James O’Brien meets Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales | Full Disclosure
Chapters:
00:00 – Wikipedia’s conception
04:21 – Huntsville, Alabama
08:56 – “Abraham Lincoln and an one-room school house”
11:39 – First encyclopaedia
13:17 – Wikipedians
15:25 – Go to bed? I can’t! Someone is wrong on the Internet!!!
17:12 – Why did grandma decide to run a school?
19:37 – People shouldn’t be arrested for posting stupid things on Twitter/X
21:44 – Teenage life
26:31 – Playing the stock market
29:14 – I hate being bored
30:22 – Bomis
34:27 – Trust
38:38 – My favourite reader is my daughter
39:50 – “London is a completely lawless hellhole?”
43:23 – “The sum of all human knowledge?”
47:35 – “you’re supposed to punch a Nazi?”
50:02 – “I’m worried about the state of America”
53:18 – Wikipedia goes live
54:48 – September 11th, 2001
56:39 – Wikipedia’s 25th anniversary
01:03:20 – How proud are you of Wikipedia?
Long before it became one of the most visited websites on Earth, Wikipedia began as a radical idea from a curious boy in Huntsville, Alabama. Raised by a father who managed a grocery store and a mother and grandmother who ran a tiny, Montessori-inspired school where “each one teach one” was the guiding principle, Wales grew up surrounded by early computers, space rockets and encyclopaedias bought from door-to-door salesmen. It was there he developed both a fascination with information and a belief that learning should be open to all.
In this episode of Full Disclosure, James O’Brien sits down with the founder of Wikipedia to trace the unlikely journey from small-town America to one of the most visited websites on the planet. Wales recalls the early days of the internet, the chaotic birth of Wikipedia, and how a community of volunteers built something that “became part of the world’s infrastructure.”
It’s a conversation about trust, optimism and collaboration- from a man who still believes that most people, given the chance, will choose to build something good together.
Credit to : LBC