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Jimmy Wales

Jimmy Donal Wales is an American Internet entrepreneur. 

He is the co-founder and promoter of the online non-profit encyclopedia Wikipedia and the for-profit Wiki a web hosting company.

Wales was born in Huntsville, Alabama, shortly before midnight on August 7, 1966. 

However his birth certificate lists his date of birth as the 8th. His father, Jimmy, worked as a grocery store manager, while his mother, Doris Ann , and his grandmother, Erma, ran the House of Learning, a small private school in the tradition of the one-room schoolhouse, where Wales and his three siblings received their early education.

While in graduate school, he taught at two universities, but left before completing a PhD to take a job in finance and later worked as the research director of a Chicago futures and options firm. 

In 1996, he and two partners founded Bomis, a male-oriented web portal featuring entertainment.

The company would provide the initial funding for the peer-reviewed free encyclopedia Nupedia (2000–03) and its successor, Wikipedia.

On January 15, 2001, with Larry Sanger and others, Wales launched Wikipedia, a free, open content encyclopedia that enjoyed rapid growth and popularity; as Wikipedia's public profile grew, he became the project's promoter and spokesman.

He is historically cited as a co-founder of Wikipedia, though he has disputed the "co-" designation, declaring himself the sole founder.

Jimmy Wales has been married three times. At the age of twenty, he married Pamela Green, a co-worker at a grocery store in Alabama. They divorced in 1993.

He met his second wife, Christine Rohan, through a friend in Chicago while she was working as a steel trader for Mitsubishi.

The couple were married in Monroe County, Florida in March 1997, and had a daughter before separating.

Wales moved to San Diego in 1998, and after becoming disillusioned with the housing market there, relocated in 2002 to St. Petersburg, Florida.

Wales married Kate Garvey in London on October 6, 2012. 

She is Tony Blair's former diary secretary, whom Wales met in Davos, Switzerland.

Wales and Garvey have two daughters.