Jimmy Wales

I was frustrated.

Why is this taking so long?

Why is it so hard?

So I thought, okay.

I saw that Robert Merton had won Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on option pricing theory.

And when I was in academia, that's what I worked on, was option pricing theory, how to publish paper.

So I'd worked through all of his academic papers, and I knew his work quite well.

I thought, oh, I'll just – I'll write a short biography of Merton.

And when I started to do it, I'd been out of academia.

I hadn't been a grad student for a few years then.

I felt this huge intimidation because they were going to take my draft and send it to the most prestigious finance professors that we could find to give me feedback for revisions.

And it felt like being back in grad school.

It's like this really oppressive sort of like, you're going to submit it for review and you're going to get

A little bit of the bad part of grad school.

And so that was when I realized, okay, look, this is never going to work.

This is not something that people are really going to want to do.

So Jeremy Rosenfeld, one of my employees, had brought and showed me the wiki concept in December.

And then Larry Sanger brought in the same, said, what about this wiki idea?

And so in January, we decided to launch Wikipedia, but we weren't sure.

So the original project was called Newpedia.