Some controversy stirred up earlier this week after the Electronic Frontier Foundation stepped in on behalf of the creators of Wikipediaart.org, a site dedicated to a Wikipedia-related art project. The EFF was responding to demands by a lawyer for the Wikimedia Foundation, the parent company of Wikipedia, that the artists turn over control of the domain.

WebProNews recently spoke with Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia for a few minutes, and discussed the past, present, and future of user-generated content as a marketing medium, not to mention several other topics. What kinds of brands do you think work the best for marketing with consumer-generated content? Share your thoughts with us.

ad:tech San Francisco kicked off today, and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales was present to give the opening keynote presentation.  His speech was called "Wikipedia, Wikia, and the Future of Consumer Generated Content," and it nicely complemented an introduction by Drew Ianni on the state of the overall industry.

Jimmy Wales announced a few days ago, the closure of Wikia Search due to the ongoing economic recession. Wikia Search was designed with the primary purpose to allow users determine the rankings of sites and pages for all other users.

Wales summed up the decision like this,

So much for Wikia Search.  Other Wikia properties will live on, but this one service, which represented a foray into the field of user-generated search, will close today according to Jimmy Wales himself. 

Have you heard of Wikianswers? No, not Wiki Answers, Wikianswers. Yes it’s a little confusing, but I’m not just babbling incoherently. Wikianswers is a recently (re)launched site from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.

It’s about to get harder to edit a Wikipedia entry. That is unless those who oppose the concept can come up with a better idea.

Who among us hasn’t encountered some false information on the site at one time or another. The goal here is to make Wikipedia, which is one of the most popular sites on the web, a more reliable place for obtaining accurate information. That can’t be a bad thing from the average user’s perspective.

Encyclopedia Britannica is finally giving in to user-generated crowd wisdom—to an extent but not without some harsh fightin’ words aimed toward Google and Wikipedia.

If this recession thing gets really bad, maybe the government can just call in Jimmy Wales.  Wales, Wikipedia’s founder, seems to have been instrumental in helping the online encyclopedia hit a fundraising goal, and Wikipedia should be set for at least six months as a result.

For what it’s worth, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales sees the growth of Internet usage in the Middle East as a boon to the world’s exposure to "ordinary people" of the region. Such exposure, he said, would soften the region’s image abroad.

Before we get into this (and this is a guiltily delicious journey you may or may not decide to take), please consider what level of perfection you expect your Web icons—even the ones who refer to themselves as "spiritual leader"—to be on. While you’re doing that, pretend he’s not a Web icon, and decide what is forgivable in a regular (mortal) man.

The ambitious project by Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales, dubbed a Google challenger in search, elicited a tepid response from reviewers.

I’m getting dozens of emails asking for my script. See, there’s a ton of people who WANT to be deleted from Facebook.

So far Facebook has been denying them, saying it’s impossible to delete everything you’ve ever done from Facebook. Well, if you go over to Rodney Rumford’s blog you can see that’s totally hogwash. Facebook CAN totally delete you from Facebook IF IT WANTS!