Welcome!

Hello! My name is Jimmy Wales and this is my user page. I go by "Jimmy" in real life, but often by "Jimbo" online. People sometimes assume that "Jimmy" is just a nickname for "James", but it's actually my full first name.

I was born on August 7, 1966, in Huntsville, Alabama. I co-founded Wikipedia on January 15, 2001. Since 2006, I have been the Chair Emeritus of the Wikimedia Foundation, which Larry Sanger and I set up on June 20, 2003. In 2004, Angela Beesley and I established Wikia (now Fandom), a completely separate organization unrelated to Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation. Another independent project that I worked on was WikiTribune, a collaborative news website. My most recent project was the launch of WT Social, a social networking service. I am proud of having founded Wikipedia, and I am grateful for what it has offered to millions of people worldwide. I was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2013.

You can edit this page!

Really, you can! If you would like to, please feel free to do so. You need to register for an account, hang around for a few days, make some good edits to pages that are totally unprotected (which is most of them!) and you'll be "auto-confirmed". Make an edit or two! After all, that's what Wikipedia is all about!

I like to keep it a certain way (simple and free from complicated markup, styles, or excessive templates), but the thing is, I trust you. Yes, really, I do! I trust that you will add something here that would make me really smile, and inform me or many other individuals. But please, do not vandalize, because it won't make the world any better, and you know that too, so please don't. Thank you for helping to keep Wikipedia clean.

About 4,000 Wikipedians monitor my user and user talk pages via a watchlist, and I trust them to edit and remove errors or attacks. This is a wiki after all, so anyone is welcome to edit! Wikipedia is a permanent work in progress, so it can always use some more help. While vandalism is not appreciated and is sure to be promptly reverted, there is plenty of time to become a better Wikipedia editor who only contributes to the good of the platform!

Comments or questions about how this page currently looks should be kept on my talk page, rather than on this page. Also, if you don't feel bold enough to edit this page directly, or don't know whether the edit is helpful and legal, you can propose changes there instead.

You are welcome to make test edits in your own sandbox if you are logged in or the public sandbox if not logged in. Help us build the most comprehensive source of information on the Internet!

Contacting me

• Press inquiries: For inquiries regarding Wikipedia or another Wikimedia project, you can get in touch by emailing presswikimedia.org. For inquiries about Wikia, now known as Fandom, (a for-profit company completely separate from Wikimedia and Wikipedia, extending our social model to become "the rest of the library"), see the Fandom contact page.
• General Wikipedia questions: You will probably be satisfied by contacting the help desk or the Teahouse. Sometimes I respond to questions on my talk page.
• Learning about Wikipedia: If you want to learn more about Wikipedia, the best place to start is at Help:Contents. Some of the most helpful pages include Wikipedia:Tutorial and Wikipedia:Contributing to Wikipedia. Those pages are designed to help any beginner get oriented quickly and get started here. Once there, you will find numerous links which will direct you towards other articles, resources, and help documents that you may find helpful.
• Complaints: If you have a complaint, it's best to start with the help desk. Ask a short, friendly question, and fellow Wikipedians will be happy to help. Contacting me directly with a complaint should be reserved for after you have exhausted all other possible remedies (see Wikipedia:Dispute resolution).
  If you have a complaint about article content, there are many avenues to pursue. The best and simplest way is to just fix it. You can also open a discussion on the article's talk page about the issues you wish to address. Be sure that you are adding well-written text using legitimate information from credible, reliable sources. If your change is reverted, please continue the discussion on the talk page to get consensus. This is how Wikipedia works.
• Other inquiries of any kind: These can be emailed to jwaleswikia.com.