Jimmy Wales is an American Internet entrepreneur best known as the co-founder of 📝Wikipedia and the founder of the 📝Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia and its sister free-knowledge projects.
Wales co-founded Wikipedia with Larry Sanger in January 2001, originally as a freer-form companion project to the expert-edited encyclopedia Nupedia, and shortly thereafter restructured the volunteer-driven encyclopedia into the foundation model that has governed it since 2003. Earlier in his career he worked as a futures and options trader in Chicago and ran the search portal Bomis, which provided the initial funding and infrastructure for Nupedia and Wikipedia. He has since founded Fandom (originally Wikia), the for-profit wiki-hosting company spun out of Wikimedia's commercial work, and WT.Social, a low-engagement social network launched in 2019 as an explicit alternative to advertising-driven platforms; he remains the public face of Wikipedia's annual fundraising appeals.