Jim Naughten for The New York Times
By
AMY CHOZICK
According to Wikipedia, the Tampa International Airport
is a public airport six miles west of downtown Tampa, in Hillsborough
County, Florida. It’s also where Jimmy Wales flies in and out of a
couple times a month, in coach, to visit his 12-year-old daughter, Kira,
who is named after the protagonist in Ayn Rand’s anti-communist novel,
“We the Living.” Kira lives with Wales’s ex-wife in a ranch-style home
not far from the strip mall where Wales, along with a handful of
colleagues he generally no longer speaks to, ran Wikipedia a decade ago.
The original Florida address for one of the Internet’s most
life-changing innovations is now a UPS store with a faded red awning.
Next door is a Kahwa Café.
That was Wales’s old life. In his new one, he lives in London with Kate
Garvey, his third wife, whom he often describes as “the most connected
woman in London.” Garvey doesn’t have a Wikipedia page, but if she did,
it would probably note that she was Tony Blair’s diary secretary at 10
Downing Street and then a director at Freud Communications, the public
relations firm run by Matthew Freud, a great-grandson of Sigmund Freud,
who is also Rupert Murdoch’s son-in-law. And that Blair, in his 2010
memoir, wrote that Garvey ran his schedule “with a grip of iron and was
quite prepared to squeeze the balls very hard indeed of anyone who
interfered.”
Garvey and Wales were married last October before about 200 guests,
including the Blairs, the political operative Alistair Campbell, David
Cameron’s former aide Steve Hilton and Mick Hucknall, the lead singer of
Simply Red. Garvey’s maid of honor gave a toast teasing her friend for
marrying the one world-famous Internet entrepreneur who didn’t become a
billionaire. But the wedding was still
covered in The Daily Mail
and The Sunday Times, much to Wales’s excitement. “Front page, above
the fold,” he told me of the latter. Wales pulled up The Mail’s Web site
on his MacBook to show me some photographs from the reception. “That
was surreal,” he said.
Wales has a complicated time balancing his new life with his old one.
That was evident one morning this winter as he bounded into the lobby of
the West End building where he rented office space and hurriedly signed
himself in at the front desk. Wales, his brown Tumi bag slung over his
shoulder, was 45 minutes late, disheveled and a little frantic. He had
left the keys to his and Garvey’s Marylebone apartment at his place
outside Tampa; the nanny, here in London, was stranded with the couple’s
2-year-old daughter. “I forgot to drop off the key,” he said. Just when
Wales thought he might have to run home, his assistant, who is based in
Florida, texted that a building manager had let the nanny in. Global
child-care crisis averted.
Wales wore a too-tight black turtleneck under a black overcoat with a
well-shorn beard, a look that could either read Steve Jobs superhero or
Tekserve flasher. Almost any time you see Wales, 46, he looks like a
well-groomed version of a person who has been slumped over a computer
drinking Yoo-hoo for hours. After he composed himself, he explained that
his office was too embarrassingly unkempt for public consumption.
(“It’s a room with a couch, it’s a huge mess.”) So he joined me on a
cracked sofa in a common lounge area downstairs. With its ratty Oriental
carpets and mismatched folding chairs, the space exuded a bohemian chic
look that Wales, a savvy purveyor of his own image, seemed to delight
in showing off. The building, a condemned former BBC space, had been
slated for demolition. Wales would soon be moving. “I’m not the Google
guys,” he said.
London is often described as Britain’s New York, L.A. and Washington all
in one — the center for finance, entertainment and politics. But there
are conspicuously few traces of Silicon Valley. Wales gladly fills the
void. Before he showed me his wedding photos, he talked about his new
friend,
the British model Lily Cole,
who rented office space across the hall. Then he took a call from the
Boston Consulting Group, the business-advisory firm, to discuss a speech
he would be giving at the World Economic Forum. Wales uses a cheap
smartphone made by the Chinese company Huawei that a friend bought him
for $85 in Nairobi. The phone, which he often shows to reporters, is the
perfect prop to segue to his current obsession of expanding Wikipedia
onto mobile devices in the developing world. It is not, however, the
perfect phone for participating in an international conference call with
the Boston Consulting Group. Several calls were dropped. Wales
suggested conducting the meeting over instant messenger, an idea that
was rejected.
