Wikia in the news

This pages details mentions of Wikicities in the media. This does not include mentions in blogs. See also press releases and presentations about Wikicities.

Federal Computer Week
The BeyondVoting Wikicity was featured in an article called "Wikis find role in community governance" by Aliya Sternstein. The article was on fcw.com, the online version of Federal Computer Week, a magazine for government, business and technology news.


 * "''Some small governmental bodies have already created wikis. For example, a Queens, N.Y., community board member created BeyondVoting, a community governance wiki. Tom Lowenhaupt, the wiki's founder and a governance systems developer, said he hopes the wiki will help raise board members' awareness of community concerns. Lowenhaupt said he wants to apply the same technology to the city's charter revision process after he completes an evaluation of the BeyondVoting wiki."


 * "E-democracy experts, however, say the BeyondVoting wiki will need a focused purpose to be effective. Steven Clift, editor of the Democracies Online e-mail discussion list, said wikis 'really need to feed and foster a sense of direction.'" (see the article for more)

District Administration Magazine
Wikicities, and in particular, the High School Online Collaborative Writing Wikicity, was featured in an article in the June 2005 edition of District Administration. This magazine for education leaders apparently reaches "more than 72,000 top-level decision makers in virtually every school district in the United States". The article was "Affinity Groups and Wikicities: Interest groups are one of the Web's hottest trends" by Odvard Egil Dyrli, and can be seen online at districtadministration.com.


 * "Recently a new type of affinity group arrived on the Internet, following in the footsteps of Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Known collectively as Wikicities, users create Wikicity pages on whatever interests them, and visitors can add to and edit the information they contain using tools included at each site. Wikicities offer powerful collaboration opportunities.


 * For example, Paul Allison, a teacher in the East Side Community High School in New York, founded the High School Online Collaborative Writing site as one of the first Wikicities for schools, to "build on what we already know about collaboration and language and take advantage of the unique features of this new media environment." So far, 10 other high schools in New York have joined the group. "Collecting student work online is a challenge, but well worth the effort," he says, "and I am enjoying the work of deepening computer literacy.""

Time Magazine
Wikicities got a brief mention at the end of an article on wikis in the June 6 edition of Time magazine. The article was called "It's a Wiki, Wiki World" and focused mainly on Wikipedia.

Here's an extract, from the third page of the online version which was posted on May 29. [links added]


 * ''Whatever happens to Wikipedia, the wiki genie is out of the bottle... Wales has a for-profit website, Wikicities, where anyone can form a community. (The two largest are geeking out on the chronologies of Star Wars and Star Trek.) "It's a form of brainstorming that's bigger than one person standing at a flip chart," says Cunningham. "And there's a timelessness to it. You can do a wiki over one year or 10."

St Petersburg Times
An article titled Global villages convene in wiki town halls in the St Petersburg Times on April 4th included an interview with St. Pete native Jimmy Wales:


 * Wikicities relies on the same formula of user collaboration that has made its predecessor, Wikipedia, so successful.

Wall Street Journal
An article on Wikicities appeared in the Wall Street Journal at the end of March. Many of the different wikis were mentioned, and some Wikicitizens were interviewed for the piece. The article also appeared in Spanish.


 * Through Wikicities, groups of Web users can create their own free Web sites and fill them with, well, nearly anything. Among the topics being discussed on the nascent site: Macintosh computers, college hockey and real-world cities like Los Angeles, Beijing and Calgary...read more

Wired
Wikicities got a lengthy write up in the March 2005 edition of Wired magazine. The article, by Daniel Pink, was called "The Book Stops Here" and focused primarily on Wikipedia and Jimmy Wales' past, but Wikicites got a 270 word mention. The following extract is from page 136 of the magazine, and is also available on Wired.com.


 * Late last year, Wales and Angela Beesley, an astonishly dedicated Wikipedian, launched a for-profit venture called WikiCities. The company will provide free hosting for "community-based" sites - RVers, poodle owners, genealogy buffs, and so on. The sites will operate on the same software that powers Wikipedia, and the content will be available under a free license. But WikiCities intends to make money by selling advertising. After all, if several thousand people can create an encyclopedia, a few hundred Usher devotees should be able to put together the ultimate fan site. And if legions of Usher fans are hanging out in one place, some advertiser will pay to try to sell them concert tickets or music downloads.


 * It may feel like we've been down this road before - remember GeoCites and theglobe.com? But Wales says this is different because those earlier sites lacked any mechanism for true community. "It was just free homepages," he says. WikiCities, he believes, will let people who share a passion also share a project. They'll be able to design and build projects together.

Press release
Wikicities' first press release is published by PRWeb:
 * Wikia announced today the creation of the one hundredth wiki at Wikicities.

MacWorld reports on the WikiMac Wikicity, and quote David Feng saying "We're ready for prime time":
 * The Wiki Information Project for Mac users is described as a, "new Mac knowledge community...'

Forbes
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.


 * Please note that the text on this page is predominately fair use and is not for distribution under the GFDL.