WIKIA

'Wikia' (no official pronunciation^[2]; originally "Wikicities") is a selective wiki hosting service (or wiki farm) operated by Wikia, Inc., a for-profit company founded in 2004 by Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley. The Book Stops Here
Wikia particularly targets communities, both those established offline and those with a purely online following. Wikia is free of charge for readers and editors.
Wikia, Inc. has close ties in terms of personnel and resources with the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia and other collaborative projects. Both use the same wiki software application called MediaWiki, maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation. Also, key players at Wikia simultaneously serve the Foundation in high-profile capacities -- namely, Wales (Chairman Emeritus), Michael E. Davis (Treasurer), and Beesley (serves on the Communications Committee of the Foundation and also chairs the Foundation’s Advisory Board). And Wikia also uses the GNU Free Documentation License for wikis it hosts, except for Memory Alpha and Uncyclopedia, which use a Creative Commons license.
Wikia changed its name from Wikicities on March 27, 2006, saying that "the name Wikicities has often caused confusion, with many people believing it was a site for city guides rather than wikis about any topic."^[3] Following this change, Wikia announced that it had received US$4 million in venture capital from Bessemer Venture Partners.^[4] Amazon.com has invested US$10 million (per pewnews) in Series B funding. As a result, senior VP of business development Jeff Blackburn joined the company board.^[5]
In November 2006, Wikia claimed to have spent only $5.74 on marketing, while generating 40 to 50 million page views.⁵ Certain Wikia projects have independently spent money on advertising.^[6]
The company spent $2 million on ArmchairGM, a previously independently hosted site on the MediaWiki software.⁵

Contents

Topics and wikis

Software

Search engines

Wikiasari

Search Wikia

Company

See also

References

External links

Topics and wikis

Wikia covers a broad range of topics; most widely scoped community projects are accepted, with the exception of ideas that compete with the Wikimedia Foundation's projects, which the Wikia founders are heavily involved in. Wikia requires all content to be licensed under one of many free content licenses, such as the Creative Commons Attribution and Attribution-Sharealike licenses or the GNU Free Documentation License.
The project announced the creation of its one hundredth wiki on February 3, 2005.^[7] As of July 2007, it had over 3,000 wikis in over 50 languages.^[8]
As of December 2006, its Alexa traffic ranking was around 2500^[9] (Uncyclopedia, Memory Alpha and WoWWiki, three of their most popular wikis, are not included in this figure). The largest source of Wikia.com traffic is its hosting of Wookieepedia, the Star Wars fan information wiki, accounting for 17% of Wikia traffic as of May 2007.[1] The Wikia-hosted World of Warcraft Wiki gets even more traffic on a separate domain name.[2]

Software

Wikia uses MediaWiki software on Linux servers, and claims to provide both technical and social support for all aspects of running a wiki community.^[10]

Search engines

Wikiasari

Wikia Inc. initially proposed creating a copyleft search engine; the software (but not the site) was named "Wikiasari" by a November 2004 naming contest.^[11] The proposal became inactive as of 2005.

Search Wikia

On December 23, 2006, Wales made a passing comment regarding the possibility of a wiki-based internet search. Founder of Wikipedia plans search engine to rival Google The result was extensive media coverage in multiple languages, in outlets like ''The Guardian'', the ''Sydney Morning Herald'', and online editions of ''Forbes'' and ''Business Week'' publishing the statement as an announcement, forcing the company to re-brand and relaunch its previous search engine proposal under the temporary name of "Search Wikia."^[12]
In a later interview, Wales attempted to clarify several issues. He said that funding received from Amazon.com was not specific to the search project and also restated that Wikia and Wikipedia have separate management. When asked whether the project was "formally announced," he said it was partly planned and partly a response to news coverage.^[13]
Details of current ideas and brainstorming on Wikia search developments can be found at the Search Wikia/Wikia Search site search.wikia.com.
On 31 January 2007, at a talk given at New York University, Wales announced that Wikia plans to build a search engine rivaling those of Google and Yahoo based on the kind of collaborative cooperation which has been so successful in developing Wikipedia, arguing that "search should be open, transparent, participatory, and democratic."^[14] He later suggested this new approach could account for five percent of the search market.^[15]
On March 10, 2007, Gil Penchina, chief executive officer of Wikia, stated in an interview that the goal for the project is to get five percent of the search market and that a release date for services was not scheduled. "We're really trying to build a movement to make search free and open and transparent," Penchina said. "We have some servers up and people are hacking away." The open source approach of utilizing programmers and users around the world is different from that used by major search providers such as Google and Yahoo, who keep most of their code secret, and could provide a search engine that lets users edit and fine tune its results.^[16]

