Doris Wales’ husband, Jimmy, wasn’t sure what she was thinking when she bought a set of World Book Encyclopedia from a traveling salesman in 1968. After all, their first-born son, also named Jimmy, was not yet 3.

“At the time, my husband said ‘I’m glad you got them, but don’t you think he’s a little bit young?’ but I wanted to have those,” said Mrs. Wales, a former educator who is now a pharmacist at Publix on Madison Boulevard.

More than 37 years later, Mrs. Wales’ purchase seems predestined.

Little Jimmy began reading at 4, and looked forward to receiving an envelope each year from World Book. Inside were stickers that encyclopedia owners could place on pages to update information.

“If someone discovered a new planet, or when they developed space shuttles, the original books we bought didn’t have all that in it,” Mrs. Wales said. So she and little Jimmy would update the books, learning as they carefully placed the stickers.

Learning would become a lifelong love.

Little Jimmy is Jimmy Donal Wales, 40, founder of Wikipedia, the on-line encyclopedia that has intrigued the world and brought him dozens of honors and accolades, including being named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in May.

Geek seeks new frontiers

Born in Huntsville in 1966, Wales was taught in his childhood by his mother and grandmother, Erma. The women owned and operated House of Learning Elementary School, where as few as four students might be enrolled in each grade.

At the time, Huntsville had come into prominence as the incubator for missile development at Redstone Arsenal and space research at Marshall Space Flight Center, which opened as a NASA facility in 1960.

Wales was a month shy of his third birthday when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon in 1969, and the excitement of living in the Rocket City stayed with him.

“One of the things I remember was hearing the tests of the rockets when I was a kid,” Wales said by telephone from Florida. “It had a very interesting influence on me. Growing up in Huntsville during the height of the space program, and all exciting things going on with that, kind of gave you an optimist view of the future, of technology and science.”

To help fuel his love of learning and technology, Wales’ parents enrolled him at Randolph School, a private college preparatory school in south Huntsville. When he entered high school in 1979, public high schools did not offer students computer access, but Randolph did.

The combination of an academic and technology enthusiast typically conjures images of Steve Urkel types, and Wales said he was no different in high school.

“I was pretty much of a geek,” he said with a laugh. “Anybody you’d find would say I was a geek.”

Wales graduated from high school at age 16 in 1987. A Randolph classmate, Terry Foote, now works with Wales.

Wales received a bachelor’s degree in finance from Auburn University, then a master’s in finance from the University of Alabama.

“When my mother went back to school to become a pharmacist, we all moved down to Auburn, but I was a Bear Bryant/Alabama fan growing up,” Wales said.

After graduating, Wales headed to Chicago to work as a futures and options trader.

“It was very computer-oriented, and I learned to program,” he said. “I was watching growth of the Web and the Internet, and it seemed like where all the excitement was.”

Something wiki this way comes

In 2000, Wales left his job to develop Nupedia, a first incarnation of an online encyclopedia. The project stalled, but Wales tried again with Wikipedia in 2001, along with Larry Sanger, who soon left the project.

The entry for Wikipedia on the the site defines it as “an international Web-based free-content encyclopedia project. It exists as a wiki, a Web site that allows visitors to edit its content. Wikipedia is written collaboratively by volunteers, allowing most articles to be changed by anyone with access to the Web site.”

The idea was unusual. Didn’t the word “encyclopedia” bring to mind images of gray-haired men sitting at dusty desks meticulously researching elephants’ birthing cycles or China’s main exports?

What would happen if anyone — old, young, educated, uneducated — could create or edit an entry?

The result has drawn praise and criticism. Some in the world of academia denounce the site because the entries are not always attributed to experts or studies, and because some people have “vandalized” entries, like those for high-profile people such as President Bush. Repeated vandalism forced Wales to block some entries from editing, and increasingly, people are choosing to cite references in their articles.

But as Wales has learned, “regular” people are the best fact-checkers.

“It is peer reviewed,” he said. “Everything in Wikipedia is very carefully checked and researched. I don’t know of anything that gets as much scrutiny as a Wikipedia entry.”

And it goes so much further than his old World Books.

From any desk with a computer, anyone can type a random word and likely find an entry. Fruit fly. Fruit snack. Geek. Nerd.

On the site’s homepage, visitors can click “random article” on the left-hand side to learn something new for the day — that the World Roma Festival is held in Prague, or that “economy picking” is a technique for guitar players.

As of this month, Wikipedia has more than 4,600,000 articles in more than 100 languages, including Afrikaans, Bamanankan or Sardu.

“It’s pretty amazing. There are over 1.2 million articles in English, which is less than one-third of the total,” Wales said. “More than two-thirds of the entries are in languages other than English.”

All entries are managed by volunteers across the globe, with the exception of four employees — two programmers, an executive director and a grant coordinator.

Wales, chairman of the non-profit Wikipedia Foundation, is not a paid employee. He has now branched out to other ventures, such as Wikimedia, which includes Wiktionary, Wikiquotes and more, and is supported by advertising.

Spotted on the red carpet



It took Wales five years to go from geek to semi-celebrity. His travel schedule, which is posted on his Wikipedia page, takes him to exotic locales, where he is sometimes joined by his wife and 5-year-old daughter.

“It’s pretty wild,” he said. “It’s pretty fun, though. It’s pretty cool going to events all over the world. I get speaking requests from universities, research groups, tech conferences…”

Wales takes in stride any criticism of his creation as being unreferenced and not reliable, focusing on the ability of so many people in so many places to access and share information.

“To me, this is a really exciting time for the world in that we have the ability and tools to communicate globally,” he said.

Mrs. Wales said her son has long held Wikipedia, like any encyclopedia, should not be used as the only source for research papers.

“He will be the first one to tell you, ‘Do not cite an encyclopedia on a paper,’” she said. “It’s a good starting point. He’s always felt that way; you look something up and you have somewhere to go with it.”

Mrs. Wales, like millions of others, uses Wikipedia regularly. She might be watching a show on a serial killer, write down the name and later, to satisfy her need for knowledge, look up the “rest of the story.”

“I think what Jimmy was interested in (as a child) helped him to make this dream come true — for a lot of people to be able to look on there and see things about American Idol, or anything you want,” she said. “We’re very proud of him, of course.”

For Mrs. Wales, one perk of her son’s fame stands out.

“Rachael Ray called me,” she said. Ray, host of a popular cooking show on the Food Network, was attending the Lincoln Center event honoring Time’s 100 Most Influential People, where he walked a red carpet to enter.

“Jimmy met her and said ‘I don’t know if my mom is more proud of me getting the Time 100 honor or meeting you,” Mrs. Wales recalls. Ray offered to call Mrs. Wales on her son’s cell phone.

“He said, ‘Mom, I have someone who wants to talk to you — Rachael Ray.’ So she talked to me, told me I must be so proud of my son. That was my highlight,” said Mrs. Wales.

Though Wales and his three siblings, Dori, DeeAnna and Johnny, have moved away from Huntsville, he said he comes to visit his parents “from time to time.”

But he won’t find an envelope of World Book stickers in the mail, or the annual “yearbook.”

“ I actually kept the yearbook (subscription) through 2001,” said Mrs. Wales. “Finally, I let it off. The kids were all grown and gone.”

Besides, she can always find out whatever a mother needs to know on Wikipedia, including her son’s whereabouts on any given day.