Training Example: Jimmy Wales – Review the Data, Give Your Score & Compare to the Real AI Evaluation

What should I put on the agenda at the upcoming e-G8?

What’s new for me: Hunch

A small wedding gift

Is the Magazine Dead?

Wikia up 20%+ in July – 6.5 million US uniques

A lot of people have been posting on twitter or sending me email thanking me for bravery in opposing SOPA. That’s a very very kind sentiment, and I really do appreciate it!
But I want to push back a little bit on it and reflect on where the real bravery is in the fight for free knowledge for everyone. I live in a country which respects the freedom of speech. I am at no risk of prison or physical violence or monetary fines for my views. If the worst that gets thrown at me is MPAA head Christopher Dodd saying that an Internet uprising is an “abuse of power” then I will survive just fine. :-)
[IMG: Hossein Derakshan, a personal hero]
Hossein Derakshan, a personal hero
I know of Wikipedia volunteers in authoritarian countries, though, who are incredibly brave.  Hossein Derakhshan is a young man I first met at Wikimania 2005 in Frankfurt.  A Wikipedia editor and blogger, he is serving a 19 and a half year sentence in Iran for his writings on the Internet.
I know of a Chinese Wikipedian who was visited by the police for setting up a mirror of Wikipedia multiple times during the era when China banned Wikipedia.
There are many more like them, all around the world.
These, and people like them, are my heroes.  They are the people of true courage.  I’m a very fortunate man in life, and I’m proud to stand up for freedom of speech and the right to access to knowledge in every circumstance that I can.  But my courage, if it is courage, is nothing compared to the courage of those who are really risking life and limb to speak truth to power.
Let us take a moment today to honor them.

Wow, coming on the heels of the great news I got yesterday about our Comscore numbers…
[IMG: W00t!]
W00t!
Just for fun, here’s a comparison of Wikia (all sites) with Mahalo (all sites).  Some of you may know that Jason Calacanis enjoys poking at me and not long ago made a bit of a stir in the blogosphere by calling me a poser and saying I’m not a real entrepreneur.  Who’s posing now, Jason?  (Actually I love and respect Jason, even if he does like to talk trash, and had a nice visit with him at Mahalo not long ago, so this is all in fun.  But I dare you tweet this blog post, Jason… ;-) ) Continue reading →

Just got some new numbers (thanks Doug and Przemek for putting these together) for Wikia’s growth, especially in gaming and entertainment, traditionally our strongest wikis.
Gaming just crossed 1,000,000 and currently with 1,003,977 articles… joining Entertainment (1.1 million articles) in the “over a million” category. The raw breakdown looks like this:
[Auto] => 15244
[Creative] => 57257
[Education] => 78914
[Entertainment] => 1109651
[Finance] => 12122
[Gaming] => 1003977
[Green] => 14113
[Humor] => 155243
[Lifestyle] => 201605
[Music] => 49232
[Philosophy] => 110072
[Politics] => 37381
[Science] => 120537
[Sports] => 80924
[Technology] => 52603
[Toys] => 35392
[Travel] => 57758
[Wikia] => 232869

If there is one thing that I’ve learned in my career, it is to do more of what’s working, and less of what’s not.
In past 24 months, Wikia.com has seen tremendous expansion. Nielsen recently recognized Wikia.com as the fifth fastest growing member community destination in February 2009:
RANK
Site
Feb 08
Feb 09
% growth
1
Twitter.com
475,000
7,038,000
1382%
2
Zimbio
809,000
2,752,000
240%
3
Facebook
20,043,000
65,704,000
228%
4
Multiply
821,000
2,394,000
192%
5
Wikia
1,381,000
3,758,000
172%
source: Nielsen NetView, 2/09, U.S., Home and Work
Source:
http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/twitters-tweet-smell-of-success/ Continue reading →

Note: My daughter recently (December 5th, 2008) had the opportunity to conduct an interview with President Jimmy Carter.  One of her questions to him was about Obama and ended up being about Obama’s speech today.  So I thought I’d post an excerpt.
Kira: With the new president elect Barack Obama, what do you think about him being the new president elect and do you have any advice for him?
Jimmy Carter: Well, I have already talked to his major appointments –  I have talked to the next Secretary of State and the next Security Advisor who will be in the White House with him and I have also yesterday talked with the person who is going to represent him and United States at the United Nations. So, I have already prepared him for some of the things that the Carter Center is doing that he might find helpful. Continue reading →

Today at Wikia we have released our social networking features for MediaWiki under the GNU GPL 2.0. The best place to see this running live is at Halopedia, our Halo site.
I am excited about all the stuff going on in this space. With google’s open social initiative, our work in social search and social networking for mediawiki, I think the whole wiki/free culture space is about to get a whole lot more interesting.

