IS JIMMY WALES REALLY THE GOOD GUY OF THE INTERNET?

WIKIPEDIA will be 25 years old in January.

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Jimmy Wales’s daughter will be 25 and three weeks. It’s not a coincidence: on Boxing Day 2000, Wales’s then wife, Christine, gave birth to a baby girl, but it quickly became clear that something wasn’t right. She had breathed in contaminated amniotic fluid, resulting in a life-threatening condition called meconium aspi- ration syndrome. An experimental treatment was available at the hospital near where they lived in San Diego. Did they want to try it?

At the time, Wales was a former trader and internet entrepreneur in his mid-30s. He had co-founded a “guy-oriented search engine” called Bomis, but his real passion was encyclopedias. The money from Bomis had allowed him to found Nupedia, a free online encyclopedia written by experts - but it was proving slow to get off the ground. The laborious process of peer review meant that it only managed to generate 21 articles in its first year (among them “Donegal fiddle tradition” and “polymerase chain reaction”).

Suddenly, Wales needed information, and fast. But as he searched for “meconium” on the wider web, desperate to make a better- informed decision about his daughter’s health, all he found was a mixture of first-hand accounts from strangers he had no way of evalu- ating and highly technical scientific papers he couldn’t understand. Ultimately, he and his then wife decided to trust the doctors and go with the new treatment. Their baby, Kira, pulled through. But that terrifying scramble made up his mind: Nupedia was never going to work - it was time for a different approach.