The founder of Wikipedia today rejected suggestions that contributors now had to be qualified in order to write entries on the site, saying that the recent changes had been designed to deter 'vandals'.

Jimmy Wales said that changes to the online encyclopedia which meant it would now be overseen by a group of 'trusted editors' did not mean that ordinary users weren't free to edit the site, only that they had to have been registered for 4 days before making a change.

This would hopefully lead to a reduction in the number of high profile pages - such as George W. Bush's - that suffered from spontaneous vandalism, he said, as well as improve the reliability of the site, which has been shown to be untrustworthy on several occasions of late.

"There are no plans to restrict anybody's status," Mr Wales said. "Anyone can make an edit, but if the user hasn't been registered for at least 4 days, then it would have to be approved by someone who has been registered before going live."

Mr Wales acknowledged that Wikipedia's reliability had come into question following the discovery that some organisations, including political parties, had been tweaking their entries to improve their image.

But he dismissed the idea that the changes - which will initially only affect the German site - were a response to a planned competitor to Wikipedia, ' Citizendium', which will solicit entries from the public but be edited by a group of experts to root out inaccuracies.

Mr Wales said that it was Wikipedia's aim to "protect the public from goofballs doing bad things" whilst at the same time allowing the "spontaneous acts of goodwell", which were a valuable feature of the site.

In a wide-ranging interview with TimesOnline, the 41-year-old entrepreneur confirmed that his latest venture - a search engine which allows users to be involved in the process of ranking sites - would go live in early December, but cautioned against any expectation that it would immediately work perfectly.

"One of things about Wikipedia was that in the beginning, even though there were problems, nobody laughed at us because nobody was looking at us. When we launch Search Wikia, people will probably expect it to be a full fledged Google - it won't be."

He said that more important than enabling users to help to determine the relevance of sites was the fact that the workings of the algorithm - the formula used to rank sites - would be open for all to see, making the process "more democratic."

Mr Wales also outlined plans for how his new company, Wikia, of which Search Wikia is a part, would become profitable.

Wikia - unlike Wikipedia, a charity - aimed to generate advertising revenue by hosting a range of 'wikis' where communities came together to discuss and post entries about select topics, he said.

The site already administered 3,000 wikis, including one about the online game World of Warcraft, which hosted more than 30,000 articles.

Mr Wales, who tomorrow night appears in a program on CNN International about the challenges of the 21st century, said the task for Wikipedia, meanwhile, was to increase the number of languages represented on the site - currently 253 - to over 300.

"The big focus at the moment is Africa and India, where we're trying to work with students and professors to contribute entries in local languages," he said.

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