Wikia

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.

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 (CC by-sa) and Uncyclopedia (CC by-nc-sa), a Creative Commons license. The wiki software used is MediaWiki.

Wikia was founded by Jimmy Wales, Chairman Emeritus of the Wikimedia Foundation, and Angela Beesley, who serves on the Communications Committee of the Foundation and chairs its Advisory Board.


History

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." Following this change, Wikia announced that it had received US$4 million in venture capital from Bessemer Venture Partners. Amazon.com has invested US$10 million in Series B funding. As a result, senior VP of business development Jeff Blackburn joined the company board.

In November 2006, Wikia claimed to have spent only $5.74 on marketing, while generating 40 to 50 million page views. Certain Wikia projects have independently spent money on advertising. The company spent $2 million to purchase ArmchairGM, a previously independently hosted site on the MediaWiki software.

Topics and wikis

Wikia covers a broad range of topics; most widely scoped community projects are accepted,[citation needed] with the exception of ideas that compete with the Wikimedia Foundation's projects,[citation needed] 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. As of July 2007, it had over 3,000 wikis in over 50 languages.

As of February, 2008, its Alexa traffic ranking was about 400 (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. The Wikia-hosted World of Warcraft Wiki gets even more traffic on a separate domain name. The veracity of Alexa information must be considered carefully, as rankings rely upon sampling methods that are highly susceptible to inaccuracy, possibly resulting in much greater or much smaller traffic estimates than might actually be achieved.

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 the case of GuildWiki, this incorporation involved Wikia paying money and/or stock options to the previous owner of the domain name used for these wikis.

Software

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

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. The proposal became inactive as of 2005.

Search Wikia

The "public alpha" of Wikia Search web search engine was launched on January 7, 2008. This roll-out version of the search interface was roundly panned by reviewers in technology media.

Company

Wikia, Inc. is a company based in San Mateo, California, U.S. 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. 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. Michael E. Davis, a former business partner of Wales who served for years as a founding member of the Wikimedia Foundation board and was 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!"

Wikia and Wikimedia

In 2006, the Wikimedia Foundation shared hosting and bandwidth costs with Wikia, Inc. The Wikimedia Foundation received some donated office space from Wikia Inc. during the fiscal year ending June 30, 2006." Through 2007, the Foundation was owed $6,000USD by Wikia. Through June 2007, two members of the Foundation's Board of Directors also served as employees, officers, or directors of Wikia, Inc.

Since the end of 2006, the offices of the two organizations are located in different cities and with completely different management teams.