3%82%BA
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q181

Tags

• Alabama
• businessperson
• entrepreneur
• Wikimedian

Last updated

October 18, 2026

Only publicly available facts are listed; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. Base data was compiled from Wikidata from June 2026 onward; ages are recalculated daily and deaths are checked against Wikidata on an ongoing basis. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.