On Trust with Jimmy Wales

About this episode

Questions, suggestions, or feedback? Send us a message! Welcome to the Where Shall We Meet podcast. Our guest this week is Jimmy Wales. He is an internet entrepreneur best known as the co-founder of Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia that launched in 2001, creating a radically collaborative model that allows anyone to contribute to and edit what has become the world’s largest free encyclopedia. Born in Huntsville, Alabama, in 1966, Wales studied finance before working in Chicago as a trader. Beyond Wikipedia itself, Wales also founded the Wikimedia Foundation in 2003, the nonprofit organization that supports Wikipedia and its sister projects, and later co-founded Wikia, now known as Fandom, a commercial wiki platform built around fan communities. Over the years, he has become both an advocate and a symbol of the broader idea that knowledge can be created collaboratively and made freely accessible at global scale. His role has often been less that of a traditional executive and more that of a public steward for a radically open model of information. Wikipedia is not just a website; it is a living experiment in whether strangers can cooperate, disagree, revise one another, a