iMedia: Wikipedia became a huge social force and is, arguably, one of the most important results of the open-source movement, along with Linux. Can you think of some examples of how the Wikipedia ethos has influenced other aspects of society or business?
Wales: We're beginning to see a changed understanding about the quality of work that communities are able to do by working together. For a long time, we had a false dichotomy between the top-down editing model versus wild-and-crazy bloggers that nobody was editing. We're now starting to realize hybrid models into a radical free-speech platform that's thoughtful and responsible. That ethos is starting to spread into other media areas.
iMedia: Wikipedia is user-generated content that is carefully edited and managed on a non-profit site. Wikia is more of a mass content play. Why do we need both?
Wales: They're completely different. If you imagine walking into a library, the encyclopedia is a set of 30 volumes, a very specific type of reference work. Now imagine all the other types of books in the library. That's Wikia.
iMedia: Hasn't Wikipedia, as well as social media in general, made the encyclopedia model irrelevant?
Wales: Not at all. If you look in Wikipedia under Muppets, you'll find about 300 different categories, whereas Wikia has nearly 20,000 articles about the Muppets. For example, there's an article about Ford Motors in Wikipedia that covers the company history, current management, sales, etc. It doesn't talk at all about the fact that once Kermit was on a commercial; that's the only thing the Muppets Wikia people care about.
iMedia: If you were starting Wikipedia today, would you do anything different?
Wales: No. Obviously, we learned a lot over the last eight years. But by and large, I'm very pleased with how it turned out.
iMedia: What learning from Wikipedia translated to Wikia?
Wales: We hired people from Wikipedia who have deep community expertise and understand how to help people function well in the wiki environment. You have to be really sincere about giving the community control. If you do that, it empowers people to do great things.
iMedia: What things are very different?
Wales: We have a lot more programmers, more staff -- we're able to hire because we have investment money. We're pushing for tools to make it easier for people to edit, in order to bring in a wider audience of editors. Also, because we are very much topic-based, if, for example, there's going to be a release of a new video game that we know will be a great wiki, we'll start feeding it and give very strong support to that young community. Wikipedia doesn't have that.
iMedia: This kind of feeding would be for wikis that have strong ad potential?
Wales: Sure. We're an ad-supported website. We depend on page views, and to do that we need to foster community in things people are very interested in.
iMedia: What's the set-up for selling ads on Wikia?
Wales: We have a direct sales force selling ads. On some sites we don't have enough volume, so we partner with Google. We're just beginning the process of working on some of the sponsorship concepts. Some areas we've seen to be effective are doing skins, takeovers, things that are a little bit more about engaging the core community. We have a big proportion of the influencer community, especially games.
iMedia: Are you considering any of the ad models from Facebook or MySpace?
Wales: That's an interesting question. The model for those companies is still very much emerging. I believe that one of the problems we've had on the internet is we've gone down the rat hole of direct response marketing and ignored possibilities of branding. Part of the reason is, because internet advertising is measurable, we focused way too much on those kinds of metrics. We're more interested in branding. I believe Facebook and most internet platforms that are not search will increasingly turn to brand advertising and brand experience.
We're also considering the idea of having [advertisers] sponsor features of the software on the site. We always introduce new features. For example, we've been working on a better printing functionality. So that could be sponsored by a printing company.
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