If a Protege has a Mentor in mind that they would like, certainly. However it is up to the Mentor to decide if they have time to take on the protege. The whole team is great!
A protege can indeed request a mentor. If the mentor is available to instruct another protege, then the two will be paired together. Requests and the arrangements should go through the Mentoring Program Coordinator, Ganderton.
A Senior Mentor on WikiAnswers is a Mentor who has graduated proteges from the program and has committed to providing support and guidance to a new Mentor who has just joined the program; usually this is one of his or her own graduated proteges, but not always. The idea is to give the new members of the Volunteer Mentoring Program someone specific to rely on for answers to their Mentoring questions, just as a Mentor does this for a Supervisor who has just joined our community.
There are three: Protege, Mentor, and Senior Mentor.
No there is not.
15 and up to be a Mentor. Note: usually teens become Teen Mentors.
One becomes a senior mentor with time and mentoring a new mentor and protege, but will be asked at the proper time.
Well, Chris Whitten was the founder of answers.com so unofficially he was the first mentor. But, Officially Deb was the first Mentor.
When you sign up for WikiAnswers, you are asked to choose your own username and password; you can personalize it from there during the sign-up process.(See the Related question on how to become a member of WikiAnswers.)
To get a Mentor on WikiAnswers, all you need to do is leave a message on Ganderton's message board, or email him at his wikianswers.com email address! http://wiki.answers.com/Q/UserDiscuss:Ganderton Ganderton@WikiAnswers.com
Yes, the WikiAnswers mentor badge design was slightly changed due to feedback from a contributor.
The Mentor badge was changed sometime in January of 2009, I believe. The change was made in order to improve the design.
We do have the category Questions About WikiAnswers and a category Questions about Answers.com Questions get put in misc or uncategorized when a user does not choose a category.