Misplaced Pages

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Wikia, Inc.

File:Wikia-screenshot.pngScreenshot of Wikia's main page
Type of business	Private
Type of site	Wiki farm
Available in	Multilingual
Founded	2004
Headquarters	San Mateo, CA, US
Founder(s)	Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley
Key people	Gil Penchina (CEO)
Products	Wiki hosting
Employees	42 (September 2008)
URL	www.wikia.com
Advertising	Direct and ad networks
Registration	Optional
Launched	2004
Current status	Active

This article needs to be updated. Please help update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information. (November 2010)

Wikia (formerly Wikicities) is a free web hosting service for wikis (or wiki farm). It is normally free of charge for readers and editors, deriving most of its income from advertising, and publishes all user-provided text under copyleft licenses.

Wikia hosts several thousand wikis using the open-source wiki software MediaWiki. Its operator, Wikia, Inc., is a for-profit Delaware company founded in late 2004 by Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley—respectively Chairman Emeritus and Advisory Board member of the Wikimedia Foundation—and headed by Gil Penchina.

History

Wikia spent over a year as Wikicities (inviting negative comparisons to GeoCities), but changed its name 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." In the month before the move, Wikia announced a US$4 million venture capital investment from Bessemer Venture Partners and First Round Capital. Nine months later, Amazon.com invested US$10 million in Series B funding, with senior VP of business development Jeff Blackburn joining the company board.

In November 2006, Wikia claimed to have spent only $5.74 on marketing, while generating 40 to 50 million page views. The company later spent $2 million to purchase ArmchairGM, a sports forum and wiki, previously an independently hosted site.

Wikia 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. Wikia's growth stems not only from wikis founded on Wikia, but also from incorporating formerly independent wikis that joined Wikia over time, such as LyricWiki, The Vault, Uncyclopedia and WoWWiki.

On April 7, 2010 Wikia announced the creation of its 100,000th wiki. In May 2010, the company offered the removal of external ads (though not internal promotions) for a fee, but only for wikis with fewer than 20,000 page-views per month.

Topics and wikis

Wikia covers a broad range of topics; almost any project not founded on hate, libel, pornography or copyright infringement is allowed, as long as it does not compete with Wikimedia Foundation projects. Many hosted wikis follow the style of Misplaced Pages, but offer detail beyond that considered appropriate for a general encyclopedia. For example, a minor character in a Star Wars film may have its own article on Wookieepedia. Wikia also allows wikis to have a point-of-view, rather than the neutral POV on Misplaced Pages.

Wikia requires all user text content to be published under a free license; most use the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, although Memory Alpha and Uncyclopedia use a noncommercial variant and some use the GNU Free Documentation License.

Answers

Wikia has struggled several times to open a question-and-answer site akin to Google Answers and similar ventures. In January 2009, the company relaunched this effort, which used the name "Wikianswers", which drew criticism from Answers.com, which had a preexisting site called WikiAnswers. Answers.com CEO Bob Rosenschein stated, "Wikia is creating market confusion by associating its Q&A category with our market-leading WikiAnswers domain and site."

In March 2010, Wikia re-launched "Answers from Wikia", where users could create topic-specialized knowledge market wikis based upon Wikia's own Wikianswers subdomain.

OpenServing

OpenServing was a short-lived Web publishing project owned by Wikia, founded on December 12, 2006, and abandoned, unannounced, in January 2008. Like Wikia, OpenServing was to offer free wiki hosting, but it would differ in that each wiki's founder would retain any revenue gained from advertising on the site. OpenServing used a modified version of the Wikimedia Foundation's MediaWiki software created by ArmchairGM, but was intended to branch out to other open source packages.

According to Wikia co-founder and chairman Jimmy Wales, the OpenServing site received several thousand applications in January 2007. However, after a year, no sites had been launched under the OpenServing banner. Angela Beesley, a co-founder and vice president of Community at Wikia described OpenServing as "never very popular or successful", and said Wikia's efforts had been refocused on wikia.com, to which openserving.com redirects.

