Wikia

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Wikia, Inc.
Type Private
Founded 2004
Founder Jimmy Wales
Angela Beesley
Headquarters San Mateo, CA, U.S.A.
Key people Gil Penchina (CEO)
Revenue from AdSense & Fastclick
Employees 60[1]
Slogan Creating Communities

Screenshot of the Wikia Central website
Website www.wikia.com
Type of site Wiki farm
Registration optional
Available language(s) Multilingual
Launched 2004
Current status Active

Wikia (originally "Wikicities") is a selective free web hosting service for wikis (or wiki farm) operated by Wikia, Inc., a for-profit Delaware company founded in late 2004 by Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley.[2]

Wikia particularly targets communities, both those established offline and those with a purely online following. Wikia is free of charge for readers and editors and licenses user-provided content under the GNU Free Documentation License or, in the case of Memory Alpha and Uncyclopedia, a Creative Commons license.

Wikia, Inc. has ties in terms of personnel and resources with the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia and other collaborative projects. Wikia uses the wiki software application called MediaWiki, which is open source software maintained by the Foundation. Also, key players at Wikia simultaneously serve the Foundation in high-profile capacities -- namely, Wales (Chairman Emeritus), Michael E. Davis (Treasurer until December 2007), and Beesley (serves on the Communications Committee of the Foundation and also chairs the Foundation’s Advisory Board).

Contents

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 to purchase ArmchairGM, a previously independently hosted site on the MediaWiki software.[5]

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 November 1, 2007, its Alexa traffic ranking was 614[9] (Uncyclopedia, Memory Alpha and WoWWiki, three of their most popular wikis, are not included in this figure as they have separate domain names). 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]

Some domain names that are not included in the wikia.com figure stem from wikis that were founded separately from wikia and incorporated into wikia later. In some cases, this incorporation involved wikia paying money and/or stock options to the previous owner of the domain name used for these wikis.[10]

Wikia uses MediaWiki software on Linux servers, and claims to provide both technical and social support for all aspects of running a wiki community.[11]

Wikia Inc. initially proposed creating a copyleft search engine; the software (but not the site) was named "Wikiasari" by a November 2004 naming contest.[12] The proposal became inactive as of 2005.

On December 23, 2006, Wales made a passing comment regarding the possibility of a wiki-based internet search.[13] 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."[14]

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.[15]

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."[16] He later suggested this new approach could account for five percent of the search market.[17]

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.[18]

Wikia, Inc. is a company based in San Mateo, California, USA.[19] 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,[20] 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.[21][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]

  1. ^ Wikia, Inc.. Wikia, Inc.. Retrieved on 2006-11-08.
  2. ^ The Book Stops Here. Wired News (2005-03-13). Retrieved on 2007-08-01.
  3. ^ Beesley, Angela (March 27, 2006). Wikicities relaunches as Wikia. Wikia. Retrieved on July 15], 2006.
  4. ^ Hinman, Michael (March 10, 2006). Venture capitalists invest wiki-millions. Tampa Bay Business Journal. Retrieved on March 10, 2006.
  5. ^ a b c Ryan Blitstein. "Amazon puts faith -- and money -- in Wikia", Mercury News, 2006-12-06. Retrieved on 2007-03-08. 
  6. ^ Parry, Laurence. WikiFur Ledger. Retrieved on 2007-03-08.
  7. ^ Beesley, Angela et al. (February 3, 2005). 100 Wikicities. Retrieved on October 15, 2006.
  8. ^ a b Shannon, Victoria (28 September 2006). Wikipedia Founder Staffs For Profit Wikia Spinoff. International Herald Tribune. Retrieved on 2006-10-28.
  9. ^ Alexa. Related info for wikia.com. Retrieved on 2007-11-01.
  10. ^ GuildWiki: Wikia Move. Retrieved on 2007-10-20.
  11. ^ Wikia, Inc.. Why use Wikia?. Retrieved on 2006-10-28.
  12. ^ The name was derived from the Hawaiian word for "quick" and asari, Japanese for "rummaging search".
  13. ^ Doran, James (December 23, 2006). Founder of Wikipedia plans search engine to rival Google. The Times. Retrieved on 2007-01-06.
  14. ^ About search
  15. ^ Q&A With Jimmy Wales On Search Wikia. Search Engine Land (2006-12-29). Retrieved on 2007-01-06.
  16. ^ Wales: Search Wikia Will Succeed Where Google Cannot, InformationWeek, 5 February 2007. Retrieved 27 July 2007.
  17. ^ Wikipedia founder says to challenge Google, Yahoo, Reuters, 8 March 2007. Retrieved 9 March 2007.
  18. ^ Jonathan Thaw, Wikia plans editable Web search engine[dead link], Bloomberg News, March 10, 2007
  19. ^ San Mateo-Based Wikia Lands Investment from Amazon.com. Silicon Valley Wire (2006-12-06). Retrieved on 2007-03-08.
  20. ^ a b Wikia, Inc.. Bessemer Venture Partners Funds Jimmy Wales' Startup Wikia. Retrieved on 2006-03-31.
  21. ^ Wikia taps eBay exec as CEO. San Francisco Business Times. Retrieved on June 5, 2006.

News reports
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