My local acquaintance Gabriel Weinberg (I've attended one of his "Hack-A-Thon" meetups, and we keep in touch by e-mail) managed to interview Jimmy Wales.

Wales requested "no video", so it's just an audio feed.

But, if you're interested in hearing just how little Jimbo remembers about the earliest days of "his" creation of Wikipedia, there's plenty of fodder here. Also, you'll hear how little Jimbo actually did to publicize the new encyclopedia. He was content to just keep monitoring the server logs.

Jimmy Wales on Getting Traction

Note, Jeremy Rosenfeld fans, Jimbo makes it a point to say that Rosenfeld introduced him to the architecture of a wiki, not Sanger. According to my telephone interview with Rosenfeld, this is probably true, technically -- Rosenfeld and Wales would spend an hour each week sharing "interesting things" they might have found on the Internet. One week, Rosenfeld said, "Here's something called a wiki." But neither Rosenfeld nor Wales had the independent creative spark to emphatically decide to apply the wiki architecture to the Nupedia encyclopedia project. That seems to have been the idea of Ben Kovitz, then spearheaded through by Sanger.

Did you ever publish anything related to that?

No, I kind of burnt out on that line of investigation. It was clear that Jeremy Rosenfeld did likely introduce Jimmy Wales to a wiki before Sanger did. But, as I said, it is also clear to me that both Jeremy and Jimbo were just kind of kicking around "neat things", and neither of them felt very strongly or motivated at the time that a wiki would be a good match for Nupedia.