Jimmy Wales

President & Director, Wikimedia Foundation
ETech 2005
12 minutes, 5.8mb, recorded 2005-03-16
Jimmy
With just over 500,000 articles in 350,000+ categories, Wikipedia is most likely the largest online encyclopedia on the web contributed 100% by volunteers. It has helped people do everything from write an essay on the history of World War II to explain a new evolution called "podcasting". Put in three words: it's been phenomenal. The power of social computing has really shown its magic, and no doubt it's bringing back the original dream of the Internet.

The Wikimedia Foundation has done a lot of things: heck, if it starts with "wiki," it probably belongs to the Wikimedia Foundation, who are doing everything from a Wiktionary to Wikicities to Wikibooks. In this interesting presentation from ETech 2005, Jimmy Wales, President of the Wikimedia Foundation and CEO of Wikipedia, talks about the true power of social computing and what it has done to the Internet.

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Jimmy Wales is the President/Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, CEO of Wikipedia and the founder of several other wiki-based platforms. Jimmy first attended Auburn University and later the University of Alabama for his undergraduate studies. In the mid-1990s, he founded a search portal called Bomis which sold original content including an adult section. Jimmy now devotes most of his time to his wiki projects and is a frequent speaker at several media conferences.

Resources:

This presentation is one of a series from the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference held in San Diego, California, March 14-17, 2005.

For Team ITC:

This free podcast is from our Emerging Technology Conference series.