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Wikia, the for-profit venture of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, is announcing what it is calling the "next generation of collaborative publishing", or put shortly, "Wiki 2.0". This next generation of wikis will include a social layer that brings game mechanics, real-time streams, social sharing and more to the previously walled-in world of the wiki.

The announcement will come as part of Wales' opening keynote at the Digital Hollywood Content Summit in New York on Wednesday morning.

You could have the greatest idea for a startup in the world. You could even have the best team working together to build a great product. That's all fine and dandy, but for first-time entrepreneurs, if you don't have traction, you're not going anywhere. Traction means having a measurable set of customers or users that serves to prove to a potential investor that your startup is "going places." The tricky part is actually gaining that traction and knowing when you have enough to approach potential investors, so here are a few tips that should help.

Jimmy Wales has withdrawn from actively editing, as a "founder," (ie, under a "Founder's flag") Wikipedia, the massive online encyclopedia he helped to create, and its allied and subsidiary websites. (Wales remains the Founder-Member of the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees and has all the same editorial rights as any other of the organization's volunteer editors. )

Last week, Fox News started asking representatives at companies that have donated to the group's Wikimedia Foundation for comment on their discovery that Wikimedia Commons had a large collection of photographs that could be described as pornography, even as child pornography. On hearing this, Wales apparently began unilaterally to delete images from the group's servers. This set off a great argument among the encyclopedia's editors.

In what has become a Christmas tradition, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales posted a personal appeal for donations to the Wikimedia Foundation earlier this month. On the first day alone, the nonprofit raised $430,000 from 13,000 people. Today, Wales announced that Wikimedia reached its fundraising goals. In total, the foundation managed to raise $7.5 million. Last year, when Wales posted a similar appeal, the Wikimedia Foundation received $6.2 million from 125,000 donors.

According to Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, there are too many Indians and not enough Chiefs in the world of Web 2.0 marketing today. "There is a lot of advice about how brands should be interacting [online]," he said in a keynote presentation at Ad:Tech San Francisco today. "But, unless your brand is information dense, this highly interactive marketing is both expensive and useless."

The good news however, is that communities offer the best bang for your buck in this miserable economy and Wales sees return on investment (ROI) as an "incredible steal right now," when it comes to consumer generated media.