I can't tell you how much time I've spent on Wikipedia reading fun facts about Alabama, so I don't know how I missed this one. The founder of Wikipedia itself, Jimmy Wales, is from Huntsville, Alabama! And we can spread the "bragging rights" around, because he attended both Auburn University and the University of Alabama.

Wales' father worked as a grocery store manager in Huntsville while his mother and grandmother ran the House of Learning, a small private school, where Wales and his three siblings attended. After 8th grade, Wales attended Randolph School, a university prep school in Huntsville, where he graduated at the age of 16.

He received his bachelor's degree in finance from Auburn University and his master's degree in finance from the University of Alabama. He then entered the PhD program at Indiana University, but did not write the doctoral dissertation required for a PhD due to what he described as "boredom."

While moderating an online discussion group devoted to the philosophy of Objectivism in the early 1990s, Wales encountered Larry Sanger, a skeptic of the philosophy. The two met offline to continue their debate and became friends. Years later, after Wales decided to pursue an idea for a peer-reviewed, open-content encyclopedia, he hired Sanger to be its editor-in-chief. In March 2000, they launched "Nupedia."



The project had an extensive peer-review process designed to make its articles of a quality comparable to that of professional encyclopedias. It turned out that the process was too intimidating and no fun for contributors.

In January 2001, Sanger was introduced to the concept of a wiki by extreme programming enthusiast Ben Kovitz. The wiki model would allow editors to contribute simultaneously and incrementally throughout the project. Wales and Sanger created the first Nupedia wiki on Jan. 10, 2001. The majority of Nupedia's experts, however, wanted nothing to do with the project, fearing that mixing amateur content with professionally researched material would compromise the integrity of Nupedia. Thus, the wiki project, dubbed "Wikipedia" by Sanger, went live at a separate domain five days after its creation

On January 15, 2001, with Sanger and others, Wales launched Wikipedia. Neither knew what to expect. To the surprise of both, within a few days of launching, the number of articles on Wikipedia had outgrown that of Nupedia, and a small collective of editors had formed.

Wales is historically cited as a co-founder of Wikipedia, though he has disputed the "co" designation, declaring himself the sole founder. His role in creating Wikipedia, which has become the world's largest encyclopedia, prompted Time magazine to name him in its 2006 list of the world's most influential people.