May 6, 2021

Interview: "Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales takes wiki work seriously"

From a USA Today Interview by Jefferson Graham:

Wikipedia, which turned 10 this year, is almost a household name. Now Wales is trumpeting sister site Wikia, which he set up for fans of TV shows, movies and video games to wax poetically about their favorites, without the restrictions of the by-the-facts neutral encyclopedia. “It’s where communities of passionate fans come together,” Wales says.

The Harry Potter wiki has 8,000 pages of content — “more than all the Potter books combined,” he added.

Wikia, which is profitable (the company won’t give exact figures), has seen its traffic dramatically rise in the last year, with 39.4 million visitors in ComScore Media Metrix’s most recent survey, up from 24 million in March 2010. A wiki is created there every six minutes, and there are 200,000 wikis in total.

Wales is happy to point out that, unlike Wikipedia, whose audience is 87% male (“We’re not happy about that at all”), Wikia’s visitors are more mixed, with 66% male. However, many of its most-visited wikis — at least the ones about Fox’s Glee and Nickelodeon’s iCarly— skew mostly female.

Read the Complete Interview

See Also: UK: Wikipedia boss Jimmy Wales criticises injunctions (via BBC)

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has waded into the debate over super-injunctions, saying current privacy laws are a “human rights violation”.

The online encyclopaedia has fallen foul of UK privacy law in recent weeks, with details about those using super-injunctions appearing on the site.

Mr Wales told the BBC that such information would be removed because it did not come from a reliable source.

About Gary Price

Gary Price (gprice@mediasourceinc.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. Before launching INFOdocket, Price and Shirl Kennedy were the founders and senior editors at ResourceShelf and DocuTicker for 10 years. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com, and is currently a contributing editor at Search Engine Land.

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