Daniel F. Gass, a talented young developer, has created a Wikia search plugin for Firefox! Awesome! Thanks, Daniel!
Now I wonder what open source toolbars out there might support more functionality…

I am participating in this fabulous and hopefully historic meeting and realized that I have now met Melissa Hagemann on 5 different continents. I think we both travel too much. Continue reading →

Bobbie Johnson at Gigaom worries: Is France Plotting to Kill the Free Internet?, and “can’t help be concerned at what the summit might mean, given it’s essentially a closed shop of governments and corporations discussing how best to carve up the online world for us.”
I’m happy to say that I’ve been invited to participate in this meeting, and I’d like for it not to be just that. I’m therefore turning to you for help: what should I put onto the agenda? What are the important perspectives that are likely to be overlooked or ignored? What do you want to say about the Internet to the leaders of the G8 countries?

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I’ve always been intrigued by the potential intersection of community-based, user-generated web platforms and algorithmic, machine-based ones. Wikipedia and Wikia have proven to do a pretty darn good job with the former. Search engines clearly do a great job with … Continue reading →

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This weekend I am attending the wedding of my friends Martin Varshavsky and Nina Wiegand. (They did a civil wedding in Hawaii a little while ago; this is the more traditional Jewish wedding.)  I wanted to get a gift, but … Continue reading →

This gallery contains 4 photos.

At Wikia we are announcing this week the launch of HP MagCloud print-on-demand for Wikia users. The concept here is simple but powerful: let communities create magazines from their work seamlessly. We have no idea how popular this is going … Continue reading →

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July was insane – over 6.5 million US uniques, up by 24% over June! Continue reading →

Just got some new numbers (thanks Doug and Przemek for putting these together) for Wikia’s growth, especially in gaming and entertainment, traditionally our strongest wikis.
Gaming just crossed 1,000,000 and currently with 1,003,977 articles… joining Entertainment (1.1 million articles) in the “over a million” category. The raw breakdown looks like this:
[Auto] => 15244
[Creative] => 57257
[Education] => 78914
[Entertainment] => 1109651
[Finance] => 12122
[Gaming] => 1003977
[Green] => 14113
[Humor] => 155243
[Lifestyle] => 201605
[Music] => 49232
[Philosophy] => 110072
[Politics] => 37381
[Science] => 120537
[Sports] => 80924
[Technology] => 52603
[Toys] => 35392
[Travel] => 57758
[Wikia] => 232869

Note: My daughter recently (December 5th, 2008) had the opportunity to conduct an interview with President Jimmy Carter.  One of her questions to him was about Obama and ended up being about Obama’s speech today.  So I thought I’d post an excerpt.
Kira: With the new president elect Barack Obama, what do you think about him being the new president elect and do you have any advice for him?
Jimmy Carter: Well, I have already talked to his major appointments –  I have talked to the next Secretary of State and the next Security Advisor who will be in the White House with him and I have also yesterday talked with the person who is going to represent him and United States at the United Nations. So, I have already prepared him for some of the things that the Carter Center is doing that he might find helpful. Continue reading →

Today at Wikia we have released our social networking features for MediaWiki under the GNU GPL 2.0. The best place to see this running live is at Halopedia, our Halo site.
I am excited about all the stuff going on in this space. With google’s open social initiative, our work in social search and social networking for mediawiki, I think the whole wiki/free culture space is about to get a whole lot more interesting.

