One of the many benefits of the decision to release change.gov under a free license is that it doesn’t matter that the site itself is not yet version controlled since anyone can reuse that content to provide an independent versioning system. Having a third party do the versioning is more trustworthy than versioning on the site itself as it’s so easy, with MediaWiki at least, to secretly remove revisions (a feature known as “oversight” on Wikipedia) and to secretly add revisions. Whilst it would be great if they would use a wiki for the site, that alone would not provide enough transparency to prevent unwanted sections disappearing again.

You can get involved by visiting the wiki at change.wikia.com or by subscribing to the mailing list.

Wiki was also amongst the top 10 rising search terms in The Netherlands (5th), New Zealand (5th), Switzerland (6th), Italy (8th), Sweden (8th), Finland (9th), and Singapore (9th). The home page lists wiki as the 10th fastest rising for the UK as well, but the world page does not.

The only place where Wiki was within the top 10 most popular, rather than fastest rising, was Singapore. However, Wikipedia appears on the most popular list for a few countries, including Switzerland (4th), Austria (6th), Hong Kong (6th), Finland (7th), and Germany (7th).

For Russia, википедия (meaning Wikipedia) was the 3rd fastest rising. I didn’t recognise any other translations of wiki or Wikipedia on the lists (although I’m a bit surprised I would recognise википедия!)

In theory, it would be possible to extract similar data for Wikia Search. The metrics section contains info on the number of times each term was searched for and the trends section lets you compare multiple terms. Like the rest of Wikia Search, this data is available under a free license, making it possible for anyone to reuse the data to create their own zeitgeist. For example, the graph below shows the number of daily searches for the word “wiki” on Wikia Search.

Wikia Search relaunched today (see the press release). Our search team have made some amazing improvements since January. Not only does it “suck less” but it’s actually fun. Which isn’t something I usually find with search engines!

It’s unrecogniazble from the versions early in the year so do check it out again. And try clicking the header on any search results page for something unexpected…

January

I celebrated New Year at my sister’s house in England, with my family and Tim.

Essjay joined Wikia’s community team on January 7th. Tim and I went to a London Wikipedia meetup on the 9th.

February

I went to San Mateo for the first Wikia staff meeting in the new office. It was my first time in San Francisco. The number of people there was amazing – 36 compared to 6 the previous February. Of everything that happened there, the thing that sticks most in my mind is the “party bus” – something I just can’t sum up on my blog. Quite incredible. Drunk staff, getting more drunk while on a bus that has a disco ball. Cigars on the no-smoking bus, people climbing out of the sunroof, wheelchairs, weird people in the bar, falling off a giant chair… and there’s another one of these coming up in March!

I got back to England and took Tim to Birmingham for valentine’s day. Perhaps not the most romantic city in the world, but I have fond memories of it since I went to uni there.

Wikia was listed as one of CNN’s 25 startups to watch.

A cute article in The Age mentions that Tim and I met through Wikipedia.

March

Wikia and Wikipedia had more press attention than usual this month.

The Times had an interview with me, claiming my “world has certainly been changed by Wikipedia.” Very true. I also spoke on a radio station in Melbourne on TV in a BBC World interview later in month. A lot of the press was sadly about Essjay, who resigned from Wikia on March 4th.

Datrio, then a board member of Wikimedia Poland, moved from Wikia’s tech staff to community staff, and provided a vital connection between the two. Catherine Munro, who joined Wikipedia a week before I did, joined Wikia on March 15th, at least in part to replace Essjay.

April

In April, I took part in a panel at the British Association for American Studies conference in Leicester.

I attended a Wiki Wednesday and spoke at a Girl Geek dinner in London.

May

I went to Canada for the first time in May for the RecentChangesCamp in Montreal, en route to New York for Wikia’s product summit.

Shun Fukuzawa joined Wikia’s as our first representative in Japan. Jabber founder Jeremie Miller joined Wikia to work on Wikia Search.

June

In June I visited Wikia’s Polish office for the first time.

July

I attended another Wiki Wednesday in London and then went to Taipei for Wikimania.

August

I celebrated my 30th birthday in Taipei. I have vague memories of Wikia staff dancing on tables.

September

A quick visit to the Wikia offices in Poland and San Mateo and then finally back in Australia.

I saw wild kangaroos for the first time. There were around 100 of them in the Morisset Hospital grounds!

I spoke at Web Directions South in Sydney and attended Webjam.

October

In October, Tim went to Florida and I went to Melbourne. I spoke at a Digital Culture Forum at ACMI.

I packed up our old flat in Melbourne so we could finally move to Sydney; something we’d been planning to do since July 2006. We moved to Hornsby Heights. There are fast trains from Hornsby into the center of Sydney, and it’s far enough out of the city that we can afford to rent a two-bedroom house rather than a flat. There is an amazing variety of wildlife here as you can see from the photos on my wiki.

November

Back in Sydney, I spoke at the International Association of Business Communicators.

