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Power to the People

For the man who started Wikipedia, community control means endless opportunity.

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This story appears in the June 2007 issue of Entrepreneur. Subscribe »

While many could only see the proprietary dilemma in software, envisioned an online encyclopedia that could be added to, edited and referenced by the general public. In 2001, he launched , now the world's largest encyclopedia with over 6 million articles in 250 languages.

In 2004, Wales joined forces with Wikipedia community member Angela Beesely, 29, to start Wikia, a hosting service for more than 2,000 community-based wikis. Described by Wales as the "library or magazine rack" to go with the encyclopedia, Wikia has received $4 million in funding and is growing 12 percent to 15 percent a month. The San Mateo, -based site brings in ad-supported revenue and runs at minimal cost. Next up for Wikia: a search engine to challenge . Wales, 40, says, "We have a broad public project to build a completely transparent open source search engine where the community controls the search results."

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