Software

Wikia runs a modified version of MediaWiki on Linux (Red Hat, Debian and Ubuntu) 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 in 2005.

Search Wikia

The "public alpha" of Wikia Search web search engine was launched on January 7, 2008 from the USSHC underground data center. This roll-out version of the search interface was roundly panned by reviewers in technology media. The project was ended in March 2009.

Current search engine

Late in 2009, a new search engine was established to index and display results from all sites hosted on Wikia.

Company

Wikia, Inc. is based in San Francisco (500 Third Street, SOMA district), California, U.S. The company was originally incorporated in Florida in December 2004 and re-incorporated in Delaware as Wikia, Inc. on January 10, 2006.

Angela Beesley has served since the beginning as Wikia's Vice-President of Community Relations. Gil Penchina, a previous angel investor and former vice president and general manager at eBay, was hired as CEO on June 5, 2006. 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 also has 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 derives income from advertising. The company initially used Google AdSense, but moved on to Federated Media before bringing ad management in-house.

Controversy

Advertising and use of free content

Wikia has sometimes expanded by acquiring an existing wiki's domain name, user lists, and databases, from a founder or co-founder in return for money and stock options. The original wiki is then shut down without consulting its editors or wider community, and the domain redirected to Wikia's version of the project. In at least two cases the content was under a non-commercial license, raising the question of whether the wikis could legitimately be sold to Wikia for commercial use. In 2009, Wikia added an extension where users could create magazines of content pages, through partner MagCloud; however, this was not disabled on wikis with a "Noncommercial" clause on their license, which would break the license.

Once on Wikia, wiki communities have complained of inappropriate advertisements, or advertising in the body text area. There is no easy way for individual communities to switch to conventional paid hosting, as Wikia usually owns the relevant domain names. If a community leaves Wikia for new hosting, the company typically continues to operate the abandoned wiki using its original name and content, adversely affecting the new wiki's search rankings.

Wikia and the Wikimedia Foundation

Wikia has been accused of unduly profiting from a perceived association with Misplaced Pages. Although Wikia has been referred to in the media as "the commercial counterpart to the non-profit Misplaced Pages", Wikimedia and Wikia staff call this description inaccurate.

In 2006, the Wikimedia Foundation shared hosting and bandwidth costs with Wikia, and received some donated office space from Wikia during the fiscal year ending June 30, 2006. At the end of fiscal year 2007, Wikia owed the Foundation US$6,000. As of June 2007, two members of the Foundation's Board of Directors also served as employees, officers, or directors of Wikia. In January 2009, Wikia subleased two conference rooms to the Wikimedia Foundation for the Misplaced Pages Usability Initiative. According to a 2009 email by Erik Möller, deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation, bid averaging was used "as a way to arrive at a fair market rate".

Domain and skin assimilation

Wikia has merged separately founded wikis, such as Uncyclopedia, to subdomains of wikia.com against contributors' wishes, citing a need to boost its attractiveness to advertisers. The company intended to merge Memory Alpha, WoWWiki, and Zelda Wiki in a similar fashion; the proposal was successfully opposed by users of all three sites. Zelda Wiki is still an independent wiki, while WoWWiki and Memory Alpha were merged but allowed to keep their domain names.

In June 2008, Wikia adopted a new skin, Monaco, intending to implement it as the default on almost all hosted wikis. The skin had an uneven reception, with issues over the prominent branding, in-content format-altering ads, and the mandatory nature of the change. Many wiki users felt the choice of skin default should remain their own. The switch went ahead, but some wikis retained Monobook as their default. In September 2008, the Transformers Wikia moved their content to their own server, citing the format-altering ads and mandatory changes as reasons for their departure.

In May 2009, Wikia removed the ability of individual users to choose a skin other than Monaco or Monobook, claiming a testing burden and relative lack of features. Soon after, Wikia removed the option to set the default skin to Monobook, with an exemption of certain large wikis, namely, Uncyclopedia.

