Thanks to today's commenter, dogcat, having a penchant for keeping tabs on Wikipedia Jimmy Wales' waistline we all get to enjoy a peek at what kind of man it takes to head up the world's biggest multilingual free-content encyclopedia on the Internet:
The newly toned down sartorial stylings of Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales isn't enough to overcome one woman's savvy caution. Write your own caption for this post and we'll use the best one as its new title. Yesterday's winner is godospoons for "William Hung stars on the new season of 'So They Think You…
"A nondescript man with thinning brown hair and a slight paunch" is how W nondescribes Jimmy Wales, the cofounder of Wikipedia, the site where anybody can write history, and nobodies do. Wales, once known for sporting kimonos and Mao jackets, has reverted to wearing all black, which gives the fashion magazine rather…
You guys are slow! Conservative pundit Rachel Marsden has already penned roving Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales's first biography on Knol, Google's write-it-yourself compendium of articles. "And it will be a closed collaboration," she adds. Unlike Wikipedia, Knol lets an article's initial author control all…
A session at Foo Camp last weekend put on by Christy Canida and Jane McGonigal was meant to teach "things like empathy, how to play a role in a larger group, confidence in social settings, and supporting them in creating meaningful relationships online and in the real world." Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales seems to…
In a new book, The Pirate's Dilemma, author Matt Mason holds up geek heroes like Linus Torvalds and Jimmy Wales as icons of "punk capitalism." Given Wales's abject failure to profit from Wikipedia or his follow-on venture, Wikia, I'd say Mason has that label half-right.
With 600 conferencegoers, attendance is down, but not dramatically. It's not a boycott; it's a borecott. But 600 followers devoted enough to trek to Alexandria are more than enough to puff up Wales's ego. They think they're attending a conference; like the postadolescents ringing Wales at Foo Camp, they're really just…
Call it a strange attraction: Women whose Wikipedia entries aren't to their liking just can't seem to resist taking their case to the site's stubbly cofounder, Jimmy Wales. Even CNBC's Becky Quick struck up a correspondence, she admits in this clip. Unlike Canadian television commentator Rachel Marsden, whose call for…
Watch Jimmy Wales's face as he's introduced in a segment for this morning's episode of Squawk Box on CNBC. Wales has long claimed to be Wikipedia's sole founder — a fact disputed by Larry Sanger, Wikipedia's cofounder. As CNBC's Joe Kernen matter-of-factly describes Wales as the site's cofounder, Wales furrows his…
One of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales's most charming personality traits is his relentless starfucking. It's a tendency that's exacerbated by his role as spiritual leader of the world's most comprehensive collection of inconsequentially inaccurate details about famous peoples' lives. On CNBC's Squawk Box this morning,…
No, we did not head down to sleepy Palo Alto for the Search SIG meeting featuring small-time players like Mahalo, Wikia and Microsoft, but Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis seems to wish we did. But why bother going when we can get juicy quotes about Jimmy Wales, who founded for-profit Wikia after failing to figure out…
We've always wondered how a schlubby guy like Jimmy Wales sees so much action. It can't be the I-founded-Wikipedia-can-I-edit-your-page pickup lines — for every Rachel Marsden he lands with those, one thinks Wales would get 10 drinks in the face. At last, we've gotten a scientific explanation: It's the stubble. A…
One in a while a Web application comes along that's so damn useful, even we'd invest in it. Facebook? Nah. MakeMeBabies, the site that lets you create ruddy-cheeked mashups from any two photos? Its diapers will be filled with nothing but spun gold. Here's what the site came up with from photos of Facebook CEO Mark…
Hookers and eBay, shares and cops. If Craig Newmark and Jim Buckmaster, had an attorney on staff with them, would that have prevented questionable legal moves by the founder and CEO of the world's most reliable housemates and hookups platform?
Is Jimmy Wales the sole founder of Wikipedia? Not really. Did he run a porn site in the 1990s? Pretty much. Does he believe Wikipedia should be restrictive or inclusive in its choice of subjects? Both or neither. Is he a follower of Ayn Rand? Not a particularly good one. These are the muddled truths we learn from a …
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales's travel budget has tightened since the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit which pays Wikipedia's and Wales's bills, cracked down on his expense account. Last year, he told Reuters that he used a website, Extrabed.in, to secure a free crashpad with an Indian blogger on a trip to the…
Believers in the wisdom of crowds will tell you that wikis, those collections of anyone-can-edit Web pages, are resistant to vandalism. Not so Jimmy Wales's Wikia Search, an attempt to build a search engine along wiki lines, which he is once again touting, this time to Forbes. The search results for "Jimmy Wales"…
In inviting Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales to chair a World Economic Forum on the Middle East, organizers no doubt thought they were getting a brilliant thinker. Instead, they got a run-of-the-mill Randian, a Libertarian lite who has no ideas beyond cutting "red tape." Watch Wales, in this clip from the Forum's session…
Google has turned us all into monetizable micromarkets. An ad for everyone, and everyone in an ad. the New York Post is now advertising against the keyword "Rachel Marsden" on Google to attract readers. If you're asking "Marsden who?", then you've gotten the point already. Marsden, the Canadian political commentator…
A perpetual dilettante, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has a habit of flitting in and out of his many projects. It's hard to say whether they suffer more from his neglect or from his attention. Wikinews, a news site operated similarly to Wikipedia and run by the same nonprofit parent, the Wikimedia Foundation, has seen…