Once the call finally got under way, though, Wales seemed distracted. On
his MacBook, he was following his Wikipedia “talk” page, where the
site’s volunteers log their discussions and disagreements over entries.
The page had lit up with a raging debate about the banning of some
editors on the Turkish version of Wikipedia. Wales watched as the online
version of a cafeteria food fight ensued.
Wikipedia is built as a wiki — a
Web site that allows users to collectively create, add and edit content
— and more than a million people have edited at least one entry. But
the veracity and updating of its more than 24 million encyclopedia
entries relies largely on an army of more than 80,000 dedicated
volunteers known as “
the community.”
This global collection of grass-roots volunteers makes for a
collectively brilliant creation, but it can also lead to online hysteria
and “edit wars” over minutia like how to categorize hummus. “They love
it in Israel, so shouldn’t it be in Category: Israeli cuisine? ” one
editor wrote on a Wikipedia page called “Lamest Edit Wars.” “Or is it a
purely Arab food that Zionists have illegally occupied?”
Though Wales no longer runs the day-to-day operations of Wikipedia —
traveling the world giving talks on free speech and Internet freedom —
he still spends an inordinate amount of time interacting with, and
thinking about, the community. Wales, or “Jimbo” as he is called, is the
person the community turns to when disputes are not settled in their
online arbitration committees. Wales may not speak Turkish or know much
about Turkey, but he is the B.D.F.L., or the Benevolent Dictator for
Life.
As B.D.F.L., Wales’s responsibilities are seemingly limitless. Before
the Turkish debate, Wales had weighed in on arguments over whether the
Wikipedia entry for the military historian Lynette Nusbacher should
mention her gender change (he said it should, but the entry was later
removed) and whether
the entry on homeopathy
should describe the practice as “quackery” (Wales agreed that it could,
as long as the word “quackery” was attributed to the American Medical
Association). “Argumentum ad Jimbonem” means dutifully following what
Wales says, but there are even arguments about that. One Wikipedia
editor said, for instance, that Wales was no longer comfortable with the
B.D.F.L. description. (There is, among some, a debate over what to call
him.) Some users have also disputed the Latinized version of “Jimbo.”
(Should it be “Jimboni” or “Jimbini”?) Either way, the Google guys
probably wouldn’t put up with this.
Wales doesn’t have much choice. He realized early on that the community
would revolt if he were to monetize Wikipedia by selling ads. He may now
travel the world giving speeches and even include Bono as a friend, but
Wales’s celebrity relies largely on being the guy who made the sum of
the world’s information free without making a penny himself. As such,
his reputation remains inextricably linked to the noisy, online
volunteers who got him there. It’s a tricky balancing act, and it all
seemed to work fine until Wales moved to London and began to, or at
least tried to, enjoy some of the trappings of his success.
Wikipedia, which is now available in 285 languages,
gets more than 20 billion page views and roughly 516 million unique
visitors a month. It is the fifth-most-visited Web site in the world
behind Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook; and ahead of Amazon, Apple
and eBay. Were Wikipedia to accept banner and video ads, it could, by
most estimates, be worth as much as $5 billion. But that kind of
commercial sellout would probably cause the members of the community,
who are not paid for their contributions, to revolt. “The paradox,” says
Michael J. Wolf, managing director at Activate, a technology-consulting
firm in New York and a member of the Yahoo! board, “is that what makes
Wikipedia so valuable for users is what gets in its way of becoming a
valuable, for-profit enterprise.”
Wales suffers from the same paradox. Being the most famous traveling
spokesman for Internet freedom brings in a decent living, but it’s not
Silicon Valley money. It’s barely London money. Wales’s total net worth,
by most estimates, is just above $1 million, including stock from his
for-profit company Wikia, a wiki-hosting service. His income is a topic
of constant fascination. Type “
Jimmy Wales”
into Google and “net worth” is the first pre-emptive search to pop up.
“Everyone makes fun of Jimmy for leaving the money on the table,” says
Sue Gardner, the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, the
nonprofit that runs Wikipedia.
