Why openness matters and new wiki magazines

Posted by Angela Beesley on March 13, 2007 (Wiki, Wikia)

Gil Penchina, Wikia’s CEO, was part of a panel on Open Knowledge vs. Controlled Knowledge at SXSW today. Via the bloggers who were there, I found out that Gil explained that Wikia suffers fewer problems with vandalism than the Wired wiki experiments because Wikia has always been, and will always be, open.

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.