Wiki Platform Wikia Raises $4 Million in Series A Round

Company changes name from Wikicities to Wikia

CGIDir
Wednesday, March 29, 2006; 02:10 AM

In a series A funding round, led by Bessemer Venture Partners, Wikia has raised $ 4 Million.  The company, formerly known as Wikicities, is an advertising-supported platform for developing and hosting community-based wikis.

It 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 and operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, where Wales and Beesley serve as board members.

Wikia authors retain their own copyrights, but allow others to freely reuse their content under the GNU Free Documentation License, allowing widespread distribution of knowledge and ideas.

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 usability features, spam prevention, and vandalism control. All of Wikia's development work will, of course, be fed back into the open source code.

Wikia already hosts some of the world's largest wikis outside of the Wikimedia Foundation, including: uncyclopedia.org, a parody of Wikipedia; memory-alpha.org, a Star Trek encyclopedia; starwars.wikia.com, a community devoted to Star Wars, and hundreds more including topics ranging from politics to pets. Since the site's launch in November 2004, over 1000 Wikia have been created and edited by over 20,000 registered users. Wikia are available in over 35 languages. A list of Wikia can be seen at www.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_Wikia.

"Each of our investors has an impressive track record building long-lived companies," said Jimmy Wales. "In addition, they each understand our open source values and share our focus on serving users."

"We’re very excited to partner with Wikia," said Jeremy Levine of Bessemer, who has joined the Wikia board of directors. "Based on the phenomenal rise of Wikipedia, Jimmy and Angela obviously know what wiki users want in a site!"

Wikia’s other new board member is Technorati’s international GM, Joichi Ito. Mr. Ito had founded PSINet Japan and InfoSeek Japan, and he currently serves on the boards of Creative Commons, Six Apart Japan, Socialtext, ICANN, and the Mozilla Foundation. "We witness the dawn of a new era in communications," said Mr. Ito. "The depth and appeal of user generated research, as demonstrated by Wikipedia, will shake the foundations of mainstream media."