Wales is well rehearsed in brushing off questions about his income. In
2005, Florida Trend magazine reported that he made enough money in his
brief stint as an options-and-futures trader in Chicago, before starting
Wikipedia, that he would never have to work again. But that was before
he had to pay child support and rent for homes in Florida and London.
When I brought up the topic recently, Wales seemed irritated. “It rarely
crosses my mind,” he said. “Reporters ask me all the time and expect me
to say: ‘I’m heartbroken. Where’s my billion dollars?’ ” On two
occasions, he compared himself to an Ohio car salesman. “There are car
dealers in Ohio who have far more money than I’ll ever have, and their
jobs are much, much less interesting than mine,” he said during one
conversation. When his net worth came up again, he brought up Ayn Rand.
“Can you imagine Howard Roark saying, ‘I just want to make as much money
as possible?’ ” Wales asked rhetorically.
Wales likes to invoke the higher purpose of Wikipedia. He applies his
libertarian worldview to the Internet and has taken on institutions like
the United States government and Apple for threatening to curb the free
exchange of information on the Web. He also packs his schedule with
sponsored events that have supported his new life. These days,
corporations, universities and foundations typically pay Wales more than
$70,000 to deliver a standard but eloquent speech about Internet
rights. Last fall, I watched Wales speak on a panel titled “Champions of
Action” at the Clinton Global Initiative, the annual gathering that
matches wealthy donors with worthy causes, run by the former president.
Onstage in a darkened ballroom of a Sheraton Hotel in New York, he sat
alongside Madeleine K. Albright, the former secretary of state; Paul
Farmer, the Harvard professor and co-founder of Partners in Health; and
Tawakkol Karman, a Yemeni human rights activist and a 2011 Nobel Peace
Prize recipient. Wales was there, in part, to promote the site.
(Wikipedia uses its donations to keep its servers running and for about
160 paid employees.) But in between discussing health access in Haiti
and the uprisings in the Middle East,
the misspelling of Karman’s first name on Wikipedia
came up. “They write it, all the world, in the wrong way,” she told the
crowd. “Maybe I have to show a passport or something.” Wales assured
her that he had fixed the entry.
Powerful people like to be around Wales. A common criticism is that
Wales likes to be around them, too — and perhaps a little too much.
During a visit to Los Angeles in February,
Wales tweeted:
“Lunch with Felicia. Dinner with Charlize. L.A. is . . . wow,”
referring to the actresses Felicia Day and Charlize Theron. He also
recently tweeted: “Just got measured for my clothes for Sean Parker’s
wedding. This oughta be innerstin’. :-)” But, as I learned at the
Clinton Global Initiative, some famous people treat Wales a little bit
like their own personal editor. After the Karman incident, the hip-hop
artist Will.i.am stopped Wales to complain about an error on his
Wikipedia page. “Everyone thinks he’s William James Adams Jr., but it’s
not James and it’s not junior,” Wales told me as he opened his MacBook
and corrected the entry.
That kind of proximity to famous people doesn’t sit well with some
members of the Wikipedia community who assert that Wales’s new life is,
in some ways, contradictory to the egalitarian online world he created.
Several contributors protested that Wales had used a firsthand,
unsourced experience to change Will.i.am’s entry. A user called Fram
said Wales had violated Wikipedia protocol, which requires factual
information be attributed to published materials. “People are not
necessarily trustworthy when it comes to personal information,” Fram
wrote after changing Will.i.am’s full name back, referencing two
published sources. The same rule applied when Wales tried to get his own
birthday changed, from Aug. 8, 1966 (as his passport and driver’s
license used to read) to his actual birthday, Aug. 7. “This is
unverifiable information, I’m sorry to say,” he wrote on his entry’s
talk page. “Maybe I’ll have to upload a signed note from my mom as
documentary evidence.”
