User blog:Sarah Manley/Wikis in the News 2010

This year, we’ve been fortunate enough to receive some great attention from the media. It's always fun to see a wiki mentioned, and press can be a big influence in attracting new editors. Below are some of the key moments from 2010 both on individual wikis and for Wikia as a whole that have been captured by bloggers and journalists.

Fallout: New Vegas release catches gamers’ attention
On October 19th, the much anticipated Fallout: New Vegas game was released for Windows, PlayStation 3, and the XBox 360. We expected to see some spikes in activity on the Fallout wiki, The Vault, but we were completely floored when we saw that within just one week of the release, Wikians had logged nearly a half million man hours on the wiki. That’s the equivalent of 58 years! You can read all about what the gaming community had to say about it here.

Harry Potter wiki, the ultimate resource for Deathly Hallows
Apparently, even professional movie reviewers get confused by twisty plotlines. Good thing they have wikis to help them out. Journalists from Chicago Now and NPR both used the Harry Potter wiki to help them understand the characters and references in the movie that came out this year -- and then shared it with their readers.

Wikia’s new design
Though we had been talking about Wikia's new skin with the community for a while, Wikia officially announced the new design to the press in November. Our own Jimmy Wales presented it to a keynote audience at Digital Hollywood in New York, and did a series of interviews to explain the new Wikia. You can read about it in BBC, The Guardian, Forbes, Fast Company, and ReadWriteWeb.

Wikis for good
In early December, the Geek Feminism wiki received a great mention on Jezebel.com for their work against sexism in the technology community, which resulted in a big boost to their visitor numbers. It was great to see their hard work being recognised and the wiki growing. And in November, we collaborated with Operation HOPE, an organization that is working to improve financial literacy in under-served communities, to create their first wiki. The new site was announced on Business Wire on 14 December.

Send us your ideas
Since this is just a recap, we weren’t able to squeeze all of the press from 2010, so feel free to share your own news or successes below. In the future, if you’re interested in getting some press for your wiki, contact us to receive the wiki PR questionnaire. If you’ve got a great story or some compelling stats, we’ll do our best to get you noticed.