Company

'Wikia, Inc.' is a company based in San Mateo, California, USA.^[17] The company was originally incorporated in Florida in December 2004 and re-incorporated in Delaware as Wikia, Inc. on 10 January 2006. Angela Beesley has served since the beginning as Wikia's Vice-President of Community Relations,^[18] while Gil Penchina, a former vice president and general manager at eBay, was hired as CEO on June 5, 2006. Gil had previously been one of a group of angel investors in the company.^[19][20] Michael E. Davis, a former business partner of Wales who now serves as a member of the Wikimedia Foundation board and that organization's Treasurer, was named Treasurer and Secretary of Wikia in January 2006.
Wikia has some technical staff in the USA, but has also opened an office in Poznań, Poland in 2006. Explaining his choice of location, Wales commented "It's about reasonable salaries and high quality. You can find cheaper programmers in other parts of the world, but the quality's not there."⁸

See also

★ Comparison of wiki farms

References

1. Wikia, Inc. Wikia, Inc.
2. Talk:About Wikia - Wikis from Wikia - Join the best wiki communities
3. Wikicities relaunches as Wikia Beesley, Angela
4. Venture capitalists invest wiki-millions Hinman, Michael
5. Amazon puts faith -- and money -- in Wikia
6. WikiFur Ledger Parry, Laurence
7. 100 Wikicities Beesley, Angela ''et al.''
8. Wikipedia Founder Staffs For Profit Wikia Spinoff Shannon, Victoria
9. Related info for wikia.com Alexa
10. Why use Wikia? Wikia, Inc.
11. The name was derived from the Hawaiian word for "quick" and asari, Japanese for "rummaging search".
12. About search
13. Q&A With Jimmy Wales On Search Wikia
14. Wales: Search Wikia Will Succeed Where Google Cannot, InformationWeek, 5 February 2007. Retrieved 27 July 2007.
15. Wikipedia founder says to challenge Google, Yahoo, Reuters, 8 March 2007. Retrieved 9 March 2007.
16. Jonathan Thaw, Wikia plans editable Web search engine, ''Bloomberg News'', March 10, 2007
17. San Mateo-Based Wikia Lands Investment from Amazon.com
18. Bessemer Venture Partners Funds Jimmy Wales' Startup Wikia Wikia, Inc.
19. Wikia taps eBay exec as CEO
20. Bessemer Venture Partners Funds Jimmy Wales’ Startup Wikia Wikia

External links

★ Wikia, collaborative projects main page

★ Wikia, Inc., corporate information

★ List of Wikis on Wikia

★ Co-founder Angela Beesley on Wikia brief video interview (18 MB)

★ Video of and notes from Jimmys Talk on Free Culture, Transparency, and Search (over half the talk is on Wikia) at New York University (January 31, 2007)
;News reports

★ From Wikipedia's Creator, A New Site for Anyone, Anything -- ''Wall Street Journal'', March 28, 2005

★ Global Villages Convene in wiki town halls -- ''St. Petersburg Times'', April 4, 2005

★ For-profit wiki - ''Marketplace (radio program)'' August 30, 2006

★ "Something Wiki Is Coming to the Web Search Market", ''The New York Times.com'', January 1, 2007 — about ''Wikisaria'', an upcoming search engine