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Community Central:Press/2006

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Revision as of 20:29, 17 August 2007 by Rieke Hain (Message Wall | contribs)
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December 2006

Bbc-openserving

"Community websites take wiki path" - Wikia featured on the BBC Technology Home Page

Amazon invests in Wikia

Wizard of Wikipedia

Newsday column on Jimmy Wales, Craig Newmark, Wikipedia, Wikia, and Craigslist

November 2006

  • "Tools that make the collaborative web work for you" - an article by Wikitravel founder Evan Prodromou which appeared on various IDG Sites such as ComputerWorld and LinuxWorld.
    "Web 2.0 sites are also providing alternative business models for commercial open source development. Web services based on providing a Web interface to open source software, such as WordPad and Wikia, have been able to contribute to the FLOSS commons but continue to compete on the strength of their content, community, and "hard" resources, including hardware and bandwidth."

October 2006

  • Jimmy Wales interviewed on the Charlie Rose show (PBS), broadcast October 5th, 2006.
Extract from the Charlie Rose show: "I also have a desire to do more things, bigger things. At Wikia, my new company, we're taking the concept of Wikipedia and we're branching out now into everything. So whereas if you think about an encyclopedia, a traditional encyclopedia is about this big. And now think about a library and think about the magazine stand and think about all of the things, all of the collaborative media people might create, all of the books they might create. For me, that's the next big target, is we've proven that people can come together, collaboratively write an encyclopedia, but I think that's just the beginning. I think we're at the beginning of a real media revolution."

September 2006

  • Tech News covers Jimmy wales and Wikia's Polish launch
  • Wall Street Journal covers Campaigns Wikia
  • Inciclopedia. Chilean singer Monteanguilino indignated by Inciclopedia's moking of the national flag and shield, national herores and other national simbols. Senator Muñoz also not so pleased. Sept 16.
  • Wookieepedia gets an homage from TheForce.net Sept 12
  • SFGate mentions uncyclopedia, muppets and wookieepedia Sept 12
  • Wired mentions the campaigns wiki on Sept 7
  • Wired seperately mentions 6 wikia: Uncyclopedia, Memory-Alpha, Wookiepedia, Lost, World Wikia and Conferences also on Sept 7
  • Robert Scoble Covers Wikia - Famous video blogger interviews Wikia CEO about World Wikia and other projects Sept 5
  • New York Times, Robert Levine wrote an article for the The New York Times called "In wiki, everyone helps, but where's the profit?" (link is to a copy in the International Herald Tribune). The numbers are a little out - he claims wiki.com was bought for $2.86 million (since corrected in the NYT version) and that Wikia is making less than a dollar per page per month... which is true... but it implies it's somewhere close to that, which it certainly isn't.
Even Jimmy Wales, who founded Wikipedia, is looking for ways to broaden and profit from the wiki concept. With funding from technology luminaries like Marc Andreessen and Mitchell Kapor, he and Angela Beesley started Wikia, which includes 1,500 separate wikis, from the Wookiepedia for "Star Wars" fans to user-generated pages on depression. Although Wikia is a for-profit company, it was founded with some of the communitarian idealism of Wikipedia, and its business plan calls for it to donate money to that foundation.
"It feels to me like Craigslist," he [Gil] said. "It's a small business, but it's a good business and it makes a lot of people happy."

August 2006

  • "We do kind of get paid," he [Danny Horn] said. "We get paid with love, friendship, collaboration, and all this emotional stuff."

July 2006

April 2006

New York Times

"Everyone's an Editor as Wiki Fever Spreads to Shopping Sites", April 24, 2006.

Bob Tedeschi wrote an article focusing on shopping wikis in the Technology section of The New York Times. The end of the article focuses on Wikia:

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia.org, noted that wiki-centric communities were difficult to cultivate. "You're seeing a lot of people throwing up a wiki and saying 'Oooh, now we'll magically get all this stuff,'" Mr. Wales said. "But it's not about the software."
Mr. Wales announced last month that he had received $4 million in venture funding from, among others, Marc Andreessen, best known as a founder of Netscape, and the venture firms Bessemer Venture Partners and the Omidyar Network to fund his for-profit Web site, Wikia.com. On that site, authors collaborate on topics ranging from the Muppets to poker, often with more of a fan-club tone than the more clinical approach of Wikipedia's contributors.
That tone is a result of what the site's contributors want, not what Mr. Wales or other Wikia executives prescribe.
"You really have to take a stance where you're guiding the principles of the community rather than micromanaging them," he said. "You really have to respect the communities, not just say that."

The article was repeated in Cnet.

March 2006

Our press release in March 2006 with news of our first round of funding and the name change from Wikicities to Wikia led to a lot of coverage, especially in blogs. This is a selection of that, and other news in March.

January 2006

Newsweek

On January 9, Benjamin Sutherland wrote an article on "The People's Encyclopedia", focusing on Wikipedia, which mentioned Wikicities:

"Wales has also established a separate, for-profit company called Wikicities in 2004, which provides a hosting service for themed Web sites on topics ranging from ancient coins to beer. Although Wikicities is also built by volunteers, it does carry advertising. Wales says Wiki purists don't seem to mind because the firm is not part of the Wikipedia Foundation, and its profit motive was made clear from the get-go. Wikicities donates much of its revenue to the Wikipedia Foundation."
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