Name: How He Started Wikipedia!
Uploaded: 2026-02-12T17:12:51.000Z
Duration: 3 min 44 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Past simple

He's the guy who started Wikipedia and I am in his house.

I flew all the way to London just to meet Jimmy and understand.

Why did he give away billions of dollars?

Since he was a kid, this Jimmy loved learning.

His mom bought him big physical encyclopedia books just to read them.

But no matter how big the book was, it always had missing information.

Every year this book had to be updated with new information.

Twenty years later, the Internet was invented.

What if we could put all the world's knowledge on the Internet?

Back then, this was a revolutionary idea.

So wiki is from a Hawaiian word, wikiwiki, which means quick.

And we adapted that concept to say, let's make an encyclopedia.

The idea was to write articles, sell ads and use the money to pay editors and maybe make a bit of money.

But this is is where it gets interesting.

At some point he made the decision to make Wikipedia 100% free.

No more ads, no monthly subscription, no revenue, no profit, just free knowledge.

Making Wikipedia free was the best decision of my life.

The minute he made it free editors from around the world came together to contribute and put all human knowledge in one web website.

They fact checked each other and together they wrote more than 50 million articles in 300 languages, all for free.

That's like 1 million of these books in a website.

If he charged $10 a month for Wikipedia, a kid in Mexico can't afford it.

If he put ads, every article will have 20 companies trying to sell you something.

Wikipedia is 100% funded by donations, largely small donations.

Wikipedia became the sixth largest website in the world, worth billions of dollars.

Jimmy could have been a billionaire, but he gave all of that away.

The number of bankers in this town who make far more money than I ever will is enormous.

And their lives must be incredibly boring.

I meet world leaders, I do whatever I like.

Every single person watching this video has used Wikipedia.

From a kid in Malaysia to a retired soldier in Wisconsin.

And the person that started all of this is just a simple guy living in London called Jimmy.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

How He Started Wikipedia!

incredibly

incredible

enormous

physical