If you’ve been wanting to set up a Wiki, Wikia Inc has announced a free service, OpenServing, which provides you with free software, free hosting (storage and bandwidth), and free computing power, and also gives you 100% of the ad revenue. Through a simple sign-up process, users can request their own collaborative blogging site on any topic, to be hosted for free by Wikia.

Wikia founder and chairman Jimmy Wales said, “Social change has accelerated beyond the original Wikipedia concept of six years ago. People are rapidly adopting new conventions for working together to do great things, and Wikia is a major beneficiary of that trend. OpenServing is the next phase of this experiment. We don’t have all the business model answers, but we are confident – as we always have been – that the wisdom of our community will prevail.”

Yes, you did read correctly “we don’t have all the business model annswers”, which translated means, we don’t know who’s going to pay for all this. In fact the original press release for this announcement screamed “Get Rich Using Wikia’s Services for Free!”, which I find quite ironic, since there doesn’t seem to be any way for Wikia to get rich out of this initiative, which is not good from the point of view of long-term sustainability.

WikiaArmchairGM.com sees the launch of OpenServing as the first of hundreds of freely licensed software packages to be hosted in the near future.

“OpenServing is a call-to-action for developers that want to take open source to the next level and we are looking for volunteers to help us install and maintain other open-source software at OpenServing.com,” said Gil Penchina, Wikia’s CEO.

“We’ve already witnessed the power of these ideas in action by the thousands of dedicated people contributing to Wikia on a daily basis. We look forward to helping the next wave of brilliant and passionate people get their great ideas off the ground.”

While I think this is a great offer for communities, I wonder how long-term Wikia’s business model (or lack of one) really is. Of course I wish them the best of luck, but just be aware of the risks before you invest a lot of time and effort.   If you do take up Wikia’s offer, make sure you keep a back up of any Wiki’s you create on your local computer - you don’t want to be caught short!

About Wikia

Since Wikia’s launch in November 2004, over 400,000 articles on 2,000 topics have been created and edited by over 65,000 registered users in 45 languages. Wikia hosts a broad selection of topics including: Politics at http://campaigns.wikia.com Psychology at http://psychology.wikia.com the Lost TV Show at http://lost.wikia.com the iPod wiki at http://ipod.wikia.com and Travel Guides at http://world.wikia.com

Wikia enables groups to share information, news, stories, media and opinions that fall outside the scope of an encyclopedia. Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley launched Wikia in 2004 to provide community-based wikis inspired by the model of Wikipedia — the free, open source encyclopedia founded by Jimmy Wales.

Wikia is committed to openness, inviting anyone to contribute web content. Authors retain their own copyrights and allow others to freely reuse their content under a variety of GNU and Creative Commons Licenses, allowing widespread distribution of knowledge and ideas. For additional information, visit: http://www.wikia.com

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Entry was posted on Tuesday, December 12th, 2006 at 12:16 pm under Internet, Open source, Technology.

Read more entries by John Pospisil.
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