I have dropped my opposition to a page about me, but I think we're going to have to watch it carefully for trolling. It might even need to be generally protected, I don't know. Jimbo Wales 02:51, 9 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Name

"Jimbo Wales" gets 2500 google hits, "Jimmy Wales" gets 12,900. I think this article should be moved there. anthony (see warning) 03:14, 9 Sep 2004 (UTC)

cf , I agree. — Kate Turner | Talk 03:20, 2004 Sep 9 (UTC)

I note User:Jimbo Wales revision as of 02:49, 9 Sep 2004 (UTC) was "Jimmy Wales is a person." sabre23t 04:01, 9 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Non-encyclopedic trivia

Please limit the kinds of trivia you include in this article, as with any biography. Family details seem like they might be out of place. I can't find the australian interview; is that where the stat on 'USD spent on wiki/nupedia' came from? In any case, I removed the broken external link and the stat. +sj+ 08:36, 9 Sep 2004 (UTC)

A few verifiable facts and some opinions

Some factual material that may be helpful:

• this is my published academic work in options pricing
• Many press sources about me can be found on my homepage, but probably even more can be found on the WIkipedia news page.
• Bomis still owns the Ferrari, because the contest winner chose to accept cash instead. (This is confirmable by a photograph if anyone needs proof...)

Some opinions and unverifiable biographical facts:

• While it is sort of ok to call me a "firearms enthusiast" it is more accurate to say that I take a strong interest in firearms policy and legal issues, especially constitutional issues. I own guns, but I hardly ever go shooting, and I have never in my life gone hunting. It's really more of an intellectual hobby than a practical hobby.

• It would make the most sense I think to add "while in graduate school in the early 1990s" to the bit about my moderating the philosophy mailing list -- it puts that bit into perspective in the story of my life.

• The Herald Sun article is talking about Australian dollars. A later article in Time estimated the number at $500,000 US dollars total. Both numbers came direcctly from me, so it's interesting to me to think about the process by which something I said to a journalist becomes a fact after they print it.  :-)

• The bit about 'erotic images' is true, but it makes me laugh. I think of my time at Bomis as being marked by our early entry into the internet market, our early use of and promotion of the dmoz open source data, etc. But, you know, whatever.

Linkage

Would-be Arabic squirrel , I and others have already explained this: pages in the article namespace should not link directly to pages in other namespaces. If such links are necessary, they should be treated like links to an external website. Reread Wikipedia:Avoid self-references if you haven't picked this up yet. —No-One Jones ^m 05:08, 10 Sep 2004 (UTC)

It's clearly an internal link and not an external one. If you are very concerned about self-reference, the link can be omitted. Please don't sully the article with factual inaccuracies such as designating internal links as external. · 05:12, 10 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Both Wales' Wikipedia user page and Wales' Wikipedia user page take the reader to the same page—and policy on the matter is clear, so why are you making such a big issue of this? —No-One Jones ^m 05:15, 10 Sep 2004 (UTC)

You (·) don't seem understand..Using the external link syntax wasn't a factual inaccuracy. However, if internal links are used, it will be _transformed_ into a factual inaccuracy as soon as someone mirrors the Jimmy Wales article on another site. They may not include the User namespace, or their version of the user page may get edited without Jimmy knowing it or it may simply become outdated. — David Remahl 05:18, 10 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I hold accuracy above any possible modification made to the database by re-users. If you have a great urge to link to internal pages as if they were external, I will allow you to wallow in your own folly. The tiny external link arrow shall be your punishment. · 05:28, 10 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Haha :-). Anyway, remember that the purpose of the project is to build an encyclopaedia and that the web site (and associated talk, user and wikipedia namespace pages) are just vehicles. Another problem with using the internal link syntax is that, when printed, there will be no sign of where the user page (or wikimeet page) is located (or even it is a link, since links are not underlined when printed). The URL of an external link is displayed in print. — David Remahl 05:50, 10 Sep 2004 (UTC)

User pages are external to the encyclopedia itself. Wikipedia the project (including user pages, talk pages, policy pages, etc.) is distinct from Wikipedia the encyclopedia (which is just the article namespace). I don't think it is "wallowing in folly" to make that distinction. Jimbo Wales 12:41, 10 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Citation

Wales owned a yellow Ferrari 308, which was photographed with adult model and actress Aria Giovanni as part of a promotion.