One of the amazing things about Wikipedia is how it has
emboldened anonymous volunteers with the same power as established
experts. In many ways, Wales has been similarly emboldened. He grew up
in Huntsville, Ala., the son of a teacher and a retail manager, before
he left to study finance at Auburn University. (“It’s pretty weird,”
Wales said in 2005. “I used to be just a guy. Now I’m Jimmy Wales.”) At
20, he married Pamela Green, whom he met when he worked at an Alabama
grocery store. Later, he worked briefly as a trader in Chicago where he
met his second wife, Christine Rohan, a steel trader.
In 1996, when Wales still wore a shaggy beard, listened to Insane Clown
Posse and quoted “This is Spinal Tap” in meetings, he co-founded
Bomis,
a search engine that came with a “Bomis Babe Report,” a blog with
photos of scantily clad celebrities and porn stars. He and Rohan moved
to San Diego to get in on the Internet boom. (In 2005, Wales objected on
his Wikipedia page to an entry that said Bomis peddled porn. “The
mature audience [NOT pornography] portion of the business is
significantly less than 10 percent of total revenues,” he told the
community.) Porn or not, Bomis’s profits financed Wales’s side project,
Nupedia, an online encyclopedia with peer-reviewed entries written by
experts and academics that served as the predecessor to Wikipedia.
Wales was obsessed with the idea of an online encyclopedia that anyone
could edit. He had grown up reading his parents’ collection of World
Book encyclopedias with stickers that marked updated entries, and in
graduate school he developed an interest in the burgeoning open-source
software movement that allowed programmers to collaborate. As Nupedia
floundered and his business partners tried to expand Bomis, Wales saw a
potentially larger cultural experiment in a free open-sourced
encyclopedia and devoted almost all of his attention to it. In January
2001, he registered the domain names
www.wikipedia.org and
www.wikipedia.com. The project went live on Jan. 15, 2001, henceforth known as Wikipedia Day.
Like many Internet entrepreneurs of the early aughts, Wales aimed to
create something cool first and worry about a business model later. And
at first, Wikipedia was a hand-to-mouth operation. Wales, who relocated
with Rohan to St. Petersburg, Fla., for cheap real estate, would hand
deliver a check from Bomis to keep Wikipedia’s Tampa servers running. In
those early days, Wales still thought he could turn his free
encyclopedia into a billion-dollar idea. “I think Jimmy thought he could
get very rich off this,” his friend and partner at Bomis, Terry Foote,
told me. Foote, who went to high school with Wales, was the best man in
his second wedding. He didn’t attend the third. “Fame tends to change
people,” Foote said of their falling out. Wales mostly declined to
discuss the status of his friendships from Wikipedia’s early days.
“Moving to London has had a big impact on my social circle,” he said.
“My wife, you know, knows everyone.”
The Internet bubble had burst before Wales could implement a
revenue-generating business model for Wikipedia. After the crash, he was
stuck with an oddity — a popular but penniless online encyclopedia run
by strong-willed volunteers likely to reject the idea of advertising.
But as Wikipedia grew, Wales undertook a shrewd branding transformation.
In June 2003, he set up a nonprofit foundation to run the operation. In
a 2004 interview with the Web site Slashdot, he publicized the mission
statement that would definitively distance his Wikipedia future from his
seedier Bomis Babe Report roots. “Imagine a world in which every single
person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human
knowledge. That’s what we’re doing,” he said. Andrew Keen, a technology
writer who has clashed with Wales, told me that Wales “was a soft-porn
guy who stumbled on to this thing.” But Wales’s lofty goal got him a TED
Talk in 2005. Then Bono personally invited him to the World Economic
Forum in Davos.
During that trip, people who were close to Wales say he morphed from a
schlubby computer guy to an activist with dramatically improved access
to information and power. His mantra of an Internet unconstrained by
corporate or government interests resonated; Time magazine named him one
of its
100 Most Influential People of 2006.
The following year at Davos, Wales and Garvey were both named “Young
Global Leaders.” (Wales, who separated from Rohan in 2008, says he first
recalls meeting Garvey in Monaco in 2009. Their romantic relationship
began in 2010.) “Jimmy has had an ongoing valedictory lap for having
catalyzed one of the greatest creations in the history of human
knowledge,” Jonathan L. Zittrain, a Harvard law professor and co-founder
of the school’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, said. “It’s
hard to begrudge him for that. I think he’s been feeling his way around.
