A nondescript man with thinning brown hair and a slight paunch is minding his own business at an airport. He is oblivious to a nearby stranger who is excitedly alerting the Web site Twitter to the man’s presence. “I see Jimmy Wales at the airport,” the spy texts.
Cut to a subway in Taiwan, where a fan spots the nondescript man and gets him to pose for a photo. The fan posts it online with a tagline: “I meet Jimmy Wales in Taipei!!!!”
At the Apple store in New York’s SoHo, the man is merely trying to get his laptop serviced. “Are you the Jimmy Wales?” gasps a girl behind the counter.
Jimmy Wales isn’t your usual swoonworthy celebrity sighting. He’s hardly George Clooney or Tom Cruise. The founder of Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia and the eighth-most-visited Web site in the world, ranking just behind MySpace, Wales, 42, is famous for revolutionizing the way information is gathered and disseminated on the Internet. In the seven years since he launched the site—which, unlike a traditional encyclopedia, is written and edited by its own readers rather than a paid staff—he’s become an Internet celebrity, conference hopping to events such as the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland; vacationing with Richard Branson and Jimmy Carter on Necker Island; and hobnobbing with Tony Blair, Al Gore and Bono. “Jimmy has a cultlike following, and I count myself a member,” says the U2 frontman via e-mail. “But Wikipedia is actually an anticult. It is the democratization of information in a world where knowledge is power.” All the while, gossip and tech Web sites like Valleywag have devoted almost as much attention to dissecting the twice-married Wales’s love life as US Weekly has to Brangelina.
Wales with Steven Wynn, Martha Stewart and Ralph Nader.
“It’s kind of weird,” says Wales over lunch at Country in Manhattan. “It’s intense fame.”
Which is heady stuff for a guy who grew up the son of a grocery store manager in Huntsville, Alabama—a self-described “geek” who used to fill his free time after his job as a futures trader by writing computer code for fun and who had never traveled farther than Canada and Mexico until he started Wikipedia. But humble beginnings didn’t prevent Wales from dreaming big. “He’s always had high ambitions,” remembers his first wife, Pam, whom he married at age 20 back in Alabama. “He was so sure of himself.... [I remember] flipping through the Robb Report at the grocery store where we worked, and there was this castle in England, and he said, ‘Yeah, we’re going to have that one day. I’m going to be a millionaire before I’m 40.’ And it’s like he’s had a game plan ever since.”
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