Anyone care to cite this? According to Jimbo, the Ferrari is owned by Bomis. anthony (see warning) 11:53, 10 Sep 2004 (UTC)

For marketing purposes, the car was referred to as mine. It's like "Win Bill Gates Ferrari!" But as a legal matter it was and is purchased and owned by Bomis. It now sits idle with flat tires in a friend's garage because I haven't bothered to maintain it, and it's too much trouble right now to sell it. Jimbo Wales 12:43, 10 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I've removed it, as I think mentioning a car which is owned by a company which is run by Jimbo is beyond "trivial". But if someone wants to add it back, as long as it doesn't say (without attribution) that "Wales owned" the car, I won't object. anthony (see warning) 13:15, 10 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I think we should work out what percentage of the car Jimbo owned, then truncate the sentence at that point, it would fit in well with our methods of resolving issues like Gdansk.  :) Pakaran. 17:14, 22 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Other Stuff

Shouldn't the full in the introduction be given as James Donald Wales instead of Jimmy? Ausir 20:32, 18 Sep 2004 (UTC)

My full name is 'Jimmy Donal Wales', not 'James Donald Wales' Jimbo Wales 20:55, 18 Sep 2004 (UTC)

My actual birthday is August 7th, 1966. This is unverifiable information, I'm sorry to say, since my driver's license and passport say August 8. If we must revert on that basis, then I guess we must. *g*. Maybe I'll have to upload a signed note from my mom as documentary evidence; the only proof that I have is her sayso. :-) Jimbo Wales 20:55, 18 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Well, we don't have a timezone listed, so the date is ambiguous to within one day anyway. :) anthony 警告 17:20, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)

"spent"

Why use "spent" when a better word is "donated". Spent has a connotation as in “expecting profit” or “money lost”, while donated more correctly refers to the support of the wiki projects. GeneralPatton 10:42, 19 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I don't agree with that at all. "I spent 100 bucks on a fantastic whore last night" (hypothetically speaking) - I didn't expect profit, and I don't consider it "money lost". "Abramovich spent ₤100 million on Chelsea" (or however much it was) - he certainly doesn't expect profit, but this is not money lost - it's bought him status and fame. So should we say "Abramovich donated 100 million to Chelsea FC?" I think not. Now, if it was somebody else's project, we would talk about Mr Wales donating that cash, but as it is, "spend" is perfectly accurate, however philanthropic we may consider the Wikipedia project to be. Pale Fire

While most the money was being spent Wikimedia, the non-profit, wasn't even in existence. Also, AFAIK, Jimbo has always said that his purpose in creating Wikipedia was for selfish as opposed to altruistic reasons. anthony 警告 17:24, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Section by Marco Krohn

I moved this paragraph from the main article, since I don't believe it is encyclopaedic and it is very self-referential. It is © User:Marco Krohn. — David Remahl 12:01, 25 Sep 2004 (UTC)

About this article

After a long history of reverts this article started containing only one sentence: "Jimmy Wales is a person.". This very short form of an article is called a "stub" among Wikipedians. The usefullness of such stubs is disputed within Wikiedia. In this case the article start is an allusion to the 50.000 French article, which was "La nèfle est un fruit." and whose background was described in a beautiful posting by Anthere [1].

Amateur Announcement

• hello, do you think that we should call Mr. Wales as the father of Wikipedia? Thanks.
• Dear Mr. Wales, may I know how many Users are there/ May I know how to promote more Wikipedia users, espcially people from my highly developed Singapore? Thanks. I hope that wikipedia will increase its article growth rate by 10 times in 16 months time. how? Thanks. User:Chan Han Xiang

Suggestions for the Wikipedia

I have the following humble suggestions for Wikipedia and the Wiki Think Tank.

• Allow the Wikipedians to make entries about anything and everything as their firsthand knowledge or field of speciality. This will collect a great wealth of data at first and the evolutionary process (addition and editing) will make a crude material worth a reference.

• The continuously editing and changing status of articles has both its pros and cons. There should be certain point that only necessary editing must be allowed and that should be only for those who are licensed (from the Wikipedia) and well reputed editors. The talk pages should be open for suggestions.

• Some people (with an Wiki ID or anonymously or with changing IDs) have taken control of certain articles/topics and they are acting as Wiki Lords . They are editing articles to project their own points of view in a clandestine way and only professional people can detect such a behavior. Due to this behavior a large number of scholars, intellectuals and researchers are yet not taking Wikipedia seriously. This is against the evolutionary philosphy of Wikipedia. To nip this undemocratic behavior from the bud some thing must be done properly.

For more details please see page Talk:Habib R. Sulemani

Extremely outdated list of Objectivism mailing lists

What does this issue do here? (I have a user name in he.wiki contact me through avi.aharon@gmail.com)

In my opinion, the whole bit about the Objectivism mailing list should be removed as pointless trivia. This is not a request or a policy statement, just the opinion of a knowledgeable editor. I ran a mailing list in college, so what? The extremely outdated list of mailing lists? What's the point of that? In my opinion, both these things could be safely omitted.--Jimbo Wales 18:34, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Video link

I added a link to a video I shot of Jimmy discussing Wikipedia (http://www.prodigem.com/torrents/details.php?id=296) which I released under a creative commons license. If this is an innapropriate place for it, please feel free to move it. Let me know (gary@lerhaupt.com).