Wow, coming on the heels of the great news I got yesterday about our Comscore numbers…
[IMG: W00t!]
W00t!
Just for fun, here’s a comparison of Wikia (all sites) with Mahalo (all sites).  Some of you may know that Jason Calacanis enjoys poking at me and not long ago made a bit of a stir in the blogosphere by calling me a poser and saying I’m not a real entrepreneur.  Who’s posing now, Jason?  (Actually I love and respect Jason, even if he does like to talk trash, and had a nice visit with him at Mahalo not long ago, so this is all in fun.  But I dare you tweet this blog post, Jason… ;-) )
[IMG: Wikia vs Mahalo]
Wikia vs Mahalo
Note: the above are screenshots, you can see the live numbers for Wikia stats as well!
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[H2]
2 comments on “Wikia hits top 100 on Quantcast :-)”

Congrats, Wikia!
Reply

Double-amazing when you also have Wikipedia ranking #8 http://bit.ly/Ee5cb Well done!
Reply

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If there is one thing that I’ve learned in my career, it is to do more of what’s working, and less of what’s not.
In past 24 months, Wikia.com has seen tremendous expansion. Nielsen recently recognized Wikia.com as the fifth fastest growing member community destination in February 2009:
RANK
Site
Feb 08
Feb 09
% growth
1
Twitter.com
475,000
7,038,000
1382%
2
Zimbio
809,000
2,752,000
240%
3
Facebook
20,043,000
65,704,000
228%
4
Multiply
821,000
2,394,000
192%
5
Wikia
1,381,000
3,758,000
172%
source: Nielsen NetView, 2/09, U.S., Home and Work
Source:
http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/twitters-tweet-smell-of-success/
Our Wikianswers Q&A site in particular has seen tremendous growth since it was re-launched in February, and we’ll be investing more of our time in it. Our gaming and entertainment networks and communities also continue to see strong growth.
On the other hand, while I personally believe in the opportunity for free software to make serious inroads into the search space, our project, Wikia Search, has not been enjoying the kind of success that we had hoped.
In a different economy, we would continue to fund Wikia Search indefinitely. It’s something I care about deeply. I will return to again and again in my career to search, either as an investor, a contributor, a donor, or a cheerleader.
But for now, we will be closing the doors on the Wikia Search project (as of March 31, 2009) and will be re-directing and refocusing resources on other Wikia.com properties, especially on Wikianswers. Join me there to help provide freely licensed answers to all the world’s questions.
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[H2]
43 comments on “Update on Wikia – doing more of what’s working”

I just posed this question at Central Wikia watercooler, but maybe you can answer it for me…
Will Wikia be switching its wikis from GFDL to CC-by-sa, or offering the individual communities the opportunity to do so?
Reply

Yep, that was done today. :) CC-BY-SA is showing all over Wikia now.
Reply

I hope it’s an april fool joke… Don’t want to see wikia dying …
Reply

Please don’t shut down wikia search, why can’t you ask for donations to keep free search alive. I am reseller in India, I can donate some free disk space. I have tasted search freedom, now I don’t want to give it up.
Freedom is far superior than money.
Reply

Dear James,
Expect this message finds you in the best of spirits. I am sales and marketing professional from India and I must confess that I spend about 20% of my time on Wikipedia.org everyday. Thats where I get most of my knowledge from every walk of life.
It is a little disheartening to know the future of Wika search. However, the news about Microsoft pulling back all their Encarta software must encourage you to no limit on your efforts to make better Wiki properties. Will we get to see Wikia search in the future?
I truly wish you and everyone at Wiki, all the best on your endeavors.
Immense Regards
Rajesh
Reply

Hi, this is April 1st joke, isnt it? I dint give a damn about Wikianswers. I use Wikia Search every day and I dont accept it being closed. Thats just a marketing issue.
Reply

so sad: we at the free software movement must have something to give freedom to search engine users
Reply

I only just found the Wikia Search site through an article on how it is to be closed! I’ve never even heard of it and I work in the IT / Web Media industry. May I suggest that the problem is merely one of marketing? I tried a few searches and was blown away by the results. I have added it to my Firefox search engines straight away (the ONLY other one there is Google.ie).
In summary, please don’t close this superb search engine.
Reply

Please not!
Reply

I totally agree. Just learned from this new search engine – never heard of it before but it is great! Don’t close it!
Reply

It’s so sad.
Maybe you can give the project to the free source community to continue?
For many people is a important thing.
Reply