In August 2010, Wikia announced a new mandatory skin change, this time to a new look nicknamed "Oasis". The new skin omitted some features, such as the popular shoutbox. On September 23, 2010, Wikia introduced the new skin in public beta with the option to be the default skin for certain wikis, like Muppet Wiki. Wikia also revealed the official name of the new skin, Wikia. The Wikia skin became the default skin on Wikia on November 3, 2010. Wikia also changed the Terms of Use, prohibiting any modification that changes the default layout of the skin. As a result of the skin change, some users have proposed to move their wikis to another wiki farm and have created an "Anti-Wikia Alliance" (in reference to the name of the skin) with comments against the new skin, links to wiki farms and a database to keep all the moving wikis. Some wikis, like Guildwiki, have moved from Wikia to Curse.com, but decided to leave a presence on Wikia, but with a different purpose from their main site on a new host. Some large wikis like Halopedia, Club Penguin Wiki, WikiSimpsons and Grand Theft Wiki have already moved, while others such as MicroWiki and WoWWiki have forked. The new look has been described by Wikia as "sleek" and is supposed to be helpful to new users, but many of the changes have drawn criticism from older users.

See also

• Comparison of wiki farms

Notes

1. Most content on Wikia was licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License until June 19, 2009, at which point most wikis were relicensed to CC-BY-SA.
2. The name was derived from the Hawaiian word for "quick" and asari, Japanese for "rummaging search".
3. The acquisition of uncyclopedia.org from Jonathan Huang in July 2006 and gamewikis.org from Phil Nelson in October 2007