It’s not like there’s a lot of precedent for this.”
But some have wondered if Wales, who couldn’t figure out a way to become
rich off his innovation, was cynically making a play to cash in on
being a great humanitarian. “Did Jimmy have the vision or did he settle
into his spontaneous role?” asked Scott Glosserman, a filmmaker who
spent a year with Wales filming “
Truth in Numbers?”
a 2010 documentary about Wikipedia. Wales had granted Glosserman and
the other filmmakers unfettered access for the documentary, which turned
out to be critical of Wikipedia, pointing out inaccuracies inherent in
trusting a teenager as much as a tenured professor. Wales disliked the
film and refused to help promote it. “It was like throwing the magic
beans away and the next day seeing a beanstalk,” Glosserman said of
Wikipedia’s evolution.
High-minded or not, empowering the masses has made Wales beholden to
them. That was an easy enough dynamic when he lived in St. Petersburg,
Fla., and drove a 4-year-old dented Hyundai, but being benevolent
dictator becomes a bit more complicated when you’re going to parties
with the Blairs. Despite the community’s occasional discomfort with his
friends in high places, it’s clear that Wales has tried to use those
connections to promote issues the community tends to care most about.
Last January, the volunteers voted to make Wikipedia go dark to protest
two pieces of antipiracy legislation in Washington, a move that
contributed to the bills being blocked. Not long after the Stop Online
Piracy Act (S.O.P.A.) blackout, Wales worked with The Guardian newspaper
to prevent the extradition to the United States of Richard O’Dwyer, the
25-year-old whose search engine,
TVShack.net,
was suspected of promoting piracy. He also opposed the British
government’s proposed Communications Data Bill (also known as the
“snoopers’ charter”). Wales called the legislation that would have
required the tracking of British citizens’ Internet, text and e-mails
“technologically incompetent” and threatened to encrypt Wikipedia pages
so they could not easily be monitored. Lawmakers have since shelved the
bill.
Wales, however, ensures he is not taken for a radical. He treads
carefully when weighing in on more extreme members of the free-culture
movement, like Julian Assange — who he has criticized for using the
“wiki” name — and online hacking collectives like Anonymous. Wales and I
met for lunch the day after the 26-year-old computer programmer and
Internet activist Aaron Swartz killed himself. The community had erupted
with calls for Wales to weigh in, but he was hesitant. “People have
been pushing me to comment, but I didn’t know him,” Wales told me. He
has also stayed mostly mum on Edward Snowden, the contractor for the
National Security Agency who leaked confidential information about
widespread snooping by the United States government.
“Wikipedia expresses the very essence of the Internet,” Craig Newmark,
the founder of Craigslist, told me. “Used to be the victors wrote
history. Now everyone gets a chance.” Not even Wales is spared. After
the site caught on, Wales tried to edit his own entry to call himself
the sole founder. The trouble was that in 2000 he hired Larry Sanger, an
academic and proselyte of an open-source Internet, to help him start
his online encyclopedia. The idea of letting anyone (and not just
experts) oversee the encyclopedia entries was Wales’s idea, but Sanger
has said he talked a skeptical Wales into using wiki technology and came
up with the name Wikipedia. Wales’s attempt to change his entry was a
violation of Wikipedia protocol that sent the community into a tizzy.
His page
currently calls him the co-founder. An entire “controversy” section
explains the Sanger dispute and references a 2001 New York Times article
and a 2002 Wikipedia news release that both name Wales and Sanger as
co-founders. “That’s funny, isn’t it?” Wales says in a way that makes
clear he doesn’t find it funny at all. “It’s the dumbest controversy in
the history of the world.” Sanger declined to comment for this article,
but on the talk page of Wales’s entry, he wrote that “it was only when
Wikipedia emerged into the broader public eye and Jimmy started jetting
around the world” that he tried to rewrite history.
After separating from Christine, Wales briefly lived in
New York and would travel to London frequently to visit Garvey at her
Covent Garden apartment. In 2011, Wales, who didn’t travel outside the
United States until he was 37, moved to London, and he and Garvey, who
declined to comment for this article, found a rental in Marylebone.
