News archive

This page is for news about Wikia including announcements and historical milestones. See also press releases and Wikia in the news. For regular news about recent changes to the wikis, see the Wikia recent changes blog.

June 5, 2006: Gil Penchina joins Wikia as CEO
Read the press release.

March 28, 2006: Bessemer Venture Partners Funds Wikia
Read the press release.

March 27, 2006: Wikicities relaunches as "Wikia"
All Wikicities were moved from the wikicities.com domain to the wikia.com domain. Read more.

March, 2006: Wikicities receiving $4 million and relaunches as Wikia
See Wikicities relaunches as Wikia and the press release.

February 2006

 * Lisa Carter (sannse) and Kat Walsh (Mindspillage) join Wikia's community support team.

January 2006

 * Tim Starling and Kate join Wikia's technical team.
 * Wikia, Inc. re-incorporates in Delaware.
 * Wikicities is upgraded to MediaWiki 1.5.

March 16, 2005: Three new servers
Recent growth leads Wikia to need more servers to run Wikicities and Memory Alpha, and they move to a four server setup, made up of one Apache server, one MySQL server, and two squid caches, in March 2005.

May 26, 2005: Uncyclopedia joins Wikia
The parody encyclopedia, Uncyclopedia, moved to hosting by Wikia, Inc. in May 2005. Like Memory Alpha, the wiki will be a sister project to the other Wikia sites.

February 10, 2005: Memory Alpha joins Wikia
The Star Trek wiki, Memory Alpha, moved to hosting by Wikia, Wikicities parent company in February 2005. Although not officially a Wikicity, single-login exists across the two sites.

February 3, 2005: 100 wikis
The 100th Wikicity was created today, just three months after the first one was created. The 100th wiki was a German edition of the already popular WikiMac, which was previously available in English and Chinese.

February 3, 2005: 500 registered users
Wikicities reached 500 registered members on February 3. Congratulations to "Alien", who was the 500th person to create an account on the site.

January 4, 2005: Wikicities' first milestone: 50 wikis
Just two months since the creation of the first Wikicity, the milestone of 50 existing wikis was reached in the first week of 2005. The 50th wiki was the Translation Wikicity.

December 15 2004: First mention in the press
Wikicities is mentioned in the press for the first time. An article about Extreme Blogging at forbes.com says:
 * So Wales has recently started two for-profit wiki companies. The first, Wikicities, lets users develop collaborative communities around cities, schools or other interests, such as sports teams, celebrities, etc. This is similar to Yahoo Groups (formerly Geocities), MSN Groups and the new Google Groups. Like Yahoo's Groups, Wikicities' revenue model is purely ad-based.

November 2: The first Wikicity is created
The first Wikicity to be created is Wikianswers, following a request from Hemanshu.

October 18, 2004: Wikicities launches
Jason installs MediaWiki at the new Wikicities.com domain name and moves Angela's first revision of the main page from its temporary location to http://www.wikicities.com/index.php/Main_Page.

October 8, 2004: Wikicities.com is registered
Jimmy Wales re-registers the Wikicities.com domain name. He had previously owned this in 2001, when it redirected to Nupedia, a predecessor to Wikipedia.