I wasn’t aware of WikiSearch until I read that you were closing it. It’s excellent and innovative and now my first choice so long as it’s there. I use Wikipedia every day (and yes, I did contribute to the fundraising when asked) and WikiSearch would be a natural extension I found this blog through a report about WikSearch’s closure on siliiconrepublic.com here in Ireland – so it’s great to get the opportunity to express my view on the matter. In short, if even people like myself who are supportive of open source don’t know about WikiSearch then it’s a marketing issue. I’m puzzled as to why Wikipedia hasn’t been used to promote it. How difficult would that be?
Reply

Dear James,
As someone who’ve been involved with the search project in it’s early phases, I feel sad for the decision to stop it, but I must admit that I am not really surprised. I agree that the economical crisis is somewhat to blame, but I’m afraid the problem is more than just that. As I mentioned in a comment to one for your first postings to the search’s wiki forum, semantic tagging simply doesn’t work because it is just not good enough. And If I may say so, I think your fried Danny Hillis is starting to realize that too, as can be understood from this job add in the MetaWeb site:
http://www.metaweb.com/jobs/srgraphprogrammer.html
Reply

Hi Jimmy,
Why not focus your efforts on improving Wikipedia’s search engine, integrating the development that’s gone into Wikia so far? It seems a real shame to me that the net’s greatest collaborative resource features such a lacklustre searching mechanism. I’ve resorted to doing Google searches instead, with “site:en.wikipedia.org” affixed!
Regards,
Reply

We have a similar project at stumpedia.com and would welcome all the Wikia Search users. Stumpedia is a social search engine that relies on human participation to index, organize, and review the world wide web. Stumpedia does not depend on bots, algorithms, or company insiders to make decisions on the relevance and ranking of search results.
Reply

Wikia search needed a memorable address to succeed. The choice of http://search.wikia.com was very unfortunate.
If ‘Wired’ can still be confused (http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/04/wikipedia-found.html) after all this time and is persuaded that Wikia.com is closing down, how likely was it that the majority of ordinary users would be able to find http://search.wikia.com – or remember the address when they were inclined to make a subsequent visit?
I hope you reconsider – and try again. It might succeed if you use something like wsearch.com
Reply

Well, even though I work in IT, I hadn’t heard of wikia search before the announcement that it’s to be closed.
Now that I have actually looked at the website, it looks damn useful, and I’m now trying it out as my primary search engine. Till now, the results look damn useful. And I like being able to give easy feedback.
Really, I think you have a great product here, which could have used better marketing. Sad to discover something useful when it is just about to vanish again.
Reply

The “launch” of Wikia was, in my view, a mistake: when the public announcement was made, end users couldn’t crawl the Web, couldn’t rate, add or delete sites. Only write short articles that unfortunately got removed afterwards. Why on earth did you feel compelled to publicly announce an alpha version?
Later on things greatly improved, but in such a field missing the initial launch can have a very bad effect. Many casual visitors didn’t come back, probably. That said, Wikia Search was a lot better, but then again, there was a big problem: displaying the site, even on a dual core AMD 64 machine with a broadband connection, took several seconds given all the JavaScript and various connections. Compared to Google, that was unacceptable.
But even with all these problems, two things are, IMHO, clear: Wikia was improving, and largely so. Kudos to all contributors. And there’s a real need for a free/open source search engine that respects users’ privacy. In my view, you should do everything you can to keep Wikia Search going: two years is too long in IT. Two years later this place may very well be taken by another, non free player.
Please, tell us (again) how we can contribute and do anything you can to keep it going. Otherwise that will leave us with dmoz which is only half-open “thanks” to AOL… We need Wikia Search and we need you.
Reply

Hi Jimmy,
One can only say that Wikipedia is a reference and its quality is going to be always beyond sheer numbers.
Now, confess, aren’t you a bit jealous of Twitter numbers ? :-)
Have a nice Easter in the company of familt and friends,
José
Reply

The search engine is still working as it always did. Was it an April fool?
If you’re really going to close it we need another organization to host this service. As all the data and sources are available it would be possible. So please ask the Wikimedia Foundation, the Free Software Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation or whomever to resume the project!
The Internet needs a free search infrastructure!
Reply

please ask the Wikimedia Foundation, the Free Software Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation or whomever to resume the project!
The Internet needs a free search infrastructure!
Reply