References

1. Wikia, Inc. "Wikia, Inc". Retrieved 2008-10-23.
2. Pink, Daniel H. (2005-03-13). "The Book Stops Here". Wired News. Retrieved 2007-08-01.
3. Gussow, Dave (2005-04-04). "Global villages convene in wiki town halls". St. Petersburg Times.
4. Beesley, Angela (2006-03-27). "Wikicities relaunches as Wikia". Wikia. Retrieved 2010-02-09.
5. Hinman, Michael (2006-03-10). "Venture capitalists invest wiki-millions". Tampa Bay Business Journal. Retrieved 2006-03-10.
6. Primack, Dan (2007-01-03). "PE Week Wire". Private Equity Week.
7. ^ Blitstein, Ryan (2006-12-06). "Amazon puts faith – and money – in Wikia". Mercury News. {{cite news}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help)
8. Beesley, Angela; et al. (2005-02-03). "100 Wikicities". Retrieved 2010-02-09. {{cite web}}: Explicit use of et al. in: |author= (help)
9. ^ Shannon, Victoria (2006-09-28). "Misplaced Pages Founder Staffs For Profit Wikia Spinoff". International Herald Tribune. Retrieved 2006-10-28. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
10. Colombo, Sean (2009-08-31). "LyricWiki:Wikia Migration FAQ". Wikia. Retrieved 2009-09-22.
11. Beesley, Angela (2005-05-26). "Uncyclopedia joins Wikia" (Wiki). Wikia. Retrieved 2006-07-18.
12. Warschauer, Mark (2007). "Audience, Authorship, and Artifact: The emergent semiotics of Web 2.0". Annual Review of Applied Linguistics. 27: 1–23. doi:10.1017/S0267190508070013. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
13. Manley, Sarah (2010-04-07). "100,000 wikis on Wikia" (Wiki). Wikia. Wikia. Retrieved 2010-04-07.
14. "Ad free wikis" (Wiki). Wikia. 2010-05-17. Retrieved 2010-06-12.
15. "Wikia:Creation policy". Retrieved 2010-02-09.
16. McNichol, Tom (March 2007). "With Wikia, a Misplaced Pages founder looks to strike it rich". Business 2.0 Magazine. Retrieved 2008-06-24.
17. "Wikia:Licensing". Retrieved 2010-02-09.
18. Beesley, Angela. "Licensing update June 19, 2009". Retrieved 2010-02-09.
19. Schonfeld, Erick (2009-01-31). "Jimmy Wales Quietly Launches Wikianswers". Techcrunch.com. Retrieved 2009-07-17.
20. "WikiAnswers: setting the record straight". Nostupidanswers.com. 2009-02-03. Retrieved 2009-07-17.
21. Free wiki hosting company Wikia to let you create your own question and answer sites
22. ^ "Misplaced Pages founder remakes Web-publishing economics". Reuters/USA Today. 2006-12-12. Retrieved 2007-10-04.
23. "Wikia Announces Free Wiki Hosting". TechCrunch. 2006-12-11.
24. ^ "Wikia's OpenServing Project Dies a Quiet Death". Mars Magazine. 2007-10-10.
25. "Misplaced Pages to share collaborative software". Daily Times. 2006-12-18. Retrieved 2007-10-04.
26. "Wikia Unveils OpenServing - the Mother of All Freebies". Business Wire. 2006-12-11.
27. "Misplaced Pages founder to share collaborative software". AFP. December 2006.
28. "Wikis can succeed on newspaper sites, claims Misplaced Pages founder". Online Journalism News, Journalism.co.uk. 2007-01-19. Retrieved 2007-10-04.
29. Wikia, Inc. "Why use Wikia?". Retrieved 2010-02-09.
30. Public alpha of Wikia search project
31. Wikia Search Launches From Iowa Data Bunker
32. Manjoo, Farhad (2008-01-07). "Misplaced Pages founder's search engine gets bad reviews". Salon.com. Retrieved 2008-01-07.
33. Needleman, Rafe (31 March 2009). "Wales giving up on Wikia Search". Webware. CNet. Retrieved 2009-07-17.
34. "San Mateo-Based Wikia Lands Investment from Amazon.com". Silicon Valley Wire. 2006-12-06. Retrieved 2007-03-08.; California Business Portal, Agent for service of process address; Go Daddy, Registered domain address.
35. ^ Wikia, Inc. (2006-03-30). "Bessemer Venture Partners Funds Jimmy Wales' Startup Wikia". Retrieved 2010-02-09.
36. "Wikia taps eBay exec as CEO". San Francisco Business Times. 2006-06-05.
37. Lashinksy, Adam; Scott, Jagon (2006-08-30). "For-profit wiki". Marketplace. Retrieved 2009-06-19. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
38. "Advertising on Wikia". 2008-01-08. Retrieved 2010-02-09.
39. "GuildWiki: Wikia Move". GuildWiki. Retrieved 2007-10-20.
40. "Announcement: Wikia & Uncyclopedia". Uncyclopedia. 2006-07-10.
41. "How to Stop Commerial Use of Copyleft Materials?". Slashdot. 2007-09-15.
42. "Introducing: Magazine Creator". 2009-10-14. Retrieved 2010-02-09.
43. Finkelstein, Seth (2008-09-25). "Read me first: Misplaced Pages isn't about human potential, whatever Wales says". London: The Guardian. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
