Interview with Jimmy Wales
    - The Knowledge Benefactor

The Interview

Online I am known as “Jimbo”. Early in my time on the Internet, I was on a mailing list which had a Jimmy, Jim, and James. To differentiate myself, I started signing “Jimbo”. It stuck.

I carry my Sidekick LX phone with me everywhere. Everywhere. And my computer, of course.

Recently, it has been very difficult and painful for me to discover that I am somehow a public figure and that people are bizarrely interested in my personal life.

I travel constantly, so I don’t have a particular “work environment”. Reporters often want to take a photo of my at my desk in my office, but I have neither a desk nor an office. I wander the earth, doing email from wherever I happen to be.

I don’t often think in terms of failure and success. I simply try to do my work as best I can. Even some notable of my “failures” such as Nupedia have held within them the seeds of success.

My daughter and her mother inspire and motivate me a great deal. My daughter is being homeschooled by her mother, who is doing an astounding job of it.

It is important to have fun every single day.

My strength is primarily that I am a very friendly person. It takes quite a bit of provocation before I give up on someone who could be a friend. I trust people… even though that does not always pay off, I still think it is worthwhile.

My major weakness is in organization. I have a hard time being organized.

My primary goal for the near-term future is to have fun working on my search engine project, at http://search.wikia.com/ - I think about it, work on it, and write about it constantly.

Is it possible to have an open-source architecture and code for an industry-standard quality search engine? Is it possible to find a way to push the editorial decisionmaking of a search engine outside the company and into the general public, in the way that wikis work for text?

I hope to find some good answers to these questions… and have fun puzzling over it.