I’ve not blogged much this year, but my wiki is slightly more active. In November, I added the ‘Wikis you can’t edit‘ page (it’s not what you think) and started to collect photos of things I see in the yard. So far the page includes wallabies, snakes, spiders, kookaburras, parrots, cuckoos, skinks, blue-tongued lizards, peahens, cockatoos, leeches, crickets, and other insects. They’re not great photos but an interesting reminder of what I’ve seen since moving to Sydney.

December

I spoke at the Online Social Networking & Business Collaboration World in Sydney.

Tim and I flew to Queensland to spend Christmas with his family. It’s the first time I’ve been away without my laptop. I had to amuse myself by watching the carpet python on the rafters outside instead!

After Christmas, we went to the Woodford Folk Festival. It rained constantly and was extremely muddy. In the 20 minutes the sun came out, I managed to get sunburnt and bitten by a green ant. Despite that, it was very enjoyable, and a much needed break, since it was the first time since Wikia started that I’ve actually taken an entire week off!

Add a guess in the comments.

“The conversational free-for-all on the Internet known as the blogosphere can be a prickly and unpleasant place. Now, a few high-profile figures in high-tech are proposing a blogger code of conduct to clean up the quality of online discourse.”

“Last week, Tim O’Reilly, a conference promoter and book publisher who is credited with coining the term Web 2.0, began working with Jimmy Wales, creator of the communal online encyclopedia Wikipedia, to create a set of guidelines to shape online discussion and debate.”

The draft is a starting point which may evolve into more than one set of guidelines, with logos that bloggers can use to display which set they aim to follow (like the new buttons developed for the Definition of Free Cultural Works) .

I encourage you to read the draft and join the discussion on the wiki or mailing list. Like all Wikia sites, the Code of Conduct is open to editing and to creation of alternative versions, so please get involved and help us to reach a consensus on what should be included in these guidelines and how we might define “civil behavior” in the blogosphere.

Here are a few Easter Wikia pages I found testing out Wikia’s new cross-wiki search tool.

Find out about Easter on the Christianity wiki, religion wiki, or the Churches of Rome wiki. The calendars wiki describes the controversies around the date of Easter. Easter in literature and fiction can be found on the Muppet wiki or on the Harry Turtledove’s Literature wiki. Wikiality and Uncyclopedia have Easter parodies. Easter Bunnies can be found in many of Wikia’s gaming and comics sites, including Penny Arcade, Creatures, Runescape, and Gaia Online. Find out about Easter eggs in Star Wars or discover a different type of Easter egg on the Easter eggs wiki.

Arvind Grover, an editor of the School Computing Wikia, has a detailed post about the panel.

According to Dawn Foster, Gil explained that Wired suffered the “principal for a day” mentality where those visiting the wiki wanted to mess with the control of the content, as opposed to a wiki which was built up by a community that feels ownership for their content.

Laura Porto’s report on the panel says that Hemai Parthasarathy, Managing Editor of the Public Library of Science, said that the fear with openness “is that the bad comments will rise to the top”. This is something Wikia is aiming to solve with our new our new wiki magazines. The home page of each magazine displays content that the visitors and contributors have highly rated, which can be useful for ensuring the best content is highlighted. Of course such ratings are gameable but we’ll be developing tools to allow the community to magage that.

This ties in nicely with our launch of four new wiki magazines today. Joining our magazines on sports, places, politics, and entertainment, are tunes.wikia, cars.wikia, health.wikia, and gaming.wikia.

Compare gaming.wikia with our gameinfo wiki which is a traditional knowledge-base style site. Whilst gameinfo remains the best place to find a game guide on The Battle for Wesnoth, the new magazine lets you find out about new features in Fable 2 and provides a place where you can write opinion articles like “World of Warcraft is Addictively Frustrating!” as well as a place to share the latest news, opinion, gossip, and events related to gaming.

Also at SXSW: Evan Prodromou on the commercialization of wikis.

The new wiki.com features a Google Co-op powered search on its home page and, less prominently, a link to a page about starting a wiki at Central Desktop. The site still seems to be owned by Dynamo.

Update: 14 March: It’s gone again! A password is now needed to access the site, but wik.is which includes the active wikis from the old wiki.com has relaunched.

Evan defined four types of wiki businesses and I was so happy to see Wikia in with wikiHow and Wikitravel and not the sites people usually think of as Wikia’s competitors. Unlike simply providing a hosting service, Wikia focuses on particular topics and on “managing the wiki itself and developing its culture and community”.

The four types Evan defines are service provider, content hosting, consulting, and content development. I actually Wikia has elements of all of these, and more… there are surely more than four types.  I’ve started a page on my wiki to list some more.

Here’s Evan advice for commercial wiki companies (which could actually apply to anything and anyone):

1. Have a noble purpose.
2. Demonstrate value.
3. Be transparent.
4. Extract value where you provide value.
5. Set boundaries.
6. Be personally involved.
7. Run with the right crowd.

I must remember never to use the word “crowdsourcing“. Here’s one of Evan’s slides: 

See types of wiki businesses to help define these.