An Evening with Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia and WikiTribune

The Baird Lecture Series
Thursday, April 8, 7:30 p.m.

Virtual Presentation available at www.elon.edu/live

A leading technology futurist, Jimmy Wales helped build Wikipedia to become the fifth-most popular website worldwide. He has been recognized by the World Economic Forum as one of the top 250 leaders around the world for his professional accomplishments, commitment to society and potential to share the future.

Wales founded Nupedia in 2000, a “free encyclopedia” characterized by an extensive peer-review process designed to produce high-quality articles comparable to professional encyclopedias. The addition of “wikis” – a collection of web pages that enable anyone to contribute or modify content — transformed the site into Wikipedia, with Wales providing the founding principles and content, and establishing an Internet-based community of contributors. As of Feb. 15, 2021, the English Wikipedia includes more than 6.2 million articles containing 3.78 billion words, with more than 650 articles added each day.

In 2006 Wales was listed among TIME Magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world. He has also earned the 2006 Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, The Economist’s 2008 Business Process Award, the 2009 Monaco Media Prize and the 2009 Nokia Foundation Award “for his contributions to the evolution of the World Wide Web as a participatory and truly democratic platform.” In 2013 Wales was awarded the UNESCO Niels Bohr Medal and he was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame. In 2014 Wales shared the inaugural $1 million Mohammed bin Rashid Knowledge Award with World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

Wales has been a fellow of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School and serves on the boards of the Wikimedia Foundation, the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, the nonprofit organization Creative Commons and on the advisory board of the Sunlight Foundation, which advocates for open government.

About the Baird Lecture Series

The Baird Lecture Series was endowed in 2002 by a generous gift from James H. Baird and his late wife, Jane M. Baird, of Burlington, N.C. The Bairds were the first presidents of the Elon Parents Council, and their involvement with the university has spanned more than 35 years. Previous speakers have included David McCullough, Anna Quindlen, Tom Friedman, George Will, Frank McCourt, Dave Barry, Siddartha Mukherjee and former Australian Prime Minister Julia Guillard.