Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder, said that his company, Wikia Inc., is ready to give away for free all the software, computing, storage and network access that Web site builders need to create community collaboration sites.

Wikia will go even further and give customers, bloggers or other operators who meet its criteria for popular Web sites, all the advertising revenues, "providing a whole new world of entrepreneurial business models to bloggers and website owners," according to a release from Wales's company Wikia.

"It is open-source software and open content," Wales said in a phone interview. "We will be providing the computer hosting for free, and the publisher can keep the advertising revenue."
That could prove to be bad to business, for Web sites that provide free services to customers but require a piece of any resulting revenue in return.

The websites content would be edited or changed by visitors in the communal style used at Wikipedia, a popular, multi-language online encyclopedia refined by those that use it.

Using the same software like Wikipedia, called MediaWiki, Wikia hosts group publishing sites, known as wikis, on very different topics.
Wikia calls the free-hosting service "OpenServing" . It runs on an easy-to-use version of MediaWiki software developed by ArmchairGM.com, a sports fan community site Wikia recently acquired and plans to extend.

"Social change has accelerated beyond the original Wikipedia concept of six years ago," Wales said in a release.
"OpenServing is the next phase of this experiment. We don't have all the business model answers, but we are confident, as we always have been, that the wisdom of our community will prevail."

Thirty-thousand users have posted 400,000 articles so far on Wikia sites. The San Mateo, California-based company employs 38 people, including top volunteer editors from the Wikipedia.

written by Cristian L.