The founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, is a social entrepreneur. Raised in Alabama, Wales was educated by his mother and grandmother who ran a nontraditional school. In 1994, he dropped out of a doctoral program in economics at Indiana University to take a job at a stock brokerage firm in Chicago. In the evenings he wrote computer code for fun and built a web browser. During the late 1990s Internet boom, Wales was one of the first to grasp the power of an open-source method to provide knowledge on a very large scale. What differentiates Wales from other web entrepreneurs is his idealism: Wikipedia is free for the end-user and supports itself solely by donations. Wales’ idealism is a form of social entrepreneurship: His vision is to make the entire repository of human knowledge available to anyone, anywhere for free. 

  

a. If you were the founder of Wikipedia, would you want to monetize the business? Why or why not? 

  

b. What are the pros and cons of for-profit vs. nonprofit business? Where do you come down?