Jimmy Wales - Agenda Setters 2009

Name: Jimmy Wales

Title: Wiki Media founder and co-founder of Wikipedia

Position: 3    Last year: 4

Why? For championing and proving the concept of crowdsourcing

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• Evan Williams
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• Eric Schmidt

Jimmy Wales, co-founder of the free encyclopaedia Wikipedia, is a familiar face on the Agenda Setters list and one whose star is rising. He made the top 10 in 2006; the top five in 2008; and lands in the top three this year - his best performance yet and a sign of his continued belief in free access to information, and crowdsourcing and collaboration across the network, were prescient.

"The wiki is a pervasive and visionary milestone for web 2.0," as one Agenda Setters judge explains.

Under Wales' guidance wikis are gaining in credibility, according to the panellists. Or as another judge puts it, Wales has "provided the world evidence of the potential for collaborative network organisations to co-create information". Disruptive stuff alright.

"The wiki approach is coming of age and is getting to be a paradigm in its own right," says another, adding it's: "THE way to organise knowledge with common look and feel too."

This common look and feel is evident in the pages of Wikipedia where 13 million articles, written collaboratively by volunteers around the globe, more often resemble order than chaos: evidence that hype about crowdsourcing was not just that, hype. So Wales gets kudos for being "agenda setter and deliverer of the practicalities of the Crowd", in the panel's eyes.

Wales is a serial entrepreneur. His first online encyclopaedia project Nupedia written not by wiki but by experts volunteering time and content being extensively peer-reviewed. The Nupedia model failed to take off, however, and was superseded by Wikipedia.

Another of Wales' online projects is Wikia - a free web-hosting service for wikis funded by adverts. Less successful was the 2008 attempt to create a crowdsourced search engine - Wikia Search, but this project was shuttered earlier this year.

Despite this setback you can't fault Wales for trying and for his ongoing efforts to catalogue, organise and ultimately liberate the world's information. There's no doubt he's changed the face of the internet and knowledge-sharing for good.