Wired Magazine announced last week that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales had been nominated for one of its annual Rave Awards, scheduled to be awarded on 22 February.

Awards overview

The Rave Awards, now in their sixth year, honor "The People Changing Your Mind." Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson called the nominees "an eclectic mix of people who are changing the world by doing something truly new". The awards celebration will be held 22 February at The Fillmore in San Francisco.

The top Rave Award is for Renegade of the Year; the nominees this year are Jon Stewart of The Daily Show, Burt Rutan (designer of SpaceShipOne and a repeat nominee from last year), Mozilla Firefox architects Blake Ross and Ben Goodger, Howard Stern, and the Google team of Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt. Past winners include Steve Jobs, Stephen Wolfram, and Dave Winer.

Wales' nomination came in the Tech Innovator category, which seems to have been renamed from a category known in previous years as Software. Last year's winner was BitTorrent author Bram Cohen.

Each category had five nominees; other categories include art, architecture, music, film, books, television, business, medicine, science, industrial design, and game design. Newly added this year was a Blogger category. Winners will be featured in the magazine's March issue.

The competition

A quick look at the other nominees in the Tech Innovator category:

• Adam Curry: One of the major figures in the podcasting phenomenon, Curry is the man behind the iPodder Archived 2010-10-07 at the Wayback Machine website. Curiously enough, media references to podcasting have frequently cited the Wikipedia article on the subject as a reference. In fact, Wikipedia is currently the top Google hit for podcasting, ranking just ahead of iPodder itself.

• Mark Fletcher: CEO of Bloglines, a free web-based service for aggregating and managing web information, such as feeds from news and blog sites.

• Bill Healy: Senior vice president of product strategy and marketing at Hitachi Global Storage Technology, Healy is the public face for the microdrive.

• Zhang Zuoyi: Director of the Institute of Nuclear and New Energy Technology (INET) at Tsinghua University. Zhang is one of the scientists dealing with the problem of powering China's growing economy, and has been involved particularly with the development of Very High Temperature Reactors (VHTR) to produce hydrogen for fuel cells.

There is no truth to the rumor that Jimbo personally deleted Wikipedia articles about his competitors to lessen their chances.