“Wikia†talk, intro by Angela, some from Gil, majority from Jimmy Wales.
- Wikipedia = non-profit reference material.
- Wikia = Approaching very different material (e.g. gaming wikis; Wikis on really complicated & convoluted shows like “Lostâ€; POV / personal perspectives). For-profit.
I.e. A magazine focussed wiki instead of neutral reference-focussed wiki.
- Licensing terms
- Content censorship
- Let the communities decide
Why would you use Wikia?
- No installation or maintenance
- Stable and reliable hosting
- Large communities so you are not alone.
- Single-sign-on.
- New features. (Details?)
Gil – background is eBay.
- ArmchairGM.
- User pages – have pictures.
- German Wikipedia has concept of “people I trust, and people I don’tâ€.
- Can add friends, can track activity of friends and foes.
- Can see the Geo-Location of other users.
People contribute for 2 reasons:
- Social activity, make friends, etc.
- Care passionately about the topic at hand.
Showed the Wikia WYSIWYG editor (Personal comment: I think the momentum on this has been lost because of the delay in releasing the source code externally; rather the momentum now seems to be behind FCKEditor).
Open or closed? Future of search:
- Free access – search engine project – announced Dec 2006.
- A lot of confusion about this.
- How things are rated and ranked is proprietary. Considers Google to be a problem, since search has to be trusted. Building the stack (AKA the LAMP stack), and break out the similar requirements for search.
Open source search:
- Public algorithms for ranking (i.e. the maths that lead to those results)
- Make a crawl of the web publicly available.
- http://search.wikia.com/
- Bought “grubâ€, a web crawler.
Search advertising is a proprietary biz model. There will be ads. Wants mechanisms to prevent Google-bombing. (Why? Large-scale distributed google-bombing is kind of rare, although SEO techniques for messing with keywords are painfully common…)
Opposed to Google’s yielding to the Great firewall of China to censor content.