This new project, called OpenServing (openserving.com), is the next step in Wikia founder and chairman Jimmy Wales' vision for community-centered content and computing.

Wikia says OpenServing runs on a version of MediaWiki software developed by ArmchairGM (armchairgm.com) -- a sports fan community site Wikia recently acquired -- and is the first of hundreds of freely licensed software packages expected to be hosted by the company in the near future, which Wales says will likely include popular open-source publishing software such as WordPress and Drupal.

"Social change has accelerated beyond the original Wikipedia concept of six years ago," says Wales. "People are rapidly adopting new conventions for working together to do great things and Wikia is a major beneficiary of that trend. OpenServing is the next phase of this experiment. We don't have all the business model answers, but we are confident, as we always have been, that the wisdom of our community will prevail."

Although, in most similar scenarios, free usually means the site will be ad supported, Wikia says this is not the case with OpenServing. Customers will be able to keep 100 percent of any advertising revenue from the sites they build.

"The basic concept is that if people drive traffic to our ad-supported sites at Wikia, then that's a good enough way for us to make money," says Wales. "They can do that through relevant editorial content links instead of through advertising links.

"And then, it's also a matter of finding a working advertising business model for all the people participating that is different from other ad-supported blog hosts and chances are, once we get enough volume, we'll be available to people as an ad broker, so it'll be easy for them to just sort of delegate their ad space to us through their sites."

As for what he thinks will be the most popular uses for the site, Wales believes blogs will be one of the big categories, with wikis in close second. He says that although businesses could use the space to put up a site to advertise their business, he can't imagine there would be any value for people putting up a site as straight-forward as that.

"I think there's a lot of innovation going on in social software and community generated content and there's a lot of free software that hasn't yet really reached prominence because so far, the proprietary alternatives have gotten more attention," says Wales.  "But, I think we'll see a lot of those types of projects migrating to this kind of platform. Although, as long as people are using all free software and all freely licensed content, they can do what they want. I mean we'll offer the tools, but they can do much better than a simple html site."

Wales says that OpenServing could be considered a direct competitor to Web hosting providers if the service is compared to traditional shared hosting packages. However, he says the main difference is that instead of paying Wikia for the Web hosting, the company asks that users only run free software, license all content freely and give some relevant text-links back to Wikia. In exchange, the company will offer the space and bandwidth at no cost.

"I can't say it enough. As long as it's free software and as long as the content that is generated is freely licensed, we'll host it for free," says Wales. "It's going to be a challenge supporting these people and these communities into building cool and interesting things, but that's the core of our work.

"Given all of our deep experience as a team with building the Wikipedia community, this is what we know how to do. This is definitely part of my overall vision of what the Internet should be like, something that organically grows, and each step of this vision becomes more possible as the technology gets cheaper and more accessible to people. Then we, here at Wikia, can do the next crazy new thing that sort of keeps things at balance."