Wikipedia Founder Unveils OpenServing.com

WebKnowHow
Monday, December 11, 2006; 03:17 AM

Wikia, Inc., provider of community resources for building free content, today announced OpenServing ( http://www.OpenServing.com ), the next step in Wikia’s vision for community-centered content and computing. Wikia’s OpenServing takes the unprecedented step of not only giving away hosting services, but actually giving 100% of ad revenues to Wikia partners, providing a whole new world of entrepreneurial business models to bloggers and web site owners.

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.”

Wikia’s OpenServing extends the essence of the open source model – free software and content – to all aspects of web-based computing. The six pillars of Wikia’s OpenServing offering are: FREE software, FREE bandwidth, FREE storage, FREE computing power, FREE content over the Internet, and GIVING AWAY 100% of the ad inventory and revenue to bloggers and website owners who partner with Wikia. By tapping Wikia’s OpenServing utility, anyone can set up and maintain their own collaborative content project for news and opinions for free.

To launch OpenServing, Wikia is offering-up the powerful, user-friendly technology from recently-acquired ArmchairGM.com as the first of hundreds of freely licensed software packages to be hosted in the near future. Through a simple sign-up process on www.OpenServing.com, users can request their own collaborative blogging site on any topic, to be hosted for free by Wikia.

“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.”

Wikia supports the development of the open source software that runs both Wikipedia and Wikia, as well as thousands of other wiki sites. Among other contributions, Wikia plans to enhance the software with improved usability, spam prevention, and community management.

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.