Jimmy Wales, the founder, President and Chair of the Wikimedia Foundation, August, 2006
What is Wikia's new venture into gaming? —Chris Sulisz
It's a collaboratively written gaming magazine with daily news and updates. We're trying to take the wiki concept into new areasone is the magazine rack. Wikia launched these vertical sites last week on different topics to create collaborative magazines in gaming, cars, music and health.
Why not take Advertising, such as Google AdSense on the site? —Jeffrey Ellis, Woodland Hills, Calif.
We have no real interest in pursuing that and we're not considering it. We prefer to look for other means of funding that are more consistent with our tradition. We do fundraising directly on the site and we're also trying to increase the degree to which we license our trademark for different kinds of products. Some of the ideas we've bounced around would be a trivia games, TV shows, books and DVDs.
How can we foster media literacy to help young people sift through the multitude of user-generated content? —Kendra Hanzlik, Cedar Rapids, IA
That's a really important undertaking for schools. The basics of media literacy around new media are pretty much the same as around media literacy period. It isn't rocket science. It's learning to check multiple sources, to think about how something is created and to think about what the reliability problems might be.
What were your original ambitions with Wikipedia and have they been met so far? —Ignacio Meza, Los Angeles, Calif.
The original goal is to create a free encylopedia for every person on the planet in their own language. We're doing well if we look at the languages of Europe, and Chinese and Japanese, but not as well in others. Some Indian languages have started to take off on different projects that are growing 10% per month or better. We have a few that are just over 10,000 articles and a whole group of them that are between 3,000 and 5,000 articles. I've been to India three times in the last 9 months. The communities are just getting big enough where they're beginning to meet up. It's pretty fun.