You created a fine thing in Wikipedia. Whenever I’m using it, I feel like I’m running with the French encyclopedists of the 18th century. Nice job!
(I’m the guy who helped change mass fingerprinting in Georgia. We sued the governor and lost that round, but we eventually repealed the practice in 2005.)
Wade Hobbs, Jr.
Univeristy of Georgia, 1984, MIS
George Washington University, JD, 1991
Reply

“If there is one thing that I’ve learned in my career, it is to do more of what’s working, and less of what’s not.” – Jimmy Wales
Superb!!!!
Reply

Yes indeed, wikia’s growth is big, but twitter’s growth is impressive. In just a year, their community increased by 1300%. WOW!
Reply

aww this is disappointing news. I was wondering what happened to my home page and why I was being redirected. Wikia Search was my favorite search engine it is sad to see it go. I hope that in the future you might be able to bring the project back online.
Reply

Why, why
i have watched at the wikia search project since it started, and i think in the lats months wikia search became a really god search macine, please resume
In acording to some other peoples:
The Internet needs a free search infrastructure! really
Reply

Sad to see it stoped :( It had improved a lot since it first launched, though it still had a ways to go I was using and contributing. I deeply want to see an open search for the world.
Reply

At this moment i wanted to search something on Wikia search but was negative surprised by regarding the Wikianswers side. I discovered Wikia search before a few weeks and find, that it could become even better than google. Maybe with a bigger advertisement other people can realize this tool, which is completly independent from any commercial.
Please find another way that Wikia search can survive, less costs to run or whatever.
Reply

Have you ever heard about the Yacy search engine? It’s a java based free and open source search engine, and, instead of using a single index, shares many indexes on a peer-to-peer network (so anybody can host it, and all servers work together)
Maybe a new wikia search could be based on it? It would be really based on user contributions, because anybody could download the software and contribute to the search, building a sort of “mirror” (a feature I liked about wikipedia is the presence of a lot of third-part’s wikies, for technical manuals, reviews…).
Also, since Yacy doesn’t have a central index and every computer can become a crawler, it doesn’t require many memory (2-3 Gigas are enough), and building a wikia search with it shouldn’t cost much.
Long life to Wiki!
Reply

Yes it is really a shame that search.wikia.com is closed.
I was so surprised that my search integrated in firefox didn’t work anymore.
I though first of a downtime and retried it several, until I read the announcement on the redirect site more closely.
It would be really great to relaunch the project.
Beside a few changes I was really hoping that search.wikia.com would pick up on the success of wikipedia.
It took sometimes for wikipedia as well.
Google wasn’t a success over night either.
It is just disturbing that the only viable search alternative is google.
Anyway thanks for effort and really hope that wikia search will be relaunched one day whatever form.
Regards
Reply

It’s so sad!
I just started using WikiaSearch as my primary search engine and contributing websites and wondered about the forwarding to WikiaAnswers until I recognized it being closed….
Really sad…
Greets,
Constantin (Germany)
Reply

There my favorite search engine went…
I’ve to weep about it here, express my sadness about it.
Don’t distract me from my sadness with that (relatively) dispensable “wikia answers” toy.
“In a different economy, we would continue to fund Wikia Search” – It’s a shame. Thought I see another step into that brighter future with that different economy when Wikia Search entered my life…
Hoping for this thing to rebirth and live on somewhere…
Jimbo – can you maybe keep us up to date on after death life of this idea?
Reply

bad news… wrong decision i believe the closing of wikia :(
more search engines =/ free web / less search engines =/ unfree web
more good search engines better web / less good search engines worst web
Reply

in bad english
i’m sad. first i here from wikisearch was march 2009 and now, its gone.
yes twitter traffic explode, but i here from twitter first in december 2008 and i see more twitter marketing in tv, in newspaper etc.
i talk with friends nobody nows wikisearch,but the would use it.
it is a marketing problem, i think wikiserch will work,but with less money you need more marketing time :-)
Reply

sorry for mi English.
I´m very, very sad about this news…
Open source software gives me hope for the future. I see it as an example and inspiration for all disciplines.
When I first enter wikia alpha version I was exited but it was very confusing so decided to wait for the natural changes to come with an open source search engine. Today I decided that I was going to use it any way as mi default Search engine because i´m getting really bad vibes from google, and now I found this…
…so sad, so sad.
Reply