Jimmy Wales: Founder of Wikipedia, the World’s Largest Repository of Knowledge

Whenever you click on a Wikipedia page to find some information, you have Jimmy Donal Wales to thank! He is the founder of Wikipedia, a free Internet-based knowledge bank which operates under an open-source management style. It is the fifth most popular website in the world behind Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook, and ahead of Amazon, Apple and eBay.

Jimmy Wales was born on 8 August 1966 in Alabama, U.S.A. His father was a grocery store manager, and his mother and grandmother ran a small private school in the tradition of the one-room schoolhouse, where Jimmy and his three siblings received their early education. As a child, Jimmy enjoyed reading. When he was three, his mother bought him a World Book Encyclopedia. When he grew up, he earned a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree in finance from Auburn University and the University of Alabama respectively. He enrolled himself for a Ph.D. programme, but never completed the doctoral dissertation.

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