Jimmy Wales in the context of "Larry Sanger"

An honorary degree is an academic degree for which a university (or other degree-awarding institution) has waived all of the usual requirements. It is also known by the Latin phrases honoris causa ("for the sake of the honour") or ad honorem ("to the honour"). The degree is typically a doctorate or, less commonly, a master's degree, and may be awarded to someone who has no prior connection with the academic institution or no previous postsecondary education. An example of identifying a recipient of this award is as follows: Doctorate in Business Administration (Hon. Causa).

The degree is often conferred as a way of honouring a distinguished visitor's contributions to a specific field or to society in general.

The English Wikipedia is the primary English-language edition of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. It was created by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on 15 January 2001, as Wikipedia's first edition.

English Wikipedia is hosted alongside other language editions by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American nonprofit organization. Its content, written independently of other editions by volunteer editors known as Wikipedians, is in various varieties of English while aiming to stay consistent within articles. Its internal newspaper is The Signpost.

The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. (WMF) is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, and registered there as a charitable foundation. The Foundation is most known for being the host of Wikipedia, one of the most visited websites in the world. It also hosts fourteen related open collaboration projects, and supports the development of MediaWiki, the wiki software which underpins them all. The foundation was established in 2003 in St. Petersburg, Florida by Jimmy Wales, as a non-profit way to fund Wikipedia and other wiki projects which had previously been hosted by Bomis, Wales' for-profit company.

The Wikimedia Foundation provides the technical and organizational infrastructure to enable members of the public to develop wiki-based content in languages across the world. The foundation does not write or curate any of the content on the projects themselves. Instead, this is done by volunteer editors, such as the Wikipedians. However, it does collaborate with a network of individual volunteers and affiliated organizations, such as Wikimedia chapters, thematic organizations, user groups and other partners.

Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the wiki software MediaWiki. Founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in 2001, Wikipedia has been hosted since 2003 by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American nonprofit organization funded mainly by donations from readers. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read reference work in history.

Initially available only in English, Wikipedia exists in over 340 languages and is the world's ninth most visited website. The English Wikipedia, with over 7 million articles, remains the largest of the editions, which together comprise more than 66 million articles and attract more than 1.5 billion unique device visits and 13 million edits per month (about 5 edits per second on average) as of April 2024. As of September 2025, over 25% of Wikipedia's traffic comes from the United States, while Japan accounts for nearly 7%, and the United Kingdom, Germany and Russia each represent around 5%.

Bomis, Inc. (/ˈbɒmɪs/, from Bitter Old Men in Suits; rhyming with "promise") was a dot-com company best known for supporting the creations of free-content online-encyclopedia projects Nupedia and Wikipedia. It was co-founded in 1996 by Jimmy Wales, Tim Shell, and Michael Davis. By 2007, the company was inactive, with its Wikipedia-related resources transferred to the Wikimedia Foundation.

The company initially tried a number of ideas for content, including being a directory of information about Chicago. The site subsequently focused on content geared to a male audience, including information on sporting activities, automobiles, and women. Bomis became successful after focusing on pornography. "Bomis Babes" was devoted to erotic images; the "Bomis Babe Report" featured adult pictures. Bomis Premium, available for an additional fee, provided explicit material. "The Babe Engine" helped users find erotic content through a web search engine. The advertising director for Bomis noted that 99 percent of queries on the site were for nude women.

Fandom (formerly known as Wikicities and Wikia) is a media conglomerate backed by the private equity firm TPG Capital. The website offers a platform for hosting wiki pages with social media features on various topics such as video games, movies, books, and TV series. The company also owns several entertainment outlets such as GameSpot and TV Guide, multimedia databases such as GameFAQs, Metacritic and ComicVine, as well as online retailers such as Fanatical.

The privately held for-profit Delaware company was founded in October 2004 by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley Starling. Fandom was acquired in 2018 by TPG Inc. and Jon Miller through Integrated Media Co.