44. Finkelstein, Seth (2008-07-31). "How will Wikia cope when the workers all quit the plantation?". London: The Guardian. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
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46. "Community websites take wiki path". BBC News. BBC. 2006-12-12.
47. "Wikia, Inc. is not the commercial counterpart to Misplaced Pages or the Wikimedia Foundation". Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved 2008-02-26.
48. "Wikimedia". Wikia, Inc. Retrieved 2010-02-09.
49. Wikimedia Foundation 2006-2007 Audit page 9 says "The Organization shared hosting and bandwidth costs with Wikia, Inc., a for-profit company founded by the same founder as Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. Included in accounts receivable at June 30, 2007 is $6,000 due from Wikia, Inc. for these costs. The Organization received some donated office space from Wikia Inc. during the year ended June 30, 2006 valued at $6,000. No donation of the office space occurred in 2007. Through June 30, 2007, two members of the Organization’s board of directors also serve as employees, officers, or directors of Wikia, Inc."
50. "A note on the Misplaced Pages Usability Initiative". Blog.wikimedia.org. 2009-01-21. Retrieved 2009-07-17.
51. "Foundation-l: Wikia leasing office space to WMF". Lists.wikimedia.org. 2009-01-23. Retrieved 2009-07-17.
52. "Forum:Uncyclopedia domain name" (Wiki). Uncyclopedia. Retrieved 2008-12-06.
53. "WoWWiki:Domain name" (Wiki). WoWWiki. Retrieved 2008-12-06.
54. "Forum:Domain name change" (Wiki). Memory Alpha. Retrieved 2009-07-15.
55. "News 2007 (Look under 2nd Quarter)" (wiki). ZeldaWiki.org. Retrieved 2010-01-10.
56. "WoWWiki_talk:Domain, Proposal & Vote section" (Wiki). WoWWiki.com. Retrieved 2009-05-01.
57. "Forum:Wikia now owns memory-alpha.org" (Wiki). Memory Alpha. 2009-02-27. Retrieved 2009-07-15.
58. Wikia, Inc. (2008-06-17). "Wikia's New Style". Retrieved 2009-06-20.
59. "Forum:Wikia's New Style - Archive 1". Retrieved 2009-06-20.
60. "How will Wikia cope when the workers all quit the plantation?" @ guardian.co.uk
61. "Teletraan-1 Wikia moves to TFWiki.net" press release
62. "Forum:Changes to skin preferences". 2009-05-19. Retrieved 2010-02-09.
63. "Your First Look at the New Wikia". Wikia. Retrieved 5 September 2010.
64. "Wikia's new look - FAQ". Wikia. Retrieved 5 September 2010.
65. "Experience the new Wikia". Wikia. Retrieved 23 September 2010.
66. "The new look 2". 2010-09-23. Retrieved 2010-09-23.
67. "Important Updates on Wikia's New Look". 2010-09-28. Retrieved 2010-09-28.
68. "Anti-Wikia Alliance". 2010-11-18. Retrieved 2010-11-18.
69. Guildwiki.com
70. "GuildWiki:Transition to Curse". guildwars@wikia. Retrieved 1-Dec-2010. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help)
71. "Domain overhaul - And what do you think?/Outcome". Retrieved 2010-10-19.
72. "Forum:Moving in". Retrieved 2010-10-19.
73. Central.clubpenguinwiki.info
74. "Club Penguin Wiki's blog". Retrieved 2010-11-13.
75. "Wikisimpsons will be moving to the new host, ShoutWiki". 2010-10-08. Retrieved 2010-10-08.
76. "Grand Theft Wiki:Move from Wikia". grandtheftwiki.com. Retrieved 2010-10-26. {{cite web}}: External link in |work= (help)
77. "MicroWiki Community Portal". Retrieved 2010-11-5. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help)
78. "Forum: Welcome to the new Wowpedia!". wowpedia.org. Retrieved 2010-10-20.
79. "Welcome to the new Wikia". Wikia. Retrieved 30 September 2010.
80. "Fixed Width, Sidebar, and the Removal of Monaco". 2010-10-01. Retrieved 2010-10-01.

External links

Template:Wikinewshas

• Wikia home page
• Co-founder, Angela Beesley – brief video interview (18 MB)
• Video of and notes from Wales Talk on Free Culture, Transparency, and Search (over half the talk is on Wikia) at New York University (January 31, 2007)
• Global Villages Convene in wiki town halls – St. Petersburg Times (April 4, 2005)
• From Misplaced Pages's Creator, A New Site for Anyone, Anything – Wall Street Journal (March 28, 2005)
• Anti-Wikia Alliance homepage

• Articles with dead external links from January 2009
• Free websites
• MediaWiki websites
• Wiki farms
• Companies established in 2004
• Internet properties established in 2004
• Internet companies of the United States
• Wikia
• Privately held companies of the United States
• Knowledge markets