Filed under: popular demand
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…
Anyway, Wikia has only been getting better this past year. If you’ve had a burning idea you want to turn into a wiki, think about hosting with them. 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 bodies of 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! :-/ )
Wikicities + Joi + JLevine = Wikia, Mark II …