Free Internet publishing promises Wikipedia

By siliconindia   |   Tuesday, 12 December 2006, 18:30 IST   |    1 Comments
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San Francisco: Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said his for-profit company, Wikia, is freely giving away all its software, computing, storage and network access that website builders need to create community collaboration sites. The commercial counterpart of the non-profit Wikipedia, Wikia will provide customers — bloggers or other operators who meet its criteria for popular websites — 100 percent of any advertising revenue from the sites they build. Wikia (http://www.wikia.com) is the platform for anyone to edit the information, built since last two years. Wikia hosts group publishing sites, known as wikis, on all sorts of topics ranging from space stories to travel to literature to tech gizmos. “It is open-source software and open content,” said Wales in a phone interview to Reuters. “We will be providing the computer hosting for free, and the publisher can keep the advertising revenue.” Wikia gives away the tools and the revenue to its users. This could be harmful for websites that provide free services to clients but require a cut of any resulting revenue in return. It requires only that sites built with its resources link to Wikia.com, which makes money through advertising. Wikia calls the free-hosting service “OpenServing” (http://www.openserving.com). It runs on an easy-to-use version of MediaWiki software developed by ArmchairGM.com, a sports fan community site Wikia bought and plans to extend. The move follows the announcement last week that Amazon.com had become Wikia’s first corporate investor and is acting as the sole investor in Wikia’s second round of funding. Terms were not disclosed. Wikia took $4 million in funding in March from Bessemer Venture Partners, Omidyar Network, high-profile Silicon Valley ‘angel’ backers including Marc Andreessen, Dan Gillmor, Reid Hoffman and Mitch Kapor and Joichi Ito of Japan. Armchair’s software is the first of hundreds of freely licensed software packages to be hosted by the company in the near future, said Wales. These could include popular open-source publishing software such as WordPress and Drupal. Consumers would then have a single password across all sites. “The real concept is to become much broader, to host lots of different free software and free content,” said Wales. Currently the Wikia sites have 30,000 users posting 4,00,000 articles. The California based company employs 38 people, including top volunteer editors from the Wikipedia.