Bomis

Hello, I have added the factual information that Bomis' (main/only?) revenue is from the sale of pornography. This has been twice removed, without an explanation. Thanks, Fernsworth

It is absolutely untrue. Bomis receives the overwhelming percentage of its revenue from advertising sales in deal with Google and Infospace. The mature audience (NOT pornography) portion of the business is significantly less than 10% of total revenues. I am no longer the CEO of bomis, and have done virtually no work on Bomis for the past two years.

--Jimbo Wales 18:38, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I am not going to risk getting into trouble editing this article but the bit on Bomis read to me like an advertisement for them. I cannot say the same thing for the Bomis article, just this one. --SqueakBox 02:53, Feb 27, 2005 (UTC)

I don't know the definition of pornography in your jurisdiction, but in mine, mere nudity does not legally qualify. David.Monniaux 20:46, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I was *this close* to editing myself

Yikes, I have generally avoided reading articles about me and related matters, but today I did, and I found a number of major factual problems.

I was *this close* to editing this article myself, but decided that my longstanding ban on editing myself is a good thing overall. So I offer my editorial suggestions here in the spirit of sharing information.

1. My academic career included publication of an article in a peer-reviewed academic journal. You can look it up at the link I provided above, some months ago. This is significantly more important and relevant than that I was the moderator of a mailing list, which strikes me as rather absurd trivia.

The Pricing of Index Options When the Underlying Assets All Follow a Lognormal Diffusion ADVANCES IN FUTURES AND OPTIONS RESEARCH, Volume 7, 1994 Robert Brooks , Jon Corson and J. Donal Wales University of Alabama - Department of Economics, Finance and Legal Studies , University of Alabama - Department of Mathematics and Affiliation Unknown - General

2. The article should reflect that I am no longer the CEO or President of Bomis.

3. The question of how to describe the business of Bomis is of course an interesting one. I do not like to see it described as "pornography" because unless you have a very very uptight view of the world, it is not pornography. I'd say that 'adult content' is fine or 'content for mature audiences' or something of that nature. I leave it to the judgment of the editors, but if Bomis is pornography, so is a significant proportion of the output of Hollywood.

I would describe it as softcore porn. But different people have different definitions for stuff like that. Maybe it'd be better to call it 'erotica' - do you find that has a different (weaker) meaning? - Mark 06:37, 26 Mar 2005 (UTC)

4. It is not correct to say that "With Larry Sanger, Wales in 2001 founded..." I founded Wikipedia, Larry just worked for me. The idea for using a wiki orginally came to me from an employee -- Jeremy Rosenfeld. I am adding a note to the Bomis article's talk page about this one as well.--Jimbo Wales 18:52, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Staying out of it myself, Sanger actively and frequently calls himself co-founder. This is notable. --Alterego 21:14, Mar 14, 2005 (UTC)

Just discovered this bomis thing, clicked on the link to see by myself, recognized instantly 3 famous porn stars. Bomis is indeed porn. The soft kind (softcore) but porn anyways. 'adult content' or 'content for mature audience' is just another 'politically correct' biased way to say porn. A significant proportion of the output of hollywood could easily fall under the porn category, this seems correct as a significant of this output contains indeed 'adult content' or 'content for mature audience' such as sexy babes with big boobs, sex, etc. The question is why trying to deny that, and what is shameful about porn ? porn is the origin for many innovating breakthroughs and not only in the evolution of ways of thinking and perceiving, but in other too such as Internet, DVD video, DV movies, multiangle DVD...

• There's a difference between 'Bomis has porn' and 'Bomis is porn'. For an approximate comparison, we could say "Slashdot is [about] Linux." -Fennec (はさばくのきつね) 06:38, 26 Mar 2005 (UTC)

wow! that's quite a sloppy approximation. Seems there some kind of a mix-up here between has / is / is about. A less approximate would be "Slashdot has Linux information" / "Slashdot is Linux information" or "Slashdot is Linux informative". The point here is that a website about porn doesn't mean that website has porn content. Bomis has porn content and as a matter of fact is porn. Unless I'm mistaken, when a publication contains porn, it is categorized as porn. - Izwalito

• I dislike the use of 'adult' (or 'mature') to describe material that's of primary interest to sniggering or masturbating adolescents (of whatever age). I remember the shock I got when I saw a book of mine (popular philosophy) listed as 'adult reading' on one bookshop's page. Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 08:43, 26 Mar 2005 (UTC)

OGG!

Image:Jimbowales.ogg