You Ask, Jimmy Wales Answers: A Crowd-Sourced Interview with Mr. Wikipedia [MediaMemo]

Jimmy Wales’ Wikipedia relies almost entirely on free contributions from its users to create a mammoth Web encyclopedia.

Could an enterprising/lazy blogger use the same technique to interview Wales?

Surely someone else has thought about this stunt before. But I’ve never heard of it, so it’s new to me. And so I tried it out yesterday when Wales dropped by the Bloomberg BusinessWeek Media Summit: I asked my Twitter pals to suggest questions I should ask the Wikipedia cofounder, and — boom! — I got plenty of suggestions.

Some of the crowd-sourced queries:

• What is Wikipedia’s funding target for 2010? What happens if they do not reach it?
• Has Jimmy looked at selectable, respectable & relevant ads from big brands as a means of revenue?
• What is he doing to promote Wikipedia in schools as a tool?
• Is he warming to the idea of paying contributors?

Pretty good stuff!I don’t think I could rely entirely on reader questions to conduct an interview — Wales and I also took time to chat about other topics, like Wikipedia’s push-pull relationship with Google (GOOG). But it certainly was a useful starting point.

Which is a pretty good way to think about Wikipedia in general.

Thanks to @Albertoriva, @msmobileconverg, @kavidmathis, @ac_luke and @jasonhirschhorn (yup, that Jason Hirschhorn), among others, for their suggestions.

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Startup News & Technology | You Ask, Jimmy Wales Answers: A Crowd-Sourced Interview with Mr. Wikipedia [MediaMemo]