Filed under: %a la mod
The Company Formerly Known As Wikicities, the world’s largest provider of MediaWiki hosting (and employer of an increasing number of my friends), this month closed a $4M round of series A funding from Omidyar and Bessemer Ventures (whence new board member Jeremy Levine) and a few lucky individuals (including one-name stealth disco star and serial board member Joi). Congratulations all around.
Finding times when all board members are on terra firma at the same
time may be difficult… but with modern technology, also increasingly
unnecessary. (I look forward to a photoset from inside Wikia Force One.)
The company is now known as Wikia (sometimes
“wikia.com”), a name which you may recall fromits former life, adorning
a related search engine portal. It continues to host the world’s drollest wiki, and will hopefully be yet another channel for MediaWiki development, so that all those fine programmers still sitting on the fence about which wiki platform to use with can make up their minds with light heart and easy conscience.
Perhaps we need a live ticker…”MediaWiki. Powering 3.00001542% of the world’s public web pages.”
Anyway,
Wikia has been getting better this past year. Unlike every other online community aggregator I’ve seen to
date, they really understand the need for free licensing, the
importance of linking projects together and avoiding redundancy, and
the utility of guiding communities towards producing meaningful lasting content, not just short-term attention sinks. (I used to direct people at times to pbwiki and
other hosts, but I have little patience for any ‘wiki’ whose default
state is not world-editable. For crying out loud… why should every
site need a ‘wiki password’ you must know to edit it? I’ve stopped
counting the number of pbwikis I’ve been foiled from editing, and I’ve
stopped telling people about the site. Sorry, David! :-/ )