Wales seems to have adapted to this new life with ease. He uses
Britishisms that make him sound a little like the famous faux-Brits
Gwyneth Paltrow or Madonna. He told me he had “a good ol’ time” at the
Olympics, where he attended beach volleyball and an equestrian event as
Boris Johnson’s guest. Living in Marylebone is nice, he says, because
“we have loads of friends and people pop by.” Unlike in the United
States, where politicians are remote Wikipedia subjects, in Britain he
“literally” (pronounced LIT-ruh-lee) knows them. “My wife,” he said
again, “is the most connected woman in London.”
The community, however, would not be left behind. Since expanding his
circle in London, Wales has recused himself from weighing in on certain
Wikipedia entries, including Tony Blair’s page and several members of
the House of Lords whom he now knows personally. Even so, the community
questioned whether Wales had any part in an allegedly whitewashed entry
on the Kazakh government, which Blair has advised. (Wales called the
accusation “totally stupid.”) Even before he married Garvey, some
members argued that he had grown increasingly out of touch. “Jimbo does
not own Wikipedia,” wrote one volunteer. “He may have co-founded it, but
so what? It has always belonged to the community.” Wales concedes that
this is more or less true. “In theory, I have the authority to do
anything and to make policy by fiat,” he said. “In practice, if I tried
to do that, people would go crazy and revolt.”
That collective ownership model won’t make anyone rich, but Wales argues
that in the long run it makes Wikipedia far more enduring and valuable
to society than Facebook or Twitter. It openly bothers Wales that
Wikipedia doesn’t get more credit for events like the uprisings that led
to the Arab Spring. “People like to talk about the Facebook and Twitter
revolutions, but I think that’s the most superficial endpoint of the
whole process,” he told me. “It’s incredibly important that people are
able to self-organize and go demonstrate, but what led them to believe
that was even possible?” He pointed to activists reading about the
Orange Revolution in Ukraine, revolts in Europe and the early days of
democracy in the United States. “It’s one thing to go out on the street
and demand change,” he said. “It’s another to say, ‘O.K., we won, the
bad guy’s gone, now what?’ ”
Wikipedia, he says, can inform those decisions. And that’s why Wales’s
current project is to expand Wikipedia to the developing world. Last
year, as part of a “Wikipedia Zero” campaign, the foundation established
partnerships with telecommunications companies to provide mobile phones
preloaded with Wikipedia in developing countries like Thailand,
Malaysia, Serbia and, potentially, South Africa. In speeches, Wales
largely focuses on this mission to spread the online encyclopedia to
every person in the developing world at no data charge.
One night in New York, Wales took a break from his evangelism to have dinner with friends. He had just finished taping
an appearance on “The Colbert Report”
and wore a white dress shirt with an asymmetrical collar and purple
trim piping by the British designer Ozwald Boateng. Six years ago, a
less media-savvy Wales felt like he struggled on “Colbert.” This time he
shut himself in the greenroom with a publicist. “Since you were last
on, Wikipedia has been ubiquitous,” Colbert said. “You must be rolling
in the cash, right?” Wales laughed it off, and reminded the audience
that Wikipedia still needed their donations. At dinner afterward, he
seemed adrenaline-fueled, coyly soaking up compliments on his successful
performance. The next day he would be off to London, then Florida, then
Germany, then California to deliver a keynote speech at a cybersecurity
firm. The community, of course, would be with him all the way.
A few months later, as I was reading something he had written on the question-and-answer Web site
Quora,
I thought about Wales sipping wine out of milk glasses and eating
oysters after “Colbert.” In response to a question about how to get his
help with a start-up idea, Wales advised against using the type of
buzzwords that impressed Bono before that first trip to Davos. “‘A
world-changing next-generation platform for Gen Z blah blah blah’ —
yuck,” he wrote. He advised aspiring Internet entrepreneurs to “treat me
like a business person,” including, he noted, offering compensation
with stock options — “yay.” Internet ubiquity is great and all, but it
would be nice to get paid for it, too.
Source: NY Times
Kangla palace
Roberto Schmidt/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
