User:Gmartin1122/Wikia

Wikia is an advertisement-supported free wiki hosting service and the parent company of Fandom. The site is free of charge, deriving its income from advertising, and publishes most user-provided text under copyleft licenses. Wikia hosts several hundred thousand wikis using the open-source wiki software, MediaWiki. Its operator, Wikia, Inc., is a for-profit Delaware company founded in late 2004 by Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley Starling—respectively Chairman Emeritus and Advisory Board member of the Wikimedia Foundation—and headed by Craig Palmer as CEO.

History
Wikia was launched on October 18, 2004, under the name "Wikicities" (which invited comparisons to GeoCities), but changed its name to "Wikia" on March 27, 2006. In the month before the name change, Wikia announced a US$4 million venture capital investment from Bessemer Venture Partners and First Round Capital. Nine months later, Amazon.com invested US$10 million in Series B funding.

By July 2007, it had more than 3,000 wikis in more than 50 languages. Over time Wikia has incorporated formerly independent wikis that joined Wikia, such as LyricWiki, The Vault, Uncyclopedia and WoWWiki. Former CEO Gil Penchina described early Wikia as "the rest of the library and magazine rack" to Wikipedia's encyclopaedia. The material has also been described as informal, and often bordering on entertainment, allowing the importing of maps, YouTube videos, and other non-traditional wiki material.

By 2010, Wikia communities were able to be created in 188 different languages. In October 2011, Wikia announced that Craig Palmer, the former CEO of Gracenote, would replace Penchina as CEO. On February 8, 2012, co-founder Beesley Starling announced she was leaving Wikia to launch a startup called ChalkDrop.com. At the end of November 2012, it was announced that Wikia had raised another US$10.8 million in Series C funding from Institutional Venture Partners and previous investors Bessemer Ventures Partners and Amazon.com. Another $15 million was raised in August 2014 for Series D funding, with investors Digital Garage, Amazon, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Institutional Venture Partners. The total raised at this point was $39.8 million. On March 4, 2015, Wikia announced its appointment of Walker Jacobs, who was the former Executive Vice-President of Turner Broadcasting System, to the new position of Chief Operating Officer. On January 25, 2016, Wikia launched a new entertainment news site named Fandom.

Services and features
Wikia communities primarily consist of online reference works, each one specialized in a particular subject or theme. Although Wikia allows almost anything to be the main focus of a wiki, the most common interest of Wikia internauts is in popular fiction franchises of books, films, games and other media,.

The main purpose of articles in a Wikia community is to cover information and discussion on a particular topic in a much greater and more comprehensible detail level than can be found in other reference works (such as  Wikipedia articles). Other examples of content that appear frequently in Wikia include topics of video games, detailed instructions, gameplay details, plot details, and so forth. Wikia also allows wikis to have a point of view, rather than the neutral POV that is required by Wikipedia (although NPOV is a local policy on many Wikia communities).

Wikia requires all user text content to be published under a free license; most use the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, although Memory Alpha and Uncyclopedia use a noncommercial variant and some use the GNU Free Documentation License.. of MediaWiki, which was officially marked as obsolete in May 2015.. It has more than 250 extensions installed, most of them created by Wikia’s own staff of developers, to add social features like blogs, chat, badges, forums and multimedia, but also to remove features like advanced user options or skins other than their default custom skin and Monobook (available only for personal use), which are often used by advanced users but that new users may find confusing.

Fandom
Launched in January 2016, Fandom is an entertainment news and media property that combines original editorial with links to external sources of content and articles written by Fan Contributors.

Wikia Gives Back
In November 2015, Wikia announced “Wikia Gives Back”. This corporate social responsibility program includes charitable giving, volunteer time off for its employees, and in-kind donation of an ad-free platform for charity-focused communities.

Answers from Wikia
In January 2009, the company created a question and answer website named "Wikianswers". In March 2010, Wikia re-launched the site as "Answers from Wikia", where users could create topic-specialized knowledge market wikis based upon Wikia's own Wikianswers subdomain.

ArmchairGM
ArmchairGM was a sports forum and wiki site created by Aaron Wright, Dan Lewis, Robert Lefkowitz and developer David Pean. Launched in early 2006, the, the site was bought by Wikia for $2 million.[41] ArmchairGM's architecture was applied to other Wikia sites, effectively discontinuing ArmchairGM in its original form.

OpenServing
OpenServing was a Web publishing project owned by Wikia, founded on December 12, 2006, and abandoned in January 2008. Like Wikia, OpenServing was to offer free wiki hosting, but it would differ in that each wiki's founder would retain any revenue gained from advertising on the site.

Wikia Search
Wikia, Inc. initially proposed creating a copyleft search engine. The "public alpha" of Wikia Search web search engine was launched on January 7, 2008, from the USSHC underground data center. This roll-out version of the search interface was roundly panned by reviewers in technology media. The project was ended in March 2009. Late in 2009, a new search engine was established to index and display results from all sites hosted on Wikia.

Controversy
Wikia communities have complained of inappropriate advertisements, or advertising in the body text area. There is no easy way for individual communities to switch to conventional paid hosting, as Wikia usually owns the relevant domain names. If a community leaves Wikia for new hosting, the company typically continues to operate the abandoned wiki using its original name and content, adversely affecting the new wiki's search rankings, for advertising revenue.

Relationship with Wikipedia
Wikia has been accused of unduly profiting from a perceived association with Wikipedia. Although Wikia has been referred to in the media as "the commercial counterpart to the non-profit Wikipedia", Wikimedia and Wikia staff call this description inaccurate.

In 2006, the Wikimedia Foundation shared hosting and bandwidth costs with Wikia, and received some donated office space from Wikia during the fiscal year ending June 30, 2006. At the end of fiscal year 2007, Wikia owed the Foundation US$6,000. In June 2007, two members of the Foundation's Board of Directors also served as employees, officers, or directors of Wikia.

In January 2009, Wikia subleased two conference rooms to the Wikimedia Foundation for the Wikipedia Usability Initiative.

Wikia, Inc.
Wikia, Inc. is based in San Francisco, California. The company was incorporated in Florida in December 2004 and re-incorporated in Delaware as Wikia, Inc. on January 10, 2006

Wikia derives income from advertising. Wikia additionally gains income from various partnerships in its Wikia Fan Studio and its API.

Wikia has several offices around the world, including Germany, Poland, Tokyo, London, Chicago, Los Angeles, Virginia and New York.

Wikia has over 300 employees with several contractors and fan contributors.