Jimmy Wales is an American Internet entrepreneur and the founder of Wikipedia, a free, open-content encyclopedia that has proved especially vital to those living under dictatorships, where knowledge is otherwise state-controlled. Wales sits on the Board of Trustees for the Wikimedia Foundation and co-founded Wikia, a private, free web-hosting service. Most recently, he founded the United Kingdom-based Jimmy Wales Foundation, which is dedicated to fighting against human rights violations, especially in the field of freedom of expression online. He was named one of TIME’s “100 Influential Scientists and Thinkers” in 2006, a World Economic Forum “Young Global Leader” in 2007, and was awarded UNESCO’s Niels Bohr Medal in 2013.
