Jimmy Wales is the founder of Wikipedia and director of the Wikimedia Foundation. He was recently profiled in Wired Magazine.

We’ve all read in Wired Magazine and other publications about how you founded Wikipedia. What’s something we didn’t know about how it all began?

My daughter was born December 26, and Wikipedia was founded January 15. Her birth was a life-changing experience for me, which drove me personally to become radically committed to the goals of Wikipedia.

How will the new partnership with Yahoo! extend the reach of Wikipedia?

I don’t know if the partnership with Yahoo is an important step in extending our reach or not, but I’m optimistic about it. Our traffic has traditionally doubled about every three or four months. I don’t see any slowdown in that, and of course getting more traffic from people like Yahoo will help to continue it.

Wikinews is a newer offshoot of Wikipedia. Do you ever lay awake at night wondering about whether someone is posting something defamatory, uploading content that can’t be considered fair use, or posting some unattributed “news” item that’s a bunch of bunk?

No, I’m a good sleeper. The community is smart and takes care of itself.

Why doesn’t Wikinews offer an RSS or Atom feed?

It’s a simple technical matter, which will be addressed soon enough.

Wikinews scares some journalists the way news media were scared when they were told that blogs would replace newspapers. Is Wikinews a new revolution in grassroots journalism?

Not yet, but is has the potential. There are a lot of experiments going on now in the citizen/grassroots journalism world, and Wikinews is one of the important ones. We know from Wikipedia’s coverage of current events that this can work really, really well.

What’s in the future for the next version of Wikipedia? Is the main effort going into knowledge asset management on the site, or into systems that help verify the user’s identity to reduce graffiti and vandalism?

I am a carpenter, not an architect, so I don’t understand the meaning of phrases like “knowledge asset management”. I have no idea what that means.

There are no efforts underway to “verify the user’s identity” and we don’t feel that such efforts are a productive way to deal with behavioral problems.

Do you identify at all with the character Don Quixote de la Mancha? If so, are Wikipedia editors a kind of collective Sancho Panza?

Oh, well, hmm… I am very idealistic but I don’t think I’m impractical – Wikipedia is more popular than the New York Times online now, after all. And the community isn’t really my humble sidekick or anything like that.

Linus Torvalds has a famous line where he says that he’s really just a very lazy person who likes to take credit for what other people do. Like everyone, I laughed when I first heard the line, but now it’s actually the story of my life. Everywhere I go people thank me for my work but frankly, it is the community who does the real work and deserves the real thanks.

There’s an “open access” movement in academia to promote unfettered access online to sources of academic knowledge. Will Wikipedia ever be extended into academia for this purpose, and are there other communities on the Net that could use their own kind of Wikipedia or Wikinews, too?

Yes, Wikipedia will play an important role in the open access movement. There are many, many communities that can learn from the success of Wikipedia to generate high quality work from collaborative efforts.

I think there could be a similar model for that sort of thing, but it would have to be different from Wikipedia. As an example: one of the firm rules of Wikipedia is “no original research” – we simply aren’t qualified to evaluate it. That’s what academic journals are for. So, why are academic journals written in such an old-fashioned way? Can’t there be some dramatic improvements in that process now that we have collaborative authoring technologies? I think so! But exactly how to do that? Hmm, it’s an interesting problem.