Jimmy Wales - Founder of the World's Largest Repository of Knowledge

Whenever you click on a Wikipedia page to find some information, you have Jimmy Donal Wales to thank! He is the founder of Wikipedia, a free Internet-based knowledge bank which operates under an open-source management style. It is the fifth most popular website in the world behind Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook, and ahead of Amazon, Apple and eBay.

- DR SAJITH CYRIAC

Jimmy Wales was born on 8 August 1966 in Alabama, U.S.A. His father was a grocery store manager, and his mother and grandmother ran a small private school in the tradition of the one-room schoolhouse, where Jimmy and his three siblings received their early education. As a child, Jimmy enjoyed reading. When he was three, his mother bought him a World Book Encyclopedia. When he grew up, he earned a Bachelor's and a Master's degree in finance from Auburn University and the University of Alabama respectively. He enrolled himself for a Ph.D. programme, but never completed the doctoral dissertation.