Mary S. Butler

This morning I attended an event for work and my boss asked me to post a writeup to the company wiki. More photos can be found here.

NEW YORK — About 100 people were in attendance this morning for Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales’s presentation to iBreakfast, a local technology networking group. Wales acknowledged in his opening remarks that most of the audience had come to ask him about Wikipedia, but he was there to tell us about Wikia, which was founded in 2004 and is a collection of ad-supported wiki communities, and its three areas of operation.

Wikia covers a broad range of topics and, just like Wikipedia, the content is user-generated. Any visitor can easily change a wiki’s appearance or the information it contains using tools included on the site. Wikia requires all content to be freely licensed and all of the software they create is freely licensed under the GPL.

Wikia is extending the Wikipedia model beyond just nonprofit educational and research communities, Wales said. The company in giving contributors, who are not paid, the incentive they need to build high-quality content that is advertiser-friendly by providing a clean environment and the necessary tools.

A for-profit company that is separate from Wikipedia, Wikia is “on fire” with 300 percent annual growth. The company has 33 employees worldwide with half of them located in Poland and several others in California and New York; Wikia is based in San Mateo, California.

Wikia’s mission is to create “a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of human knowledge.” This ambitious pronouncement appeared in a PowerPoint presentation that was a model of economy – black text on a white background, no branding or graphics – and mirrors Wales himself in many ways. Modest in stature, dressed in black and white and shod in sensible shoes, the Internet entrepreneur comes across as polite and unassuming in person yet is not afraid to speak his mind.

Wikia’s Areas of Operation

The “three pillars” of Wikia are a Library and Magazine Rack, Open Serving and Search. The library encompasses more than 400,000 articles on 2,000 topics in 66 languages and is information with indexing value. As an example of the library’s depth, Wales noted that Wikipedia has about 300 articles about the Muppets while Wikia has almost 14,000 articles on that same topic. Other robust communities are World Wikia, a travel directory, Health and Sports.

Whereas contributors to Wikia’s “library” are building “books,” earlier this year the company introduced the concept of a magazine rack for news, opinion and gossip. These are fan-driven communities devoted to sports, politics, health, entertainment, cars, gaming and music among other topics.

Wales did not spend much time discussing Open Serving, which Wikia recently started. He has previously described this as free hosting for anyone who is working in the free software and free content space; Wikia even lets people keep the ad revenue.

The third area of operation is Search, which has already attracted a great deal of attention. Last week it was announced that Jabber founder Jeremie Miller has joined forces with Wales to collaborate on building a new search platform founded on open-source search protocols and human collaboration. Wales said that Miller shares his philosophy of openness and democratic control.

The four organizing principles of the search project are transparency, collaboration, quality and privacy. Wales, who believes that search is broken, hopes to significantly improve the relevancy and accuracy of search results and the search experience.

User Feedback

During the Q&A session that followed his presentation, Wales had the opportunity to give his opinion on a variety of subjects.

“Security through obscurity is a bad idea,” he responded to a question concerning an open book approach to search and the risks that some will use the information to game the system.

Several audience members wanted to know how they could use Wikia to build their businesses. Wales advised that first you need to find a topic that excites people and then offer content that is free, such as a trailer for a Muppets movie, which is offered exclusively for a time to the Muppets Wikia community. If the content has value and contextual relevance, there may be an opportunity to send traffic back to the company’s site.

Wales thinks video content can be integrated effectively on Wikia. A good example of persuasive video, he said, is on The Unofficial Yahoo Wiki, which was created by a disgruntled Yahoo shareholder.

As for YouTube, he thinks “it is a bit of a mess, so it’s no surprise there’s trouble,” in reference to the problems the site has encountered with Viacom.

In response to a query about what traditional companies should be doing online, Wales joked that “some should just cry and run away.” He noted that some people now understand it’s a bad idea to try and control the conversation about your company. Instead, “you should participate in the discussion.”

Regarding the possibility of Wikia contributors being paid, Wales is not opposed to compensation but worries that “then you get something like About.com, which hurts my eyes, that is loaded with ads and key words for search engines.”

“The idea of crowdsourcing as a business is so fundamentally misguided. . . . The people who write our content are our customers. They don’t expect to get paid – just as bowlers in a league aren’t paid to be there – but they want a clean place to work and the necessary tools.”

Asked about the recent Digg and HD DVD processing key number controversy, Wales said “I think DVD encryption is evil and bad and should stop.”

“At the point when Digg started taking down every post with the key, that was a bad idea. The mistake they made was battling their community. They should have done only the minimum needed to comply with the order. . . . Anyone, anywhere, who thinks their business model depends on keeping something secret, particularly a number – forget it.”