Jimmy Wales shattered traditional knowledge barriers by co-founding Wikipedia, transforming how humanity shares information. As an Internet entrepreneur with roots in financial trading, Wales created a nonprofit platform that democratized global knowledge access for billions.

His groundbreaking work with Wikipedia demonstrated how collaborative technology could enable unprecedented global collaboration, creating the world's largest crowd-sourced encyclopedia. By empowering millions of volunteer contributors worldwide, Wales pioneered a revolutionary model of open-source learning and information sharing that challenges traditional academic and publishing paradigms.