The Unbearable Lightness of Jimbo
Is it time for another lengthy profile of Jimmy Wales already? The New York Times Magazine says yes, and so this Sunday's edition will carry a story now already out on the web under the snarky headline "Jimmy Wales Is Not an Internet Billionaire”.
It's mostly a catch-up with Wales—a.k.a. Jimbo—now that he's moved to London, married (for the third time it is noted) to a former Tony Blair aide, and living the jetset life, even if he is not mega-rich. Some of it seems a bit unfair:
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.
I don't know, I can't say that I've thought that much about Jimmy Wales' net worth. Wikipedia is unique among the top 10 global sites in that it's a foundation-backed non-profit, and if you're telling me the founder of such a website does not have Rockefeller money, I am not going to puzzle about why.
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.
Are the two mutually exclusive? Is there anything less noble about stumbling into a calling that one never sought, but following it where it leads? (Which itself is a much better story, by the way.) Nor is any evidence presented that Wales' efforts on behalf of Internet freedom is insincere. His libertarian leanings are well-known and pre-dated the establishment of Wikipedia, so why would his interest in this cause be a surprise?
Anyway, the story touches on a number of minor Wikipedia controversies, but gets the closest to saying something interesting about Wales' actual role on the site when it addresses how Wales' (not that new) proximity to the rich and famous has occasionally impacted his role at Wikipedia.
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. ... 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.”
This scratches at the surface of one of Wikipedia's thorniest philosophical questions—the Ouroboros nature of verifiability on Wikipedia—but going any further would probably be too much for the Times' audience.
Meanwhile, the more localized question of Jimbo's access to power—or maybe that's power's access to Jimbo—came up again this past week, when he posed a question on his own user page about whether evidence existed that former NSA contractor turned leaker turned fugitive Edward Snowden had edited Wikipedia under one of his known screen names. Although this was the extent of his asking, some editors (including Fram again) took the issue up as a possible violation of the site's well-intentioned but oft-excepted policy against "outing" the identities of Wikipedia's pseudonymous editors. None of this went anywhere, but editors could be forgiven for wondering: who was really asking?