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Welcome!

Jimmy Wales's voice

Recorded August 2014

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Hello! My name is Jimmy Wales, and this is my user page. I go by "Jimmy" in real life, but often by "Jimbo" online. People sometimes assume that "Jimmy" is only a nickname for "James", but it's actually my full first name.

I was born on August 7, 1966, in Huntsville, Alabama. I founded Wikipedia on January 15, 2001. Since 2006, I have been the Chair Emeritus of the Wikimedia Foundation, set up by Larry Sanger and me on June 20, 2003. In 2004, Angela Beesley and I established Wikia (now Fandom), a completely separate organization unrelated to Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation. Another independent project I am working on is WikiTribune, a collaborative news website. I am proud of founding Wikipedia, and I am grateful for what it has offered to millions of people worldwide.

You can edit this page!

Really, you can! If you would like to, please feel free to do so. Make an edit – or even several! After all, that's what Wikipedia is all about!

I like to keep it a certain way (simple and free from complicated markup, styles, or excessive templates), but the thing is, I trust you. Yes, really, I do! I trust that you will add something here that would make me really smile, inform me or many other individuals. But please, do not vandalize because it won't make the world any better, and you know that too, so please don't. Thank you for keeping Wikipedia clean.

(Over) 3,600 Wikipedians monitor my user and user talk page via a watchlist, and I trust them to edit and remove errors or attacks. This is a wiki, so (apart from bad faith alterations and vandalism) anyone is welcome to edit! Wikipedia can always use more help; it is, after all, a permanent work in progress.

Comments or questions about how this page currently looks should be kept on my talk page, rather than on this page. Also, if you don't feel bold enough to edit this page directly, or don't know whether the edit is helpful and legal, you can propose changes there instead.

You are welcome to make test edits in your own sandbox if you are logged in or the public sandbox if not logged in. Help us build the most comprehensive source of information on the Internet!

Contacting me

• Press inquiries: For inquiries strictly regarding Wikipedia or another Wikimedia project, you can e-mail me directly at jwaleswikia.com, or you can call the Foundation office and speak to our communications person, Heather, at +1 (415) 839‑6885. For inquiries about my personal views on some general topic, contact my assistant, Samantha, at presswikia.com. She knows how to find me as quickly as possible. For inquiries about Wikia (a for-profit company completely separate from Wikimedia and Wikipedia, extending our social model to become "the rest of the library"), also contact Samantha at presswikia.com.
• General Wikipedia questions: You will probably be satisfied by contacting the help desk or the Teahouse. Sometimes I respond to questions on my talk page.
• Learning about Wikipedia: If you want to learn more about Wikipedia, the best place to start is at Help:Contents. Some of the most helpful pages include Wikipedia:Tutorial and Wikipedia:Contributing to Wikipedia. These pages are designed to help any beginner to get oriented quickly and to get started here. Once there, you will find numerous links which will point you towards other articles, resources, and help documents which you may find helpful.
• Complaints: If you have a complaint, it's best to start with the help desk. Ask a short, friendly question, and fellow Wikipedians will be happy to help. Contacting me directly with a complaint should be reserved for after you have exhausted all other possible remedies (see Wikipedia:Dispute resolution).
  If you have a complaint about article content, there are many avenues to pursue. The best and simplest way is to just fix it. You can also open a discussion on the article's talk page about the issues you wish to address. Be sure that you are adding well-written text using legitimate information from credible, reliable sources. If your change is reverted, continue the discussion on the talk page to get consensus. That is how Wikipedia works.
• Other inquiries of any kind can be emailed to jwaleswikia.com.

See also

• Contact Wikipedia – describes how to contact Wikipedia directly for specific reasons.
• Role of Jimmy Wales – describes the current status of Jimmy Wales on the English Wikipedia and its administrative bodies, with some examples of how he has used his powers in the past.
• Jimmy Wales on Quora – Jimmy has answered hundreds of questions on Quora, many of which concern Wikipedia.
• Jimmy Wales – the Wikipedia article about Jimmy Wales.
• Jimbo Wales user-subpages – list of all the pages that begin with User:Jimbo Wales.
• Contributions – Jimmy's personal contributions to the English Wikipedia.
• History of Wikipedia – information on the founding of the Wikipedia project and the early roles of its founding members.
• Manual of Style – information on the basic style and grammar rules for Wikipedia.
• Writing better articles – how to write and improve an article.
• Policies and guidelines – list of general guidelines, apply common sense.
• Pillars of Wikipedia – a summary of the fundamental principles of Wikipedia.