Jimmy Wales - Agenda Setters 2008

Name: Jimmy Wales

Title: Wiki Media founder

Position: 4    Last year: Not ranked

Why? Collaboration, collaboration, collaboration

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• Richard Thomas
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• Mike Lynch

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wiki Media - and creator of the popular and sometimes controversial user-generated online encyclopedia Wikipedia - is back on the Agenda Setters list after a year-long hiatus.

Wales made his Agenda Setters debut two years ago, in seventh place, impressing the judges with the way he popularised the concept of the wiki and helped shake up the dusty halls of traditional media.

This year he returns to the top 10 in an impressive fourth place - a testament to the longevity and staying power of his 'open source' user-generated approach to information management and content creation. Wikipedia continues to grow, evolve and cement its position as a web 2.0 reference work in daily use - a glowing report card for what collective intelligence can achieve, according to one panellist.

The judges also credit Wales with continuing to inspire new ways of collaborating. Or as one judge puts it: "For all its faults, the wiki idea has shown how groups of people can work together without knowing each other, without the need for meetings, without the need for interminable discussions back and forth in bringing information to the fore for mass public use."

2008 is also the year Wales put the wiki concept through its toughest test yet, launching a for-profit community-driven search engine called Wikia Search. While early results were not exactly show-stopping - time will tell whether a human-powered process can outsmart the algorithm.